The Top 5 Places We Could Colonize In Our Solar System | Answers With Joe

January 16th of this year gene cernan died gene cernan was a commander of Apollo 17 and held the dubious distinction of being the last person to step foot on the moon he like Neil Armstrong but opposite today there are only six people alive who have walked on the moon it's probably the most exclusive club in the world but that was in 1972 it's been 45 years since a human being has stepped on a celestial body outside of Earth now it doesn't take a genius to know that the race to the moon was really about cold war politics but our drive to colonize other places in the solar system has really never waned so in this video I'm going to just imagine what if we got our shoes together and actually began to spread out amongst the solar system here are six best options and stick around for my number one because you're going to want to fight me on it bring it on [Music] rgf Joe please do a video on the future human colonization of various planets and moons now before I jump into this I just want to say really quickly there's somebody out there that talks about concepts like this all the time on this channel and that's Isaac Arthur most of you guys know who he is I hear his name come up in the comments all the time I'm happy to announce that this week I'm going to be releasing a podcast that includes an interview with Isaac where we're going to be talking about some of the stuff that I'm going to be talking about in this video and in some of his videos on similar topics I'm going to be linking to some of his videos up here if you haven't seen them because it will add a whole lot of context for the stuff that I'm talking about here but I want to kind of preemptively thank Isaac for for doing this with me I'm really looking forward to it's going to be a really fun an interesting interview and I hope you all check it out if you're watching this in the future I will put a link right here and if you're watching right now just hold on and I will announce it later on this week in a live cat live cast livestream I know what things are all right so let's start with a big question why colonize planets at all now Elon Musk has been one of the big proponents of space colonization lately he recently announced his plan for SpaceX to go to Mars and his reasoning behind it is that he thinks that we need to basically back up the hard drive of our species the fact of the matter is the earth has had five major mass extinctions throughout its history and many believe that we're going through a sixth right now of our own making but even if we totally get our act together and managed first that trends we're always one super volcano or big asteroid or gamma-ray bursts away from reaching the end of the history book and even if we somehow managed to avoid all of those fades the fact of the matter is someday the Sun is going to reach the end of its lifespan at which point it's going to expand out to the sides of a red giant basically swallowing the earth talk about global warming and well yes that's not likely to happen for many billions and more years still spreading our species on the other planets is kind of necessary for us to be able to survive long term so what are our options here in the solar system well unfortunately as Dorothy learned there's no place like home we are evolved to live and survive and the very specific conditions of this planet no matter where we go there's going to be compromises and it's going to be some engineering challenges so when examining other places in the solar system for us to go to we want to try to get them as earth-like as possible and I'm going to break those down to three core ingredients and that's temperature air pressure and gravity so we have those three variables gravity air pressure and temperature we're going to use those to gauge how similar to earth and how easy these places would be to colonize and with that in mind let's get to our first option the moon the moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth has zero air pressure so there's not really much of an atmosphere at all and the temperatures are pretty extreme 353 degrees in the Sun and negative 253 in the shade so not optimal so the engineering challenges of going to the moon not great but there are some really good reasons to go there one reason is that a moon base would be an awesome place to launch to other places in the solar system the mood swings around the Earth at 2,000 238 miles an hour so that's a nice significant boost to get you kind of slingshot it out toward wherever it is you're going in the solar system plus the lower gravity means you don't need nearly as much fuel to reach escape velocity also the lighter gravity might make it a lot easier to build there things that here on earth would take significant resources and energy to get up into the air wouldn't take nearly as much there so the machinery wouldn't need to be nearly as robust the moon is also pockmarked with giant craters craters that could be used as shelter it might make it a lot easier to just dome over the top of a crater as opposed to building an entire building there also water ice has been found in some of the polar craters but to me one of the biggest advantages of going to the moon is that the communication is instantaneous just a few seconds delay as we're going to talk about a little bit all the other places all the other options we have has a significant delay in communication between the Earth and that colony but the moon it's pretty much instantaneous which means that any kind of emergencies that might come up would have the entire team on earth working instantaneously with the crew and the colonists on the moon base to be able to solve this problem they wouldn't be completely on their own that means the moon would be a great place to test out technologies and try some of the things that would be necessary on these other planets on these other surfaces and be able to work out all the kinks early on so that you can apply those technologies and those those modes to other places so even though it doesn't really match any of the variables that we've set up here I still think I'm kind of amazed that we haven't talked more about going to the moon lately going back and creating a colony or a moon base of some kind because there's some real advantages to doing that one place that we have heard a lot about of course is Mars the gravity on Mars is just over one-third of Earth's 38 percent not too shabby the air pressure is extremely low surprisingly low point six percent of Earth and the temperature can reach up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit in the day and minus hundred degrees at night so no bad so on Mars you're looking at about two out of three of the variables so the size of going to Mars is that of course it's not too far away and it's relatively comfortable temperature wise but the thin atmosphere really is a problem because it's thin enough to where it's not sustainable for life without some kind of engineering but it's also thick enough that you still have to deal with that when landing that's why a lot of people including Elon Musk's talk about terraforming Mars now there's a lot more details in Isaac's video which I'll post right here but one of the things that you could do that Elon Musk really is talking about is melting the polar ice caps on Mars because the polar ice caps on Mars are actually frozen co2 so if you melt that and put it back into the atmosphere that would thicken the atmosphere increase greenhouse gas and cause it to warm up a little bit it is obviously much more complicated than that but it is something that we would have to do if we ever really got serious about staying on Mars so living on Mars would be a pretty extreme but not nearly as extreme as the next one on our list Europa Europa is a moon of Jupiter's it has only 13% of the Earth's gravity barely in the air pressure but what there is mostly oxygen and the temperature is really cold negative 250 degree Fahrenheit on average that's a whole bunch of red buzzers which sounds like this would be a swing and a miss but there are some reasons that would be interesting to go there because the surface of Europa is ice and underneath that ice is a liquid ocean it's thought that tidal heating from the massive gravitational pull of Jupiter has warmed up the ice on the inside and has actually caused geysers to erupt which has been spotted by Hubble so many people think that Europa is one of the best opportunities to find life here in our solar system fact some theoretical probes that nASA has played around with involved drills that would go through the ice and then swim through the ocean kind of like a mechanical squid so if it's warm enough underneath that ice underwater habitats might be an option we've seen the humans can survive underwater and things like submarines and underwater habitats here on earth that same technology might apply on Europa one downside of the Europa however is the fact that it is so close to Jupiter and Jupiter's gravitational field which is supermassive also carries with it and kind of funnels radiation from the Sun which bombard that planet might not be the best place to stay in long terms but it's a compelling option even further out in our solar system you find one of the most interesting moons out there that's Titan Titan is a moon around Saturn it's also about 13% of the gravity of Earth's and not to grades there but the pressure the air pressure is actually 1.5 times that of Earth so it's actually livable air pressure the temperature however not so much it's negative 290 degrees Fahrenheit of all the places in our solar system the air pressure on Titan is the closest of that here on earth it's so close you can literally walk around without a suit on and be just fine there is one problem it's so cold that methane turns to liquid and flows and rivers on the surface so you might want to wear a sweater what great reason to go to Titan however that all that methane and other components of the atmosphere would make great rocket fuel kind of like what we talked about with the moon if we had a base on Titan that could be a great refueling station before heading out into further reaches of the solar system or beyond but I promise you something controversial so here it is my last and favorite option for colonizing another place in the solar system is Venus Venus has the closest gravity to Earth at 91% of the Earth's gravity the air pressure however is a hundred times that of Earth and the temperature is up to eight hundred and seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit now I know what you're thinking this only meets one of the three criteria so you're like Joe how could you possibly choose this is your number one because those are numbers down the planet's surface up in the air it's a different story the density of Venus's atmosphere is insane the air pressure at the surface would crush you like a soda can but about 50 kilometres up in the clouds about the same as here which means just like a ship can float on the top of the water we could build colonies that would just float on the top of Venus's atmosphere so then the gravity and the air pressure will be exactly what we're dealing with here on earth the temperature would still be high but manageable now I know people will always say but Joe if you fell off of this structure you would die there's no way around that that's true but again let's go back to that ship analogy if you're standing on the side of a cruise ship and you fall overboard there's a really good chance you're going to drown if you drop your cell phone you're never going to see it again really not that much different than that and we have cruise ships containing thousands of people and entire navies just floating around out there on the ocean there's no reason why we couldn't do that on Venus as well so you're actually getting two of the three criteria plus the communication gap would be far shorter than anywhere else except for the moon and because Venus is closer than everywhere else it would be a lot shorter trips there you go Venus for the wind incontrovertible there's no way that anything else could what oh the clouds are made of sulfuric acid it just rains acid so you would just be floating in acid it also doesn't solve the problem of where we would go in a billion years when the Sun expands it would also eat up mercury as well but for me anyway it meets most the criteria better than any other Viking solar system feel free to argue in the comments let me know what you think alright thanks to all of you for watching if this is your first time here I invite you to check out some of my other videos and if you like those please hit subscribe because I come back with videos just like it it's over in London like this and a real quick shout out to all my supporters my answer files on patreon who help support this channel and make it possible I want to give a quick mention to the people who have signed up in the last week we've got Christian Latonya out rum and Reyes right George Waters and mason mason Petrovsky I want to thank you guys for joining if you guys would like to join you can go to patreon.com/scishow you can get access to my private blog that nobody else gets to do and as always this video brought to you by tanker boy comm you get regular mouth ulcers and canker sores this is a once a day supplement that helps make those things go away you don't have to live with the pain go check it out tanker boy calm you get a risk-free trial weapon at least just again I want to encourage you to go check out the podcast with Isaac Arthur I will put the link down in the description below once it's ready and I want to thank Isaac we're doing that it's going to be a lot of fun thank you guys again for watching go out there and have an eye-opening week and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 664,671

Rating: 4.8915157 out of 5

Keywords: space colonization, Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Europa, Venus, Mars, The moon, moon colonies, moon mining, moon base, NASA, SpaceX, Elon Musk, Mars colony, going to mars, space travel, the solar system

Id: CIf6VJH4dZk

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2017