To Mars, Via Antarctica<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nWhy Colonise Titan?<\/h2>\n
As for human colonisation, certain conditions make Titan an ideal option. The water under the surface could be used to generate breathable oxygen while the nitrogen would be ideal to add buffer gas partial pressure to breathable air. Nitrogen, methane and ammonia can all be used to produce fertilizer for growing food.<\/span><\/p>\nEnergy<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nTitan has a rotation period of 16 days, with a perpetual orange haze filling your vision when it is day time. At a distance of 10 AU from the Sun, the sunlight it receives is barely 1% that of the Earth – which means any future human colony will need to require on nuclear power (or its methane bodies) for its energy requirements. There’s of course, the problem of getting humans to traverse 9 AU to get to Titan in the first place – a trip that took Cassini over 7 years. But let’s hope we figure out faster space travel techniques in the future.<\/span><\/p>\nAtmospheric Pressure<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nTitan has a surface pressure equal to 1.5 times that of Earth’s – or the same as 5 meters underwater on earth. This eliminates complex engineering of spacecrafts and space suits to maintain ideal pressure conditions to prevent humans from imploding. In fact, you can stand on Titan without a spacesuit, wearing just an oxygen mask. If that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is.<\/span><\/p>\nLow Radiation<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nAerospace engineer Robert Zubrin identifies Saturn as the most important of the gas giants due to its relative proximity and low radiation. Current human technology for radiation protection isn’t mature. Assuming the rate of advancement isn’t radical, Titan offers no issues for us to face on the radiation front.<\/span><\/p>\nWeather<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nSince Titan has a low surface temperature but a higher surface pressure, it leads to smaller atmospheric disturbances like winds. This could enable building robust engineering structures with little complex engineering.<\/span><\/p>\nBut the extremely low surface temperature makes surface life as we know it impossible. Earth-based-life relies on chemical action in water solution. At -100 o<\/sup>C the rate of chemical reactions would likely be too low for complex organisms , and cells would freeze and burst. Hence, we would need an artificial environment which would help us maintain and regulate our body temperature on the surface of Titan.<\/span><\/p>\nOxygen?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\nTitan’s atmsophere has no oxygen. Instead it has a high concentartion of Nitrogen, and methane-ethane. It also has trace amounts of Hydrogen Cyanide, which may not be deadly, but could cause dizziness in humans if breathed directly. But HCN is really not our major concern. With such a high concentration of methane, disorientation due to methane toxicity would be inevitable.<\/span><\/p>\nGravity<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nTitan’s surface gravity is 14% of earth’s. And hence, any long term human colony there would need to cope with and manage the effects of microgravity like reduced bone density, muscle deteoration and weaker immune system. Add to that the hazy effects of microgravity on fetal development, and this becomes a very serious issue if we plan to start a human colony on Titan.<\/span><\/p>\nSo all in all, practicable human colonisation on Titan remains a tough feat to accomplish. A lot of careful planning and pathbreaking engineering is required on our part, if we ever want to colonise Titan. But isn’t that the case with any world outside of our own? Titan just happens to be slightly on the easier side by the looks of it. NASA has been engaged in meticulous planning for the manned mission to Mars for years now, and the most important aspect of that would involve keeping the humans alive in those harsh conditions and minimal atmosphere. With Titan, the complexity cannot get any bigger.<\/span><\/p>\nIf Mark Wattney could grow crops on Mars all alone, we sure can live on Titan.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mankind has been unrelenting in its efforts to search for extra-terrestrial life. Somehow, asking ‘Are we alone?’ generates a unique emotion every time you bring it up. Innumerable spacecrafts have been deployed to look for life (more than 150 at last count) and research the surface and atmospheric conditions of worlds yet unexplored. The ones…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[219,240,273],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entropymag.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}