Value of the Innermost Planet
Mercury is one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. As the planet nearest the sun, it receives several times more insolation than Earth. In low latitudes, particularly, daytime temperatures are broiling hot. Without a blanket of air to retain the heat, however, nights are bitterly cold.
The innermost planet may figure prominently in the future, however. It has two valuable assets--ample water at its poles, and abundant he-3 for fusion.
The high latitudes of Mercury are not terribly hot, because the planet's obliquity is near zero. It has no seasons. Near the poles, the sun is always low near the horizon. Crater floors tend to remain in perpetual darkness and ice is stable. Given moderate temperatures, and sufficient water, future colonies may thrive. No doubt, they'll derive most of their power from solar energy. Mercury is unrivaled for the quantity it receives. And as if solar power were insufficient, future colonists may derive enormous amounts of energy from he-3, a fuel for fusion reactors.
Someday, Mercury may be the powerhouse of the solar system. It may be possible to export mercurian energy to Venus, by beam, to provide power for terraforming efforts.
The innermost planet may figure prominently in the future, however. It has two valuable assets--ample water at its poles, and abundant he-3 for fusion.
The high latitudes of Mercury are not terribly hot, because the planet's obliquity is near zero. It has no seasons. Near the poles, the sun is always low near the horizon. Crater floors tend to remain in perpetual darkness and ice is stable. Given moderate temperatures, and sufficient water, future colonies may thrive. No doubt, they'll derive most of their power from solar energy. Mercury is unrivaled for the quantity it receives. And as if solar power were insufficient, future colonists may derive enormous amounts of energy from he-3, a fuel for fusion reactors.
Someday, Mercury may be the powerhouse of the solar system. It may be possible to export mercurian energy to Venus, by beam, to provide power for terraforming efforts.
posted by starman at 6:32 AM
15 Comments:
Yea, I love Mercury (but then I love the whole solar system)! My dream for Mercury would indeed be that it would be heavily populated, with perhaps 100 million people scattered in 100 cities all across its surface, and that its particular political role would be to implement and practice wholism, to use your term, but a happy, egalitarian and progressive form of it. Did you know that its features are named for great artists, musicians, poets, etc? I would build on that to create many beautiful and diverse cities and suburbs that would attract billions of people to visit.
I have no doubt there will be colonies on Mercury someday, but limited accessible water, coupled with excessive heat except in high latitude areas, may limit a future population there to a few hundred or thousand perhaps. If Venus can be terraformed, it may hold more promise.
I think there are whole cubic miles of water on Mercury, aren't there? With unlimited solar energy available (for recycling), a cubic mile of water should support a billion people, should it not?
And the heat is no problem really, just dig down 10 meters or something. Or put up an umbrella for shade, of course I mean a giant umbrella, say a kilometer across, and you can have it as cool as you want.
I once saw a television documentary that indicated there is a mini-asteroid belt inside the orbit of Mercury, and that it is the remains of a planet sighted years ago and tentatively named Vulcan.
Also, right before he was stricken with cancer Carl Sagan proposed seeding Venus' upper cloud rack with blue-green algae as the first step in terraforming our sister planet.
Thanks to progrev and Glocke for comments. :) As far as I know, there was never any confirmation of Vulcan. It was allegedly seen once in the mid 19th century and never since. Maybe there are remains of a comet orbiting the sun.
I don't know how many people can be supported by a cubic mile of water. Of course heat is far from the only problem. Much of the energy collected during the day would have to be used to provide warmth during the bitterly cold night lasting nearly a whole month i.e. half of the 59 day rotational period.
Another problem is air. There is frozen water but what about CO2, oxygen and nitrogen etc? They'd have to be imported.
Could Venus' cloud blanket contain sufficient water vapor for it to produce a Genesis-like planet-wide downpour if the proper meteorological conditions could be artificially devised?
This would not be possible with Mercury or Mars. Again, Venus seems the best choice for colonization.
Unfortunately the Venusian atmosphere has little if any water vapor. One plan calls for using algae to split CO2 then import hydrogen from Jupiter to combine with the oxygen to form water. Of course there would also have to be some method for reducing insolation falling on Venus.
We should not terraform Venus or Mars, etc., because it is not necessary in order to settle there (as I've said before but never seem to tire of reminding people). The way to settle new worlds is to build glass-domed cities or other protected spaces covering only a few square miles per hundred thousand or so people. Thus, 100 million people on Mercury could be sheltered under say 10,000 square miles-- under 0.1% of the planet's total surface area (do the math, this does not requie people to cram together like sardines)! Leave most of each world in its original condition, for adventures, etc. Given several years' time, it should not be too expensive to transport huge quantities of water, hydrogen, or nitrogen, etc., from one world to another within the Solar Sysetem.
I think Venus's atmosphere contains small yet significant quantities of water, perhaps as much as Earth's atmosphere (or maybe just a tenth of that), like one cm, for example. It would be difficult to extract it because of the enormously high temperatures--you'd have to cool the air by 800 degrees to get the water to condense out.
I dunno...it would be tough to grow adequate food for sizeable populations if the habitable area were limited to what domes can protect. I very much doubt any kind of construction or settlement would be possible on Venus without a significant transformation of its present environment.
Why do you think it would be too hard to grow enough food? Why couldn't a dome cover half an acre per person (granted, that would be only 1,280 people per sq. mi., rather than the 10,000 I suggested above), which, given high productivity yield (due to abundant energy) and a vegetarian diet should enable you to eat well. Domes are not that expensive, nor is the necessary rerfrigeration although I must admit, I do not know how much the requisite cooling WOULD cost, could we ask the Planetary Society about that? Or look it up in Wikipedia? Or find it in a temperature-engineering book? In my current writings, I am proposing that each person have $1 million in order to enter space. By pooling their assets, a community of a few hundred might then be able to afford the requitiste dome, fridge, and other necessary inputs to exo-agriculture.
Cooling wouldn't be necessary at high latitudes--or part of the dome could be opaque--but there might not be enough sunlight to grow crops. One problem with domes, as opposed to terraforming, is that Mercury and Mars don't have much atmosphere to provide shielding from meteors. Also, extreme temperature fluctuations might degrade the domes. One crack and the whole colony could be through.
Interesting. True at high latitudes on Mercury the sun is at a low angle, but this problem can be partly solved by each of 3 methods: (1) place plants on vertically stacked shelves so that each plant gets a lot of SIDE-insolation (or use huge mirrors to bend and focus (concentrate) the sunlight down onto horizontal fields); (2) grow the plants with artificial lighting; (3) let the 100+ cities on Mercury's surface trade food grown in low latitudes for ice carved out of polar ice-fields.
As for meteors, I think in general the problem should be solved by dividing the domes into hundreds of huge panes maybe each 100' x 100', so that a given crack won't spread over the whole thing. Air will escape, true but that seems to be a slow enough process that people could walk to smaller hard-covered shelters or even repair/replace the ruined glass pane. On Venus, on the other hand, a cracked pane would be more dangerous because CO2 would rush into the dome under enormous pressure; probably everyone would have to be evacuated to hard-covered temporary shelters--on the other hand, of course, meteor strikes on Venus's surface are most exceedingly rare!
I recently read something fascinating, which is that it can rain sulfuric acid on Venus's surface!! Have you ever read anything like that??!!
I'd like to know more about the effects of the extreme temperature changes on glass domes. But right now I'm thinking about the new famous "gorilla glass" of which you may have heard too? So I suspect the glass manufacturers could come up with solutions....I also think we could arrange to bathe the domes with some constant-temperatured liquid.
I tried to look up refrigeration but it seems awfully complicated and we'd probably be best to see if we can find experts who could answer specifically questions about making habitats on Venus--could you write about that to the Planetary Society if this interests you as much as it does me?
Interesting ideas, but the escape of air from a pressurized dome to a vacuum is anything but slow! Have you heard of cases in which all kinds of objects, even people, were sucked out of a high altitude plane after a window shattered?
You could ask about dome glass etc in yahoo answers, astronomy and space.
Yes but I've also read about cases where even a fairly good-sized hole opened up and still life went on as normal for quite a while or until they could get it fixed. I think the key is that air escapes at the speed of sound, so a square-foot hole will release 1100 cubic feet per second, so that if there are 11 million cubic feet of air to begin with (e.g., a dome 300' x 300' x 120' (admittedly far bigger than an airplane passenger area, though maybe smaller than average for a dome on Mars etc.), it would take 10,000 seconds (almost 3 hours) for all the air to escape, so there would be no need for a great panicky rush.
Thanks for the yahoo reference, I'll check it out!
I think there would be a sense of urgency, since the inside could become uninhabitable well before ALL the air escapes, and it could be difficult to access and fix the hole in time. Btw I'm "TimD" in "yahoo answers" or one of at least two by that name.
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