Is Colonizing Jupiter's Moons Really Possible/Valid In This Century?

>Probably not in this century
Why not? We got far from 1900 - 2000, from just looking at the planets to actual landings on numerous planets and moon as well as manned moon landings. The next 100 years will probably not be any less than this.

Don't forget heating from tidal action.

Dude its so easy its not even funny, by the time start which will guaranteed be in this fucking century people will wonder why we never started sooner. We're going fill up this solar system so fucking fast our heads are going to spin. not just with human life but with a shit ton of the life on earth is coming with us.

>The next 100 years will probably not be any less than this.
I beg to differ. The last century was a time where the low-hanging fruit across multitudes of disciplines could be picked. The groundbreaking stuff today is happening on the microscale, whereas the established areas of technology only see incremental increases, automatization and so forth. There is no fuel mixture or energy source that will completely revolutionize space exploration. Every such mission still is and will remain a massive undertaking, financially and time-wise. Simple economics mean that permanent colonies are just not in the cards.

>t. Lord Kelvin

I bet people will walk on some Jovian moons near the end of this century but no permanent settlements.

>a line of reasoning was wrong once, therefore it must be wrong forever

Science is not miracle-working.

the ITS cannot make it to europa

You would need to refill in jupiter orbit or something to land

>Why not?

Because we haven't even terraformed the fucking Moon yet and we only have a vauge idea of what such a project would entail. We might land on the Galilean Moons, maybe even have a permentant settlement, but terraforming them would be a project that would require having the infrastructre to move billions of tonnes of materials, animals and plants there, keeping them alive and accounting for things like radiation and low gravity. It might not be possible to ever terraform ANY planetary body in 100 years no matter what technology we have because biology and the planet's ecosphere will have to catch up.

>We're going fill up this solar system so fucking fast our heads are going to spin
??
The white population is on the brink of demographic genocide
Why do you think we can just fucking fill up the solar system
You think the africans or south americans or muslims/indians are gonna do shit?

Chinks don't do any exploration, thats not how they work

>Colonizing
>things that are below 0.75g
>things that are not spinning to emulate 1g

Not valid. It will always be more efficient to spin something in total vacuum and micro g than to attach it to something like a moon.

>terraforming anything the size of a moon

By terraforming you mean encasing it in a giant bubble, right?

>By terraforming you mean encasing it in a giant bubble, right?

No, I mean manipulating its environment to be hospitable to life.

So, like artificial gravity or something?

Artificial gravity is unneccessary. There's more than enough resources in the solar system that a line of ships harvesting it and feeding it into celestial bodies would negate the loss of elements into space.

Its almost an order of magnitude more difficult to do than Mars. Any species that can't do Mars yet is not worth thinking about it.

>I beg to differ. The last century was a time where the low-hanging fruit across multitudes of disciplines could be picked.
Remember that new technology will be like ladders that let us reach even higher up fruits. Back when they had to calculate a new trajectory for Apollo 13 they were still using slide rulers.

>The groundbreaking stuff today is happening on the microscale, whereas the established areas of technology only see incremental increases, automatization and so forth.
Miniaturization and increased reliability are also useful for space projects.

>There is no fuel mixture or energy source that will completely revolutionize space exploration. Every such mission still is and will remain a massive undertaking, financially and time-wise.
Much is about the will to succeed. I am constantly amazed by how inventive people are in explaining away failures and lack of progress. In some ways the 1960's was peak performance but there is no reason a new golden age cannot come.

>Simple economics mean that permanent colonies are just not in the cards.
Those are words to die by, not to live by.

>Science is not miracle-working.
You know what they say about sufficiently advanced science, I hope.

europa has liquid water due to tidal friction which could be harnessed for quite a bit of energy, or if we ever get fusion working, that water represents a tremendous reservoir of power

the real difficulty is that the radiation environment around jupiter is simply punishing, we don't have any practical means for shielding in the sense that it would be low mass. and since there isnt any prospect of a miracle breakthrough that improves shielding(effectiveness is really just proportional to linear density, ie mass cross section) the only way to colonize would be if people lived under europa's ice

the rad environment in space is like standing near a reactor core, the radiation environment near jupiter is more like standing near an exploding hydrogen bomb

Europa colonist here. Cold. Do not recommend.

You do realize that the escape velocity of the moon is 4.7 times less than that of Earth right? Solar winds are 168.06 times faster than that. It will not hold any type of atmosphere at all even for the briefest of moments of usable time.

Don't go near jupiter without generous shielding then. Calisto is far away enough and has plenty of ice. Nuclear reactor, some manufacturing capability, a few brave sacrif-uh-astronauts and you've got yourself a nice colony going.
Now, shipping all that there without nuclear thermal rockets is going to be an ass, and using those will make the eco nutjobs berzerk like you've never seen before.
Forget it. Civilization is dying this century anyway. Maybe the chinks will send one way trips to entertain the secretary-emperor-eunuch or whatever.

>Because we haven't even terraformed the fucking Moon yet
That makes perfect no sense.
>and we only have a vauge idea of what such a project would entail.
It was possible to land on the moon without first having settled on the Mariana Trench.

>We might land on the Galilean Moons, maybe even have a permentant settlement, but terraforming them would be a project that would require having the infrastructre to move billions of tonnes of materials, animals and plants there, keeping them alive and accounting for things like radiation and low gravity.
It is not necessary to terraform the entire moons, just large enough habitats. In fact terraforming them would defeat much of the purpose of going there for the resources.

>It might not be possible to ever terraform ANY planetary body in 100 years no matter what technology we have because biology and the planet's ecosphere will have to catch up.
Venus might be a better chance for that, placing a giant mirror between it and the sun in the Lagrange point like some oversized sun shade and then rework the atmosphere by converting most of that CO2 to oxygen.

>people believing they can terraform anything in this solar system inside of 100,000 years.

all of jupiters moons are subject to the same radiation environment because jupiter's magnetosphere is mind bogglingly garantuan

and you can shield but the problem is that the shielding is so heavy as to make any colonization mission to europa prohibitively expensive, on the order of thousands of times more expensive than mars

Water ice is an amazing radiation shield. Europa has it in spades. That part isn't a problem, everything else is a problem.

We can't even colonise earth

you have to get there first, and build your ice structures, two hours of exposure is enough to cause terminal radiation poisoning

>shielding is so heavy

That would depend on what sort of radiation we're talking about.

So what sort of radiation are we talking about?

If it is fast protons and shit, like Earths radiation belts, heavy shielding is going to be less than useless.

Lol

Why would we need to do that? Robots can do that.

You should probably do a few minutes of googling if you have to ask those questions and make those off hand statements.

>You should probably do a few minutes of googling if you have to ask those questions and make those off hand statements.

Sorry, not as deeply interested in the subject as all that, just making conversation. If conversation does not interest you, that's fine, have a really great day now, y'hear?

>implying rad tolerant robots are cheap or reliable

do you know how many they lost at fukushima?

ALL OF THEM

...

Mars is doeable in 10,000 years, but because it would constantly be losing it's terraformed atmosphere due to it's low gravity and having no magnetic field, it would revert to being a dead rock uninhabitable by macroscopic life in another 10,000 years unless more gasses are constantly being imported.

>and build your ice structures
Or drill down into the ice using heat like they already routinely do in Antarctica.

>If it is fast protons and shit
Thus speaketh the world's leading capacity on radiation shielding.

not leading but i know my shit

>t. have done radiation modeling for a spacecraft going to europa

oh sorry

this guy(me)

is not this guy
to answer your question, it is fast protons and fast electrons and secondary products (photons)

really to be radiation of interest it needs to be relativistic in speed. and the primary factor in shielding is linear density, there is some material variance in the sense that lighter materials are more efficient for the linear density, but if you actually do the design you find that geometry means that you need more mass to get the same linear density from all angles enclosing a space and thus heavier materials are often more efficient on a gram for gram basis

also it is sometimes common to use multilayer shielding with outer layers having lower atomic weights but you always want a heavy metal as the inner layer because it efficiently stops the secondary gammas generated by brehstralung

>muh white exceptionalism
Literally special snowflake: the non-argument
Go back to /pol/ you fucking cancer.

The booster itself could throw a bitchin science package there though, huh?

Drop Curiosity sized rovers on every moon, toss a constellation of microsats into orbit

The more I think about it the more I think that 300/550 ton payload booster is more impressive and more potentially useful than the ITS itself. It opens up so many potential missions. Imagine the kind of space station you could construct with it.

I've actually heard Mars could retain an earthlike atmosphere for two million years

What's Africa's greatest scientific achievement? South America's? Who built the ballistic missile and the nuclear reactor and the computer and the spacesuit?

Okay a lot of that was Slavs but they're still not black

It's possible, it's just that our colonists will need nuclear power. There don't appear to be any insurmountable technical challenges.
nuclear power.

Pic related it's Oymyakon Russia. Winter temperatures average -50 C. People actually live in this godforsaken place. If people are willing to live in such a shitty place, they might live in places as shitty as the moons of jupiter.

>>Biefeld-Brown effect
kek no

where do you get the oxygen?

Basically this. SpaceX isn't proposing to colonize Europa. They calculated that their rocket could land there with a payload, keeping people alive during the trip is another matter.

we have yet to evaluate tidal energy resources on europa.
>>shielding
in space and around jupiter, much of the radiation we have to deal with is in the form of charged particles. Charged particles can be deflected with magnetic and electric fields.

An artificial magnetosphere has shown some potential in lab tests. pic related.
minimagnetosphere.rl.ac.uk/references.html#shieldingforspace

>>rad environment in space is like standing near a reactor core, the radiation environment near jupiter is more like standing near an exploding hydrogen bomb
patently false.

>>all of jupiters moons are subject to the same radiation environment because jupiter's magnetosphere is mind bogglingly garantuan
The radiation belts do not take up the entire magnetosphere. Callisto happens to be outside of said belts and receives a surface dose of 0.1 mSv per day or 10 times earth average background radiation. Europa receives 5400 mSv per day.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callisto_(moon)

Actually, slavs can't do shit, similar to most non-whites. They're called slavs because they were literally a slave race to snackbars for a thousand years.

If you're not Germanic, you need to kill yourself.

>that pic
we literally star trek now

>That gives you just a 25th of the sun light.

Good, the fucking sun is too dammed bright anyhow. I swear I evolved to be a night hunter, I have the darkest sun glasses I can find and it's still too dammed bright. Also maybe my undiagnosed autism has something to do with it, light and noise sensitivities are supposed to be symptoms.

It is only slightly more practical than star trek atm

They did not lose all robots at fukushima. A number have returned successfully. A number of the ones that got lost, got lost due to getting stuck.
nrc.gov/docs/ML1626/ML16267A397.pdf

However, we do know that some of the robots that have gone in are rated for 1000 Sv and the dose rate for Europa is 540 mSv per day. Meaning that one of these robots could last about 5 years on the surface of Europa.

Admittedly this is not a fair comparison, because the fukushima robots are dealing more with neutron and gamma rays, while on europa we are mainly dealing with charged particles. Not all radiation is equal in terms of rad-hardening.

There is no need for terraforming entire planets.We can make an enclosed bubble of environment.

>540 Sv
Off by an order of magnitude broseph
5.4 Sv = 5400 mSv

pic related
It has a technological readiness level of 3, which is way more star trek's technological readiness level of 0.

>It has a technological readiness level of 3
TRL 3 is "research to prove feasibility"

Which is actually the same as warp drive:
davidreneke.com/nasa-research-to-create-a-warp-drive-bubble-in-lab/

It means, "we're researching it but have no fucking clue if it will work"

You've gotta be shitting me. TRL 1 is "Basic principles observed and reported"

So uh....... have we observed a warp bubble yet?

Basic principle for an Alcubiere drive is predicted by general relativity. A foundational theory of physics.

Alcubiere drive requires negative energy. We have yet to observe that.

An artificial magnetosphere inside jupiter's magnetosphere requires magnetic field lines that don't reconnect. We have yet to observe that either.

if one has a sufficiently strong magnetic field near the spacecraft, Jupiter's magnetic field doesn't matter that much. Ganymeade has a magnetosphere.

>628,000,000 kilometers

Just thinking about it takes 20 years. Projecting and testing something that will get that far with live people in it would take 20 more. Projecting environment for a full colonization (not a research outpost) would take 50 years easily.

Not this century, maybe next one.

Colonizing no. Visiting... Probably not. Maybe.

I mean, it's physically possible, if you just magically brainwashed everyone on the planet into investing in that effort and nothing else - though even then, I think the best you could do is set up an elaborate research station and get a sizable crew in before the century was out. Not real colonization.

But in the current, non-magically brainwashed world, as things are going now, we'll be lucky to have a person set foot on Mars before the century is out. (Largely because folks are non-magically brainwashed towards other priorities.)

(Though I always have this fantasy about an insane multi-billionaire making a one-way trip just to raise his middle finger at us all as he died.)

What's so great about the Jovian moons?

Serious question

I mean I can totally understand the desire to send probes literally anywhere but why are the Jovian moons such a popular concept for manned travel?

...Cuz Mars and Venus are both closer and not inside the second largest gravity well in the solar system?

Plus, well, water.

creating a magnetic field of planetary/lunar strength is right on the same level of practicality as the warp drive

*liquid* water

Not possible in 10,000 years because of radiation.
At best we'll send robots there.

>In this century, or the next

Not a fucking chance. Space is full of radiation, yeah? We all know that, what you don't know is how much fucking radiation is around Jupiter, and why any of the plausible shielding methods dreamed up for Mars or even the Moon aren't likely on Europa.

What's with the spacefag Europa obsession anyway? Deep space colonies are idiotic but if you've just gotta leave the Inner System, why not choose Titan?

Radiation isn't the problem. That is an easy fix. The problem is lack of proper gravity. No colonizing because of that.

>Radiation isn't the problem
It is if you're not retarded.

>Radiation isn't the problem. That is an easy fix

For a sense of scale, here's surface radiation per year (REM) at a few locations
Earth: 0.62
Earth's Moon: 50
Mars: 15
Io: 1,314,000
Europa: 197,100
Ganymede: 2,920
Callisto: 36

And here's what those REM can do:
"Safe" workplace exposure: 5
Massively increased cancer risk: 100
Horrifying unavoidable death in a matter of hours where you melt like the dude from Robocop: 800

>B-but muh ship has magnetic field!
Tell me how you could ever have enough energy to create that.

Martian atmosphere loss argument always triggers me. It loses atmosphere at geological time scales, thousands and millions of years. If we work on it we can have a reasonable atmosphere in couple hundred years. In thousand years we'll either have advanced superconductor technology that will provide sufficient shielding or we'll be extinct. It's like saying everything is futile on earth because in a billion years will be uninhabitable. It's simply so far away in the future that it makes zero sense to worry about it.

What energy? I'm really doubting a 1GW couldn't provide enough to shield a ship.

Radiation is easily shielded. Not enough shielding? Add more layers of different material. Why is this a "problem" because "MUH MONIES CRY CRY".

Spin on a cock, kid.

you'd be wrong.
A planetary seems relatively at the surface but is effective at shield because the dipole covers a huge amount of space.(and the amount of deflection for a particle will be proportional to field strength *and* path length so a weak field over a wide area is a very effective deflector.)

If it was so damned easy the guys pushing magnetospheric deflection wouldn't be at TRL 3, they'd be at TRL 7.

>Why is this a "problem" because "MUH MONIES CRY CRY".
Limited resources dumbass. It is a question of whether we send 100 people to europa or 10000 people to Mars. Cause cheaper is just another way of saying "more stuff for the same amount of resources"

>moar layers
All of which cost mass, which comes directly out of your payload capacity. Jupiter's radiation belts are literally the most intense ones in the solar system, and the amount of shielding that's technically available and needed to survive them would make it effectively impossible to perform manned science up close with existing propulsion technology.

>Radiation is easily shielded
To cut radiation in half requires 12.7mm of steel. Another 12.7mm halves it again, etc.

That means to safely approach Io you'd need a protection factor of about 1/262144, so you'd have to be completely encased in about 230mm of steel, similar to the armor plate on a WWII battlecruiser.

A cubic meter of steel weighs 8,000kg. Wrapping a one meter cube in enough steel to protect from this radiation would require about 12,000kg of mass - and that's just to protect a space you could barely fit Warwick Davis in.

>If people are willing to live in such a shitty place

I don't think you realize just how "shitty" Jupiter's moons are. I mean they're not shitty, but in terms of habitability they are. Europa has no actual land, it's surface is just ice floes. Calisto is caked in 1 mile thick ice the whole way around, Ganymede as well. And Io is covered in toxic chemicals and volcanoes. Oymyakon is paradise compared to them, if only because it has actual land and oxygen.

I actually feel like there's a real... "lack of ambition" in a lot of these shithole ice pit places on earth. Like, why are people still living in wooden buildings depending on massive amounts of imported fossil fuel in this day and age?

1) Iron isn't a mass-efficient choice, nor a dual-use material. Anything can be used as radiation shielding, including your supplies, equipment, and waste.
2) It certainly isn't necessary to shield radiation down to 5 REM/year just to "safely approach" a planet. The approach maneuver isn't going to take years.
3) 12 tonnes isn't a prohibitive mass of shielding-usable supplies and equipment to accompany each astronaut. In fact, it's probably less than the minimum needed for other purposes.
4) This amount of shielding isn't hard to achieve in a voluminous surface structure made from local materials or a cavern.
5) Thanks to the square-cube law, the larger the volume you want to shield, the less mass of material you need per unit volume, so for large expeditions with a high crew count, cramped radiation shelters become a non-issue.

The earth's magnetic field is on the order of NANOTESLA. You can buy permanent magnets with 1 tesla magnetic field strengths at the grocery store.

>To cut radiation in half requires 12.7mm of steel.

There is only one kind of radiation, and only one way to shield against that one radiation.

nope. We can also use magnets or electric fields. The radiation is charged particles. Charged particles can be deflected

>if the van halen belts are real then how come we aren't all dead

too much radiation from jupiter, mars is better

>gamma radiation is charged

Name one thing you (You) have contributed to society.

110% this.

You don't use 1 type of shielding nor one type of thickness or orientation.

You live under the surface for one thing. Yet, it seems you know nothing about actual radiation shielding. Not even wikipedia level knowledge.

>MUH MONIES CRY CRY

>Limited resources

If we are putting people on Europe to live, we won't have resource problems. We'll be mining off-Earth.

The reason we will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever have a """"""""""""""colony"""""""""""""" on europe is because there's not enough gravity.

Spin on a cock, brainlet kiddies. Science has you buy your balls.

not worth the resource allocation at this time

% this.
nice to see you agree with yourself. you're still a brainlet tho

Once we get off this gravity well and have the technology of orbital construction, why would we ever get back? It doesn't make much sense to settle planets when we can just settle space. The most we would do is set research outposts. Even more so if the planet has less gravity than mars.

>this microbrain doesn't know dipole magnets follow an inverse cubic rule

a bar magnet that is 1T at a distance of 1mm(at its surface) will be 1e-21T at a distance of 1re(the earth's radius)

FYI 1e-21 is 1/1000th of an attotesla

idek the actual si prefix for a number that small

>12 tonned isnt prohibitive
>implying you could colonize europa with a single cubic meter of volume