Are you team Enceladus or team Europa

Why cant we just spam Super-Cassinis at all the moons? Both Jupiter and Saturn. Just give JPL the SLS budget and tell them to go bonkers. Skycranes, drills, the whole shabang

?
Nothing special about europa, all those planets have liquid water

Yeah, but Enceladus is only like 100 million years old, while Europa could be almost as old as the Earth. Guess which one would have had more time to develop life.

>tribalism even when it comes to planets
you lot are LITERALLY hilarious

>europa and enceladus
>planets

Team Saturn

...

>planets

Who /skiesofvenus/ here?

This ^

all of the Galilean moons probably have life in them

It's a no brainer. Fuck mars.

your mom looks like a ball of shit

They should be planets too desu

>Life on Io
I'd honestly feel bad for those poor microbes if they were unfortunate enough to be born on that hellhole

All of these fucking retards ITT not on the SpaceX hype train. LMAO have fun being on earth with the mongoloids

You mean the hyperloop train?

I mean the red planet

Reminder that the upper atmosphere of venus can be colonized cheaper than Mars

Source?

You mean you want to be on Musk's redtip?

My ass, but the shorter distance and drastically higher returns from solar energy back me up

Yeah but WHY would you that? Why build expensive floating colonies that have to withstand strong as fuck winds when you can't even use the planet's resources or anything near it? A single base built for the sole purpose of scientific research would be cool, but not fucking cities. And if you want solar energy then just build space stations.

At least Mars can serve as a stopgap between Earth and the main belt whenever we decide to mine some asteroids, and Mars itself has plenty of minerals that could be useful, maybe even allowing the colonies to be partially self-sufficient after a while. Not to mention the possibility of finding microscopic ayy lmaos somewhere.

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”

I don't want to live in a fucking floating city in a bullshit runaway greenhouse gas planet or eating shit potatoes on mars where the environment outside my spacesuit is trying to kill me 24/7

The sad reality is that there are no suitable backup planets in our star system

>literally seas of liquid methane
Titan is the only real choice

>310 mi in diameter

fucking moonlets, when will they learn?

Yep, Enceladus is too unstable for life to have developed, and most likely never will. So, Europa it is.

YEaaaa... IDK about this one simply due to the insane radiation belts around Saturn

stop trying to transcend humanity and accept you're an ape

either that or go on an island and die by yourself

So we don't get genetically fucked by low gravity and fucking radiation you cuntfuck. Also much lower chances of accidental death due to lack of oxygen/water.

no water though fuckface.

Whats wrong with being an ape? Name something better.

>Whats wrong with being an ape? Name something better.

Eagle or any other bird of prey. Better vision, fly all day and soar in the sky at 60 miles per hour, apex predator, not have to worry about math and science

Because Venus is where we learn how to terraform. It can also be used as a way station between Earth and the future dyson swarm that is Mercury

Its life is purely to survive. hunt, hunt, hunt some more. Sure, It is biologically more capable, but with technology we surpass it in every way, are free to be hedonists, indulge in sex, drugs, violence, power, etc.. Eagles probably don't even feel emotion since they have no spindle cells or a fucking frontal cortex. They will never know happiness, joy, surprise, companionship, etc.

dude it only takes like 5 m^2 of 50% eff

This, Titan is the comfiest body to colonize in our solar system. The spacesuit for Titan could be basically just light airproof clothing with a heater inside. Europa and Enceladus are interesting but they're more suited for travel hubs and storing stuff.

??
a vacuum is better than a cold as fuck atmosphere like on Titan

Y'all weebs only have a boner for titan because it was In a mainstream animu. Titan a shit. Get a real moon

Mars isn't a fucking vacuum either? At least titan isn't like -200 F.

Reminder that you're full of shit.

Fuck you, Titan is never warmer than twice as cold as the coldest recorded temperature on Mars. Also, since its atmosphere is even denser than Earth's, you need much better insulation in order to deal with the heat flux and not die of hypothermia.

Heating and insulation are far easier than extracting resources from the soil, and not having to seal against pressure is a huge positive.

Titan has an atmosphere opposite of Earth's, it's full of a reductant as opposed to an oxidant. This means it is economical to drive an internal combustion engine by carrying an oxidiser tank as opposed to a fuel, and jet engines could work in the same way. Mars has plenty of solar energy and heat, which makes it great for primitive settlements, but putting a fission reactor on Titan will ensure productivity. Question is, are there any free oxidants buried away underground, or will we have to put in energy to extract them? Earth had plants storing carbon and hydrocarbons underground as well as producing oxygen, but whether such deposits exist on Titan will be a big factor in long-term colonisation. Worst case scenario we shuttle hydrocarbon fuel from Titan to Earth, and oxygen back the other way.

Did you know that gravity on Titan varies by almost 4% because of the tidal forces from near side to far? Titan is also tidally locked, so one side always faces Saturn.

This.

Enceladus by heart, but Europe for practical purposes.

Noice b8 m8... Wait, were you serious ?

Reminder that that is bullshit.

Cost will depend on the amount of resources you can get on the planet instead of bringing them with you.

This. Let's kill off the F-35 program and start shotgunning Cassini+ and New Horizons+ probes into the void. Or if you want to go full pipe dream, lets figure out how to get a probe to Proxima Centauri B in under one hundred years.

What do moonlets learn, and how do they learn it?

This is objectively the correct answer. Titan has complex geologic processes, an atmosphere, and is bigger than Mercury. Plus, it has a subsurface ocean like most outer moons have.

At this time, Enceladus seems the most plausible option.

Enceladus only formed 100 million years ago so Europa. Though I don't believe any body in the solar system bar Earth has life.

ISS =/= Earth
you are wrong

What do you mean "ISS -/= Earth"?

Never mind I get t. OK, "Earth originating life then" smart arse.

Team Titan phoning in

Titan Master-race.

>not Team Pluto

I don't understand the 100 million years old argument. Earth for the first billion years is a molten lava from planetary accretion

As soon as Earth cools down, life sprung up almost instantaneously.

So what if Enceladus is 100 mil years old. It is the only celestial body with 100% confirmed liquid ocean in it

>are free to be hedonists, indulge in sex, drugs, violence, power, etc.

Animals also kill for fun. Just take a look at any housecat ever. They're set for life in term of food, still murder critters left and righjt

Yeah but you need to consider that Earth also had a very chemically dynamic environment. It had plenty of organic molecules and a stable, warm environment for the to form RNA. As interesting as Enceladus and Europa are, I just don't think they have the chemical environments to from life. I think we are the only intelligence species in the galaxies.

>implying life on earth came from earth

Have you ever even looked at the images from the Huygens probe? The "rocks" are solid chunks of water ice

>friendly thread discussing which moons are better
>hur dur planets n tribalism
please leave

Enceladus. We could check for life by analyzing geyser ejecta. I mean it's just throwing it out. Hell we don't even need a lander we can just fly an orbiter through the plume with a big net on it and see if we catch any fish!

But mainly Enceladus because it isn't located in a deathly radiation belt that totally fries electronics. This makes it easier to make sure the technology for exploring icey moons works before we send a probe to Europa.

>>Super-Cassinis
You are thinking much too small user. NASA had this project, which eventually got cancelled, called the Jupiter Icey Moons Orbiter (JIMO). JIMO was a going to be a fucking nuclear powered space battleship. We're talking 200 KW of electric output from the reactor for driving huge ion engines, a full scale ice penetrating radar, and high bandwidth communication. It would have been able to visit, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, and maybe even Io. Oh and it was going to drop a nuke powered lander on Europa too.

A big part of it was developing a high power nuclear reactor for space. If you aren't aware, this is a big fucking deal because the only nuclear reactors that could work in space today are Ruskie made and don't generate much power. Having a ready to go space rated nuclear reactor design would open up a lot of mission possibilities.

And you know what? It all got cancelled because Bush wanted to send people back to the Moon, which got cancelled too. If it wasn't for fucking manned space exploration, we could have it enroute to jupiter RIGHT NOW.

>>liquid methane
life as we know it does not work on liquid methane. Life as we know it uses liquid water. We're pretty goddamn sure Europa and Enceladus have that.

Europa and Enceladus both have fucking oceans. We're pretty damn sure Enceladus has hydrothermal activity. Were pretty damn sure Europa has a mechanism for transporting organic shit to the surface which gets bathed in deathly radiation, and moving that shit back underwater. If that's not a complex geological process I don't know what is.

>>The spacesuit for Titan could be basically just light airproof clothing with a heater inside
And an air tank, and mask. You know what a spacesuit could be? A tight thing of spandex and a bubble helmet. The spandex doesn't even need to be air tight.

Titan is at goddamn cryogenic temperatures. That dense atmosphere is gonna make heat transfer quite effective. But it gets even worse, it is believed to rain methane. Humans are hot enough to boil that. And if you recall from thermo, a phase change is a great way to carry away a lot of heat!

Oh and when it rains it pours. Like METERS of rain at a time. This means flash floods of CRYOGENIC METHANE. Sure they may occur over decades or century timescales, but if you build your initial colony at the wrong time, you're fucked. Cassini actually found some lakes that WEREN'T THERE BEFORE.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_of_Titan#cite_ref-37
nature.com/news/2006/060724/full/news060724-7.html

>>but putting a fission reactor on Titan will ensure productivity
of course, it's going to be a very long time before your colonists can build reactors. If Earth stops sending fuel, your colonists are quite fucked.

People on Mars at least have the capability of building solar on their own in the near term.

>> any free oxidants buried
hell to the no. You'd need some pretty crazy process to produce it and some pretty crazy process to prevent it from reacting over geologic time periods.

>>shuttle hydrocarbon fuel from Titan to Earth, and oxygen back the other way.
so you're gonna speeding up something with the mass of an oil tanker to KILOMETERS PER SECOND? I don't fucking think so. A kilo of gasoline in geostationary orbit has more kinetic energy than it has chemical potential energy.

You could just you know ship nuclear fuel to titan and use them to produce whatever scary oxidizing agents

>>oxidant tanks
so the most sane oxidant to use on Titan is liquid oxygen. It's probably somewhat stable at the surface. This stability presents problems. Liquid oxygen combined with organic material is actually explosive:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyliquit
groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.engr.explosives/_MreonOuJ04/Q2sLkDBIp5QJ
We've used liquid oxygen this way on a large scale to blow stuff up in mines.

It explodes with a high detonation velocity than dynamite. The mixture of LOX and organics is quite unstable and can be detonated by electrostatic charge build up or impact. Particularly troublesome is that liquid oxygen spilled onto tarmac can cause them to become sufficiently explosive so as to be detonated by walking on them.

Well guess what Titan probably has? Electrostatically charged hydrocarbon soil:
thespacereporter.com/2017/03/sand-grains-titan-electrically-charged/

A LOX spill on titan is a goddamn landmine.

Here's a video of an LOX-hydrocarbon dust explosion:
youtube.com/watch?v=mrJdjNiZY6Y

>implying titan doesn't have water as part of its cryovulcanism

I did say it was a worst case scenario, but as you said, a little nuclear fuel goes a long way. I was just suggesting more portable energy sources for surface vehicles to use.

>oxidant tanks contain things that are explosive
>implying non cryogenic temperatures
You know what else is explosive at sufficient temperatures? Petrol vapour and air. Guess what people carry about in just about every car on Earth? You'd never store the oxidant and the fuel mixed together, that's just asking to become a space Jihadi. Sure if you spill it you be careful as fuck, but you'd do the same with a gas leak on Earth. If you feed LOX into the engine in controlled, small amounts, it's not going nuclear on you. If it's hypergolic then you don't even need a spark, but I doubt it at those temperatures. Titan is at 95K, which is barely 10K above Methane's flash point. Sounds perfect for internal combustion to me. LOX actually boils at 90K, so you'd have to keep it pressurised otherwise it would just evaporate, thus not creating a hazardous spill. It might react as it comes in contact with the atmosphere, but it wouldn't accumulate on the ground to be set off by electrostatic sand. Furthermore, the atmosphere of Titan is hardly 100% methane. It is in fact only 1.4% methane, with the rest being nitrogen and a 0.1-0.2% hydrogen. This equates to a partial pressure of around 1.4 psi. Hardly a gas tank waiting to be set off.

>he fell for the Titan memery

So what if it has liquid CH4 and CH4 glacier? Does it have water? No. Does it have oxygen? No,

Titan is nothing but a meme planet, with almost likely no life of its own and not a habitat worth colonizing/living. It might be worth it to mine the moon for it's natural gas (CH4) but not much more

Neither, I'm not a colonylet, I want BIG moons.

neither

Team Mars or nothing

Mars aint got no water on the surface, also not a moon.

Mars has gotten ruined by normies memery and Elon Musk. That's like saying your favorite baseball team is the Yankees. Pleb tier, shit taste 3/10

Hello there. Posting best moon in the solar system and the only one that had people on it. And not only that, unlike all others it might have them again in the near future if the clusterfuck that is NASA is at least somewhat fixed during the next few years of republican dominated government.
Jupiter and Saturn's bitches can go wait a few more centuries, if not forever.

>Living inside a gravity well.
Lmao look at these primitives. O'Neill cylinders are the future.

On a semi related note, why does Saturn have some many interesting moons?

titan could be useful for aerobraking from high velocity transfers

Jupiter doesn't have any atmospheres so you can't aerobrake there, which is a problem.

BRAAAAAAAAAAAP

>>implying titan doesn't have water as part of its cryovulcanism
Europa and Enceladus have fucking oceans. We have yet to detect any signs of liquid water on titan.

>> Petrol vapour and air.
Don't detonate, they deflagrate. Deflagration is subsonic combustion, detonation is supersonic combustion. Because detonation occurs release more energy faster it does a lot more damage. To get mixtures of petrol and air to detonate you need high pressures otherwise you get more of a fire than an explosion

>>but you'd do the same with a gas leak on Earth
LOX and organic mixtures are IMPACT, friction, and electrostatic shock sensitive at CRYOGENIC TEMPERATURES. We do not worry about impact and friction sensitivity when we deal with gasoline or gas leaks

here have some videos of asphalt/oil and LOX detonating from IMPACT
youtube.com/watch?v=lY_BMzqP6rE
youtube.com/watch?v=zFyqilT0ld0

>> LOX actually boils at 90K
at one atm, but we aren't in Kansas anymore. The Huygens probe measured a surface pressure of about 1.45 atm. At 1.45 atm, oxygen boils at about 93.8 K, pic related is from the NIST gas properties calculator.

Huygens measured about this temperature at the surface. However, more recent results from Cassini show that the surface temperature can vary somewhat and that temperatures can get down to 89.5 K in places. So liquid oxygen might actually be somewhat stable at these temperatures.

>>thus not creating a hazardous spill.
it lasts long enough at earth temperatures and pressures to be hazardous
gulfnews.com/news/uae/transport/tanker-spills-liquid-oxygen-on-road-1.168568
chicoer.com/article/NA/20150504/NEWS/150509913

At these temperatures and pressures, it's not going to boil away or evaporate very fast. So yes, we could get accumulations for long enough to be dangerous.

Although, this is something of an edge case. If one gets into a situation where you spill liquid oxygen on Titan, you have bigger problems.

Thank you for the many valid points. I still think LOX-storing craft are the way to go simply on a specific-impulse basis, we'd just have to develop appropriate self-sealing tanks. In air you don't have to worry much at all until you land, but I'm sure with today's technology+more we'll have safe landings as long as the weather isn't bad, which it probably won't be.

>Europa and Enceladus have fucking oceans. We have yet to detect any signs of liquid water on titan.
Pulled that one out of your arse, I see. According to pic related and other sources, there is vary likely a large underground ocean under Titan's icy surface just like the other large icy moons of the solar system. I'd say it's a more likely candidate for life than any of the others because it has a significant atmosphere.