I spent the weekend at a LARPing convention called Intercon. pet peeve space science fiction callisto which is the best moon in the solar system Or not, there’s some research on the ISS going on now with animals in centrifuges that might give us a clue in a little while. We don’t really know how healthy the 1/8 g on the big moons is compared to 0g or 1g so that might make a big health difference too. Oh, and there are a bunch of other moons but they’re tiny and don’t have enough gravity to make things like cooking or pooping convenient.
Clearly Callisto is where you make your first space settlement.
#Spaceplan selenium boondocks plus#
Plus you get the same access to both ice and non-ice you get on Ganymede. There are some extra cosmic rays compared to down here in the atmosphere but it’s the same radiation environment the astronauts on the ISS see which seems to be basically fine. Enough shielding is very doable, particularly with all that ice around, but you’ll need to spend lots of time indoors.īut Callisto? On Callisto you get the same dose of background radiation you get within Earth’s protective Van Allen belt. Not immediately but you’ll get a yearly dose on the surface 30 times higher than the lowest dose clearly linked to cancer and 60 times higher than the one we let nuclear power plant operators be exposed to. Ganymede has lots to recommend it, lots of ice *and* non-ice. If you’re not going to put a colony underwater then Europa’s surface is super radioactive and unprotected humans will tend to get a lethal dose after one day on the surface, though under a kilometer of ice you’re fine And they have stuff that, like, isn’t water on their surfaces if you want access to other elements for some strange reason. If you want a colony in a Moon’s ocean that’s an ok place to put it but we think that Ganymede and Callisto also probably have oceans too. We can be sure it has a liquid ocean under all that ice, which means there’s a possibility of life. Basically nobody puts one on Io except as a weird research station which is great, because Io is objectively a terrible place to have to be unless you want to learn more about how hot sulfur behaves in high radiation environments.Įuropa is a common one and there are reasons for that.
#Spaceplan selenium boondocks tv#
It’s sad that books, TV shows, etc always overlook Callisto when talking about people having settlements on Jovian moons.