Scientists discover evidence for a habitable region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus
phys.org
phys.org
Saturn is YEARS away. Like 4-7 depending on where the planets are at.
Wouldn't it make sense to have a methane mining base on Titan anyway?
Because the numbers just don't work for chemical rockets. The already-harsh rocket equations get even worse when you have to carry along the mass to feed, water, and breath, too.
There is ~4.5 billion tons of uranium already in sea water [1].
If that fact surprises you, you may just have not known it. If that fact scares you or makes you want to deny it, you're probably still stuck in the irrational fear I'm talking about. The world is not a pristine place with no radioactivity in it until Man comes along and somehow, like, manufactures it from nothing but his sheer Evil for the nefarious purpose of destroying the environment, mu-hu-ha-ha-ha. It's a thing that's already out there. It's not that terrifying if we take basic precautions that, it turns out, we already take because you know what's way scarier than a few dozen pounds of uranium falling near you? A flaming exploding rocket falling on you. So we already don't launch over cities and such.
And we really won't progress as long as people can not only act irrationally about the real dangers, but think they're being more moral by being irrational about the dangers than people actually using their brains and that it's vital to yell at the people using their brains and attempt to socially pressure them into just going with the herd and assigning infinite danger to the scariness of OMGRadiation!!!1!.
[1]: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/ferguson2/
So I don't know what you are raving about.
Yes, anything involving radiation causes fear. The reality is that the atomic bomb tests deposited tons of plutonium in the atmosphere and no one has detected any health consequences from that. I am not sure why someone would say a few dozen more pounds of plutonium would matter.
A lot of ethically questionable scientific research might potentially be performed by so-called "rogue states" that don't feel bound by international norms.
We're seeing something like that in regards to copyright and patents, where some countries that don't respect intellectual property have no problems violating copyright and patents of countries that do.
Similarly, cloning research and human-embryo research that might be banned in some countries is being performed by others. Launching nukes it to space is another opportunity to advance for countries that have no ethical problems with that.
(link to bad astronomy, a reasonably good explainer type source)
(Fusion would require not just that some small-city-sized installation works on Earth but that something small enough to usefully fit in other structures can generate power. We know we can put fission reactors in spaces small enough to run submarines, so that is almost certainly feasible.)
Isn't the fear that this would start another nuclear arms race? I'm not sure if the threat is that much worse (considering how effective the nuclear triad is) but any perceived advantage would have consequences that increase the threat of nuclear war.
And people are working on building reactors. NASA has plans for one[1] in the 100kWe range. But mostly spacecraft have had low power needs and so people haven't wanted to deal with the complexity of a reactor.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Affordable_Fission_Engine
I should have been more specific - isn't the fear that nuclear power generation in space could be utilized as part of a weapons program.
First we really need to capture a good asteroid, though. And have the infrastructure to turn that into useful reactor building material.
My point is not that this will happen tomorrow. My point is that this seems to me to be fundamental to any real exploration or settlement of the solar system and that anyone who is planning on settling Mars or goodness help us, Saturn or Jupiter via chemical rockets is just crazy. Sort of like how we used to do math problems on when it was worth it for some computation to just wait for next year's exponentially-better processors and start it then, anyone running with that plan is going to be beaten by the initially-slower, but way stronger plans that involve building some infrastructure in space first, rather than trying to jump straight for the flashy awesome stuff.
... of course, that also means admitting there's basically no chance that any sort of space settlement can occur in our lifetimes almost no matter what the tech advances might be, because before we can settle there's a lot of building infrastructure that lets us build infrastructure that lets us build better infrastructure to do. And somehow figure out ways to keep this all paying for itself as it goes.
From the article:
"The amount of molecular hydrogen we detected is high enough to support microbes similar to those that live near hydrothermal vents on Earth," said SwRI's Dr. Christopher Glein, a co-author on the paper and a pioneer of extraterrestrial chemical oceanography.
It would be really interesting to compare the economics of shipping large volumes of fuel around moon system, to shipping them around a relatively tiny ocean.
Wow. Maybe basic transport is not the first area where intelligent machines will make their human counterpart superfluous. I'm sure machines can do better than this.
Probably similar are Europa and Triton.
"Habitable" makes it sound like we could move there and live there without too much trouble. That's not true. What has been discovered is that microorganisms might be able to live there, near hydrothermic vents that seem to create free hydrogen, which could support primitive life. That life could be similar to life living around hydrothermic vents on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. No sign of life itself, though, just a process that could theoretically sustain life without requiring sunlight.
By the way, it's already a month old, there's nothing new since Cassini's last trip.
Also, can't believe Newsweek did a mistake like that if not for clicks...
"Update: An earlier headline read that signs of life were found on Enceladus. We regret any misunderstanding this headline may have caused. NASA has discovered that Enceladus is habitable, not inhabited."
It's Newsweek, but still...