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Solar System’s biggest asteroid is an ancient ocean world
- pilom 10y agoCan we add this to the list of possibilities for human colonies? Moon, Mars, Ceres. It has less gravity so bones would be harder to maintain but less of a gravity well to get out of after landing. All that water is pretty darn appealing for refueling. It is farther away so solar insolation is less but sounds like it still would be worth it.
- zspade 10y agoWell Ceres only has a diameter of 589mi (a little over 1/4 the size of our moon). It might be a good launchpad for refueling though, given the near in-significant gravity and apparently plentiful water.
- jboggan 10y agoEscape velocity of ~ 500 m/s, that's slower than most rifle bullets travel!
- Florin_Andrei 10y agoI'm looking at all the hydrogen laying around in the system in various forms, including water, and all I can think of is - energy. It's the stuff that powers the stars. If only we could master that damn fusion now.
- achr2 10y agoHydrogen is not really what powers the stars, it's the immense gravity that collapses the hydrogen nuclei to allow fusion.
- kiba 10y agoIf you need gravity, you could build rotating habitats.
- castratikron 10y agoMaybe we could crash it into Mars and drink it there. It probably wouldn't burn up when entering Mars' thin atmosphere. Disclaimer: I've played a lot of Kerbal Space Program.
- groovy2shoes 10y agoPardon me, but were you born of evil in a fiery volcano?
- IndianAstronaut 10y agoTitan. It actually has a significant atmosphere, actually a bit thicker than Earth's. Abundant ice as well.
- scardine 10y agoIn "The Expanse" TV show, Ceres is the birth place of the main character, police detective Josephus Miller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series)
- colordrops 10y agoThis show should be more popular than it is. It's relatively hard scifi that posits a realistic future of solar system colonization.
- posterboy 10y ago>hard scifi It's not, but it takes some inspiration
- pilom 10y agoIt certainly starts out fairly hard scifi (with the only exception being Epstein drives) but takes a pretty sharp turn away from that as soon as the proto-molecule is out and about. It was hard for me not to put the book away and stop reading the series when the zombies showed up because I was so engrossed in the realism behind the story that those parts just felt like a betrayal.
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- colordrops 10y agoWhat's wrong with Epstein drives? I haven't read the book, but what is impossible about them? Is it the amount of energy needed?
- pilom 10y agoThey are more fuel efficient than anything physics predicts is possible because they effectively have the max thrust of chemical rockets, combined with a nearly infinite ISP from using no reaction mass. They mention refueling the fusion reactors and the steam thrusters, but they never mention reaction mass for the Epstein drives.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoIts 1/3 of the asteroid belt by mass. So the asteroid belt is what, 1/6 water by mass?