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We'll probably (50% or greater chance) want all the water we can get our hands on. Water makes great rocket fuel and is a critical component of life support sys
by max76 7y ago
We'll probably (50% or greater chance) want all the water we can get our hands on. Water makes great rocket fuel and is a critical component of life support systems. Water, having mass, tends to collect in gravity wells.
- DuskStar 7y agoRight, but those gravity wells might make that water rather irritating to get to relative to water contained in comets or other Oort Cloud objects.
- Faark 7y agoOort Cloud objects as in [0]? Getting to asteroids takes way to long already. Yeah, Oort cloud won't happen unless we have a magical breakthrough in propulsion as depicted in The Expanse. And at that point current intuition around gravity wells will probably not apply anymore as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes_Interstellar.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes...
- max76 7y agoCeres is about 2.5AU from the sun, has more water than Earth and the mass of 0.00015 Earths. The ort cloud is 1,000-100,000 AU away. I am making the assumption that we will have a much stronger preference for water closer to Earth, and we aren't talking about large gravity wells.
- DuskStar 7y agoThere's a massive practical difference between Ceres size gravity wells that can be escaped with a half-decent cannon and ones that can't. And I've never heard of people suggesting there might be life on/in Ceres.