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Pluto’s dark side spills its secrets – including hints of a hidden ocean
- PaulHoule 6y agoPluto is probably a better place for habitation than Mars. Most of Pluto's mass is volatiles such as water, carbon monoxide and nitrogen: things you can use to make plastics and pharmaceuticals, breathing air, trees, and human bodies. Instead of supporting millions of people on Mars Pluto has the resources to support trillions of people.
- ianai 6y agoQuick google and Pluto has something like a surface temp of 47 kelvin. That’s cold enough that I think the material on the surface would turn explosively energetic if ever exposed to something like the temperatures we humans live. It also wouldn’t have soil. That far out, you really need good sources of energy like fusion and fission as solar wouldn’t provide enough. On the other hand, I’m sure there’s some incredible science to be done out there. Like making gigantic structures (particle accelerators, telescopes, etc) out of what ever can be scraped from nearby asteroids and such. I wish we could park a satellite around it.
- PaulHoule 6y agoWho wants to live on the surface? Cut Charon up into small ringworlds (e.g. no structural difficulties at 100 km radius but you do have to put a roof on; if you could make a journal bearing that can handle 10 km/s then you can make these bigger and not put on a roof) You can make very thin solar arrays out of plastic film + semiconductor layers. You only need D+D fusion once you get even further out.
- ianai 6y agoSeems to be about 1w/m2 at the best at Pluto. It’s over 1000 times higher out here. 1/1600 th the power available at earth. Doesn’t seem enough.
- philliphaydon 6y agoWe're gonna need computers there so we will ship some 10th gen Intels to use as heaters.
- stephenhuey 6y agoAnd run some Flash apps on them to keep the fires burning!
- manquer 6y agoElectron apps probably to keep up with times I would say
- bryanrasmussen 6y agogiven the surface temperature obviously some large corporations could run all its server farms there to keep them cooled. I nominate Facebook.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoI'm sure we can scrap together a few thousand Pentium 4-based Dells to send.
- KineticLensman 6y ago> trillions of people Really? A frozen dwarf planet in the outer solar system supporting a thousand times more people than the Earth? Without a functioning biosphere or solar energy?
- throwaway5752 6y agoYup. Leaving aside that we have never yet to send an unmanned lander there, and it has roughly the surface area of Russia. If it were as densely populated as Manhattan over its entire surface it would have a population of less than half a trillion (appr 442,000,000,000) people. That on less than a thousandth of the W/(m^2) solar radiation of Earth. I'd be really interested if anyone is bored enough to figure out a trillion person's population energy requirement and see how long a 50% mass/energy efficient fusion process could sustain a population of that size of a fuel base the size of Pluto. edit: assume 1 year at 1 GW-year per 1000 kg fuel for fusion power.. global energy use is about 18 TW-years, and round the population to 10^10 people. Not entirely comparable, but 10^12 people -> 1.8 * 10^3 TW-years or 1.8 * 10^6 GW-years. So about 200 million kgs of fusion fuel burned per year? And how much of the H in Pluto's water would be T or D?
- FranOntanaya 6y agoTechnically, once you start colonizing a planet's underground you have little vertical limitations. Manhattan isn't a cube, most people live in a 50 meters layer from the ground. 50 meters is nothing if you are building an underground grid. Thermal insulation would be nearly perfect and radiating excess heat can be passive, so there wouldn't be energy usage from that.
- throwaway5752 6y agoYes, but people have to eat and try accounting for per 1000 w/m^2 of sunlight over crop and grazing land, after adapting for food production in tunnels with LEDs. Or trying to figure imagine what transportation looks like. Easier to just look at current usage and accept it's a spitball estimate. For cubes, what building material available there will support 3-d structures at that scale? It's mostly ices out there. Relying Ni/Fe asteroids feels like magical thinking and is not in line with scales involved. For that mater, where's all the carbon going to come from to make the people out of? For reference, if you assume 1000 sq ft per person (maybe generous, but you have to account for transportation conduits, plumbing, food production, structural reinforcement) with 10 ft height, it's about 300 cubic meters. For a trillion people, that ends up being a 70km cube. I doubt there is any durable foundation on Pluto, and any structure would melt the ground it's (axiomatic thermodynamics) without active cooling, which increases the energy requirements. Ultimately, I don't see why anyone would want to live packed into a small cube on Pluto eating engineered food. A trillion people packed in a cube underground in a block of gas ices isn't going to experience wonder and joy of exploration.
- klyrs 6y agoTrillions? It's a tiny planet and people would have less than 20 square meters to live on. Do you have a plan for how to feed these people?
- sambull 6y agoWhy would you need more space on a people farm? Is it free range, probably not.
- tehjoker 6y agoKind of depressing to see people see a fascinating new world that has developed for billions of years in the cold made of volatile chemicals, and the first reaction of people reading about it is to cut it up and remake it in our image.
- basementcat 6y agoNot unlike a westerner who visits an exotic foreign country for the first time and looks for a McDonalds for lunch.
- social_quotient 6y agoBut what’s more sad here. They want McDonald’s or that there is a McDonald’s?
- shadowprofile77 6y agoAnd what would be so sad about there being a McDonald's? Or maybe you believe that most of the developing world should be conserved in an "authentic" state for your aesthetic and political benefit? Because if that McDonald's exists in X place and is doing a brisk business, some not too small percentage of the local population is perceiving a benefit from it. Not to mention that, being a franchise business, it's benefiting some local entrepreneur, his/her family and all the people they benefit in the local economy through the restaurant and earnings they spend elsewhere. Sure, let's not stuff western megabrand businesses into every nook and cranny of the world's cultural landscape, but to call the rise of modern market brands in developing countries "sad" is self serving and narrow-sighted at best.
- nprateem 6y agoAnd is a toasty -230 degrees C on the surface. Just think - all those trillions of people could sunbathe without even breaking a sweat.
- 8jy89hui 6y agoIf you look hard enough, you'll find evidence of what you want. Life on Europa or Enceladus seems like a far shot but relatively possible. Pluto feels like an entirely different league. This article seems to point more at our obsession with finding life than anything else.
- dfischer 6y agoThere’s more truth to your first statement than anything else that exists.
- behnamoh 6y agoHonestly, even if we find microbial life on other planets/moons, it wouldn't make the news that much as we already know some forms of life actually came to Earth by meteors.
- beamatronic 6y agoI think it would expose 2 camps of people. Like masks have. Some would react with anger and disbelief. And for others, it would be Tuesday.
- AngryData 6y agoBiologists might lose their shit over seeing new forms of life. Of course it would be decades at a minimum before anything useful came out of it.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoAgain, that question of life elsewhere when we have an abundance here but are killing it with indifference. Can we prioritise.
- _Microft 6y agoThis is a false choice. We could both protect life here and still seek out new life at the same time.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoWe could. But we're not.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y agoWe are not trying particularly hard to find life elsewhere either.
- koheripbal 6y agoThis is like asking the baker to help make candles because there's a candle shortage. People need to do what they are efficient at. ...especially in this case since China is producing the most CO2 and hasn't even agreed to slow down their CO2 production _growth_ until maybe 2030!
- rwmj 6y agoUnlike many BBC "science" programmes, this recent one about Pluto was not terrible: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kqm9 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kqm9