Is it possible to colonize uranus

Mars is already quite cold compared to Earth, and the Asteroids and Jupiter even more so, but with thick insulation and some mirrors to bounce light in you can do fairly decently.

That might not sound like much but it is actually almost a third of what average illumination is on Earth, when you factor in atmospheric reflection, cloudy days, nighttime, and higher, colder latitudes.

It is also a good deal brighter than the inside of most well-lit buildings, and is enough for decently robust photosynthesis to grow food. Especially with supplemental light from mirrors or LED growth lamps. But once you get out to Saturn and further that becomes increasingly impractical and a serious issue, because while food growth does not show up on your electric bill it is what we use virtually all our energy for.

Closer in to the sun we can use solar panels for power and we do not need any power to grow food. As we get further out we cannot use solar and we need to heat or cold habitats and supply lighting for food, so we need a lot more power even as our main source dries up. So what are our options? Well the first is simple, build bigger mirrors. A mirror can be quite large and paper thin after all. Alternatively we can build those mirrors far away, closer to the sun, and and either focus them on the place we want illuminated or send an energy beam, microwaves perhaps or lasers, out to the destination to supply energy.

We also have the option of using fission, if we can find enough Uranium or Thorium. So we would be looking at millions of years worth of energy supply. Of course fusion is even better, particularly since hydrogen becomes much more abundant as you get further from the Sun. We do not have fusion yet, but it is a technology we can plan around probably having inside our lifetimes, and while uranium and thorium might be counted in parts per billion, hydrogen is more plentiful than every other element combines, especially once you get far from the Sun and Inner Solar System.

So it is much better power source, an effectively unlimited one except on time scales of billions and trillion of years.

Still, if we do not have it, we still have other options. Bigger mirrors, beaming energy outwards from closer to the Sun, and classic fission of Uranium and Thorium. Access to fusion is not absolutely necessary but if you have it you can unlock the outer solar system because you have your energy supply, a cheap and abundant fuel supply, and much faster and cheaper spaceships.

Of course hydrogen, plain old vanilla hydrogen with one proton, like the sun uses for fusion, is harder to fuse than deuterium and may be a lot longer developing, we also have fusion using Helium-3 which has some advantages over hydrogen, so that is worth keeping in mind as well as we proceed outward.

The biggest of those an the most interesting for colonization is Titan. So it has everything we need for life except energy and gravity. It is low enough that you could probably flap your arms and fly, if you had wing attached. It needs some source of energy though, and we discussed that. So we often think of it as a low-tech colony since it is one we would want early on.

In an scenario like that it is very easy to imagine a lot of local transit between Titan and its smaller neighboring moons, which are more rocky and might be easier to dig fissile materials like Uranium and Thorium out of. You might have a dozen or so small outposts on neighboring moons mining fissile materials and other metals and a big central hub on Titan they delivered that too which also exported Nitrogen to other colonies in the solar system.

Moving back and forth between moons is pretty easy, especially since things landing on Titan can aerobrake quite easily, whereas Titan itself has a pretty strong gravity well and thick atmosphere to climb out of but is a good candidate for a space elevator, since it requires nothing more sophisticated than a Lunar Elevator on our own moon and has an abundant supply of the materials needed to make Zylon for instance, a material strong enough to make an elevator there and which we can mass manufacture right now.

At last count it has over sixty and many of them quite large. So just like Europa it is an interesting candidate for Colonization. While Saturn is best known for its amazing rings, they tend to be overlooked in colonization.

In spite of that the rings are not a bad place to set up shop. Being mostly water, they are abundant in hydrogen for fusion fuel and have little mass individually makes them as easy to approach or leave as an asteroid. Just big icebergs in space really, and there are many moonlets in the rings that can be as large as half a kilometer across.

So you can burrow down inside one for protection from radiation and impacts and possibly mine smaller ones for their ice to be brought to places where water is not abundant. So it is a lot of fresh water that is very easy to access and move elsewhere, and ice mines in the rings of Saturn might be quite useful and make good homes. Living inside an iceball might not sound appealing but it is better than it sounds like and we will discuss that more when we reach the Kupier Belt.

Uranus, and Neptune, are sometimes known as Ice Giants instead of Gas Giants because it has a lot more water. It also has more ammonia and methane and all three get called ices in this context because they make up most of the solid matter when you get this far out in the solar system. Like Venus, Uranus has very long days, at least in terms of places receiving continual sunlight, the poles get 42 years of perpetual sunlight then 42 of darkness.

Sunlight being a relative term, the light is quite minimal especially inside the atmosphere. Now Uranus has a large collection of moons as well, useful and colonizable like the other moons we have looked at, but otherwise unremarkable beyond being named for characters from Shakespeare, rather than the more common mythological names. None have atmospheres though there is a possibility Oberon or Titania might have subsurface oceans.

However jupiter has lots of moons, most of which are farther away so they are less irradiated. For a short-term visit -- say a few days -- the gravity on 1 Jupiter shouldn't be impossible, although I'd rather not try it.

Should be no problem for small, very strong people. I suspect it's going to be easier to just build space habitats. One could probably get all or at least most of the volatiles needed from ices in Saturn's rings or even Kuiper Belt objects than by scoopmining a gas giant. Let's just consider "on" as anywhere on Jupiter with a local atmospheric pressure of less than about 10 MPa.

Information about American English usage here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. How do things fly? This explains it all.

Actually they can't: "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. Join Date Jun Posts 6, Originally Posted by swampyankee. Join Date Sep Posts 10, Originally Posted by Noclevername. Join Date Mar Posts 20, In the story, the sun was acting up, so people moved to Saturn.

They lived in aerostats with a hot hydrogen balloon around a dome with more or less normal air, with a fusion reactor in a gondola. I remember it as an "okay" novel, not great. It was mostly interesting because of the premise. How do you prove that I am wrong? The Leif Ericson Cruiser. Join Date May Posts 1, Originally Posted by cjameshuff. Saturn's far enough from everything else that it's plentiful resources seem mostly useful within the Saturn ring and moon system.

Jupiter's much closer, and surrounded by easily accessible moons likely to contain large amounts of ices. I'm not talking about the big Galileans, but all the little irregulars. Also, the small gravity well, low surface gravity, and thin atmosphere of Mars might make it economical to export volatiles from. Also, a space elevator on Earth is just theoretically possible, one on Mars would be far easier to achieve. Phobos and Deimos may have ices as well, and are easier to reach than all but a handful of asteroids.

Most of the asteroids likely to have large reserves of volatiles are in orbits that take a lot of delta-v to reach, but with orbital production of propellants, it may also be economical to work them.

Asteroids also work particularly well with beamed propulsion technologies and space elevator style tethers. And Mercury may have water ice at the poles. It's in a decent position to take advantage of solar sail vehicles to export it, as well.

Originally Posted by Van Rijn. Join Date Nov Posts 5, They'd need a good plane change before being sent on a transfer orbit lieing in the ecliptic. Join Date Apr Posts 2, I notice some people are concerned about radiation levels within Jupiter's atmosphere, but I don't think there is actually any issue with radiation there at all. Go a few tens of km down and you won't have any more radiation issues than we do here on Earth's surface - the harmful radiation is around Jupiter isn't it?

General request : If I ask a question, I'd like people who know about the subject to answer it with factual answers preferably with references. Saying we don't know is fine if that's the case. However, I'm not really interested in guesses or personal opinions. I was thinking that too, like Earth van Allen belts, Jupiter's should be similar, although much stronger, although on cloudtops should not have effect. Equinox also brings a ring-plane crossing, when Uranus' rings appear to get narrower as they pass through, appearing edge-on and then widen again as seen from Earth.

However, Uranus was not near the crossing point. The spacecraft is asleep during most of its eight-year interplanetary trek from Jupiter to Pluto.

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