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Carrion Luggage #1095958 added August 26, 2025 at 9:59am
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Titanic
A titanically ambitious idea from Scientific American:
Let's Colonize Titan 
Saturn's largest moon might be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live
It's not a new idea, mind you. Science fiction has considered it for nearly as long as it started speculating about off-earth colonies, and that was long before the 2016 date on this article.
The idea of a human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn, might sound crazy.
From the perspective of some hypothetical person unexposed to science fiction, the idea of a human colony anywhere but within the fragile eggshell protection of our home planet sounds crazy. Then you read a bit of SF and start to think these things might be possible. Then you read even more SF, and maybe some actual science, and you're back to thinking it's batshit.
Crazy or not, though, we humans specialize in conceiving the impossible, or, in this case, the extremely improbable. So I'll indulge.
Its temperature hovers at nearly 300° below zero Fahrenheit, and its skies rain methane and ethane that flow into hydrocarbon seas.
Now, if it were ethanol instead of ethane, I'd be the first to promote an expedition there. The difference, chemically, is that one of the hydrogen atoms in ethane is replaced with an -OH radical to make it an alcohol. Any of the alkanes can make this substitution and it becomes an alcohol instead of an alkane. We're mostly familiar with the least poisonous of those, ethanol. You also have methanol, also known as wood alcohol, which can blind you. And there is, of course, propanol, from propane, usually sold as isopropyl alcohol, which has its uses in cleaning because it's so damn poisonous. The "iso-" prefix indicates to chemists where on the carbon chain the radical hangs out.
But I digress. There may be clouds of ethanol in space, but they're many light-years away. Titan's in our own backyard. Well, sort of. Not really. Matter of perspective: right on top of us by cosmic standards, really freaking far away by human standards. And besides, it's cheaper to make ethanol right here than stealing Titan's ethane and doing... whatever.
Nevertheless, Titan could be the only place in the solar system where it makes sense to build a permanent, self-sufficient human settlement.
Ignoring for a moment that they really mean "besides Earth," given an advanced enough technology, and the desire to do so, we could put colonies on Mars, the Moon, certain asteroids, or somewhere in space (in ascending order of batshittery). We don't have the tech yet, especially the part about it being self-sufficient. No matter what certain guanopsychotic public figures have proposed.
We reached this conclusion after looking at the planets in a new way: ecologically. We considered the habitat that human beings need and searched for those conditions in our celestial neighborhood.
Mostly, we need all the other life on Earth.
Our colonization scenario, based on science, technology, politics and culture, presents a thought experiment for anyone who wants to think about the species’ distant future.
And just like that, it becomes a bit less insane. Assuming we have a distant future (an assumption I'm not prepared to make), many things that we consider impossible will become merely unlikely, and the unlikely can become quotidian.
But although the Moon and Mars look like comparatively reasonable destinations, they also have a deal-breaking problem. Neither is protected by a magnetosphere or atmosphere.
Except that the less-batshit proposals involve going underground, letting many meters of rock do the radiation-stopping. And they either use natural caves, or robots to do the digging.
Underground shelter is hard to build and not flexible or easy to expand. Settlers would need enormous excavations for room to supply all their needs for food, manufacturing and daily life.
But we'll have robot slaves to do that for us.
Titan is the only other body in the solar system with liquid on the surface, with its lakes of methane and ethane that look startlingly like water bodies on Earth.
Shouldn't be anything startling about it. Landscape is landscape; fill it with liquid, and you get a fractal boundary, and fractals are notorious for appearing similar to each other. And let's not gloss over the temperature.
It’s cold on Titan, at -180°C (-291°F), but thanks to its thick atmosphere, residents wouldn’t need pressure suits—just warm clothing and respirators.
I am filled with doubt on that.
Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface...
There was a time we thought Earth's resources were unlimited, too.
Titanians (as we call them) wouldn’t have to spend all their time inside.
You know they'll just end up being called "Tits."
There is no quick way to move off the Earth. We will have to solve our problems here.
If only.
Look, I have no problem with speculation and dreaming. I've been inhaling science fiction since I was a kid. But speculation like this can be misleading. I am entirely in favor of space exploration and discovery; I reject out of hand the argument that we "should" be using those resources to solve problems on Earth. For one thing, there will always be problems on Earth as long as there are humans here to cause and identify them. For another, it's not like that money gets blasted into orbit; it continues to circulate in the economy.
So, yes, let's dream and explore. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. |
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