The 5 most hostile worlds

[Launch window]

100 years ago nobody would have thought the USA would have had people on the Moon or Russians would have men living orbiting our Planet.

Let's assume in 50 years time we have developed great propulsion from developing technology such as fusion, ion-drives, nano-tech, anti-matter or fisson. Rather than waiting months or years to reach other world it takes just a matter of hours or weeks.
Now there is a new space race launched by all the space agency's to build settlements or bases on every world in our solar system. Which of the worlds would you consider to have the highest levels of hosility and be very hard to inhabit. For the puropose of this discussion I'd like to stay away from Asteroids, Exo-planets, Gas-Giants and Comets.

Here is my list of Ten


1 Io : Unlike that Outland movie Io would be almost impossible to colonise. It has huge variations in temperature, it doesn't have a stable surface and is the most volcanically active body in our solarsystem, it has a thin toxic atmosphere and its ionizing radiation would be instantly lethal
2 Mercury : Forget Ben Bova's mercury or Arthur's Rendezvous with Rama, this minor planet is deadly. Flying near the Sun would always be high-risk, Mercury has huge changes in temperature, it has little or no atmosphere and radiation dosage would often be deadly during flares.
3 Venus : This planet has 2 major problems, it is hotter than Mercury and has a highly corrosive atmosphere. However the Russians proved craft could be built to survive this hellish climate, upper-atmosphere is less hostile and planet's surface has rescources.
4 Triton ( Neptune ) or Titania ( Uranus ) these bodies are very cold, they are some of the coldest places in the solar system and lie at great distances from Earth so rescue missions would be almost impossible but they do have solid surfaces and a lot of water-ice
5 Pluto : Cold, Dark, and even with new propulsion it would still be very far away from the Earth.
6 Saturn's Moons : Mimas or Rhea
7 Ganymede or Callisto
8 The Earth's Moon. Russia sent Luna probes to the Moon, the USA sent Rangers and Surveyor's and landed Armstrong and Aldrin with the Apollo mission, it is now the target of ESA's Smart-1 and may soon be explored by robotic craft from China and India. The Moon however is a lifeless rock with few resources, lunar dust could be deadly. Its close proximity however will always be an advantage.
9 Mars : It has a 24 hour day and looked habitable to early astronomers who thought they saw channels and canals, Orsen Wells caused American public panic with his War of the Worlds broadcast. Mars may have once had flowing water but today it appears to be a dead, dusty and cratered world. Martian dust could be toxic and building a long-term colony could be difficult due to radiation exposure.
10 Titan : Very cold and it also has low gravity but Titan seems quiet planet-like and might also be full of rescources.

[mantiss]

Just for fun here are My picks:

Hyperion: sounds dreadful with it's chaotic motion, days always mixing, shorter, longer, changing axis, circadian sickness guaranteed! Would have to be underground, and sending anything to it and back from is going to be a challenge.

Venus: Too hot, too much pressure, a technological challenge at all levels, you can't even go underground for freshness. This is hell in ways Mercury will never be.

Prometheus: which is constantly interacting with Saturnian rings sounds like a bad spot as well. Constant pelting and erosion.

Io: drenched in radiation, constant sulphur eruptions, an alien environment that has little chance of offering immediate interest and ressources.

Miranda: the sheer geology there might be a Hiker's dream challenge but it makes for unusually difficult exploration.

[antoniseb]

Most Hostile World? Umm Good thing you mean confined to here in the solar system.

- If Jupiter has a solid surface of metalic Hydrogen, that would be a tough environment to walk around on.

- Io's boiling Sulfur soup surface perpetually bathed in lethal ionizing radiation would have to be a treat.

-How about Mathilda? An asteroid made of charcoal brickettes that act like the slowest quicksand in the universe (speculation on my part).

- Venus would be a picnic after the surface of Jupiter, but still more than a trifle unpleasant.

- If cold is an issue, perhaps Sedna, or perhaps one of the comets with very long orbits, like Kohoutek.

[MrClean]

Speaking of exploring worlds, hop on over to Escape Pod and look for the story 'Fools Seldom Differ' It's a very small after dinner mint, wafer thin, but I laughed till I errupted and spewed among other things, coke outta my nose while driving down the highway.

[Swift]

I don't know, I'd like Io. Most of my graduate work involved the synthesis of transition metal sulfides. All the work was done in a special furnace where we could flow hydrogen sulfide over the starting materials (and keep it from killing everyone). On Io, it would be bench chemistry and I'd have to be in the special container. ;)

The other thing I don't understand about this list, ok Earth is the most hospitable for humans - what is number 2? Any world or moon in this solar system, other than Earth, will require special life support for humans. Some are relatively harder, but none are easy.

[baric]

After Earth, the least hostile planet in the Solar System is....
(drum roll)

Venus!

You just have to get over the notion of living on the surface. Floating 50 km above the surface, you have the following advantages:

1) Near-Earth gravity
2) temperatures that allow liquid water
3) an atmosphere to protect you from solar radiation
4) atmospheric pressure similar to Earth at sea level

Balloons filled with breathable oxygen would float well above the surface, supporting colonies of Earth organisms. Over time, you could "colonize" the vast majority of the Venusian atmosphere at the 50km level with several times the living space that Earth provides.

And if you wanted to slowly terraform Venus, it would be much easier to control robots from 50 km away than from Earth.

[Doodler]

Most hostile.

1) Io
2) Venus
3) Titan (what is it with dense atmospheres, anyway?)
4) Mercury
5) Phobos, in about 37,000 years.

[Launch window]

The other thing I don't understand about this list, ok Earth is the most hospitable for humans - what is number 2? Any world or moon in this solar system, other than Earth, will require special life support for humans. Some are relatively harder, but none are easy.

I would think for setting up a small colony on Enceladus, Titan and Europa would be ok as these worlds might be quiet habitable, even though there may not be much atmosphere on Enceladus & Europa you could always drill down deep and set up a bunker ( like some of NASA's plans for underground lunar bases ) or one might built a mobile submarine type base on Europa. The biggest problem however is getting big payloads out there quickly, with our current rocketry tech and gravity assists it takes about 1 year and a half to reach Jupiters Moons or 4-7 years to reach Saturn's Moons, it would be difficult to keep a crew mentally and physically healthy for this long. That's why the Earth's Moon and Mars are better targets for now, not because they are more livable or have more resources but because they are closer.

[Romanus]

1.) Venus. The surface is not inhabitable with any technology we know of for an indefinite period, and even the upper-atmosphere can be turbulent. IN orbit, one would have to contend with increased heat and greater vulnerability to solar flares.

2.) Io, for the aforementioned reasons, and also because it's deep in Jupiter's gravity well; getting to it and escaping it would both be difficult and fuel-costly.

3.) Any of the other Galilean satellites.

4.) Icarus or Phaethon. Say what you want, but these would be fascinating worldlets to explore the long-term effects of intense solar radiation, with the added bonus that they may be extinct comets. However, at perihelion they both get much more heat and radiation than Mercury does, and their orbits would be difficult to intercept. What a solar platform, though!

5.) Pluto. Creating suits and habitable units that could withstand the extreme cold would be very difficult, besides the planet's great distance.

6.) Triton, ditto.

7.) Mercury. I don't have as unfavorable an opinion of the planet as some others. Though it would be very difficult to get to, I'm guessing that conditions near the poles would be manageable, and rock shelters would be easy to construct. Most of the heat could probably be dealt with by using parasols and insulated boots, since there's no atmosphere to transmit the heat. On the night-side, it would take some time for the surface to cool off, making it usable for that much longer. Still, this is beyond anything we can do today.

8.) Enceladus. Though radiation is not an issue here, it *is* the source of Saturn's E-ring, and a manned ship would have a much larger cross-section than Cassini. There's also the problem of Saturn's distance.

9.) See the distance problem; also, Titan would be difficult to design space suits for because of the the cold.

10.) The Moon. Solar storms and extreme temperature swings will give future colonists the blues, regardless of its nearness to Earth.