Date: May 24, 2011
Title: Fun Things to do in Our Solar System, Our Cosmic Paddling Pool
Podcaster: Paul Jones
Links: Facts About Things You Tube Channel
You can watch Paul’s video “preview” of this podcast here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=904fO59UBzU
Description: A whirlwind tour of a couple of very practical, but at the same time quite fantastical, destinations for human spaceflight in our diverse and interesting solar system.
Bio: Paul Jones is a visual effects artist and animator with a passion for science. He is the creator of a fortnightly animation series on youtube called facts about things, which can be found at www.youtube.com/factsaboutthings.
Sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is sponsored by — no one. We still need sponsors for many days in 2011, so please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the “Donate” button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Paul Jones, presenter and animator of facts about things, a fortnightly factual video series on youtube. You can find it by going to www.youtube.com/factsaboutthings without any spaces. Today I’m trading the animation for this Audio Podcast about a couple of fun things to do in our solar system, our cosmic paddling pool.
As the great Carl Sagan once said, “The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, and the water seems inviting.” Now eventually I believe that if we make the right choices, that metaphor will extend all the way out into the milky way. Certainly we are discovering more and more planetary systems around other stars, some of them only tens of lightyears from our own, and that number’s only going to increase.
Getting there is something we have already considered. Projects like the British Daedalus in the 70’s and the American Longshot in the late 80’s have shown that, conceptually, these places are reachable with near-future technology. These projects give us a blueprint for sending a probe to an extra-solar planetary system and have it report back within a human lifetime.
Judging by how unexpectedly diverse and interesting our own solar system is, we can’t even begin to imagine the unknown unknowns waiting or us out there. And that brings us back to our topic for today’s podcast, just how fantastic our own solar system is. We’ve waded a little way out. Let’s paddle around for a while. Sure, we could swim over to the nearest rock again, or even, as many people suggest, over to Mars.
That makes sense because of course the further we go the more expensive it’s going the be. There’s a universal currency in space travel, and that’s the change in velocity (or delta v) required to get you from orbit a to orbit b. The greater the change in velocity, the more fuel you need to take, the bigger the rocket you need to get that fuel into orbit in the first place.
So, let’s start with some cheap options. There is one planet with a we can visit with a delta V even lower than Mars, and that’s Venus. NASA actually studied a manned flyby mission towards the end of the Apollo project. Of course the downside of trying to land on Venus is that it’s clouds are made of sulphuric acid and the atmosphere is crushingly dense on the surface, it’s the equivalent pressure of being under a kilometer of ocean here on Earth.
But the comparison to the ocean is an important one, because if you want to study the ocean, you usually do it from a boat floating on its surface. In Venus’ dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide and a little nitrogen, a balloon filled with breathable air would float just like helium here on earth. It sounds fantastical, and it is, that’s why I’m talking about it, people could live in zeppelins filled with air, floating in the upper atmosphere of venus. If that doesn’t sound like a fun thing to do in our solar system, then I don’t know what is. Actually, I tell a lie, because this next thing pretty much tops it in every way. It’s a dream of mankind that’s been around since dinosaurs, and we weren’t even around back then.
It’s true that Venus has the thickest atmosphere of all the terrestrial planets in our solar system, but if you also include moons, then Saturn’s moon Titan would come second. The surface pressure on Titan is a much more comfortable 1.45 times our own atmosphere. Titan is a very interesting place to visit in it’s own right, because it’s the only other place in the solar system, and at the moment our known universe, where we have discovered liquid on it’s surface.
However, it’s not liquid water, it’s mostly the hydrocarbons ethane and methane. The energy contained in these hydrocarbons is hundreds of times that of all our gas and oil reserves here on earth. That may sound exciting, but even if we were to forget about the environmental effects of burning fossil fuels, the standalone energy cost of getting the hydrocarbons away from Titan, away from Saturn, and back to earth is far greater than the energy contained within them.
But despite the high cost of getting there and back, once you’re there, Titan is a moon that’s not much bigger than our own. In fact on Titan you’d actually weigh a little bit less than on our moon, and again it’s atmosphere is thicker than here on earth. On Titan you would be light enough, and the support from the atomosphere great enough, that if you put wings on your arms and flapped them up and down you would be able to fly. Like a bird. It’s the only place in our solar system where anyone can do that, and we could go there, we could fly, like birds.
Now if that doesn’t seem like enough, and I’ve only just touched on the surface here, there’s so much more we can do. But.. if maybe even the science that we can do in our own cosmic paddling pool, doesn’t seem like enough to justify the cost, then I’ll leave you with a quote from Randall Munroe, the author of the webcomic XKCD.
“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.”
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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