I haven't seen anyone talk about Europa much yet...assuming we get nuclear fusion, though, Europa would be perfect. It has limitless supplies of energy, and you could build a base anywhere you wanted to (compare to Mercury, where we're limited to a few polar craters). It's small, so the gravity well is not a large problem (according to XKCD, it looks to be about that of the Moon), but, at Moon size, it's big enough that it could be an actual self-sufficient colony with culture and cities rather than just a glorified supply depot. Although other than water it has almost no natural resources, it can draw on the rest of the Jovian moons to get them. (The sci-fi fantasy of lots of small contracters bopping about in tweeny little ships is just that-a fantasy- with distances and gravity wells as large as Earth or Mars. But in Jupiter's orbit, where you're going comparatively short distances to extract resources from moons with small gravity wells, it makes a lot of sense). There are no problems with cosmic rays as it is shielded by Jupiter's magnetic field. Plus, it will serve as a stopping point for any ships going to the beyond.
Ganymede will thrive, too, for the same reasons. There's some evidence that Callisto also has an ocean under the surface, but it'll be much harder to get to.
If I had to make a prediction as to where humanity will be living in the year 3000, maybe 2500 if we're lucky, my list would be:
Earth (assuming we haven't completely shot it to hell; still home to most humans)
Mars (home to a few million, since we won't have finished terraforming yet)
Venus (if in 3000 we've been starting terraforming for, oh, 750 years, we might have...maybe a couple tens of thousands?)
Europa (for the reasons described above, likely to actually have more humans than Mars, maybe ten to twenty million).
Ganymede (probably about the same number as Europa, though colonized a bit later)
And if we really pushed at it, or took another look in 3500, we'd also probably see humans on:
The Moon (main problem: importing water)
Mercury (if only the polar craters; no more than a couple million, probably just a few tens of thousands)
Ganymede (take a bit more work than Europa, but has enough rock to be a bit more self-sufficient for a few raw materials, notably iron and silicon).
Callisto, maybe, but it would take a lot of work, and it might not make as much sense as just spending that development money on an existing colony
Titan (really, really far out, but absolutely full of energy and raw materials. I expect that if not at this point then certainly by 4000 Titan will be one of the big capitals of humanity)
Enceladus (little more than a small colony of Titan; it might not even be colonized)
Triton, mayyyyybe. We kind of forget just how vast these distances are. Mars and Venus are both quite close to the Earth- where the Earth is 1 AU from the sun, Venus is .7 and Mars 1.5 AU. But then distances rapidly increase. If you can get through the asteroid belt, Jupiter and its moons is not that horribly far- it's about 5 AU from the sun. But Saturn is 10 AU away. The thing is that Mars and Venus have a lot of potential and because the distances are short they're cheap to get to. Jupiter and Saturn are far away, but there's a lot of potential in their moons.
Triton has water ice, frozen nitrogen and dry ice, and if it were closer- in Jupiter's orbit- we'd definitely colonize it. But it's 30 AU away, and at that distance, I just don't think so. Or maybe we will, but not until we're going beyond the solar system and need stopping places. But if we need stopping places (ie are not using an Alcubierre drive), that means we're staying relatively close to the Solar System...but where would we be going? There's a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, but it's at a temperature of 1200 C and likely made of magma.
Looking at Wikipedia's list of nearest stars, the nearest real candidate for a habitable planet is Tau Ceti, which might have up to two of them (Tau Ceti e and f). The kicker is that Tau Ceti is twelve light-years away, and at that distance you'll want an Alcubierre drive. That same drive would also allow us to colonize Triton more cheaply, but at some point you have to ask: what's the point? It's likely to be the Space Age equivalent of the Norse colony on Greenland: just off the edge of the civilized world, inhospitable, poor in self-sustaining natural resources, with a very small population, rarely visited and likely to be abandoned as anything more than a gas station if and when we find out that there's much better pickings beyond it (North America, Tau Ceti), and if we're using a warp drive, as we most assuredly will be, it won't even get gas station status (unless it turns out that Alcubierre drives are best switched on where there's no danger of running into somewhere inhabitable; in that case Triton will be the launch point for many a mission).
There is one problem we'll run into for a lot of these- carbon. We'll need to import carbon onto the moon, Europa and (possibly) Ganymede. That's why Titan will be such a boon- there's carbon, nitrogen, and water all over the place.
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Topic: Humans, and eventually a colony on Mars. (Read 66676 times)