Hot? yes, but apparently cooler than England right now as long as you're a meter below ground in a ring around the poles (how's a constant 21c/70f sound)
this guy's website is so weird but I love the novelty of the idea and he portrays a plausible scenario for it being ultimately more habitable than Mars
Honestly doesn't surprise me that you could make that argument, Mars is a really fucking awful candidate for colonization. Absolutely no idea how bazinga brains got it into their mushy cores that they'd like to live in a giant rust desert that can't regulate temperatures or grow any life
Like yes I'd like to imagine the least habitable parts of my home planet, turn all their uninhabitability dials up to 11, take away the oxygen for good measure, and then fucking move there :galaxy-brain:
I wish they would
I mean the argument about asteroid strikes and stuff does have some merit, it would kinda suck if we managed to avert climate apocalypse only to be deleted from existence by a 10km wide asteroid, but idk maybe blowing up asteroids is more feasible than mercury base would be
yeah, the infrastructure that interplanetary colonisation requires would also be enough to detect + deflect large asteroids, and would also be vulnerable to the far more common big solar flare wiping out all precision electronics, both in space and in inevitably tech-dependant colonies
There are stellar phenomena that could burn the atmospheres off of every planet in the solar system at the same time and we wouldn't know until the trees caught on fire. It is really best not to think about how fragile this planet is.
At least this idea is slightly less naive in that there's no pretense of the colony ever having economic value to earth :yea:
Dumb rock doesn't even have a magnetic field. Even on Earth we're afraid of the destructive potential of cosmic rays and such, I can't believe what they'd do to us on Mars.
Venus doesn't have this cool room temperature underground zone tho and you'd have to go through sulfuric acid atmosphere and there also aren't what seems to be a giant layer of ice covered in potential hydrocarbons
All that tells me is that we *have * o settle there. Humanity's arrogance compels us to settle in the most hostile places, even though nature doesn't want us there. It'd be the Pheonix Arizona of the solar system.
It might be more hospitable than Phoenix if you get the floating cities to work
"We choose to go to Mercury in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are eat, but because fuck God. Stick this rocket all the way up your divine ass. We're going to Mercury and we're going to live there!" -
Venus doesn’t have this cool room temperature underground zone tho
It does have a nice warm upper atmosphere though, not room temperature but under 200f which is more manageable than mars i think lol
The voyage to Mercury might take 6.5 years like the MESSENGER trip because of the large velocity change involved
Mercury orbits at 48 km/s and Earth orbits at 30 km/s for anyone else who was wondering about this.
Edit: Actually this doesn't tell the whole story...
The energy our spacecraft needs to shed is on a completely different scale to using brakes to slow down while driving downhill on Earth. Arriving at Mercury travelling slowly enough to be captured by its gravity is a bit like falling down a cliff millions of kilometres high and landing softly on a moving target half way down!
So yeah you need to go faster to get there, but you'll be going way too fast if you don't spend a bunch of time doing break checks around venus and mercury before getting there
The voyage to Mercury might take 6.5 years
One year in space fucked up Chris Hadfield and Scott Kelly to the point of needing extensive physical therapy under strict medical supervision. Even if they're in magic pods, the ships are going to arrive just in time for everyone still alive to be medically retired.
Potentially shorter than Mars since mercury's orbit apparently brings it closer to every other planet than any other, at some point :shrug-outta-hecks:
people from philly :solidarity: people talking about resources on other planets
water ice
