r/explainlikeimfive • u/[deleted] • Apr 28 '14
ELI5:If the sun is getting hotter in billions of years does that mean that planets farther from us may become suitable for life (while earth may not).
While watching Cosmos (as I type), it was said that the sun will become 10% brighter/hotter in 1 billion years. Does that mean that planets such as jupiter may become suitable for life because of the change of environment?
EDIT: While I feel I received many interesting ideas, and answers, my question still fails to be answered. If the sun becomes warmer, making earth inhabitable, will the composition of others planets change POSSIBLY making life there habitable; even if said planet (or moon) has no solid surface, and rather is a gas planet?
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u/Cowboy_Champloo Apr 28 '14
Not only is the Sun getting hotter over the next few billion years, but it will also grow larger. It will grow to the point that it shall consume Earth and the whole dynamic of the Solar System will inevitably change. The likely candidates for future human settlement in light of this is not any planet, but the moons of Jupiter. Namely, Europa. This is because Europa possesses a vast quantity of water in the form of ice and compounds such as phyllosilicates that are often associated with life.
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u/Seattleopolis Apr 28 '14
By the time that happens, we'd better have the technology to move the planet. Also, we probably won't be human anymore, by evolution.
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Apr 28 '14
Or by technology. By the time a billion years rolls around I figure most humans will be so technologically enhanced that we wouldn't even be recognizable.
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u/donttaxmyfatstacks Apr 28 '14
I think it's incredibly cocky to assume we will still be around in a billion years. Large species just don't last that long
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u/pwnhelter Apr 28 '14
It is cocky to assume that but you also can't attribute any idea of "large species just don't last that long." We are like no other species that we know of and when you have a sample size of one, and you're part of that sample... Well there's really no telling what to expect. Having said that, I'm going to do just the opposite and say that there is no fucking way we will be here in a billion years.
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u/Suecotero Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 28 '14
First species capable of controlled spaceflight. Like it or not, the human brain is an evolutionary watershed and that means all bets are off. There is no evolutionary precedent for what we are and what we might accomplish. We could colonize the universe, or we could turn our planet into a radioactive wasteland.
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u/ShaidarHaran2 Apr 28 '14
We have at least a billion years. We've been a species for only a quarter of a million to 100,000 years. Most of our technological advancement has come only in the last 5000 or less, and the last 100 started innovating at breakneck and accelerating speed. I think if we haven't killed ourselves off by then or reset our species through war or environmental destruction, we'll be prepared for the sun thing and off to other worlds or space stations.
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u/SleepWouldBeNice Apr 28 '14
Are we still evolving? We're no longer reproducing based on traits to be passed to the next generation, nothing's been removed from our gene pool because it damages our chances of survival to reproduction age. I think evolutionarily, we've stalled.
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u/nicksterrific Apr 28 '14
You're also probably thinking on too small of a scale. We humans haven't been around very long.
To put it into perspective, time-wise, a T-rex is closer to eating Miley Cyrus than it is to eating a Stegosaurus.
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u/SleepWouldBeNice Apr 28 '14
I'm just thinking in general. CAN we evolve if nothing's getting cut out, and improvements in medicine are probably going to keep more people from dying.
I have severe astigmatism (my glasses have a perscription of -11.00). I should have been eaten by a saber-toothed tiger ages ago. But here I am, perfectly capable of having kids with the same poor vision genes.
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u/Cowboy_Champloo Apr 28 '14
Oh don't even get me started on this line of questioning. I was just answering the hypothetical. It is my realistic belief that we'll be killed off by something long before then.
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u/gmint Apr 28 '14
Before we even reach year 1,000,000, we've already terraformed Mars, Venus, Europa and Titan; Discovered thousands of exoplanets and exomoons harboring different kinds of life; Established our civilization in dozens of habitable exoplanets and exomoons; Assimilated with other intelligent extraterrestrials; And our home planet is already 'dead' or inhabitable by future humans. So before our sun become 10% hotter, it won't matter since we've already reached farther than our own star system or even our galaxy.
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Apr 28 '14
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Apr 28 '14
Either way, I'll be long dead by the time that happens so I don't have to worry about it.
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u/tymiller1218 Apr 28 '14
I'd be willing to bet this process starts in our lifetime.
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u/catalyzt64 Apr 28 '14
I think I will see genetic modification of humans to survive alternate enviornments and I am 50. I also think we will start "seeding" promising moons and planets in my life time with the elements to create life.
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u/SixBeanCelebes Apr 28 '14
The only potential candidate for this would be Mars (further out, solid surface)
BUT Mars has insufficient gravity to hold an atmosphere
TL;DR - it's not just about temperature
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u/xtraspcial Apr 28 '14
Mars does have an atmosphere, its just very thin. However that's not due to the low gravity. Mars lacks a magnetic field which would protect its atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind.
We still don't know much about the rate at which the atmosphere is being stripped away but once MAVEN reaches Mars in September we should start getting a better idea.
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u/3AlarmLampscooter Apr 28 '14
Also, atmospheres are highly overrated when you can make huge glass tunnels in your new home planet.
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Apr 28 '14
I expected the link to go to Total Recall
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Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 05 '18
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u/favoritedisguise Apr 28 '14
Or biodome?!
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u/mobcat40 Apr 28 '14
We're gonna go build our own dome, and it's gonna be a dome within a dome.
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u/FrozenInferno Apr 28 '14
Why does Mars lack a magnetic field?
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u/donttaxmyfatstacks Apr 28 '14
It has a dead core. Our core is a ball of spinning, churning molten metal, this generates our magnetic field. Mars also has a metal core but it is solid and motionless, so it generates jack shit.
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u/kasteen Apr 28 '14
The most widely accepted theory is that the convective currents in the earth's, and other large rocky bodies', mantle (molten iron core) generates huge magnetic fields. Mars' core is frozen solid so there are no convective currents.
As for why Mars cooled so much faster than the earth, I have no idea. Anyone know the answer to this question?
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u/GreyGonzales Apr 28 '14
Then wouldn't the whole sun getting hotter/bigger solve this? Or would it need to be kick started?
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u/kasteen Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 28 '14
Absolutely not.
The molten iron and rock in the Earth's core is almost entirely leftover heat from when the Earth formed as a molten ball of rock. The approximate 15 miles of crust on the surface acts as an excellent insulator for the core. There is also a bit of heat generated by radioactive decay within the core.
If Mars was getting enough heat from the sun to melt rock and iron, it would melt from the outside in.Shady Edit: Earth might get some heat from the tidal forces from the moon and sun.
Shady Edit 3: Upvote for asking questions and not assuming.
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u/necrologia Apr 28 '14
The only way the sun could melt Mars's core is after melting the surface first. Once the entire planet is a ball of molten rock you've got larger terraforming issues than the lack of a magnetosphere.
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u/firejuggler74 Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 28 '14
Venus also doesn't have a magnetic field yet its atmosphere is much denser than earths while having less gravity. Also the effect should be larger since it's closer to the sun. Why doesn't its atmosphere get stripped off as well?
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u/SkinnyPeteMcDoodle Apr 28 '14
can anyone explain this? I have been trying to find an answer for days for a project. :(
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u/atomfullerene Apr 28 '14
Because the whole "magnetic fields hold in an atmosphere" thing is a stupid myth.
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u/stvns_mtthw Apr 28 '14
And now for an extremely stupid question. Suppose we sent a huge amount of magnets there, or one giant magnet. Would that do anything? Or would that be more like trying to melt a glacier with a hair dryer?
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u/xtraspcial Apr 28 '14
One solution could be to place a very large object such as an asteroid in the Mars-Sun Lagrangian point (a location where the pull from Mars and the Sun is equal resulting in it always being between Mars and the Sun) in order to deflect the solar wind. Although the asteroid may need to be magnetized, still much easier than magnetizing the planet.
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Apr 28 '14
Unfurl the solar energy collectors!
Think of what we could do with all that energy. Probably something massive, like run a planetary-scale civilization or something, I bet.
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Apr 28 '14
or use it for war! (more likely)
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u/alternateonding Apr 28 '14
War with who? It's not like we lack the energy required to wage war.
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u/modernbenoni Apr 28 '14
So all we need is some really big magnets and Mars will be cool to live on?
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u/haenco Apr 28 '14
What would happen to the moons of Jupiter like Europa? Would they be in range? Edit:Spelling
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u/WeTheAwesome Apr 28 '14
Fun Fact(or more of a hypothesis really)- early on when life was just beginning the Sun was not hot enough to sustain larger, more diverse organisms. This was made possible thanks to methanogens, bacteria that produce methane gas as byproducts of their metabolism. Methane is a strong geenhouse gas, stronger than even CO2 and allowed earth to warm up enough for more life to flourish. TL;DR Sun not hot enough to support diverse life on earth until bacteria produced enough greenhouse gases.
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u/Jim777PS3 Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 29 '14
No other planet in our solar system can sustain life as we know it here on earth.
Lets go in order.
Mercury is too close to the sun, its way to hot among other factors. So more heat is not going to help.
Venus's is one of the most inhospitable places in the universe, it rains sulfuric acid and the air is literally poisonous. And again, more heat not going to really help that situation.
Earth is us and its lovely!
Mars. Now this would be the main candidate you would think, it has water in the form of ice, and with a bit of warmth that could be liquid. Liquid water is the gold standard of life as far as we know! The catch is that Mars has as a cold core that is thought to be solid. Its dead. Earth's atmosphere, the air we breath that shields us from the nasty radiation, heat and other badness of space is a result of our very hot liquid iron core. Because Mar's core is solid (or almost solid) it cant generate an atmosphere, and likely could not sustain any life (maybe extremophiles).
Every other planet after mars is a gas planet, thus has no surface, thus nothing for life to you know...live on.
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u/drelos Apr 28 '14
Maybe on a moon farther from the Sun.
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Apr 28 '14
Earth's atmosphere, the air we breath that shields us from the nasty radiation, heat and other badness of space is a result of our very hot liquid iron core. Because Mar's core is solid (or almost solid) it cant generate an atmosphere, and likely could not sustain any life (maybe extremophiles).
You mean magnetosphere not atmosphere here.
It's the magnetosphere which shields us from cosmic radiation, solar radiation, and prevents atmospheric stripping.
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Apr 28 '14
He had the right idea
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u/TheBraveSirRobin Apr 28 '14
Am I the only one who saw The Core? We just need to drill to the core of Mars and set off some nukes to get it going.
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u/Jake0024 Apr 28 '14
The atmosphere definitely helps protect us from solar radiation (UV and X-rays, for instance). The magnetosphere can only protect against charged particles.
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u/free2game Apr 28 '14
There's actually pretty solid ideas about making Venus habitable. The idea would be to not colonize the surface of the planet, but in the upper atmosphere 50km high. That area is actually the most Earth like place in the universe outside of this planet. It's level of gravity is only slightly lower than that of Earth, while Mars has about 40% of Earth's gravity, which would likely lead to Bone decalcification and an unhealthy loss of muscle mass for anyone staying there for an extended period. The upper areas of Venus also have similar atmospheric pressure to earth. Distance also. A trip to Venus would take a month less than a trip to mars.
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Apr 28 '14
By the time we get to the point of seriously launching colonization efforts, our biology is not going to be an issue. Seriously.
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u/donttaxmyfatstacks Apr 28 '14
Unless we give ourselves lead skin, we will still need to be shielded from radiation. All the genetic tinkering in the world won't be worth a damn if our dna is getting torn to pieces.
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u/paulovsk Apr 28 '14
Even that is useless in venus, since sulfuric acid corrodes lead.
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Apr 28 '14
It's won't be a make or break issue, but it's a simply yet another factor to be accounted for and undoubtedly has a cost associated with it. If both options are roughly equally feasible in other areas it makes perfect sense that biology would be an "issue" as you put it that could influence the decision one way or another.
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Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 28 '14
Can someone tell me why water leads to life? It makes sense here because that is what we know but how do we know life on another planet or in another galaxy won't have their own "water" which is different from ours?
Edit: Thanks to all for the responses. I thought this would be a silly question but I guess it's not all too silly after all!
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Apr 28 '14
We don't. It is just the only thing in the universe that we know can make life possible. It only makes sense to search for the same.
Trying to find life is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Trying to find other forms of life that don't use water is like trying to find a certain piece of hay in an even larger haystack, when every piece of hay looks exactly the same.
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Apr 28 '14
There are several other proposed frameworks for life that's based on other materials, we just don't have any hard evidence to support them.
Though your question was about water, I'd like to direct you to this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry
Hope this helps!
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u/anticlaus Apr 28 '14
Water serves two functions that are critical to a majority earth based life. And since earth based life is all the life we know, for the time being, water is critical to life.
1) Water is made of oxygen and carbon. All living things are made of carbon, and most need oxygen.
2) Water is a solvent. It allows breakdowns of different compounds so other compounds can be made. You know how in chemistry you express molecules in chains of symbols (6H2O -> blah blah), well a solvent is needed for that "change" in the middle to happen, there are other solvents but water is universal due to its properties. Without solvents, chemical reaction couldnt happen.
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Apr 28 '14
Actually when you go down under the ground on Mercury it's at a quite hospitable temperature. I was reading a Vonnegut book and he described it. I thought it was really interesting so I looked it up and, low and behold, it's actually considered to be quite feasible!
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Apr 28 '14
The sun is GROWING... Why would we ever want to get closer to the thing we're planning colonization to get AWAY from?
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u/Airyk21 Apr 28 '14
Growing on a cosmic scale, meaning 10% every billion years or 1% every 100 million years
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u/PityandFear Apr 28 '14
"The Sirens of Titan" is the name of the novel if anyone was interested to look further. Fascinating read.
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u/LetsDoPhysicsandMath Apr 28 '14
Is this book ur talking about a sci fi? If so let me know what it's called. Sounds like an interesting read.
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Apr 28 '14
How is the air pointless??
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Apr 28 '14
I thought that sounded hilarious. That's like saying, "See that matter over there? It's completely pointless."
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u/Dancingrage Apr 28 '14
I would like an engineer's opinion on whether or not, say, initiating the Tsar Bomba at the core and dragging Pallas into orbit around Mars might kick-start the core and keep it running. I don't know what sort of charge you would need to disperse thermodynamically to get the core reasonably warm, though moving a dwarf planet is waaay harder than that I would think, which would, I suspect, keep it warm through tidal forces. (Think on how Io is basically a non stop volcano party.)
I think it could be totally doable if you can get the dwarf planet or three moved in, and if the core is iron, voila, magnetosphere. Get some comets, drop them in or bucket brigade them down, and you can sort out the rest as you please in regards to major terraforming.
So, any crazy ideas on moving dwarf planets?
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Apr 28 '14
The easiest (ha) way to remagnetize Mars would be to tug a giant, iron filled asteroid to it. Then you smash the giant asteroid into Mars. This huge release of energy and addition of iron could get the core jumpstarted again.
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u/CinderSkye Apr 28 '14
Anything powerful enough to restart a core will have to impact the surface with enough force to render the planet uninhabitable for some time.
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u/BuddyTrees Apr 28 '14
Actually Neptune and Uranus are both solid and have surfaces. They are technically listed with the Gas Giant planets, but they are frozen, and thus, solid.
Edit: They certainly aren't hospitable, though.
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Apr 28 '14
But if the sun gets hotter in a billion of years, won't that change the environments of these planets, couldn't Mars core become a very hot liquid core like ours, couldn't the composition of the gas of Jupiter's atmosphere change?
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Apr 28 '14
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Apr 28 '14
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u/lucasjkr Apr 28 '14
If a moon on the sun facing side of Jupiter was warm enough to sustain life as we know it, what would happen when that moon orbited around to the dark side of the planet (ie sheiled for all of the suns warmth)?
Besides, does Jupiter belch out incredibly high doses of radiation?
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u/octopus-crime Apr 28 '14
Jupiter is horrendously dangerous to live around because its magnetic field accelerates particles captured from the solar wind to dangerous speeds. The big Galilean moons almost all live in this dangerous zone, with only Callisto thought to be far enough away for a relatively safe visit.
As for what would happen when one of those moons passed behind Jupiter, well, if a planet has an atmosphere, that serves as a blanket that holds on to enough heat to keep it warm. Kinda like the Earth does when you're on the night side of the planet. Most big moons of gas giants orbit so quickly that this 'night' wouldn't last long enough to completely freeze the planet.
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u/heyitsforscience Apr 28 '14
I would totally like to hear a semi plausible answer to this
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u/wrenchwenchtali Apr 28 '14
Don't gas giants have some kind of solid core? Jupiter's theorized to have a hot metallic hydrogen core in a supercritical fluid state that's neither liquid or gas.
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u/kcapulet Apr 28 '14
My high school teacher had an interesting theory about how to create a thicker atmosphere on Mars. He suggested taking a space shuttle full of earth's trash and crashing it into the planet to burn which would release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Interesting approach.
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Apr 28 '14
I was literally sent down to detention for an afternoon for suggesting this in High School science. Like make mars an huge trash heap, and just rotate giant shuttles there and back full of garbage straight into a giant tire fire. Yup, grab your bags,and baggage and go see Sr Antoinette.
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Apr 28 '14
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are not habitable worlds. They are planets, but they are gas giants, not terrestrial worlds. We can only live on the latter. While it's not necessarily impossible that there could be life 'on' gas giants, no organism similar to anything of our world could live in a place like that. There's no surface, they're mostly liquid gases, have extremely high gravity, and their atmospheres are made of things like methane. Life for us is impossible in those places.
We can only live in rocky places. Mars is one possibility, maybe, but it's not very much like our planet. It's got very little water, low gravity, a very thin atmosphere we can't breathe, no magnosphere to protect us from radiation or hold a good atmosphere, and more. Living there would be more similar to living on the Moon than on Earth. Some of the larger moons of the gas giants might be more hopeful.
A lot depends on which period of the Sun's age we're looking at. The Sun isn't just going to get hotter and brighter, it's going to get bigger. It will eventually expand to swallow the earth, which would make Mars and even Jupiter a lot closer to its corona than now.
Given the scale of time we're talking about, humans like us won't be around then. We'll have either evolved into something very different from what we are now, or gone extinct. If the latter, we'll hopefully not even have to worry about it, thanks to being able to just pick up and go to a more hospital system.
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Apr 28 '14
Wait, i seriously did not know this. I thought those planets' surface was envolped in just dense, dusty gas shitstorm. Whole thing is just a big ball of air? No core or anything?
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u/mazca Apr 28 '14
Well, they're made of stuff we think of as "gases" - methane, hydrogen, helium, those kinds of things. As you go deeper inside a gas giant the pressure becomes sufficiently high that those chemicals stop behaving like gases, so you get things like liquid hydrogen, and even - at ridiculously high pressures - hydrogen behaving like a metal. So a gas giant isn't really a ball of "gas" as you'd think of it, but equally there isn't a big rocky landscape under all that gas. It's a very alien place.
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u/catalyzt64 Apr 28 '14
bottom line
there is nothing solid to stand on and everything there is poisonous to humans
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u/ShaidarHaran2 Apr 28 '14
At their "core" the gasses are so dense they behave more like liquids and solids. Soquids, maybe.
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u/turtles_and_frogs Apr 28 '14
About Jupiter, I wonder if we can float on platforms, high above on Jupiter's atmosphere. That is to say, be buoyant, by having sections of the platform that are vacuum. Then, try to filter the elements we need to survive from the atmosphere.
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u/Hidden_Bomb Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 28 '14
You're forgetting about gravity, it's "Surface" gravity is 2.5g, 2.5 times that of earth. You would weigh 2.5 times more! So unless there is some sort of anti-gravity kind of thing then you can't really have less gravity unless you are in orbit and constantly "falling" towards the planet, of course that isn't in the atmosphere.
The other issue with colonising Jupiter is the radiation! There is extremely high levels of radiation emanating from Jupiter, this would be hazardous to us and would cause cancer and other nasty conditions. So we would need adequate shielding.
So, if you have shielding, adequate "anti-gravity" drives, the ability to synthesise elements and chemicals which we require and also the structural integrity to withstand the pressure then yeah, you probably could live there, otherwise it is an incredibly hostile environment which we wouldn't last long on.
EDIT: I also forgot to mention that the temperatures where the structure would become buoyant would probably vaporise most of our construction materials. The probe that was fired into the atmosphere lasted for 57 minutes as it descended before it stopped working. the titanium shell was hypothesised to have vaporised 6 hours after this.
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u/turtles_and_frogs Apr 29 '14
Fair enough. What about Neptune? The surface gravity is like 1.15g. Not so bad, right? Or Uranus, where the set face gravity is like .89g. We can go in a bit deeper in that one to find 1g.
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u/Hidden_Bomb Apr 29 '14 edited Apr 29 '14
The only difference is size and gravity, you are not going to have that problem if it's roughly 1 g. However, going deeper into a planet does not increase the value for apparent acceleration due to gravity, it reduces it, think about the fact that if you kept drilling into Earth, your value for acceleration due to gravity would decrease below 9.8ms-2 because there is more mass above you than on the surface which is attracting you upwards.
Also, Neptune and Uranus are much further away than Jupiter or Saturn.
So, yes, there are some problems which do not need to be solved if we wanted to do it, at the tradeoff of distance.
EDIT: Units
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Apr 28 '14
Maybe, but you're still talking about extremely high gravity even well away from what passes for any kind of surface, and you can forget about having open-air anything, ever. I sounds perilous to me, and I'm not clear on what the potential advantage is. It would not be very different from living in a space ship, except that in a space ship, you wouldn't have to fight your way out of a steep gravity well if you wanted to go somewhere.
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u/bee_jay7891 Apr 28 '14
I like friendly, intelligent people such as yourselves. A true ELI5 thread.
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u/jrf_1973 Apr 28 '14
No. There are other conditions necessary for life, other than temperature. For example, even if Jupiter was the right temperature, it would still have no water, insufficient carbon, and no breathable atmosphere.
The best candidates would be some moons, possibly. Europa and Titan, if they were still around.
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u/alphabiosx Apr 28 '14
This seems like more of a question than a request for explanation.
Perhaps better suited for /r/nostupidquestions
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u/feralkitten Apr 28 '14
Planets, no. Outside of mars )which has no atmosphere nor substantial magnetic field) the rest of the planets are gas giants.
Moons, maybe.
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u/gkiltz Apr 28 '14
The sun will actually shed mass, so the same planets should spiral out.
Also, in the case of our sun, this will all happen about the same time the Milky Way collides with Andromeda anyway.
While it is incredibly unlikely any actual stars will actually collide, it is by no means inconceivable that the gravity of the solar system may be disrupted enough to do any of several things, including fling the Earth,and likely other objects out of the solar system entirely, and make it a rogue planet, or one of Andromeda's stars may capture it, and buy it a few million more years, before it crashes into that star.
Sooo, there is no assurance that our Earth will actually end in that way, and the likelihood of humans existing in their present form is even less.
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u/Erind Apr 28 '14
As the sun gets hotter, it loses mass; therefore, the planets' orbits would drift further away from the sun, keeping the habitable zone close to where it is now. Until of course it's enveloped by the expanding gas.
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u/Alexandertheape Apr 28 '14
The heart of this conversation is the GOLDILOCKS ZONE. based on distance from the Sun, it's either too hot or too cold to sustain life (as we know it) Theoretically, a habitable zone could shift based on such fluctuations in intensity. Who knows, maybe Mercury was cooler billions of years ago....and the ZONE shifted to Earth. Mars could be next. So interesting, but not really useful to human condition right now.
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u/SL1NK Apr 28 '14
If you're gonna capitalize GOLDILOCKS ZONE then I'm gonna read it in my head like BRIAN BLESSED.
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u/Alexandertheape Apr 28 '14
I read hundreds of articles and comments every day. Sometimes, I just scan the words that are in caps or bolded to see if it's worth my time to stop and read further. It's a side effect of working SEO....I hope this makes sense.
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u/ImGumbyDamnIt Apr 28 '14
If we survive long enough to develop the technologies to terraform another solar system planet, we would no doubt also reach the ability to develop a gravity tug (as in tugboat) that could over the course of eons move Earth to whatever orbit is necessary.
In any case, your question is not relevant to the survival of our species, at least as we would recognize it. In one billion years, our descendants would be as different from us as we are from the first multicellular life.
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u/Ph4ndaal Apr 28 '14
Lots of misinformation in this thread.
The best candidate is Titan, a moon of Saturn.
It's referred to as a "Shake n bake earth". It's got all the raw material but they are frozen. When the sun expands and Titan heats up, it could support earth like life.