While most space visionaries are planning for settlements on the moon and eventually Mars, a NASA engineer named Janelle Wellons has an even more ambitious idea. According to Futurism, Wellons, a mission operation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, suggested recently that humans should establish a settlement on Titan, the second largest moon in the solar system, orbiting Saturn.
Titan has several advantages as a new home for humans. It has about a 14 percent the gravity of Earths. It has a thick atmosphere, mostly comprised of nitrogen and methane. Its surface consists of rock and water ice, with rivers, lakes, and even seas of liquid methane. People would not need pressure suits to walk on Titan’s surface as they would on the moon and Mars. They would be protected from radiation by the thick atmosphere. The water could be mined, used for drinking, bathing, and agriculture and cracked into oxygen and hydrogen.
Of course, Titan has several disadvantages as a new home for humanity. The moon of Saturn is incredibly cold, an average of -292 degrees Fahrenheit. The low gravity might affect human reproduction, similar for people living long-term on the moon and Mars. Titan is also 746 million miles from Earth. The Cassini space probe took seven years to reach the Saturn system, a voyage that would be problematic for humans. Seven years of exposure to radiation and microgravity would likely kill human colonists long before they completed the voyage to Titan.
Sounds pretty dreadful to me. To read more, click here.