On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.
Riiiight. And you're going to get the power to electrolytically split that water into hydrogen and oxygen where, exactly?
(Whoever wrote that piece forgot that water is one of the end products of combusting hydrocarbons with oxygen, not a starting point. Basic physical chemistry and thermodynamics.)
Let's go through the energy budget of a Titan colony point by point:
* Titan is so far out from the sun that the available solar power is roughly half what it is in Jupiter orbit, which in turn is a tenth of what we're used to (per my skimming of this source: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/nov_2007_meeting/presentations/... ), and that's before we factor in the murkily opaque atmosphere; I infer that photovoltaics are a non-starter on Titan.
* Some analog of wind or tidal power might be workable, but remember we're talking about an ambient surface temperature down around 90 degrees Kelvin; the free energy in the atmosphere will be drastically lower than the equivalent on Earth (temperature on the order of 300 Kelvin).
* Forget hydrocarbon combustion (coal -- snort!) because there's a slight lack of anything to combust it with.
* This leaves nuclear as the sole reasonable option for powering a Titan colony, which opens up a raft of other questions: if Fission, then what is the abundance of 235U or 232Th on Titan, and how accessible are the necessary isotopes? And if Fusion, well, first we need to demonstrate a working base-load producing fusion reactor here on Earth.
* Let's also bear in mind that a thick atmospheric blanket of mostly nitrogen at 90 Kelvins is, shall we say, a little bit chilly, and the ground any human-occupied base is built on will be a mere hundred Kelvins lower than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, and we're going to need a lot of energy just to keep from freezing. (Also note that any significant human presence there is going to end up pumping out so much heat pollution that there may be eventual weather disturbances as a result.)
It's a bit like imagining how hypothetical Venusians might build a colony on Earth, with their requirement for pressurized habitat domes kept at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit (in American units).
Disclaimer: I am not a planetary scientist, I'm just a science fiction writer who thinks about how this sort of thing looks from 30,000 feet rather than trying to quantify it with enough precision to justify a research grant. But I still think balloons in the atmosphere of Venus or tunnels drilled into the walls of Valles Marineris make more sense.
Elon Musk's ticket to Mars will be less meaningful (if we take the word 'colonization' seriously) unless somebody can stick several thousand people into a hermetic sealed box and they are still alive and thriving after 10 years.
I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unknown). That and the ISS toilet doesn't work properly. It's an un-sexy topic and there hasn't been much progress.
I see houses are heading towards zero energy from the grid, but a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
Off topic, I enjoyed 'A Colder War' and was curious about your thoughts on Gene Wolfe.
a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
We have invented such a "magic box" -- but it's large-scale: that's what municipal sewage farms mostly do (modulo the final step of turning poop into energy bricks: sewage is generally too contaminated to be economical to turn into safe biofuel without expensive treatment). Also, it relies extensively on bacterial fermentation and takes a lot of human intervention to control.
The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago. (Not Invented Here is a besetting problem with NASA, which for political reasons isn't allowed to Buy Foreign.)
That would be huge. Together with passive house technology each and every house in a city, town or countryside would be 'off grid'. That kind of independence would make our infrastructure much less fragile. Building downwards (a recent topic) will be easier.
- Our magic box is an isolation point for dangerous and toxic substances.
That will prevent every household from contributing toxicity to the surrounding environment. Adaptions to new forms of waste become possible at source.
If toxic elements can be compacted and stored, useful compounds/elements derived, and some used for energy, then in the future we won't need pipes anymore than we needed pneumatic tubes for sending messages/parcels once we developed automotive transport. The self driving bots will simply visit periodically for a new cargo to be delivered as industrial inputs. Since the magic box performs some level of element/compound sorting there is probably a market where your waste is automatically profiled and sold. It pays for at least part of its own operation.
Last but not least many countries have no ability to construct decent infrastructure for political reasons. The magic box solves that problem in a way that scales with population.
tldr; Back to the future, since 'night soil' historically was a commodity collected from each household.
> The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago.
Yes. Calcium from astronaut bones (another serious issue) was clogging up the system at a much higher rate than on the terrestrial surface.
I don't know how the Russians solved it but I sometimes think with Americans Business acumen and Russian Science there would be very little we couldn't get accomplished. I'm sure you've heard of Russian phage technology for medical treatment. Cures for alcoholism.
One of the things that is fascinating about the Cold War is how we saw Science developing differently. That is something that should trouble the thoughts of more people.
The thing is, they don't need to be hermetically sealed for 10 years on a small scale. They just need to be self-sufficient long enough for the next supply wessels initially, until they can build up sufficient scale to be able to start solving the problems themselves and the environmental scale is sufficient that you buy time to fix problems that pop up.
Scale "solves" a lot of these issues by buying time and providing a population large enough to do the work required to fix things.
By '10 years' in a hermetically sealed box I meant an experiment on Earth to understand the inputs/outputs so we could give scientific and engineering advice when something goes wrong in the Mars biosphere. Biosphere 2 failed for unforeseen circumstances. This experiment would also be a good way to select for the kind of people capable of being the first explorers.
You need to bootstrap the process but due to changes of government, economic troubles, you have a finite window in which to scale successfully. Building that biosphere becomes important fast.
Even the most exacting monarchs had limited control over what happened in the colonies due to distance and time. The further you extend your reach, the more autonomy you have to give to the peripheral. It's like a law of nature.
Talking of giving up control there's a funny book by Wernher von Braun (of German rocket science fame) where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
I agree it definitively increases risk. But I also think that it is inevitable that such a colony will be highly dependent on supply runs for longer than we'd like.
> where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
It's a funny coincidence, but not that improbable: Elon is a biblical name.
I think you're probably right for the most part, but a few other thoughts occurred to me for energy sources not mentioned in the article:
1) Cryovulcanism is suspected to be present on Titan. Maybe it would be possible to tap into geothermal energy there?
2) Given that there's an atmosphere, we could fly balloons there. It might be possible to use high-altitude solar panels to collect energy with some sort of drone balloon swarm. Probably still not all that practical for a dense population, but maybe it could support some sort of sparse drone rancher scenario?
3) Along with wind as you mentioned, there's also the possibility of hydroelectric power as there are rivers, lakes, and rain on Titan. Bearing in mind that the "hydro" there is hydrocarbon sludge, of course.
Yeah, probably not all that practical of a place to live, but fun to think about. :)
I'm not sure of any generators that would be effective at colder than antarctic temps for use with hydro... I mean, most complex materials will become brittle and shatter. It's not a problem anyone I'm aware of is really trying to solve.
I think for a "titanothermal" system, you use the right density hydrocarbon as the working fluid in the "boiler", and 3-D print the components out of H2O :-)
Except water ice isn't a very good heat conductor, so the evaporator / condenser might have to be something else. Ice could be used for other parts, though.
Getting to Mars seems to be the most feasible option at this moment, because we already have a lot of answers for this route and things like radiation shield (I bet this will be deflector shield) will be sorted out soon.
But when we'll figure out how to build something in Venus atmosphere, it's quite likely we will already have working fusion reactors. And they open the way both for faster space travel and for heating and industry on Titan, which means that it's more comfortable option for us than Venus. Still, not a second choice, because we'll have to build a base and some industry on the Moon anyway.
You had it with the fusion reactor. Manned exploration of the solar system is pretty much contingent on having fusion power. Once we do that, we can create constant thrust engines as well as light up greenhouses where ever. At least, those of us with some significant cash could.
I suppose cheap fusion could be dangerous, as well. Imagine every Joe Sixpack with a railgun powered by Mr Fusion. (sort of a Snowcrash meets Back to the Future dystopia)
As far as I can tell, combustion of methane seems to produce significantly more energy (around twice as much) as burning hydrogen, for the same amount of oxygen. Note that burning carbohydrates also produces carbon dioxide in addition to water.
Sorry, yes, you're right. Then splitting the water would definitely be energy negative (although still desired, to produce something the colonists can breathe).
On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.
Riiiight. And you're going to get the power to electrolytically split that water into hydrogen and oxygen where, exactly?
(Whoever wrote that piece forgot that water is one of the end products of combusting hydrocarbons with oxygen, not a starting point. Basic physical chemistry and thermodynamics.)
Let's go through the energy budget of a Titan colony point by point:
* Titan is so far out from the sun that the available solar power is roughly half what it is in Jupiter orbit, which in turn is a tenth of what we're used to (per my skimming of this source: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/nov_2007_meeting/presentations/... ), and that's before we factor in the murkily opaque atmosphere; I infer that photovoltaics are a non-starter on Titan.
* Some analog of wind or tidal power might be workable, but remember we're talking about an ambient surface temperature down around 90 degrees Kelvin; the free energy in the atmosphere will be drastically lower than the equivalent on Earth (temperature on the order of 300 Kelvin).
* Forget hydrocarbon combustion (coal -- snort!) because there's a slight lack of anything to combust it with.
* This leaves nuclear as the sole reasonable option for powering a Titan colony, which opens up a raft of other questions: if Fission, then what is the abundance of 235U or 232Th on Titan, and how accessible are the necessary isotopes? And if Fusion, well, first we need to demonstrate a working base-load producing fusion reactor here on Earth.
* Let's also bear in mind that a thick atmospheric blanket of mostly nitrogen at 90 Kelvins is, shall we say, a little bit chilly, and the ground any human-occupied base is built on will be a mere hundred Kelvins lower than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, and we're going to need a lot of energy just to keep from freezing. (Also note that any significant human presence there is going to end up pumping out so much heat pollution that there may be eventual weather disturbances as a result.)
It's a bit like imagining how hypothetical Venusians might build a colony on Earth, with their requirement for pressurized habitat domes kept at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit (in American units).
Disclaimer: I am not a planetary scientist, I'm just a science fiction writer who thinks about how this sort of thing looks from 30,000 feet rather than trying to quantify it with enough precision to justify a research grant. But I still think balloons in the atmosphere of Venus or tunnels drilled into the walls of Valles Marineris make more sense.