Would it be possible to live on a gas giant moon?
I have an odd fascination for wondering what exotic living locations would be like, such as a Dyson sphere. After some thinking today I wondered if anyone knew if it would be possible to live on a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, like Titan or Ganymede, if the following assumptions were true:
1) There’s a breathable atmosphere
2) The moon has an atmosphere and magnetosphere (or whatever) that solves the problem of radiation
For instance, many years in the future the sun expands until it’s close enough (or hot enough) to warm the moon in question enough to allow life (we’ll go with ‘life as we know it’). Let’s say it’s Ganymede, which has a magnetosphere, it warms up, spews some water onto the surface and manages to hold on to an atmosphere.
Would it be livable? Or would the gravitational forces between Jupiter, other moons, and the sun (at this point in the future) cause too many surface instabilities? Given the size of Jupiter, would its journey around the mother planet and Jupiter’s trip around the sun cause problems? Like being in the dark too long?
Do we have any astrophysicists around?
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18 Answers
Well, I’m not an astrophysicist, but I am an amateur astronomer. If I accept your presuppositions (and add that it’s warm enough for life), and there is an energy source that can be utliized to grow food, then yes.
But there is no moon with a breathable atmosphere, sadly.
I guess the assumptions kind of add a problem. Sort of like saying, “In the future Ganymede is a happy sunny place where unicorns run wild and liquid gold flows in streams.”
I think I was more curious about the gravitational effects and any period spent on the far side of Jupiter.
But it sure would be spiffy living on a world with a sun on one side and a big gas giant on the other.
If it was gas there would be nothing to live ON. It would be like trying to live on a cloud. Wait…Nevermind. But I’m letting this stand because….because.
@Dutchess_III Every time I fly I wonder what it would be like to live on a cloud in a castle sculpted from wind and water crystals. I imagine fishing in gaseous lakes for night fish and mining rainbow crystals.
Which neither Ganymede nor Titan are likely to have >:(
If I was a gas giant with a space suit, yes.
It’s not a gas giant, it’s a moon of a gas giant.
Europa may have a very thin atmosphere composed mostly of oxygen. Also there could be a water ocean beneath its frozen surface.
The sun would have to heat up tremendously in order to melt the surface ice of Europa. Anyway at best Europa would likely be a wretchedly inadequate place to try to live.
I have a giant amount of gas. Does that count?
@gondwanalon I was thinking the sun would have to expand a bit, but now I don’t remember if it would cool down when it expanded, or get hotter.
I would say yes, if it met the conditions to sustain animal/plant life.
The Sun will expand till its corona encompasses the Earth in the distant future, as it runs out of hydrogen and switches to helium fusion in some 5 billion years. That will vaporize all the water on earth and warm the moons of the gas giants. But it’s a brief warm spell. Shortly after that phase in its life, our Sun will run out of fusionable material, its gravity will collapse it into a white dwarf leaving halos of glowing, inoized gas behind, forming a planetary nebula.
Temperatures throughout the solar system will plummet when our Sun becomes a white dwarf. All the water vapor on Earth will condense as ice, leaving one very large snowball orbiting a small, dim spot in the sky.
So, can we use the moons of the gas giants as a haven during this light show?
None of the gas giant moons have a breathable atmosphere, but several do have abundant water. Water can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen providing fuel and breathable atmosphere. So it is conceivable that given 5 billion years to prepare, mankind might make the leap to escape the red giant phase of the Sun’s final death throes.
We would have a great deal of terraforming to do. Also the gas giants are a tumultuous territory. Their massive gravitational wells attract stray objects from the Asteroid Belt, elsewhere in the Solar System, and far beyond. So living in that neighborhood would have some features akin to dodge ball, but where the balls weigh tons and are traveling at 45,000 MPH. Still, it would beat the heck out of getting barbecued by a red giant Sun.
Ganymede orbits Jupiter once every seven days. It has a liquid iron core which is responsible for its magnetosphere. The magnetosphere is in opposition to that of Jupiter’s and seems to keep Jovian plasma away—perhaps a greater threat than solar flares.
When the liquid core wobbles, it creates tidal pulls in the surface, leading to some changes in the surface. The core wobbles when the moon gets out of resonance with Io and Europa, or when other items of significant mass travel through.
Would it be possible to live there? Well, assuming we learned how to create our own habitats that are sealed away from the atmosphere. And assuming we could travel there. And assuming we had the capability of extracting material we need to live from the moon, I’d say we could survive there for a while. I don’t think it would matter how big the sun was, heat would always be a problem, but the hardest problem would be the lack of an atmosphere, and the lack of a capability of terraforming the moon
The thing about gas giants is that they can probably be used as giant energy sources. Assuming we have the tech to actually go to these moons and terraform the atmosphere to some extent, we can probably just suck hydrogen from the gas giants for fuel cells.
@Qingu Jupiter is a beautiful planet
@Qingu WOW! Thanks for that link. The full-sized view literally sent chills down my spine. Since a number of the moons of the gas giants either have frozen or in some cases under-ice liquid water, there should be abundant hydrogen and oxygen available for future terraforming.
Sometimes I worry that the 300+ year old, 3x-as-big-as-Earth Great Red Storm on Jupiter is actually a sentient organism, and will one day perceive us as a threat, and then use lightning to strike Jupiter’s liquid metallic hydrogen ocean in a way that manipulates the planet’s magnetosphere, which already nearly reaches Earth, to create an EMP pulse that destroys our world’s electronic infrastructure.
@Rarebear said, ”I have a giant amount of gas. Does that count?” Well, that explains the quantum flatulation question! :)
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