Colonize Mercury

[exchemist]

You see the latest News from Mercury, more water than we thought.

#https://www.space.com/38274-mercury-has-surprisingly-icy-north-pole.html

Maybe Mercury can sustain a human presence indefinitely, the hard part is getting humans there. Once buried under the north pole, they should be well protected from whatever the Sun puts out. I am thinking about a linear mass driver built at the North Pole. the planet rotates slowly, so when the mass driver is pointed in the right direction, you can fling the payload into an orbit that will intercept Earth. Since Mercury is particularly dense for its size, it may contain a higher abundance of precious metals such as platinum than Earth, and there are less environmental restrictions against strip mining on Mercury. We might want to send something to Earth to pay for the colony, and ingot of platinum ought to survive atmospheric entry into Earth quite handily, as the metal has a high melting point.

Thereby bringing the price of platinum crashing down? (Only teasing :) )

 

But yes it is interesting. And given the slow rotation rate one might even by able to use thermocouples to provide the energy, I suppose. 

[TomKalbfus]

Some things which might make good exports, Uranium for a Saturn colony. Uranium could be used as fuel for an atomic fission power plant to heat Saturn's atmosphere to fill a hot air balloon and thus stay aloft for as long as it has uranium. Saturn offers a 1-g habitat for humans to inhabit, it is well protected from radiation by Saturn's atmosphere and magnetic field. The pressure gradient of Saturn's atmosphere also changes less with altitude that Earth's, that means a thicker atmosphere above your head at the 1-bar altitude, as hydrogen weighs less than nitrogen. I suppose the habitat portion of the habitat would be inside a second envelop within the balloon that contains the heated hydrogen and helium, this minimizes the surface area of the balloon through which heat loss could occur. Now the term "Hot Air" balloon, the "Hot Air" need only be hot relative to Saturn's surrounding atmosphere, in the case of Saturn, "room temperature" would qualify as "Hot" and produce gases within that are less dense then those outside. What Saturn lacks is heavy metals that Mercury could supply. You could mine it off of some of Saturn's Moons, after you get through that thick layer of ice surrounding the rocky cores of most of them, or you could mine it on Mercury. This would also work well for a Titan colony.

Edited September 27, 2017 by TomKalbfus

[TomKalbfus]

As far as what a Mercury colony might look like. Mercury has volcanoes, a colony could be placed in a lava tubes near the North or South Poles. The high latitude reduces the amount of solar insolation the ground receives thereby reducing the average temperature deep underground. So we either use a lava tube or dig a deep pit on a location in the Polar region. And at the top of the opening to the chamber, we can have a mirror reflecting sunlight into the chamber. A mirror 3-meters wide can illuminate the interior of a cave that is 9 meters wide at normal Earth daylight levels. We put some glass to cover the hole but let most of the light to pass through. Because gravity is 38% of the Earth's we can dig deeper into Mercury than in Earth, thus gaining access to more mineral deposits. We can have mines elsewhere on the planet that operate at night on a part-time basis.