Episode 77 of SfS — The Great Migration: Living at the Edge of the Solar System — is Now Live!
This week was the final episode of the Great Migration, which dealt with how humans may someday live around Neptune, Pluto and Charon, and the Kuiper Belt. With the right technology, resources, and strategies, humans could live on or around the many moons, dwarf planets (if you subscribe to that notion), and iceteroids that populate the outer Solar System. For starters, there are abundant resources out there that could fuel the “fusion economy” — i.e., hydrogen and helium from Neptune’s atmosphere.
And much like the Main Asteroid Belt, there are countless small bodies that are rich in materials that would enable settlement efforts elsewhere. This includes the massive amounts of water ice and volatile elements needed to terraform planets like Venus and Mars — like hydrogen, ammonia, and methane. But perhaps the greatest opportunity is for scientific research, which includes investigating the possibility that “Ocean Worlds” like Triton, Pluto, and Charon could support life in their interior oceans.
There’s also the opportunity for research involving the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Out in the farthest reaches of the Solar System, where interference from local sources would be non-existent, scientists could conduct searches for possible “technosignatures” and listen for indications of extraterrestrial transmissions. Someday, there could be branches of humanity known as Neptunians, Tritonians, Plutonians (or Hadeans), and other cool adjectives!
Follow the links below to learn more.
Where to Listen:
Originally published at http://storiesbywilliams.com on August 11, 2024.
