Sunday, October 25, 2009

Survival In A Trailer Park In Space?

One of the many surprises coming from the Cassini mission to Saturn is that the outer ring of Saturn is constructed in whole or in part from liquid squirted into space from the moon Enceladus.

An additional interesting tidbit is that there is some salt along with some organics in the water being sprayed from that moon:

For the first time, scientists working on NASA's Cassini mission have detected sodium salts in ice grains of Saturn's outermost ring. Detecting salty ice indicates that Saturn's moon Enceladus, which primarily replenishes the ring with material from discharging jets, could harbor a reservoir of liquid water -- perhaps an ocean -- beneath its surface.

(NASA Enceladus). Some of you, like me when I took my kids and grand kids to IMAX, have probably seen the IMAX Theater's movie about an imaginary trip to that moon, and the water world underneath its surface.

Will a trailer park be built there in the future as an adjunct to space travel?

Space vehicles and even the International Space Station (I worked on that project for Boeing/Rocketdyne for awhile) are like mobile homes or "trailers" as they are sometimes called, since they are made of metal, are temporary, and have no foundation attached to dirt real estate.

In my lifetime I have owned dozens of conventional homes built on concrete or block foundations, and also a couple of mobile homes.

I have found that very good people live in both types of dwellings, as do very bad people.

As has been pointed out on this blog, planets in solar systems are temporary dwellings, and sentient species on those planets must become nomads at some time in the cycle of the life of that species, if they want to survive as a species beyond that star's life cycle.

Perhaps a temporary trailer park on Enceladus will be part of our salvation in the future?

We shall see.

1 comment:

Randy said...

Radiation is a serious impairment to space travel. Link