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Is there any possible way that people here on Earth could live on other planets like Saturn, Jupiter, or the Sun?
Question Date: 1999-06-03
Answer 1:

The planets and star you named are made of gases so you couldn't actually live on them. You could orbit them though but it would cost you a lot of money and time to do that. Right now it isn't worth it so instead we send out unmanned spacecraft.


Answer 2:

To identify whether we could live in another place, it is important to investigate the conditions that humans are able to live under.These include air to breathe, water, food, gravity, and an appropriate temperature. Another factor is the distance from Earth necessarily for shipping supplies. Although humans are adaptable, and have many technologies that might make these conditions on other planets possible in controlled buildings, it would be difficult to make sure all of this would work for long periods. Each planet poses its own problems to setting up a place where humans might live. The moon is close by and recent studies show that it may have ice that could be used to provide a water supply. The gravity of the moon is much less than on the Earth but it is very close, making supplying it with food easier. The moon is also too small to have any sort of atmosphere so oxygen would have to provided from Earth or some technology for easily recycling air would have to be developed. Many people think that Mars would be a good place for people to live. Given the conditions necessary that I described above, why do you think this would be the case? Planets such as Jupiter and Saturn pose different problems because the solid surface is thousands of miles below the surface of the clouds and the gravity and pressure there would be an impossible place to live. The huge atmospheric storms would also provide difficult conditions. Some people think the moons of these planets might be a reasonable place for life to form but the problems of no air, low gravity, distance from Earth, and much less solar energy availability because of the distance from the sun make the idea of living so far out in the solar system unlikely. Living at the Sun itself would be very difficult because of the tremendous heat, not to mention the difficulty of getting between the Earth and Sun because of the Sun's gravity.



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