Rationalizing a Firefly - Serenity type setting

[mindstalk]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

You can then play with double planets as natural occurrences but you still only have one real habitable zone per star.

Terraformable moons of gas giants remain hypothetical objects. Jupiter doesn't have any and only lack of knowledge about Titan's innards keeps it as a maybe. Go out to Neptune to find the next big moons and you're looking at places where nitrogen is a granite hard solid. Heat one of those to human-friendly temps and who knows if things would work out all right.

Terraformable anything remains a hypothetical object. Many gas giants are much closer to their stars than ours, though, if worrying about habitable zones. If using fusion-powered artificial suns in orbit, even that's not really a concern.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by mindstalk

Terraformable anything remains a hypothetical object. Many gas giants are much closer to their stars than ours, though, if worrying about habitable zones.

My concerns were geological. The three outer Jovian moons are all a mix of rock and ice that wouldn't be viable if you melted it. They're also too small to retain liquid water gravitationaly.

The charged particle radiation wouldn't be a direct issue to anything with an Earth-like atmosphere. It might erode the atmosphere of any body without a magnetic field though.

For me at least "terraformable" can henceforth be taken as shorthand for "at least as terraformable as Mars". In the real solar system even Mars isn't that close to terraformable but it still leads by a wide margin.

[mindstalk]

Sure, but there's no reason to think our Jovian satellites are exhaustive of the possibilities. Planetary science is so far a long string of surprises.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Except that in reality, gas giant moons would be within the radiation belts and inhospitable to earth like life. Not to mention have extremely long day/night cycles, again not very earth like.

Originally Posted by mindstalk

In reality, Jupiter is the only one of our gas giants to have a huge and deadly radiation belt, and Callisto isn't within it. Long rotation periods seem more likely, given locking to synchronicity and multi-day revolutions around the giant.

If a moon is big enough to retain a liquid core, it's likely to also have a magnetic field of its own, making the GG's less of an issue.

Also, moons either outside the outer edge of the GG's radiation belts are likely not tidelocked. Plus, they need a liquid core to generate a magnetic field themselves so that they are survivable from the solar radiation.

And ones closer in than the inner edge of a GG's radiation belt are protected by the radiation belt itself to a degree. Further, they're close enough in that tidelock ceases to be a major issue.

Originally Posted by mindstalk

Sure, but there's no reason to think our Jovian satellites are exhaustive of the possibilities. Planetary science is so far a long string of surprises.

Amen!