cross-posted from: https://retrofed.com/c/ask@piefed.social/p/2414142/if-you-could-visit-any-celestial-body-outside-of-earth-which-would-it-be
Assuming you are properly equipped to handle the extreme conditions of space, of course. Does not have to be a planet, or even in the Solar System. Any planet, moon, asteroid, star, or other celestial body is available in this hypothetical!
Definitly Titan. I wanna make love on the shore of a liquid methane sea.
Whichever closest planet has intelligent life that’s amenable to receiving extraterrestrial visitors so I can tell them “don’t worry guys there IS life out there and we’re rooting for you.”
Hell yeah!
I’d have a nice dinner at the restaurant at the end of the universe.
I’d wanna walk on the surface of the sun.
“You got a death wish or something?”
No; I am assuming there would be sufficient tech to actually go to the sun and walk/swim on it. I bet it feels gnarly as hell and nobody else would think to do it.
Well, in Red Dwarf, there was word of 'a moon which was shaped exactly like Felicity Kendal’s bottom … ’
Ganymede
I wanna land on Europa. Because I was told not to.
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
Is that a reference I’m not getting?
Quote from Arthur C Clarke’s 2010 (sequel to 2001)
Thanks. Never got around to that one - yet
Thessia
I’d like to see the exoplanet that rains gemstones and amonia in a 1000kmh gale over lakes of mercury or whatever mad environment they were hypothesising, I forget.
Honestly, a nearly uncountable number of options, and you want me to pick one? I’d like to visit the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds just to see our closest neighbors at the galactic level and look back at the Milky Way. I’d like to visit Andromeda, I’d like to visit all the bodies in our solar system that are large enough to collapse into a spheroid. I’d like to visit Halley’s Comet on the far side of its trip. I’d like to visit Alpha Centauri, just to see our closest stellar neighbor. I’d like to visit the nearest star to Sagittarius A*. I’d like to visit a recently collapsed stellar nursery, and a recent supernova. After the more interesting things, I’d like to see a few hundred ringed planets, a few hundred planets in the goldilocks zone of their stars, some single and binary star systems of all the major types, and on and on.
And if all that was an option, why wouldn’t I want to live forever?
Awesome!
Venus. There are some fascinating photos.
Same, but I’d prefer to be in a bubble at 1 atmosphere floating several thousand feet up, filled with earth air and vegetation. Surface there is no fun at all.
It’s a shame we prioritize martian colonization. Venus has a similuar gravity, so close enough to not worry about muscle degradation. We could build floating cloud City above the cruising pressure depths.
This says nothing about colonization – only about crewed NASA missions. And:
NASA never intended to seriously pursue HAVOC, instead using it as a development tool for analysis skills in young engineers.
It was a pie-in-the-sky concept used as an engineering challenge.
We prioritize Mars even though it’s farther than Venus and has lower gravity because you want to colonize the surface.
Tbf, a proper mars colony (as opposed to like some kind of research base analogous to the sorts of thing we have in antarctica) is similarly far off, the challenges compared to venus are just a bit less obvious because the harshness of dealing with, say, dangerous regolith and low gravity are less visually obvious than those of dealing with a crushing and corrosive atmosphere.
I’m honestly not really convinced that mars or any planet makes a good target for space colonies. Mining/resource extraction maybe, but you cant realistically build any kind of space colony until the infrastructure exists to obtain materials and manufacture everything a society needs in space, just on account of how expensive launching stuff from earth is, and since that infrastructure would need to come before large numbers of people do and therefore must be automated, there’s not a particular need to have a space colony on the same site as a resource extraction facility. Given that, I think that the various concepts for centrifugal space habitats make more sense, where you can set your day length and simulated gravity where humans prefer them, and dont need to worry about taking off from or landing in a deep gravity well every time you want to enter or leave the thing.
Yup, fuck gravity wells, once you’re out, stay out. Particularly fond of the idea of dropping a nickel iron asteroid into a near pass of the sun (yeah, hella delta-v, probably more efficient to do it in situ, but it’s such a nice image) till it’s cherry red, setting off a bomb in the middle to make a bubble, patch the holes, fill with air, spin it up for gravity. Quick and dirty homestead. But really O’Neill cylinders are a better choice.
The caustic atmosphere is a bigger hurdle than the pressure.
Any place that has life, if it does. Like the theorized oceans under the ice on Europa or Enceladus. I want to see it. Otherwise, maybe Daphnis or Pan in Saturn’s rings. The view would hopefully be spectacular.
I’d like to see Jupiter from the surface of Io, it is about the same distance than the Moon is from Earth but Jupiter is like 40 times the radius and has colours.
A flyby of the rings of Saturn.
Outside the solar system, any nebula and go just far enough as to see the entire Milky Way from the top.
Seeing Jupiter up close is a good one. I bet I would have trouble even processing it
Betelgeuse (red supergiant). Super impressive in Elite Dangerous, real thing would be something to see.
Statistically speaking there has to be some other life out there. Although, with how rare that is and large the universe is, we’ll never find them, and they will never find us.
But with the magic of your question? I’ll go to the nearest planet with another spacefaring civilization!
I just need to remember to bring my towel.Also remember: don’t panic!
