Experience building space vehicles has spread to many countries and private industry. Going to another planet will be difficult and, without breakthroughs, unacceptably dangerous.īut the ingredients for a space colony are coming together. News media that have sold the public a false understanding of the real challenges of space exploration. A space agency, NASA, with a culture that squelches dissent and that lacks a coherent goal for human spaceflight. The technology required for a space colony is already visible. If humanity doesn’t change course on this planet, a new world free from war and climate upheaval could someday draw colonists to Titan in the same way. In earlier times, human beings struck out for strange and dangerous new places when their homes became intolerable. But the technology is coming at the same time the prospects for the Earth are getting worse. We do not yet have the technology to put people on Titan. Today, the cold, gloomy Titan skies are unappealing and impossibly distant. This will happen because, at a certain point, it will make sense. They will go boating on lakes of liquid methane and fly like birds in the cold, dense atmosphere, with wings on their backs. The nitrogen atmosphere, thicker than the Earth’s, will protect them from space radiation and allow them to live in unpressurized buildings and travel without spacesuits, in very warm clothes with respirators. Their energy will come from burning the unlimited supply of fossil fuels on its surface and their oxygen from the water ice that forms much of Titan’s mass. In Beyond Earth, Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R.Hendrix offer groundbreaking research and argue persuasively that not Mars, but Titan-a moon of Saturn with a nitrogen atmosphere, a weather cycle, and an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy, where we will even be able to fly like birds in the minimal gravitational field-offers the most realistic and thrilling prospect of life without support from Earth.Someday, people will live on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. But Beyond Earth does not offer another wide-eyed technology fantasy: instead, it is grounded not only in the human capacity for invention and the appeal of adventure but also in the bureaucratic, political, and scientific realities that present obstacles to space travel-realities that have hampered NASA’s efforts ever since the Challenger disaster. We are at the cusp of a golden age in space science, as increasingly more entrepreneurs-Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos-are seduced by the commercial potential of human access to space.
From a leading planetary scientist and an award-winning science writer, a propulsive account of the developments and initiatives that have transformed the dream of space colonization into something that may well be achievable.
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