Re: Neptune Trojans

Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
In article <462ad025$0$9906$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ben Crowell <crowell07@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here's an interesting fact for anybody else on this group
who's interested in writing SF without FTL. Neptune has
a group of Trojan asteroids, discovered within the last
few years, that probably outnumbers *all* the other asteroids
in the solar system. There's a heck of a lot of good real
estate in our own solar system, and very little of it is on
planetary surfaces.

http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9340&feedId=online-news_rss20

Well.... it depends on your definition of "good" real estate.
Mine involves a lot more insolation and an oxygen atmosphere.
Anything else is just camping out.

So do you have terraforming in mind, or are you saying there's
just nowhere in the solar system humans would want to live?

I think there's an argument to be made that planetary surfaces
in our solar system may be completely uninhabitable, since
fractional gravity is probably very bad for the human body,
just like microgravity. In the asteroids, on the other
hand, you have access to building materials, and you can
make yourself a nice rotating habitat right next to your
quarry/mine.

Of course, there are a lot of imponderables here. For one
thing, the time scale for humans to spread throughout the
solar system is probably >50 years and <500 years, and
on that kind of long time scale, humans may transform
themselves into something not human.
.

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