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Instead of wasting our resources trying to terraform Mars, we should look for planets already in this "balmy zone" to live on.
You mean like not fucking up the planet we live on? That's impossible, you're insane.
¡terraform earth!
yeah, if we could terraform mars, we could terraform earth too. i'm in the "let's put all the pollution on the moon" camp
Reaching mars is far more achievable than reaching another solar system.
I've heard that basically everywhere you go in space you will die by overheating because your body can't radiate away the heat it generates. It's weird to think that you can die from literally being cooked alive in a vacuum with a temperature of 0 degrees (readers choice of units).
Temperature is one of the least intuitive things when really getting into the nitty gritty of it. One of my favorite things to prompt people with is to ask them what makes something twice as hot as something else?
Temperature is the average speed of atoms, in space, what atoms?
Space isn't cold. It just isn't any temperature
Right, so getting to that whole "temperature is a measure of average speed of atoms," what's the average speed of atoms in 100 degrees Celsius boiling water vs 100 degree celsius steam? Or for that matter any solid at any given temperature compared to any gas of the same temperature? See what I mean when I said not intuitive?
Also, even in a vacuum a thermometer will eventually settle on a temperature it'll just take longer to equalise.
Atoms move in a solid, they just vibrate, in a liquid and glass they fly around. Somewhat bonded to each other in a liquid. But the speed is the same for any given temperature.
In vacuum I think a thermometer will just go to absolute zero/boil off.
That is just not true mate. A better working definition for temperature is the average kinetic energy of molecules not average speed of them. Smaller molecules such as hydrogen will move much faster than larger ones such as water at any given temperature. KE = 1/2mv^2
And no a thermometer in a vacuum will settle to the ambient temperature of it's environment. Nothing will settle to absolute zero. Either an object is in a true vacuum (theoretical doesn't actually exist) in which case it will remain its current temperature forever or for objects in the vacuum of space it will equalise with the temperature of it's surrounding environment.
Rather than reader's choice of units, it has to be Kelvin... 0F or 0C is warm in absolute terms.
AcKsHuLlY it could also be in rankine
I'm being pedantic as fuuuuuck because I've never actually seen it used in real life. For those that don't know, it's similar to Kelvin in that 0 is actually absolute zero, but the degree step sizes are the same as fahrenheit
Rankine is used in chemical engineering calcs because a lot of US chemical plants are built in US Customary units and it's a lot easier to calculate in Rankine and keep everything in that system than try to convert back and forth between K and F.
Thanks for the interesting info! I figured it was used somewhere, just hadn't seen it.
And reminded me of the unit I saw once that I hate the most. Kilofeet... Not kidding. Apparently used in telecommunications as a unit of length for spools of cable, probably for similar reasons of easier math but couldn't fully switch from the US standard.
It's exactly like being trapped in a thermos. But! There are space suit concepts that use an airtight helmet, but the rest of the body effectively is exposed to vacuum, supported and protected using a skin tight water-permeable fabric that prevents you from swelling up or burning in the UV. One of the benefits of this kind of space suit is that SWEATING WORKS IN SPACE!!! The sweat carries away heat (and further consumes it in the phase transition) when it instantly flashes to vapor, cooling one's body. Sweating is a human super power and we can leverage it to perform our own temperature regulation in a vacuum! I've always thought that was super cool.
and then there is the wet light bulb situation where your body can just suffocate as it sweats and cant evaporate.
We’re basically just porous critters. Just assume we need to breath from everywhere on the body.
The half of you not facing the sun would freeze, even on mercury it gets cold at night
I will simply sit on an office chair and spin around like doner on a rotisserie
If you've got even modest infrared insulation, though, your metabolism is more than enough to keep you from freezing. No convective or conductive heat transfer makes getting rid of heat more of a problem.
Space has no temperature. Space is a vacuum. Temperature needs things to jiggle.
The average temperature of the universe today is approximately 2.73 K (−270.42 °C; −454.76 °F), based on measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero
Cited from https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/09/25/947116.htm
Wonder how they calculated the "average" temperature. Was it weighted by mass or by volume?
Only mass-weighting really makes sense here imo
Wouldn't that be just star and not star?
No - it'd mostly be dark matter vs not dark matter.
Doesn't matter, it's just the eventual temperature of a black body kept in deep space
That's purely academic. IRL what actually matters is “how big and reflective is the thing you're in”.
You'd get real hot real fast in a matte black space suit.
But a thing in space is not a vacuum and is subject to heating via solar radiation
Yeah, that's kinda why it's cold. Cold is just an absense of heat.
Cold is the absence of heat in a medium that can interact with temperature imo. It certainly wouldn't act like normal cold; if you stuck your hand out and felt the vaccuum, it wouldn't feel cold, and the heat in your hand would not flow outwards into space very much. There's no convection, only radiation. Space isn't cold, matter is cold, and there's no matter.
And actually, space only gets cold (more surface radiation cooling than solar heating) a bit after Mars orbit. On earth orbit, it's already a bit toasty.
Literally. It's adorable seeing kids figure things out like that, though :)
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