New Horizons: Pluto

[PortalHunter]

This was taken yesterday.



Five days, sixteen hours, and counting...

I wonder how many books, TV shows, video games, movies, comics, illustrations, and childhood fantasies will be proven inaccurate with the depiction of Pluto?

Quite a few, but people have also been saying for decades that Pluto probably resembles Triton.

Makes sense. Gravitationally captured from the Kuiper belt... They're cousins.
Also their colouration. Pluto's reddish-brownish-tan appearance is caused by methane reacting with faint solar / stellar radiation, forget exactly how. Ah wait yes, tholin formation from UV bombardment. Just like Triton.

(Tholin as in tholin baths, right...)

And some interesting reminders from NASA that the Sun doesn't look 'just like another star' from Pluto's skies. A few hundred times brighter than a full moon here, I believe.

[Cray]

And some interesting reminders from NASA that the Sun doesn't look 'just like another star' from Pluto's skies.

I talked quite a few friends and family members into stepping outside at their local "Pluto Time" when this hit the news. It was interesting to see that level of lighting.

A few hundred times brighter than a full moon here, I believe.

~1 watt per square meter versus 0.00146 watts per square meter so, yes, for sufficiently large definitions of "a few hundred."

[PortalHunter]

I talked quite a few friends and family members into stepping outside at their local "Pluto Time" when this hit the news. It was interesting to see that level of lighting.

I'm posting right now at my Pluto Time, or pretty close to it anyway. It was maybe a few minutes ago for me. A bit cloudy, though, but I can still see details fine outside~

~1 watt per square meter versus 0.00146 watts per square meter so, yes, for sufficiently large definitions of "a few hundred."

Thanks for clarifying! Several hundred sounds better, yes.

[Rynn]

The crazy thing about how bright it actually is on Pluto is that conceivably you could power a Civilization there on solar panels, if you had the resources to fab them. If there are the resources then with OA tech you just get your robot factories to start churning them out. If you cover ~12% of the planet's surface you'll continually produce about a TW. Very inefficient :p but cool to know that renewable energy is theoretically possible so far away.

[PortalHunter]

This source from NASA has Pluto's luminosity compared to Earth's simplified down to 1/1000. Hmm.

The crazy thing about how bright it actually is on Pluto is that conceivably you could power a Civilization there on solar panels, if you had the resources to fab them. If there are the resources then with OA tech you just get your robot factories to start churning them out. If you cover ~12% of the planet's surface you'll continually produce about a TW. Very inefficient :p but cool to know that renewable energy is theoretically possible so far away.

And then I thought about growing plants with Pluto's level of illumination, which gets me thinking about cold garden worlds.

[stevebowers]

Several years ago a contributor posted a suggestion that Pluto (or any equivalent world) could be surrounded by a swarm of mirrors, multiplying the effective insolation and improving conditions there. Basically a large swarm of orbiting Weather Machines. I still haven't gotten round to writing up a world of this kind in detail, but it seems entirely possible that even these distant objects can be exploited in some way. Another way to increase the insolation is by using collimated sunbeams from the central star; this implies good relations between the inner system and the outer system.

[PortalHunter]

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-image-of...ve-geology

[Bear]

Still blurry, but best we've seen yet by an order of magnitude. Pluto finally has identifiable FEATURES!

[Matterplay1]

Several years ago a contributor posted a suggestion that Pluto (or any equivalent world) could be surrounded by a swarm of mirrors, multiplying the effective insolation and improving conditions there. Basically a large swarm of orbiting Weather Machines. I still haven't gotten round to writing up a world of this kind in detail, but it seems entirely possible that even these distant objects can be exploited in some way. Another way to increase the insolation is by using collimated sunbeams from the central star; this implies good relations between the inner system and the outer system.

There could be several such worlds in the Terragen Sphere, though I suppose that even once 'terraformed' they would be water-worlds given the starting materials. Just a thought: a rather spooky find would be a 'dead' world of this kind that was a gardenworld at some point in the distant past when it was held by xenosophonts. Particularly spooky if there is no good evidence about who made it and why an whether they still exist.

[stevebowers]

Ah yes- a frozen waterworld. Interesting idea.