Oh! Oh! I’ve thought about this!
It would make more sense to build habitat craters, dug deep enough into the ground that the surface air pressure would be at a level tolerable to humans (even if the atmosphere mixture was bad, being able to simply wear a respirator instead of an entire suit would be huge).
I did some math once, on Mars a crater several miles deep would have a pressure similar to Earth’s surface.
I think the Moon was like 40 miles or something, which at that point would probably run into other problems that I am not smart enough to worry about lol
That sounds like a really cool Sci Fi concept!
Like the inverse of doing Floating airship cities on Venus where the altitude 's atmosphere is earth equivalent
Edit: equivalent pressure wise, not necessarily component wise
You won’t even need to dig the hole! If you do this before much other habitations on the planet, you could precisely direct astroids to impact the same place to dig the whole for you. I think Cody’s Lab did a video about it, but I can’t find it right now.
Good odds there’s already a bunch of craters too, one of them will fit the bill
Getting closer to the core also means you get free heating.
Weren’t they doing this in The Expanse?
The low-gravity planets/moons we have access to have rather harsh radiation environments, too, so neither. Dig into the ground. You would put a bunker or dome up on the surface for observations and airlocks, but it’d be foolish to live that exposed on a surface without a deep well of atmosphere & Van Allen belts.
Renounce the sky; become mole people.
Now I know next to nothing about it, but listening to the Art Bell Tape Vault and other alien/conspiracy theory/etc podcasts I know that one of the big theories popular amongst some in the UFO community is that the intelligence behind UFOs is some kind of breakaway civilization that survived one of the last cataclysms on Earth and kept advancing.
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Is gravity related to planet size? Wouldn’t density matter more?
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It depends on whether you need to contain atmosphere.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy goes into exquisite detail about the tradeoffs between different construction methods on Mars and other worlds in our solar system.
It depends on the planet. Unless the planet was earthlike to some degree I would suppose MOST habitats would be underground.
A fascinating alternative is “a pressurized ETFE membrane… periodically anchored to the ground by steel cables.”
In plain language: Fiber-reinforced rip-stop ETFE (a thin, strong, light, transparent material used for yacht sails) is used to make a roof and walls with the area under it pressurized and anchored using very tall cables, hundreds of meters high or more, to create a sky. The covered area is huge, the size of a city, compartmentalized for redundancy. People are able to go about their daily lives without use of space suits and it doesn’t feel like you are “inside”.
Great link
The only reasons skyscrapers exist is due to a lack of available footprint. If you’re settling a new planet just build out single story shit as far as the eye can see.
And then call it “suburbs”!
You could do what they do in The Expanse. Spin the planet fast enough that you have artificial gravity, and build upside-down housing as you now fall away from the center.
Wouldn’t that also make the surface gravity negative and rip the planet apart?
Yeah, probably? I haven’t read the books, but I guess they have explanations of how they strengthen it.
I vote for blocks of bouncy castles several storeys high. No need for elevators.
Still domes. One reason for domes is that it helps with holding pressure, which wouldn’t be a problem on an ideal planet. The other reason is that domes have low surface area, which means there’s less weight to bring to the planet from earth.
Jetsons already did it ;)
High rise domes!
If domes are built, I don’t see then being built like those we typically see on Earth. Instead, I expect there to be layers of pressure sealing to prevent the escape of air. If you are going to put in several layers anyway, why not make the dome structure habitable.
