• Question: If the human population was low and earth wasn't a suitable place for humans anymore which planet would be best?

    Asked by Aradia D to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      @288frcc29 well the best planets for human habitability are probably orbiting around other stars in the universe. There is a zone around these stars (called the Goldilocks Zone) where the conditions are just right for water to exist – quite important for us humans! But if you mean a planet in our solar system, then Mars is the obvious choice. It has water in the soil, it has a habitable temperature (Venus and Mercury are far too hot), there is enough sun to run electricity off solar panels, it has a very small atmosphere and it has a night/day rhythm similar to Earth. Nowhere else in our solar system would be suitable. Mercury and Venus are far too hot (in fact, Venus is planet hell with very high pressures, acid rain…) and the moon is too small to be sustainable.

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      Probably Mars, though almost certainly we’ll need to get there via some kind of moon base. Mars has plenty of its own challenges (the dust might be toxic to us, planet-wide dust storms, no protective magnetic field) but the soil isn’t too acidic to grow plants in, and it can get up to non-frigid temperatures in the summer. It seems to be our best bet for now.

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