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All the land in our solar system
(imgs.xkcd.com)
For the map enthused!
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Yes, they might actually be able to pay for things from Earth with domestic industry servicing things further out. Nowhere else has an economic "pull" for humans beyond novelty.
Source? What I've seen makes it sound like a true medical mystery, at least until we have more data.
You could put a rotating band with a bit of inwards tilt along the ground, which would achieve something similar.
Space stations are also an option; I guess I really should include them. The disadvantage relative to barren rocks is that they have a certain maximum size given what materials are locally available; there's no expanding out over centuries like we're used to on Earth, and you definitely need artificial gravity. You also might need to import a significant amount of volatiles like hydrogen, if it's a near-Earth asteroid. The advantage is the sheer variety of places to put them, and easy access to zero gravity when actually desirable.
I don't know about floating on Jupiter. Nothing really floats in hydrogen, it's extremely cold, and the gravity would be multiple Gs. Venus has pretty much the same gravity as here, as well as the layer of room temperature and pressure gas.
Don't forget robots are an option, if we just want knowledge or to mine various rare-on-Earth substances.
In the long run, interstellar travel seems possible, although we'd have to be very patient.
I studied theoretical astrophysics and astro xenobiology and part of a thought experiment we did was on the long term affects of low gravity habitation. While we mostly have zero gravity studies the whole 1/3rd or less of our gravity makes some extrapolations pretty simple like cell wall thinning and the whole clots thing, and the small cardiovascular tubes of the eyes make for some good starting points to notice the effects, especially blindness.
But yeah the physical moving items with friction in a light gravity situation pose a pretty big issue for those rotating rings. While a lashed together collection of asteroids can be pretty rough but in a no gravity situation can be operated like a space station of its own. And a large station can be spun slower than the small rings needed for a planetary surface. Recent short paper on this https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210019591/downloads/ICES-2021-142.pdf
For Jupiter that is some really sci-fi stuff i have seen for it but essentially we could build a vacuum based balloon, the high amounts of hydrogen and helium make for great fuel resources and there are lots of other materials immediately in the area and water from Jupiter's atmosphere. Though the physics on the dirigible are silly and way far from something we are doing soon and so is any of this kind of speculation.
Unfortunately the nearest and most likely option is the ugly we go out and start grabbing asteroids and making a really ugly space station that works.
And also robots are not an option. You have clearly never sat on a clean meeting from COSPAR's Planetary Prevention policies. We get zero room for contamination to the poont where my mentor just suggested shooting a solid copper ball from orbit and collecting the exploding dust since it was the only way to follow all the protocols. Once people stop caring, people are cheaper, less rare, and have their own fabrication system built in.
You have to build and move a miniature Earth ecosystem just to support a person, since the only way to make food to date is with other organisms. Even in a fixed structure right here that's proven hard; Biosphere 2 had to be aborted.
NASA has done all probes in exploration outside of Earth's own system for basically that reason. How does that not come up in an academic meeting?
And vacuum balloons can't be made out of any real materials, and wouldn't solve the gravity too strong to stand in, and carousels exist on Earth, and if it's not cantilevered you should use linear tangential velocity which has to be higher for a bigger ring, and biological systems aren't linear and can't necessarily just be extrapolated out...
Alternate link for that paper, which actually is a good source. I think the last time I heard about (the lack of) progress on the problem was from Zach and Kelly Wienersmith on the Nature Podcast. I don't know who exactly would disagree with the "roughly proportional" take here, but I'd be surprised if that was just a fabrication. Proportionality also brings up questions about if higher-than-Earth gravity would then be better for us.
Anyone reading can find a ton more papers on space stuff through ICES, which looks neat.