It’s not difficult to picture humans working and living on the Red Planet, Mars. Maybe they’ll be harsh asteroid miners making their fortune mining precious minerals out of the endless supply of space rocks.
Venus also seems like it’s a pretty great place to live if we stick to the clouds in swimming sky cities, using the jet streams in our steampunk airships. However, there’s a doubtful and nearly impossible place to live – Jupiter.
With the exploration of Jupiter by NASA and other space agencies, we learn many interesting facts about this giant planet.
Jupiter is tough to travel to from the Earth because of its enormous gravity and extremely chaotic atmosphere. Even though NASA has managed to get two space shuttles to land on the surface of Jupiter, it would still take more than ten times the mass of Jupiter to squeeze into our solar system. Jupiter is a very peculiar planet, and it is shrouded in mystery. Therefore, it is highly doubtful that any humans would survive in such a hostile environment.
Jupiter is made of mostly helium gas and hydrogen. So, trying to land on it would be like trying to land on a thick, dense cloud here on Earth. There’s no landmass or crust to break your free fall on Jupiter.
Technically, if you could stand on the cloud tops of Jupiter, you would experience around more than double the gravity that you share on Earth. So, it’ll drag you down, and you’d fall to your death because it’s a gas planet made of hydrogen, the lightest known element in the Universe.
If you want to use your aircraft to explore Jupiter, then you are probably in for a disappointment. Jupiter is highly dense, so it is almost impossible for a spacecraft to travel to its lowest regions. It would only be possible for a probe to venture into the clouds at the poles.
Jupiter is encircled by an immense magnetic field, ten times more powerful than Earth’s. It catches particles and then beats them around like an accelerator. You will be cooked by a cosmic microwave oven if you are anywhere around it.
So, yes, it is highly unlikely to come near Jupiter, then alone land on the gas giant, and humans are better off on Earth or perhaps trying to colonize Mars and Venus. Maybe, the moons of Jupiter could present us with another exciting option. We have covered this in our previous article.
