Would Laythe really be habitable?

[Mercy]

Ignoring the whole radiation, tides, volcanoes and possibly poison water, there's still the whole "supplies" thing.

Where would they get food and drink, and other assorted goods?

[Specialist290]

The "Snacks" cabinet on the Hitchhiker, of course!

But seriously: Any space program that has the resources to send a fleet of colony ships out to Laythe in the first place probably also has the resources to arrange for regular supply drops as well. That's also not discounting the use of hydroponic farming, water distillation, or climate-controlled greenhouses.

[PTNLemay]

That's also not discounting the use of hydroponic farming, water distillation, or climate-controlled greenhouses.

Exactly. There would be some challenges, granted. We don't know what kind of soil Laythe is made of, and solar power would be pretty meager. But put a nice compact fission reactor (see picture for a good real-world example), connect it to a set of lights in the green-house. You're well on your way to being self-sustaining.

More than the food/water/air consumables, a big problem I see is replacing complex tools and equipment that would wear out over time. It's easy to filter water to make it drinkable, it's not so easy to fabricate titanium and aluminum from the local environment to build us some new screwdrivers (and screws).

[FITorion]

Well the churning from the tidal forces would cause volcanoes... and the moving internal liquid would most likely also cause a magnetic field. I don't know why it wouldn't... I'll have to check if IO and Europa have large magnetic fields because I think they should.

The internal heat from the tides could maintain a warm ocean. Europa has an ocean under the ice... if it were just a little closer to Jupiter that ice could be melted and a temperate environment created. The only real question to me is if such a zone would be within or outside the Van Allen radiation belts of the gas giant. If it is lucky enough to not be in one of the radiation belts then the radiation environment wouldn't be that bad... it would be less than interplanetary space. There is however a decent chance it would be in a radiation belt and then I don't think it would be possible for their to be a strong enough magnetic field to deal with that.

If it was in a belt... and had a decent field then the radiation would be high... but not necessarily impossible to deal with. Substances high in Hydrogen ... such as water ... make wonderful radiation shields. Also a few feet of dirt does a pretty good job... Laythe has both. You'd just want to limit your time from orbital insertion to landing and getting inside the protective facilities.

I know the Devs have mentioned in the past that the radiation environment on Laythe is going to be significant... But I haven't seen anything that says this will change anything... maybe Kerbals are immune "mostly" to radiation... hence why the Nuclear engines are "mostly" harmless.

Upon further research... apparently Both IO and Europa have Induced magnetic fields... induced by Jupiter's... and they do not have intrinsic fields such as what would be caused by convecting internal liquid cores.

check out this pic I found.

Edited August 25, 2013 by FITorion

[annallia]

Exactly. There would be some challenges, granted. We don't know what kind of soil Laythe is made of, and solar power would be pretty meager. But put a nice compact fission reactor (see picture for a good real-world example), connect it to a set of lights in the green-house. You're well on your way to being self-sustaining.

More than the food/water/air consumables, a big problem I see is replacing complex tools and equipment that would wear out over time. It's easy to filter water to make it drinkable, it's not so easy to fabricate titanium and aluminum from the local environment to build us some new screwdrivers (and screws).

Bring it with them along with a 3d printer. I realize this doesn't solve the problem, you still have a finite supply of material however it does lessen the degree of the problem.

[PTNLemay]

Some pics I had found a while back that are related to the topic.

Jupiter's Radiation Belts.

Ganymede's little magnetic field.

Jupiter's radiation belts cover everything pretty much up to Callisto.

[Kimberly]

If we imagine that Laythe receives radiation of the same intensity as Io does from Jupiter, and you ignore the atmosphere, how deep underwater would you have to be to negate it to a safe level? I think it would actually be quite workable.

[M5000]

This has been brought up countless times, really and I thought the community has generally established that Laythe would not be habitable if we're taking the scale discrepancy out of everything.

That said, certainly it's open to debate as Laythe is not an EXACT analog to ANYTHING in our solar system, or really anything else for that matter. Nor is Jool. Let's speculate about stuff. Let's just ignore the fact that none of the planets are actually scaled to their correct gravity or whatever, because all that does is end the creativity behind anything, and ends speculation. Remember, speculation is fun!

So, let's look at the environment that Laythe is in.

First, it's near a large planet with a thick gaseous atmosphere. Surely there's a thicker core that spins rapidly. I bet that it could generate some sort of a significant magnetic field. Besides, Laythe is very close to Jool, so even if it wasn't a huge field, Laythe would likely still be inside the field.

Second, it's got a bunch of other moons that are passing between it and the sun all the time, which, even if there were no magnetic fields, could absorb some radiation at times.

I don't speculate that Laythe generates too large of a magnetic field of its own, but the fact that it has an atmosphere of its own, and several other planets to help out, means it may just barely be in the range of safe radiation at some points, possibly less radiation near the equators, since they're most directly covered by other moons at times. So for radiation, I think we would be okay.

We know that there is Oxygen on Laythe, because jet engines work as they do on Kerbin. However, this poses another question: Is the Oxygen breathable? I tend to support the hypothesis that Laythe has oceans consisting of water, but with high levels of ammonia and salt mixed in. Both of these substances are ionizing solutions and could keep the water liquid at below its normal freezing point. However, ammonia also likes to evaporate, even when in a solution of water. I imagine that the atmosphere's humidity consists not just of water, like back home, but of a water and ammonia solution, making any areas that are even remotely high in humidity incredibly caustic to life requiring clean air. The salt would stay in the liquid water, but the ammonia pretty much sticks with the water on the surface of the oceans.

We can also see that there is no observable plant life on Laythe, and, if we subscribe to the Ammonia Hypothesis, we can speculate with relatively strong certainty that there is no microbial life.

Since Laythe is so cold, life is unlikely to start and evolve in its current conditions. If the building blocks of life were to be detected, without heat, the chances of those molecules forming proteins or complex ribonucleic acids would be greatly reduced. Possibly, if we observe volcanic activity, there may be some potential for microbial life, but the chances would still be slim, because of the caustic nature of ammonia.

So I've reached the conclusion so far that Laythe would not be hospitable or welcoming to life beginning there.

But what if we /put/ life there?

No. It would probably be like breathing bleach.

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

This Topic has been talked over and over again and I am pretty confident, that Laythe is not only my favorite celestial object in KSP.

But I guess, you can only speculate what Laythes atmosphere is really about, because we haven't received any data yet except for temperature, gravity, and so on.

Maybe when the R&D Features start to kick in, we will be able to retrieve some knowledge about Laythe's atmosphere and its ingredients.

Until then, everything said is just hypothetic and wishful thinking.

No offense here, because KSP wouldnt be the same if People didnt have played with their Fantasy and making up their minds.

Anyways, I guess you would have drowned in Laythe's extreme tides before you could take one breath at least

[Brotoro]

Whether or not the developers choose to make Laythe a friendly place is up to them... but they don't HAVE to make it unfriendly.

Jool looks superficially like a gas giant planet (and it certainly does have a thick atmosphere and no solid surface accessible to us), but it is only the size and mass of Venus, approximately. So even if the devs want it to very gas-giant-like and give it a core of super-dense matter in the center so they can surround it with a thick hydrogen/helium atmosphere and mantle, it STILL shouldn't have the massively powerful magnetic field that Jupiter does (or even the much weaker magnetic fields that Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune have). It could have a much weaker magnetic field. The devs have that option.

Even if Jool does have a radiation belt, Laythe's substantial atmosphere will block the high energy particles in the radiation belt from reaching the surface of Laythe. So there is no need to cower under the seas in any case. If the devs want to be nice to kerbals in Laythe orbit, they can choose to give Laythe a magnetic field to protect them. The distances in the Joolian system are so small that the tidal forces will be much greater than in the Jovian system (even with Jool's smaller mass), so Laythe could easily have a liquid core for generating a global magnetic field...assuming the devs want to be friendly.

Because of all that tidal heating, Laythe would be considerably warmer than the Jovian moons. If the devs choose to be friendly, they could give it a big greenhouse effect (if its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, along with the substantial amount of oxygen we know is in there), and then a very salty ocean would be sufficient to have liquid water without the need for the difficulties of ammonia. Plus, all those volcanoes would look awesome.

[Jesrad]

Laythe should have permanent, visible-in-broad-daylight, sky-spanning vivid auroras.

[lajoswinkler]

^^Seconded. I'd love to see some auroras in future updates.

[czokletmuss]

That's a little bit of a necroposting BUT the incoming official Squad AMA on Reddit is a good occasion to solve this issue once and for all

[Johnno]

That's a little bit of a necroposting BUT the incoming official Squad AMA on Reddit is a good occasion to solve this issue once and for all

You're right about the necroposting.

Locked.