• tal@lemmy.today
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    2 months ago

    Define “have”. Know about? In our own solar system?

    And under what conditions? Like, walking around on the surface? Living in some kind of underground chamber?

    There’s nothing in our solar system where you can just hop out and roam around on the surface like you would on Earth and survive. The atmosphere alone doesn’t make it doable.

    But there are attempts to find planets outside the solar system that might be habitable:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets

    Problem is that interstellar travel takes a lot of doing. The furthest a human has gone as of 2024 is just beyond the Moon. We haven’t even gone to another planet in our solar system. And traveling to even the closest star system is a lot further away.

    The Moon is about 1.3 light seconds away.

    We get within about 3 light-minutes of Mars at its closest approach.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars

    Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system, is about 4.2 light-years away.

    So traveling to planets in other solar systems isn’t something that’s probably going to happen in the immediate future. Even if one of these possibilities ultimately does turn out to be habitable, it’s not within our near-term reach. We can see, but we cannot easily touch.

    We can create a habitable base on the Moon or Mars. But it’d only be habitable conditions inside the base itself.

    Terraforming Mars or Venus might be possible.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus