Monday, September 7, 2015

Mercury

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, and also the smallest planet, about the size of the Moon.  It's gravity is about 38% of Earth's gravity, so if you were the world's high jump champion, you could jump 6.4 meters.  But you're probably not the world's high jump champion, so if you divide your jump height by 0.38, that's how high you could jump on Mercury.  You will probably get something like 1.2 meters, if you're between 20 and 30 years old.  Long story short: Averages are hard.

Anyway, all that means that you could dunk a basketball almost without raising the ball above your head. 

So, the human, and the structures would be fine in the gravity.  Mercury has no atmosphere to speak of, so the airplane would be useless, and since there are no oceans on Mercury, the boat wouldn't be very interesting.  The house could stand in the gravity, and the lack of atmosphere wouldn't affect it, but the heat would.

The temperature:
Because of it's proximity to the sun, the temperature varies wildly between day and night, with 100 K (−173 °C; −280 °F) temperatures at night to 700 K (427 °C; 800 °F) temperatures during the day at some equatorial regions.  That's definitely too hot for most of the house, but you could survive in something like a fire proximity suit.  The house could survive if it was made out of something with a higher melting point than tin.  At night, a spacesuit would be necessary.

Mercury has been suggested as a colonization site, as it has lots of solar power, not terribly unreasonable temperatures near the poles along with possible ice deposits, and possible deposits of Helium-3. 

In short, Mercury would be fairly survivable, with proper equipment.