Question: if you were to visit one planetary body in the universe what would it be?

Evan Keane answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Good question. It’s tricky. I think it would be either Mars, or a moon of Jupiter which is called Europa (I know it is not a planet but it is possible humans could live there). Hmmm, actually I think Mars. Because being on Mercury and Venus would mean you would die instantly, either being melted by the Sun (if you were on Mercury) or from the ridiculously high atmospheric pressure and sulphuric acid clouds!! (if you were on Venus). Mars is the next nearest and would be possible to go to. Next nearest is the asteroid belt but I think these would be a bit boring. Jupiter and beyond would take WAY too long to get to and anyway they are not solid planets so it wouldn’t be much good there!

So I think Mars. There is hope for humans living on Mars. Of course it needs a bit of work and we couldn’t live there now. It is colder but the fact that it has almost no atmosphere means we wouldn’t be shielded from dangerous radiation from the Sun and that would be bad!! But perhaps in the future we could “terra-form” the planet. That means change the planet a lot by imposing an artificial environment, closer to what we have on Earth so we could live on Mars, or a little patch of it which we have worked on to make it more Earth-like! This will be something to think about when we can regularly go to Mars, but that’s probably not for a while yet, unfortunately.