• BenderRodriguez@lemmy.worldEnglish
    185·
    3 days ago

    Earth’s atmospheric temperature is not what this person is talking about. The temperature outside your door depends on the sun, sure, but it’s due to Earth’s atmosphere. Go 60 miles towards “up” and the temperature of space is not the 68 degrees it is on the ground.

    I think OP is questioning the temperature of the vacuum of space near the Sun. It doesn’t really work like that though.

    • arandomthought@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      69·
      3 days ago

      To expand on the “doesn’t work like that” part: In the vacuum of space there is no air to exchange warmth with your body, or your space suit. You might be comfy on the side of your body facing the sun (if you’re at that distance where it provides the right amount of radiative heat) but the side facing away from the sun will get no heat, and therefore be cold. I imagine that would feel very weird… if you could feel it on your skin, without a space suit, without being ripped apart by the vacuum, of course.

      Does anyone know whether this “uneven distribution of heat energy” is a problem for space suits or if that little bit of air inside is enough to distribute it?

      • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nzEnglish
        44·
        3 days ago

        NASA EVA suits have liquid (water) cooling systems to avoid cooking the astronaut while outside the ISS.

        I don’t know how they actually work though. The only way to shed the heat is to radiate it away or to sink it into warming something else up.

        Found this on Wikipedia:

        In an independent space suit, the heat is ultimately transferred to a thin sheet of ice (formed by a separate feed water source). Due to the extremely low pressure in space, the heated ice sublimates directly to water vapor, which is then vented away from the suit.

        The ice sublimator consists of sintered nickel plates with microscopic pores which are sized to permit the water to freeze in the plate without damaging it. When heat needs to be removed, the ice in the pores melts and the water passes through them to form a thin sheet which sublimates. When there is no need for heat to be removed, this water refreezes, sealing the plate. The rate of sublimation of the ice is directly proportional to the amount of heat needing to be removed, so the system is self-regulating and needs no moving parts. During EVA on the Moon, this system had an outlet gas temperature of 44 °F (7 °C),[1] As an example, during the Apollo 12 commander’s first EVA (of 3 hrs, 44 minutes), 4.75 lb (2.15 kg) of feedwater were sublimated, and this dissipated 894.4 BTU/h (262.1 W).[2] The pores eventually get clogged through contamination and the plates need to be replaced.[3]

        Though I think that’s specifically for removing the astronaut’s body heat.

        • Red_October@piefed.worldEnglish
          5·
          1 day ago

          It’s also for removing the suit systems heat, and heat from sunlight. As much as we love to say space is cold, the problem things in space have is the exact opposite. Without air for the convection or conduction of heat things in space, be they satellites, a space station, or a human in an EVA suit, have a very hard time expelling heat. The International Space Station has enormous radiators on the dark side of it’s solar panels for this very reason, getting rid of heat is hard when you can’t just blow air over a heat sink.

          Also, for what it’s worth, the average energy of what few particles there are in the vacuum of space tends to be pretty high, but they’re so dispersed that it’s entirely negligible.

          • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nzEnglish
            1·
            17 hours ago

            I always try to explain that space is cold on average but near a star it is really hot.

            Case in point: the Earth. Standing on its surface under 100km of atmosphere, the sun will still burn your skin in minutes… imagine sunburn without the ozone layer.

        • Akasazh@lemmy.worldEnglish
          18·
          3 days ago

          What a great system. I wonder how the development of that worked. Did they theorize the necessity of a system like that or were the first space walkers quite unconfortable?

      • Jarix@lemmy.worldEnglish
        26·
        3 days ago

        There are glacier fed lakes when i live. You can float in incredibly cold water and if you have just the right equilibrium you can half float in freezing cold water while half getting a nice sun bath. And it IS very weird.

        One spot I camped at for many years had nice sandy area that was about 200 meters out into the lake before a drop off. As it was only about a meter deep it used to warm up the top foot or so of the water when it was fairly still and you could stick your arm down into the water and actually feel the temperature drop like there was a line underneath the water.

        Was great place to camp before it got overwhelmed by mosquitos

        • mastertigurius@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          A lot of nice places in the world that are a joy to be in until the mosquitoes show up. Do we have to have mosquitoes? Can’t the world manage without them?

          • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            We’re gonna find out one way or another. They already released genetically modified mosquito into the normal mosquito population several years ago. If everything goes to plan, those specific species of mosquitoes that also happen to bite humans, should completely die out in the next 100-200 generations.

            I have no idea how short a mosquito generation is, but I suspect that means 50-200 years.

      • Honytawk@feddit.nlEnglish
        6·
        3 days ago

        What if we spin around like a spit roast so the heat gets evenly distributed?

        How fast should we spin as well?

        • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          I wonder what it would do in relation to vertigo. I mean there’s no gravity to affect the vestibular system, but there are strong visual cues.

          Ah crap, I’m going to go down a “what happens when an astronaut spins” rabbit hole today, ain’t I? I had shit to do, oh well

      • Mesophar@pawb.socialEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        But imagine the side facing the sun is comfortable. Then it keeps warming up. And it keeps warming up. And you try to cool down, but it doesn’t cool, it just stays the same temperature or keeps warming up.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      You don’t think a function of the temperature from the sun to the earth forms a continuous line? You think it’s piecewise? It’s continuous! Yeah it probably bottoms out to effectively zero pretty quick, but there’s some distance from the sun that would be the right temperature. Sure, the other rays from the sun might not make it livable. Sure, it might be so narrow there’s no way to effectively keep yourself in orbit there without getting sucked closer and burning up. Sure, it’s a dumb thought experiment, but there’s no way there isn’t some point where it’s comfortable.

      • BenderRodriguez@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        Empty space is not like our atmosphere. Similar to sound not going through space, empty space is not a medium that can be heated. You can’t heat nothing. Heat is excited atoms. You can’t excite nothing.

        • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          The atmosphere does just “stop” either though. It also forms a gradient. There’s not a magic barrier where the atmosphere is and isn’t. It just gets gradually thinner and thinner. So in the same way there’s a Goldilocks spot in the atmosphere where it’s a comfortable temperature without being too cold, there must be another one near the sun.

          Besides, heat radiation travels through a vacuum. If it didn’t then the Earth wouldn’t get heat from the sun at all.

          • PapaStevesy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            2 days ago

            It travels through the vacuum, but it doesn’t heat the vacuum, there’s nothing there to heat. The “Goldilocks spot in the atmosphere” is on the ground, that’s why we live here.

            • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
              3·
              2 days ago

              When you’re close enough to the sun it heats you enough, because at some point you’re so close you’ll burn up, and at some point you’ll freeze, so there must be a point between them that’s comfortable. (And yes that might involve spinning so you don’t cook on one side and freeze on the other.) Never said it “heats the vacuum”.

              • PapaStevesy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                2 days ago

                Never said it “heats the vacuum”.

                But the theory that the space (proper outerspace space) in-between Earth and the sun has an even temperature gradient assumes that it does.

                • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
                  2·
                  2 days ago

                  I literally never said it’s even, only that if you plot it out it would be continuous instead of piecewise.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        The thing about temperature is that it’s not instant. Radiation from the sun heats stuff up, and that heat is absorbed by whatever the radiation hits according to its reflectivity and shape, and then lost from conduction, convection, and radiation. The characteristics of what’s being heated by the sun and the environment it’s in are what determine how hot it gets.

  • DickFiasco@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21·
    3 days ago

    Instead of wasting our resources trying to terraform Mars, we should look for planets already in this “balmy zone” to live on.