As I recently said in another video, Uranus represents a sort of neglected planet.
It lacks moons with clear evidence of liquid water like Saturn and Jupiter have, and yet
also generally lacks the pizazz of Neptune with its storms and the cryovolcanos of Triton.
In fact, we’ve only been to this planet once with Voyager II, and indeed it wasn’t
even discovered until 1781.
But one aspect I’ve always liked about the Uranus’ system are the names of the moons,
which were not chosen from Greek Mythology, but literature.
That naming scheme may have turned out to be prophetic.
Uranus, despite it’s rather sordid name and generally lack luster appearing, actually
hosts a dynamic system sporting at least 27 moons and a set of rings, albeit faint ones.
But unlike most planets in the solar system, Uranus is seemingly in for a profound change
in the number of moons it has.
The reason for this is that at least two pairs of moons in that system are on a collision
course.
One collision, speaking terms of geologic time, is imminent.
In a paper by Robert Chancia and colleagues, link below, they actually set out to study
the behaviour of Uranus’s Eta ring.
The shape wasn’t quite what it was supposed to be, but they were able to calculate the
gravitational interactions between the tiny moon Cressida and its interactions with the
other moons.
They realized that Cressida would eventually collide with another moon, most likely Desdemona,
within the next million years.
Worse, if it’s still around in some form, it’s also possible that Desdemona could
collide with the moon Juliet within 100 million years.
The next two moons slated for collision of some type, they may just bump into each other
and go on their way, are Cupid and Belinda.
The timeframe here is a bit less certain, sometime within the next ten million years,
though it could be a lot sooner, with a chance that the new moon that might form form the
debris might eventually collide with the moon Perdita.
These moons are small, and their in such a position because their orbits are tight.
And this may not be the first of such collisions, but instead part of a cycle.
There is some evidence that Uranus’ outermost ring might have resulted from these collisions.
I would say that this whole state of affairs is almost poetic, Uranus’s moons were named
after characters in Shakespeare’s plays and other works of English literature.
That the small ones periodically kill each other evokes Hamlet in some strange way.
But Uranus is not alone in having misbehaving moons.
There is another moon in this solar system that is likely to undergo collision, but in
this case not with another moon, but its own planet.
Worse, it’s the main planet we want to colonize.
It’s Mars’ moon Phobos, and it too has a fitting name, in Greek Mythology the god
Phobos, often depicted as a war horse of Mars, personifies fear and in fact the word phobia
derives from this.
And there is much to fear, this suicidal moon gets closer to Mars by 2 meters every hundred
years, and sometime within the next 30-50 million years it will either collide with
Mars, or break up and form a ring system around the planet.
Either is likely to affect a human colony on the surface, which if we haven’t colonized
it by then we probably went extinct.
If we have colonized, we very likely would move Phobos to a higher orbit, or disassemble
it completely to build orbital structures, but I offer another scenario.
Say we went extinct after we terraformed Mars, and life on that planet was running wild,
or even on the brink of extinction itself by that time as I’m not certain how long
an untended terraformed Mars could hold its environment together.
But might the death of Phobos be the last nail in the coffin for human induced life
on Mars?
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently thanking all of you!
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