Скачать или смотреть What if we Lived on Mercury? |

AumSum had always been curious about the planets, but one day his imagination zoomed all the way to Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. In a blink, he found himself standing on its rocky surface, surrounded by endless plains and deep craters.

There was no sky above him - only a dark, star-filled space. Since Mercury didn’t have much of an atmosphere, the sky never turned blue. It just stayed pitch-black, even during the day.

As AumSum took his first steps, he noticed something strange. The Sun looked huge - more than three times bigger than it looked from Earth. But the strangest part was how slowly Mercury turned.

One full day on Mercury was longer than 50 Earth days. That meant AumSum would be stuck in sunlight for weeks before night finally arrived. During that long day, the surface grew incredibly hot - hot enough to melt some metals. AumSum’s boots sizzled every time he moved. He had to take shelter inside a special heat-proof pod he imagined just in time.

He waited, and waited, and waited for the night. When it finally came, everything flipped. The planet turned freezing cold - colder than the iciest winter on Earth. Without a thick atmosphere to trap heat, Mercury lost warmth the moment the Sun disappeared.

AumSum wrapped himself in layers of super-insulated space gear, but the chill was bone-deep. Still, he marveled at the stars above. Without clouds or pollution, he could see the Milky Way stretching from one end of the horizon to the other.

AumSum imagined what it would be like to ride a rover over those bumpy surfaces or to build a space station here. But there was a problem. Mercury didn’t have air to breathe, water to drink, or soil to grow food. Everything humans would need to survive had to be brought from Earth.