There was a short story by Isaac Asimov in which aliens negotiate with Earthlings for the purchase of Jupiter, which they intend for use as an advertising billboard.
To demonstrate, a scale comparison:
Yes, when they spontaneously combust in an oxygen atmosphere. Ruins your whole visit.
As for eclipses, the thing is, it isn’t obvious from space that the moon is the same angular size as the sun from the surface. Or that the moon passes in front of the sun. Especially since it varies. Yes, you could do the math, but why? Anyone in space can make their own eclipses on demand.
And really, Saturn is by far the gem of our solar system.
Chesley Bonestell’s 1944 masterpiece Saturn as Seen from Titan
[Biologist top hat]We know, due to our existence [anthropic monocle] , that a biology similar if not identical to our own works. No such guarantees exist for any hypothetical biologies radically different than ours. We know nucleotides and other biochemicals are VERY fragile and can only exist within certain rather narrow parameters. Paper on the viability of silicon as the basis for life-in toto they are rather downcast on silicon’s utility in forming and sustaining life, but do admit that sulfuric acid could serve as a sufficient solvent for certain “siliconic” biochemistries. Wikipedia on alternate biochemistries.
OK, to be more precise, I shouldn’t have said that you could jump into orbit around Deimos. But an Olympic athlete could.
Well, unless you’re an Olympic athlete.
But you don’t need to get very radically different from Earth life to have, for instance, a higher tolerance to radiation. Heck, even among Earth life, we actually do have autotrophs that use gamma rays as their energy source instead of visible light.
Once you have watched C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate a pile of dust don’t cut it. Time to leave.
“Saturn, that’s kinda cool with the rings and all. The Moon? Just a battered space rock.”
They might find tides interesting. Oceans that move? Cool.
Perhaps. If the Moon zapped out of existence, the Sun would still raise significant tides on Earth.
Assuming planets w liquid oceans covering a decent fraction of their surface are fairly common, tides would be too. With or without natural moons.
Yeah, about half as strong as the Moon’s tides. At full and new moon, they line up, so we get super-extreme tides, and at the quarters, they oppose, so we get weak, half-strength tides.
Fun fact: This is because the Sun is, on average, about half as dense as the Moon. Well, that combined with the well-known fact that they have the same angular size in the sky. Tides are proportional to angular size cubed times density, so for two objects with the same angular size, it’s just proportional to density.
While we’re at it: For a spherical object, the time to complete one orbit just above the surface also depends only on density. So it takes about an hour and a half to orbit the Earth, and about the same time for a metallic asteroid.