Hacking Jupiter
Lisa Scott has not seen Jupiter with her own eyes. She works from a converted warehouse in Duluth, Minnesota, surrounded by haptic modeling rigs and radiation simulation chambers, designing habitats for a world she will almost certainly never visit.
She works seventy-three hours a week. She is one of the happiest people in North America
The first permanent human presence in Jupiter orbit arrived in 2041—a modest research station at Callisto, positioned safely beyond the planet’s lethal radiation belts. By 2048, the Jovian system hosts fourteen active stations, with twenty-three more in various stages of construction.
The economics are staggering. Helium-3 extraction from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere now supplies 34% of Earth’s fusion fuel. The Galilean moons yield rare isotopes unavailable anywhere else in the solar system. Europa’s subsurface ocean has become the most valuable scientific real estate in human history.
Orbital infrastructure investment reached $8 trillion in 2047, employing 2.1 people directly and another 6.7 million in supporting industries. A sizeable proportion of new engineering graduates now specialize in extreme-environment habitat design.
None of them will see their creations in person for decades, if ever. The work takes place across a communication delay of thirty-three to fifty-three minutes each way, designing for conditions no human has experienced firsthand, building homes for people who don’t yet exist.
Lisa’s current project is Lysithea Station, a 340-person habitat designed for the irregular moon of the same name. The station will support ice-mining operations and serve as a waypoint for missions deeper into the outer system.
The AGI can optimize structural loads, calculate radiation shielding requirements, model thermal dynamics across Jupiter’s twelve-year orbital cycle. It can generate ten thousand viable designs before Lisa finishes her morning coffee.
What it cannot do is decide which design is “right”.
“Right” at Jupiter means something different than anywhere else humanity has built. The radiation environment fluctuates unpredictably as Io’s volcanic plumes interact with the magnetosphere. Communication delays make real-time emergency response impossible—every system must fail gracefully through cascades the inhabitants can manage alone. And the psychological architecture matters as much as the physical: these people will live eighteen months between crew rotations, watching Earth shrink to a bright dot, experiencing sunrise as the shadow of a moon larger than Mercury.
“The AGI gives me perfect answers to the wrong questions,” Lisa explains. “It optimizes for survival metrics. I optimize for whether someone can fall in love in this space, raise a child, grieve a death, feel like they’re home.”
She spends eleven hours daily in haptic simulation, walking through her designs at human scale, feeling the sight lines, the acoustic properties, the way light moves through a common area during a Callisto eclipse. The work cannot be rushed. A habitat is not a machine. It is a place where meaning will happen, and meaning resists optimization.
Lysithea Station involves coordinated work across fourteen time zones: structural engineers in Singapore, life-support specialists in Bremen, psychological consultants in São Paulo, the actual construction crews currently in transit somewhere past the asteroid belt.
The communication delay to the construction site runs forty-one minutes today. A question sent at 9 AM returns its answer at 10:22 AM, if the crew responds immediately. Complex technical discussions can stretch across days.
This latency has created an entire discipline Lisa calls “anticipatory engineering”—designing not just the station but the decision trees the builders will need when something goes wrong and Earth is too far away to help.
She maintains a living document of 2,847 contingency scenarios, each one a small story about something failing and the humans present improvising solutions with whatever they have. The AGI generates the technical parameters. Lisa writes the narratives, imagining herself into the skin of a construction worker watching a seal fail at 3 AM Ganymede time, forty minutes from the nearest advice.
“I’m writing user manuals for emergencies that haven’t happened yet,” she says. “I’m trying to be present for people I’ll never meet, in moments I hope never occur.”
This is not efficient work. It cannot be made efficient. It is the slow, painstaking labor of caring about strangers across distances that would have been unimaginable two decades ago.
Her workspace contains a single decorative object: a photograph of Jupiter taken by Juno in 2017, the swirling storms rendered in enhanced color, blues and oranges impossibly vivid.
“I was three years old when that image was taken,” Lisa says. “It was wallpaper on my grandmother’s computer. I didn’t understand that it was a real place.”
Now she designs kitchens where people will cook meals while that same planet fills their windows, bedrooms where children will be conceived and born knowing Jupiter’s light before they ever see Earth’s sun. The weight of it—the sheer improbability that a species evolved on African savannas now builds homes around a world that could swallow a thousand Earths—sits with her through every seventy-three-hour week.
She could work less. The AGI could handle more. But the work is not a burden she carries; it is a privilege she refuses to set down.
The average Jovian infrastructure engineer works 67.4 hours per week, nearly double the 2025 baseline for comparable roles. Surveys consistently show satisfaction rates above 94%.
This is the paradox the economists failed to predict. When work becomes the construction of human futures across impossible distances, when labor means building homes for children not yet born on worlds not yet habitable, the desire to work “more”becomes indistinguishable from the desire to matter.