What Would You Sound Like On Other Worlds?

All About Space reveals how the human voice would differ if astronauts were able to talk on other worlds

- Lee Cavendish

Testing your vocal cords on another planet is a deadly experiment. If you were to voyage to another planet, step out of your spaceship and remove your helmet in order to announce your arrival, you’d be dead within minutes… or even seconds. However, if you were able to speak on other planets and moons throughout the Solar System, the varied atmospheres and surface conditions would affect your vocal cords in a different way than on Earth, making you sound like a different person.

Your ability to speak is possible because of airflow vibrating against the larynx, producing sound waves that then propagate through the atmosphere, which are then carried to, and received by, the eardrums. But what happens if the atmosphere, the medium for voice vibrations, and the surface conditions are tweaked somewhat?

EARTH

On Earth we are currently in a settled state of verbal communication. Earth sits in the Goldilocks Zone of habitability, where the planet is not too far away from the Sun. It’s here where the temperature is just right, where the atmosphere evolved in such a way that made our planet an ideal spot for life to thrive.

As an evolutionary consequence, our voices have adapted to this friendly atmosphere that consists mostly of nitrogen. These atoms are relatively heavy and make up roughly 78 per cent of the atmosphere. Oxygen is the second most abundant, comprising 20 per cent, and the rest is made up of small amounts of argon, carbon dioxide and other gases.