We need to go to Venus as soon as possible | Hacker News Reader

We need to go to Venus as soon as possible

technologyreview.com

26 pointsmontalbano16 comments

Forget about the surface. The only interesting places on Venus are all in the upper atmosphere.

In fact its cloud tops are an overwhelmingly better place to colonize than Mars. So, yes, balloons! No, you don't need extreme electronics; COTS is fine.

There's unlimited hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur there, to fabricate into plastics, carbon structure, and breathing air. Lots of solar energy, too. Air pressure is Earth-normal, temperature is Earth-normal. Breathing air is buoyant. Day is ~100 hours, depending on latitude.

The ground is more like the bottom of the sea than it is land. The pressure is so high the air behaves more like water.

I think these are great points, but with my limited knowledge, it still sounds like "being able to walk on the planet" trumps all of those point.

Wouldn't it be significantly harder/more expensive to ship everything needed to make a floating city to Venus than to make a grounded city on mars? For example, humans need space to move around. On Venus, to give people space you need to build more floating city. On Mars, people can always go outside in their spacesuit and take a walk.

How do you overcome things like that on Venus? I'm very ignorant on the subject, so any information would be very interesting.

You would need to ship the machines to split abundant CO2 and H2SO4 into C, H, S, and O, and to put them back together in different, useful combinations--carbon fiber and polypropylene, in particular, and O2, H2O, CH4, and maybe even lignin, cellulose, and broccoli. (Polypropylene because it is not attacked by H2SO4.) But with such equipment on hand, making places to walk around is just a matter of construction.

Where, on Mars, would you walk to? There is noplace outside pleasant to be. It's always colder than Antarctica, but with no water and no air.

Survival on another planet would be no picnic on the Cam, dirt underfoot or no.

'Even if we don’t find signs of life on Venus, that’s interesting too: it will mean Venus and Earth were two planets that started out very similarly and ended up with radically different fates. “That still raises profound questions that need answering,” says Byrne. “But to answer them, we need a program for studying the planet.”'

I love this copout at the end, combined with a call for funding even if we don't end up finding anything on Venus - just to answer these questions that this one guy, a space reporter came up with.

Uh, how about instead of putting hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into that, we put that money into actually fixing shit on the planet we have right now?

...to quote Michio Kaku: "I don't know whether or not we should go to outer space to colonize the planets. But one thing is sure: The universe is full of graveyards of species that decided not to."

The whole thing of space travel is to have a backup colony. Extinction-level events are very likely scenarios, and we should aim for the survival of the species; and not for survival of the rich.

You think it's not the rich who would be the first ones to get to go to Venus if it were possible in the case of some extinction-level catastrophe on Earth? It's all going to repeat, the same story, just on another planet, with the rich and powerful who got us into this mess calling the shots again. The poor people will get to go after, only to serve as labor or sacrificial test subjects for future space experiments.

The poor just want to have a decent life here on Earth, and we can't even provide that. Yet some people believe that we'll actually innovate and bring about an age of space travel, for their benefit?!

If you go to another planet when an extintion level even happens you are already way too late. It's not like this is a trivial matter to do. Any reasonable effort would require support from earth for decades.

http://astrobiology.com/2020/10/no-phosphine-in-the-atmosphe...

No, we need to confirm basic science first before doing anything as soon as possible.

I was more convinced that the original paper may have problems by https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09761 From that preprint:

> We find that the 12th-order polynomial fit to the spectral passband utilised in the published study leads to spurious results.

Using a 12th-order polynomial fit is very suspicious? And I think that it is very interesting to see Figure 2, top-left. The signal is very noisy and the polynomial fit is not convincing. That graph is a very big red flag.

Something is terribly wrong if astronomy of all fields encountered a reproducibility crisis.

Here are a couple of theme music options: https://youtu.be/ZjcQhpg3_UI https://youtu.be/vMfmi9Qg3HE

Or the Man or Astro-man cover. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svABrRXAa04

I disagree. Asteroid mining first.

Asteroid mining is a hell of a lot harder than sending a probe to Venus that can survive long enough to give decent data. It also only really gets useful when space is a big enough industry that we're building things in space for space.

But the whole "life on venus" thing is so incredibly improbable that it's not worth delaying other more important projects for. If microbial life exists there, then it has existed there for a long time, and it'll still be there a hundred years from now.

The evidence is clear the earlier reports of possible life on Venus are incorrect.

Worse, it was a failure of science to have been reported the way it was.

Multiple posts on HN have discussed this.

This article was posted shortly after the 'discovery' (2020/09/16) but is incorrect anyway.

Step one would have been to understand phosphine and life on Earth. It's not well understood.

I don't understand why step one would be to go to another planet first. But I guess that's a boring headline.

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