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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

I had a dream once that life started on Venus, multiplied like crazy and fucked up the planet with overproduction of shitloads of greenhouse gasses ending in the acidic madness that is present today, and then jumping over to Earth.

In retrospect this does not seem THAT insane and I really do wonder why we have not focused more on Venus as a whole. It seems to me that in the long term it might be easier to terraform a planet like Venus than it is to terraform a planet like mars. Stripping something away is often easier than building it from scratch - and Venus has a whole lot of atmosphere on it!

It could also just be that my brain finds the idea of T-Rex's using their little tiny arms to operate computers and spaceships on the journey from ancient Venus to Earth extra hilarious.

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> started on Venus, multiplied like crazy and fucked up the planet

it's all good until some protomolecule flies Eros into Venus and starts building the seed of a ring gate

People have speculated on doing that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus says Carl Sagan did in 1961)

For an (IMHO highly optimistic. It surely reads like science fiction to me) sketch of a plan from 1990 see https://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/TerraformingVenusQuickly.....

It claims that, if we start in 2030, there can be ten billion people on Venus by 2200, and that the project can break-even by 2045 (after spending 150 billion British pounds)

> after spending 150 billion British pounds

That's .. not a lot. Not as much you might expect terraforming and colonising _another planet_ to cost over 15 years, anyway. The UK's annual budget is £770B.

What does “break even” mean in this context?

What it always means: getting your investments back (I don’t think that paper corrects for inflation)

The paper is light on details to start with, but doesn’t mention that at all. I think they build housing and sell it to people wanting to live there.

Sorry, my question was whether this meant break even as in “we are extracting resources from Venus and selling them back on earth for more money than it cost to get them” or “Venus is now self sustaining”

If it is the first one, that seems hard to calculate, because if you are extracting that many resources you are going to distort the market on earth.

You comment makes it seem like they will break even by selling houses on Venus? How can they possibly know the market for Venus housing?

Unless I’m overlooking something, that paper doesn’t go into details, to say it extremely mildly. As far as I can tell, they only say “the first aerial space colony floats free and can be sold and inhabited”.

And as I said, the whole paper is highly optimistic. They’re suggesting huge space colonies (“the terraformed Venus is unlikely to be fully occupied until the population of the space colonies reaches ~3×10¹⁰”. That’s about four times the current population of earth)

I think I’m not alone in not seeing us put “several small space colonies” in the orbit of Venus and construct “a heavy orbital ring around Venus” ten years after we started planning.

I guess they extrapolated exponential growth of everything imaginable.

> In the long term it might be easier to terraform a planet like Venus than it is to terraform a planet like mars.

One day on Venus is 224.65 Earth days. You won't be able to change that, even in the long term.

You may not have to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus#Argument...:

“It has until recently been assumed that the rotation rate or day-night cycle of Venus would have to be increased for successful terraformation to be achieved. More recent research has shown, however, that the current slow rotation rate of Venus is not at all detrimental to the planet's capability to support an Earth-like climate. Rather, the slow rotation rate would, given an Earth-like atmosphere, enable the formation of thick cloud layers on the side of the planet facing the sun. This in turn would raise planetary albedo and act to cool the global temperature to Earth-like levels, despite the greater proximity to the Sun.”

Plants grew just fine at the poles way back when the climate supported that. Humans and plenty of other animals have lived in the arctic for millennia. I don't think the day length is a big problem.

Weather maybe. The reason why we have wind is of course because of pressure differences. But those are also caused by the centrifugal powers moving air up and downwards in spirals. That would not happen in the same way on Venus

Aren't spiraling wind currents guaranteed by the Hairy Ball Theorem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem

Humans have already measurably changed the angular velocity of the Earth with dams. Not sure why you think it will never be possible to change angular momentum, you just need minor planet collisions and/or flywheels.

Measurable but insignificant. It would take about 10^29 joules to speed Venus up to a 24h day.

The Chicxulub impact is estimated at 10^24-10^25 joules. So we need 10k-100k Chicxulub impacts in such a way that the energy is perfectly translated into Venus’s rotational energy.

That’s what, a billion tons of antimatter-matter reacting?

I don’t think we’re going to have a 24 hour day on Venus anytime soon.

It's not so much terraforming, but one idea for colonizing Venus is to live on giant airships that hang out in the upper atmosphere where the temperatures and pressures are temperate.

You still need to deal with the nasty chemical composition of the atmosphere, but that might be doable somehow. Your airship also needs to be massive and sturdy enough to shrug off hundred mile an hour winds.

Kurzgesagt did a video on terraforming Venus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI

My amateurish take on it - total effort to terraform Venus might be lower, however exploring/colonizing Mars is much easier.

> Stripping something away is often easier than building it from scratch

Is there the idea of additive vs subtractive terraforming?

I agree on Venus. I have always felt it is much more interesting than Mars.

I had read a couple of takes on staying in the clouds within Venus. Like just forget about the solid ground and treat that like the bottom of the ocean.

Make a floating city like Columbia in Bioshock Infinite.

I was convinced that its at least worth repeating, and that other people can tell me the problems with it.

Why float in clouds of acid when you could float in nothing, closer to home?

More resources to harvest and convert within the atmosphere. Better positioning to explore other parts of Venus. Can't really think of any orbital advantages, as being in/at/near any planet is a disadvantage for space exploration - compared to being in space - but having the different orbit around the sun makes you closer to other objects at different intervals than being bounded to earth-orbit.

Gravity, temperature, pressure and radiation.

Living in venerian cloud cities you won't even need a space suit to go outside, just a light breathing mask and a rubber suit to keep the acid away.

No problems with it really. We could do this today, with today's technology.

Venus is really close to us, comparatively speaking, and you won't even need a lander to get there. (You can brake against the atmosphere itself.)

The cloud city can be made of balsa wood and rubber, low-tech stuff.

Making the colony sustainable is another question, but it's not specific to Venus. Space is empty and pointless in general.

How do you ship enough balsa wood to Venus to build a city?

Start with a very small city and plant some trees?

What are they going to grow with? I guess we're basically talking about an organic factory to extract carbon from the atmosphere and convert it to wood?

The atmosphere has plenty of carbon dioxide. You probably need to ship minerals and I guess water.

Ikea 'Snoorsdrup' flatpack Venusian floating city

Contents: Balsa wood, rubber, screws, Alan key, instruction manual

(Assemble on a carpet to avoid damaging wood)

I would watch and enjoy this movie

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