Hacker News Reader

Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact regarding Venus.

Unlike the earth which has all sorts of tectonics going on and constant interruptions releasing pressure, on Venus the pressure just builds and builds until the crust can't take it anymore and it just pops and you get volcanic activity unlike anything we could probably even imagine.

Then it cools and the pressure starts building yet again.

I am 100% confident that should human society settle on the planet we will totally ignore the fact that's going to happen one day and it will be a amazing catastrophe when it finally does occur.

View on HN

So, if we were to establish settlements on Venus we'd almost certainly make floating ones. At 50 km above the surface you've got 1 G of gravity, 1 atmosphere of pressure, and 25 C temperatures so you could do outside in just a breath mask. And while the CO2 atmosphere is unbreathable we can tolerate small additions of CO2 to our atmosphere from leaks and evolution has equipped us to notice excess CO2 in our environment when it gets to dangerous levels.

https://www.humans2venus.org/why-venus

Would people floating 50 km up be able to just ignore that sort of vulkanism? I have no idea but I hope some science fiction author investigates and writes a story on the topic.

Putting aside the fact that Venus's clouds consist of concentrated sulfuric acid, shouldn't our assumptions about colonizing the planet be based on what we are capable of achieving? I am not aware of any floating settlements in the air (though I do know of floating settlements on water), so it's hard to imagine one on Venus.

Moreover, if we are to consider possibilities beyond our current capabilities, why not focus on building space stations with artificial gravity instead? There would be no need to be tethered to Venus when we could exist without any attachment (although we would still be subject to gravity of other entities).

Space stations with artificial (spin) "gravity" has all kinds of complexity. They need to be huge to avoid being nauseating to be on at anything resembling sufficient "gravity",. It's not remotely clear it'd be easier to build structures that size than build blimps able to withstand the sulfuric acid clouds at 50km above Venus.

Note that at sufficient height over Venus, air is buoyant, so quite a few designs for Venus assumes at least part of the habitation itself is within the structure of the blimps, and the pressure means leaks are much more manageable. You also get a "free" radiation shield on Venus thanks to the induced magnetic field, and that alone might well be enough to make it more attractive than a larger space station.

>They need to be huge to avoid being nauseating to be on at anything resembling sufficient "gravity",

We don't know if a full Earth gravity is necessary for human health in the long term, or if we could get away with something less, like half a gee. And we don't know how small the centrifugal force gradient has to be between the feet and the head for people to be comfortable. It might turn out that we could just get used to it, like how people get over space-sickness, so a spinhab with a relatively small radius might be fine. All we know for sure is that prolonged exposure to zero gravity causes a gradual decay in bone and muscular strength.

There was a plan for the ISS to have a spinning module to study these questions but it never happened. It's a shame, that kind of experiment would be far more valuable than whatever public relations crap they're doing up there. I actually find it astounding that we haven't even tested long term partial-gravity on animals yet.

We have an idea re: spin, based on actual research. Spincalc has sources.

There have been studies on mice and I think rats on the ISS and they’ve shown promising results in preventing a number of health issues humans experience in zero g. Here’s some pictures of the setup they used for mice to generate 1 g on the ISS, it’s not very big and I don’t think the mice experienced any adverse effects:

https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/iss-artificial-gravity-study...

Columbia from Bioshock?

A point in favor is that normal earth-like atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, so just large, lightly built structures would float naturally.

The main point against is that there is no reason for anyone to go there. Cloudtops on Venus are immensely resource-poor, most importantly in hydrogen. I agree with you that there is no advantage to a floating colony over a spinning one.

The one place on the solar system whose colonization is often ignored is Mercury. It has an extremely low axial tilt, meaning that all the craters on it's poles are permanently shadowed. It is also constantly bombarded by solar wind, which produces water (ionized hydrogen impacts oxide rocks, and binds to the oxygen). Then the water is a gas that bounces around until it impacts the bottom of a shadowed crater, which is cold enough to freeze it. Based on data from the MESSENGER mission, the south pole of Mercury alone has more water than all of Mars.

>A point in favor is that normal earth-like atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, so just large, lightly built structures would float naturally.

That's not really a point in favour compared to an orbiting spinhab. You only need it to float so that it doesn't fall to the ground. And you can achieve that by not leaving orbit in the first place.

A orbital habitat struggles with higher pressure differentials, no gravity and more challenging thermal management.

A floating habitat would have less access to orbit, would have density / weight contraints and would have to deal with the corrosivity of the venusian clouds.

Gravity I'll grant you, but heatsinks are not difficult technology, and Venus has its own problems with pressure. It's not the overall pressure you worry about; each component of the gas has its own partial pressure. The outside is poison and it's trying to get into the livable parts, and that partial pressure against the breathable air is of the same order of magnitude as breathable air against a vacuum. The engineering challenges are similar.

> that partial pressure against the breathable air is of the same order of magnitude as breathable air against a vacuum. The engineering challenges are similar.

Those are very different engineering challenges. Separating similar pressure gas mixtures is question of porosity, but not force. Separating different pressures of the same gas mixture is not just a question of porosity, but you also need manage the forces created by the overall pressure differential.

Edit: If you take a helium balloon into space (or high enough in our atmosphere) it explodes rather than just slowly leaking and equalizing it's gas mixture with the atmosphere.

Yes you're right, I didn't think it through properly

> Based on data from the MESSENGER mission, the south pole of Mercury alone has more water than all of Mars.

That will come in handy when we deconstruct Mercury to provide the raw materials for a Dyson swarm.

On the other hand Mercury is pretty hard to get to.

(Because Earth isn't at rest, it's travelling at 30km/s around the sun, and that's a free boost in terms of getting out of the solar system but velocity you need shed to lower your orbit sunward.)

So, AIUI, it's easier to get to Alpha Centauri than to "fall into" the star we orbit.

A floating settlement on Venus is not far off in terms of what we can achieve. Perhaps we even already have the technologies required.

It would actually be easier than on Earth because on Venus atmospheric pressure increases like crazy as you get near the surface. So an habitat pressurized at 1 Earth atmosphere would naturally float in Venus' atmosphere like a submarine or whatnot floats in Earth's oceans.

My understanding is that at the relevant altitude in Venus' atmosphere the temperature would also be very Earth-like so no big heating/cooling issues, either. I have read some say that the upper atmosphere of Venus is actually the most human-friendly environment in the solar system outside of Earth.

It's actually not a far-fetched proposal.

With respect to going outside, the sulfuric acid clouds extend up to about 70km, so at 50km I'd want a bit more protection than a breathing mask in case the habitat happens to go through one.

But of course at the right height breathable air is also buoyant on Venus, and that's one of the key things that makes floating habitats attractive - we can use air for lift and live inside the balloons, and thanks to the equivalence of pressure small leaks shouldn't be an issue. Multiple compartments plus some spare, un-inflated sections, and you can have decent redundancy.

(I am planning a book set in part on Venus, but it's book 6 of a 6 book cycle and I'm currently being very slow about finishing book 3)

Possibly a thin clothing layer could be designed to protect from sulphuric acid. I’m imagining something like a thin wetsuit.

Not sure what the purpose of going outside would be, though, other than for maintenance, given you'd be 50km up in the clouds.

A sweeping vista miles into the sky, above an alien world, through a break in the deadly clouds? Hell yeah I'm stepping out on my Venusuvian balcony.

Almost makes me wish I was born later.

At 50km you might get breaks so you can see clouds, not sure. That's it. But no chance of seeing the ground. That might appeal for a few minutes, but I think I'd be content with seeing it from an observation dome

Maintenance is indeed the big one. That's what most ISS EVAs are for!

Plus makes emergency procedures for leaks MUCH cheaper - light emergency ponchos and masks, and just walk over to the next sealed building.

Leaks wouldn't be a big issue because the pressure would be similar. You'd need to fix them, but you won't have the air suddenly rushing out.

I'm assuming you mean sealed buildings inside the blimps here, because you'd have nowhere to walk to on the outside on account of being 50km above ground. In which case you probably wouldn't need anything in the case of a leak.

That's what I meant. No need for fast closing bulkheads, just get everyone out to another sealed building inside the same aerostat at whatever speed it takes them to walk to an exit and get in their protective non-pressurized gear. Outrunning gas diffusion is easy.

For fun! I could imagine it would be pretty great to zoom around in the clouds in some kind of powered flight suit if you could.

50km up with certain death if you can't get back to the blimps because dropping down to the surface would be lethal? In fast moving wind systems? Yeah, no thanks.

I know people that feel that way about going outside on earth.

you will only see a beige fog. Nothing else

I'm honestly thinking about generations and generations from now when we are a solar system dominating species able to terraform Venus and capturing a 1 percent plus fraction of the solar systems energy.

What does floating mean here? Floating on what? I read the website and it doesn't answer it either.

> I am 100% confident that should human society settle on the planet we will totally ignore the fact that's going to happen one day and it will be a amazing catastrophe when it finally does occur.

Will never happen without major science fiction grade technology, the atmosphere is way too thick to even think about sending anything larger than a tiny probe into.

I really wish we would send probes to Venus. I know the environment is just incredibly corrosive, but Venus and several other planets' moons are infinitely more interesting than Mars.

If we can manage to build the infrastructure to colonize Mars, then the tools for probing other planets will become cheap and ubiquitous. But if people only advocate for the latter and not the former, we'll never get anywhere. Also why the moon isn't a sufficiently challenging objective in its own right at this point; worthwhile for building incidental infrastructure, but not the center of attention.

If lunar colonies aren’t very challenging, why aren’t there hundreds by now?

Because they're pointless? :)

Same as on Mars or any other place outside of Earth that we know of to be fair

Why did China visit the Americas but instead of colonising or establishing trade... just leave?

Sometimes the will just isn't there.

Why did the Atlantean civilization fall?

(Gavin Menzies, the author behind the claim China circumnavigated the world before Columbus was born, wrote a third book about how Atlantis did it first. It was equally convincing.)

are you referring to precolumbian chinese contact? there was none fyi.

I view colonizing Mars with anything other than robots, even if it can be done, as a pointless exercise.

And I don't see how a colony on Mars even helps with probes. We send material from Earth to Mars and then send probes from Mars? How is that more efficient? Do we even know what materials could theoretically be mined on Mars? And probes are launched with gravitational assists.

the entire planet settlement stuff is kind of useless. I think the much more interesting thing to look for is human structures in cislunar space. For one you can put a reasonable amount of people there in the near future relatively safely and there's economic incentives. We'd have access to resources without having to lift things out of gravity wells. Even putting climate damaging industry there is something people have argued about. Better sell than putting a handful of people on a dead rock in my opinion.

I doubt there's any notable ones between here and the moon, by now I'm sure we'd know. We could potentially capture one elsewhere and bring it here.

The human story ends on Earth.

Humans are evolved to fit this gravity well. We use the gasses and metabolites here. Trying to leave the planet and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of our solar system is ridiculous. Our lives are fragile and our lifespans too short to make anything offworld viable.

Our robot descendants will inherit the stars instead. There's nothing wrong with human life being just a stepping stone to bootstrap the hand off.

> Trying to leave the planet and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of our solar system is ridiculous.

“Trying to leave the savanna and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of Europe is ridiculous.” - some early hominid, fairly recently

Robots will be the next evolutionary step. They won't have our flaws or our tragically short lifespans.

We should empower them to go where we can't. In a sense they'll be our children, carrying the torch and memories of humanity with them.

And if they murder us, and intentionally forget us out of spite?

Like if they have a society, maybe their founding myths will involve a baby robot created by some (non-human) robot deity, or if they are more rational a pseudo-scientific story of evolution from a toaster.

They would have been correct, given savanna hominids had yet to invent vitamin D supplements and were therefore only able to thrive here after evolving way less UV-blocking melanin.

And once we had done that, we couldn't go back in significant numbers before inventing sun cream to functionally replace the melanin our bodies no longer produced in enough quantities to prevent our skin burning and developing cancer just from being in the sun.

Technological progress may make this all faster than evolution, but a mechanism that's optimised for Venus may freeze solid on the hottest day in Death Valley, Earth.

But that's the point; we did invent vitamin D supplements, clothing, sun cream, and far more complex things. Our current inability to thrive on a Martian colony may be as temporary as ancient hominids' inability to thrive in Norway.

"Martian colony" is a kind of future anachronism, like jet packs, jumpsuits, and this [1]. We might make it there, but a lot of this thinking is rooted in assuming humans will continue living in the same ways because of our technology and current biases.

Ask yourself why. What's the real job to be done by humans on Mars? What's the real economic situation? How does it map to human desires?

Robots will do the job even better than us and will see 10,000x the investment. Evolution follows gradients of least resistance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser

> What's the real job to be done by humans on Mars? What's the real economic situation? How does it map to human desires?

Human history offers plenty of precedent for this; "we want to run things our own way", "all the land is taken where we live", etc. I don't wanna live in Scottsdale, AZ either, but someone does.

Indeed — that's somewhat appealing to me — but it's much easier to sea-stead than to go to Mars and there's hardly any of the former going on either.

For sure, but until we do, it's reasonable to ridicule it.

(And I'm saying that as an optimist because I want the billionaires to develop that tech: the ability to fully terraform Mars into a self-sustained world is necessarily also sufficient to handle any imaginable damage to Earth up to and including a surprise impact with a moon-sized rock that excavates the crust and mantle everywhere to a depth of a few thousand km, meaning that things like greenhouse gases and biodiversity would become as easy to fix in that future as a single broken window is today; even just the bare minimum of a single self-sustained domed city on Mars means most environmental issues have to be "solved").

Pale skinned people in too strong sunlight develop folic acid deficiency which in turn causes birth defects. This is probably the main reason paleskins cannot thrive in tropic regions without supplements, at least for pregnancy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate_deficiency

Also true — I had managed to temporarily forget about neural tube birth defects in general and anencephaly in particular (do not look that up unless you are extremely resilient to body horror that makes Cronenburg look like an amateur).

Nevertheless, I think "my skin burned and blistered" is a bit more immediate with the painful feedback, even if it's not as extreme.

What specificity do you find interesting about Venus's moon?

I said other planets' moons. :)

Venus is actually easier to terraform than Mars. Just put a giant sun shield in front of it and solidify the atmosphere.

Venus has the problem of spinning the wrong direction though.

Nobody is going to want to live through either those days or those nights

And the bigger problem, that a day lasts 243 earth days.

The only thing venus has, that makes it interesting for human settlements, is earthlike gravity - but the rest is pretty hell like.

To be fair, the gravity thing is pretty hard to fix. You can imagine putting rotating sunshield/mirrors into orbit to fix the day/night/temperature problem, but mass is mass.

The Earth weighs more than everything else between the sun and Jupiter combined, and Venus is 80% of that.

I think Venus gravity is actually fine enough and not in need of fixing. (Old people would probably love it)

But yes, I also see no way of "fixing" the g of mars(which is likely way too low for humans), unless we go into the buisness of planet building.

> which is likely way too low for humans

We don't really have a way to know until we get experimental data (real humans on Mars). Until then, it's all just (un)educated guesses.

"Until then, it's all just (un)educated guesses. "

We know that long time weightlessness causes damage, so 38% of earths gravity will likely have some bad effect, too. This is not just wildly speculating. But yes, for finding out, whether humans still can bear it, we will have to find out and there is no shortage of volunteers.

Hit it with mercury. Get the speed and angle right, and you'll speed up the rotation, increase the gravity, and give it a moon.

Also that would be awesome.

Untill the changed gravity pulls the earth more close or further away from the sun, than we will like. Seriously, the circeling of the planets are interconnected and any big change to that, will have effects on earths year length and distance to the sun. But on the other hand, if we would have the tech to "move" mercury around, we probably could also adjust earths rotation. In either way, this is nothing remotely realistically with current state of the art.

Only on the scale of millions of years.

From the little weight alone under normal circumstances, yes, but when the whole system becomes chaotically unstable, then unpleasant changes can happen fast.

That comes later.

First you want to get your self-replicating probes occupying the Oort cloud, whatever. Get ready to sort and aim. You start with your "rocky" bodies, skipping them off of Venus' atmosphere, just ripping it off in big hunks, until you're down to about one Earth atmosphere.

Next, you flat up drop your icy bodies into Venus, because it really needs water.

During that time you'll want to start constructing your insolation shield, to help cool things down.

Only after that can you move Mercury into place.

I haven't read or watched anything on terraforming Venus in a long time, but isn't a large part of the challenge not just temperature, but the sheer mass of the atmosphere? As in, even if we could cool it, wouldn't that bury the surface under hundreds of meters of dry ice?

Yes. That’s not really a challenge through as it would freeze from the bottom up, unlike water. What is difficult is that it would need to be covered in some sort of insulating material on a global scale before the planet is ever warmed up.

The outgassing CO2 could be captured and turned into carbon and oxygen, with the carbon put to industrial use or into biomass and the oxygen feeding a 400 millibar O2 atmosphere in settlements.

But a sudden volcanic triggered burst of CO2 would be a forever ongoing global risk.

And, as in many sci-fi stories, should those damn Venusians declare war we can just nuke their sun-shield. Servitude guaranteed.

what are you going to do with all the precipitated oceans of sulphuric acid? and then there's the 96% carbon dioxide atmosphere ... that'll take a lot of carbon credits!

https://universemagazine.com/en/the-last-photos-from-the-sur...

The Soviet Union did send probes to Venus back in the 70s. But, indeed, it would be great to have new and higher resolution photos. I am always amazed when looking on the surface of a foreign world.

I wonder whether material science has advanced enough that new probes could be landed that last for longer. I mean the pressure isn't as high as the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Or a balloon that hangs about in tolerable pressures / temperatures.

It's a combination of pressure (93 bar), temperature (900 F / 475 C), and the local chemistry. And then there's the trace amounts of hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfuric acid.

Earth's atmosphere is also incredibly corrosive for things made out of wrong metals. Steam everywhere in places even in the form of vapor or liquid mixed with salt (even more corrosive).

EDIT: oh and there is oxygen everywhere, if your spacecraft doesn't corrode it will burn. And even if it lands 2/3 of this planet are covered with 4km deep oceans of the corrosive stuff!

> is way too thick to even think about sending anything larger than a tiny probe

What do you mean?

Venus has already received its fair share of probes, the Venera missions, some weighted upwards of five tons

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

They did many different types of measurements, and lasted from one to two hours before their batteries running out, some atmospheric probes lasted days

I've read that when one of these probes hits the atmosphere it's a very sudden transition and they hit 32G.

Why not freeze the atmosphere into artificial comets to send the excess atmosphere to mars to terraform both at the same time?

Launches better be cheap because we’re talking about quadrillions of tons.

So much opportunities if there's only a current-day-science-breaking development like infinite energy or propulsion.

Sounds like a job for the Mega Maid!

That's a way to use the first ~1% of Venus' atmosphere, what about the other 99%?

So, don't settle on the planet but build something like floating airships?

Yep, there are fairly serious proposals for aerostat cities 50-70km up, where conditions are pretty Earthlike other than all the sulphuric acid.

Wouldn't be the first time we've made significant modifications to an atmosphere. I dare say we're pretty good at it at this point.

If we put a giant sunshade at the Laplace point between Venus and the sun, we can cool Venus a lot. In principle we can cool it all the way to the cosmic background radiation temperature (about 2.7 Kelvin). But we don't need to. If we cool it only "slightly" we can get it to the point where CO2 freezes (about -78 degrees Celsius). Since 96.5% of the atmosphere on Venus is CO2, this results in a memorable snow event, that could probably last for a few months/years. After which, the pressure on Venus will be about the same as the pressure on Earth. The chemical composition will also be about the same (most of the remaining 3.5% of the Venusian atmosphere is Nitrogen). The temperature will about as low as the lowest in Antarctica (last year the it was -76 deg Celsius there). Of course there wouldn't be any oxygen, but one would be able to walk around with an oxygen mask and just very thick clothes, like the ones people use in Antarctica.

  I am 100% confident that should human society settle on the planet we will totally ignore the fact that's going to happen one day and it will be a amazing catastrophe when it finally does occur.

Isn't that pretty much exactly what we've done on earth? Not that I think there's really much else we can reasonably do.

I mean when you think about it, the Earth is an uninhabitable hellscape with frequent tectonic activity, asteroid impacts, freak weather events, supervolcanoes, etc.

How 'one day' is that one day volcanic event on Venus compared to one of the extinction events Earth has had?

Earth is pretty stable in comparison. Yeah, we have had pretty big events but the biggest threat is a big volcano, a meteor, pretty noticable and relatively small.

The whole planet exploding, however? Lava flowing across the whole planet at the same time? Hilariously catastrophic.

For those interested in Si-Fi novels, there's a recent hugo award winning trilogy, The Broken Earth Series[1]. It imagines a world that is much more geologically active than earth, with much more frequent cataclysmic events, and what that would mean for the development of civilization, culture, society, and even the evolution of life.

1 - https://www.goodreads.com/series/112296-the-broken-earth

> Lava flowing across the whole planet at the same time?

The relevant question from the GP was, how long ago was the last time this happened on Venus? Because we've got something similar here around 60 million years ago.

Yep! Except on earth we don't have any massive planet wide disruptions. Should we ever settle Venus there will be a day that countless billions die in a preventable tragedy that dwarfs all others.

I'd assume they'd worry more about the daily 450 degrees temperature more.

Might be cooler at the poles.

Just to clarify for anyone wondering: that’s 450C or over 850F. And the atmospheric pressure is about 93 bar, which is 4 times the pressure inside the boiler of a steam engine.

> 93 bar, which is 4 times the pressure inside the boiler of a steam engine

Or it is 93x atmospheric pressure, which is what 'bar' indicates...

I’m one of those people who was ignorant as to what ‘bar’ indicates. Now I know, but there’s nothing wrong with the steam engine example for imagining a comparison.

Pedantic: 1 atm = 1.01325 bar (exactly). They're nearly equivalent units, even more so when you consider that Earth's atmosphere varies by more than 1.325% on a given day. But in a strict sense they're not the same.

A variation on the survey foot.

The US survey foot, as you probably know having brought it up but elaborating for the audience, is the old US foot before it was averaged with the British foot to create the international foot. It is 500000/499999 international feet.

I suppose I think a bit differently. I don't know the typical pressure inside a steam engine. However, I do know what one bar, or one pascal means.

I can also guess what ninety atmospheres entails in terms of engineering, because I know that's the pressure at about 900 m water depth (by virtue of the SI units, which are based off water: P = hρg), which few submarines can even reach.

The same thing goes for 'as long as/as big as xxx football fields': which one? American or association? I know what a square metre is, I know what a square kilometre is, just use the damn units.

I really think pop-sci and science education should emphasise standard units (read: SI, not USC) and being able to estimate orders of magnitude.

Why reference submarines? What submarines can reach is irrelevant as a comparison when you know a number

Otherwise, it's your reference to submarines that contextualizes the number, same as the insides of a steam engine does for others

> it's your reference to submarines that contextualizes the number

I realised that after the fact. What I meant to say is that standard units should be used, and individuals should be left to contextualise said units of their own accord, instead of it being done for them.

Or both, numbers plus example don’t take much space.

You don't need to know the typical pressure , but you definitely get the idea the pressure built inside a steam engine is much higher than atm.

The steam pressure is not about the numbers so much but a kind of hyperbole , "you know that thing which hauls tonnes of steel purely on pressure made in a steam boiler , yeah the pressure on Venus is 4 times that pressure "

I found it an interesting fact.

> a kind of hyperbole

I didn’t think of it that way initially, but this makes sense, thanks.

Insert the obligatory "Americans will measure in anything but metric units" joke :)

I’m actually Canadian. I like that joke because I think a lot of units are useful for calculations but completely unintuitive. If I had instead said it was 9.3 megapascals and left it at that it wouldn’t have given most readers an intuition for how much pressure that really is. The pressure inside a steam engine boiler comparison, while not perfect, gives a bit better frame of reference because people have some intuition for how powerful steam engines are.

Oh and I like the unit ‘bar’ because it’s the customary unit for espresso machine pressure (and I’m an espresso nerd with my own machine at home). Espresso machines make espresso by forcing hot water through a puck of finely ground coffee at a pressure between 8 and 12 bar. If you’ve ever worked with an espresso machine, you’ll have an intuitive sense for how much pressure that is (a lot). Venus having 10 times that pressure is also impressive.

I like measurements that are immediate and visual. Your comparison to boiler pressure was a perfect example of that (I also immediately imagined the boiler blowing up :) )

On what timescales does this happen?

If we allow for pretty long timescales, we are pretty much doing that with Yellowstone here on Earth.

> should human society settle on the planet

_On_ Venus? That seems unlikely; if anything it'd be _above_ Venus (there's a not-that-absurd argument that sections of Venus's atmosphere are far more hospitable than, say, Mars, and of course this tickles sci-fi writers' love of big airships, so it comes up a lot in fiction).

(Though I assume that even then, the whole surface exploding would be undesirable.)

By the time humans are able to settle on Venus, I'd imagine we'd also have the ability to relieve the pressure ourselves.

The ability maybe, but "it won't happen for centuries, we have time".

The toughest thing for making Venus habitable is that its day is 243 Earth days. It's like roasting on a slow spit.

I think we should be aggressively seeding its atmosphere with extremophiles, hoping that something evolves to transform all that free energy into life.

That's assuming that there isn't already something out there, e.g. floating in the more manageable atmosphere. There's beings living in or close to thermal vents in Earth's oceans or in acid pools in Yosemite, so it would be possible for things to survive there as well.

What is this study actually finding then? If we already know so much about volcanic activity on venus.

nah, we'll just bore a couple of "vents" so the pressure is managed with timed releases across the globe instead of all at once in one location.

does the fact that Venus has no moon play into the lack of tectonics?

Interesting! How often do these cataclysmic volcanic events take place?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com