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piloto_ciego

I don’t see why people are so excited about Mars.

1. For one there’s the perchlorates. Basically the dust is poison.

2. After that, there’s pressure or I suppose the lack there of basically You might as well be in space.

3. Solar panels don’t work for shit on Mars, because it’s so much further away in the inverse square law is a bastard.

4. It’s a long ass way away.

5. The lower gravity has implications long term for having babies.

Like, I think we should explore space, and become a multi planetary species, but I don’t know that Mars is the place for a viable long-term colony. I’m much more partial to Venus-cloud-cities or something similar.

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I'd be excited to see someone living on Mars, or at least visiting. Just like I'd be excited to see someone climb a previously unconquered mountain or invent an innovative new technology. I want to be part of a species that never stops pushing the boundaries of what's possible - I bet that if we keep persisting, we can go far further than most people today can even imagine.

There's an alternate timeline out there where everyone always listened to the "experts" telling them their dreams are stupid or impossible. No-one in that timeline has ever even run a four-minute mile.

Perhaps #6 could be that Mars does not currently have a magnetic field like this planet does[0].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field_of_Mars

This should be #6 - you’re right.

Yup, the only real way we could ever set up a long term habitat on mars would be to do it underground to shield from the radiation. The only way we could maybe justify the huge pain in the ass it would be to stay there long term, is if we treated it as a purposeful scientific mission with a goal of looking for signs of (potentially ancient) life, and accepted that there’s nothing else useful we could really do there.

Whether this is worth it is questionable. What isn’t questionable, is the fact that we will never, ever, ever be able to have a viable independent colony on mars.

Granted it doesn’t look like low-hanging fruit but never, ever is a very long time.

>> What isn’t questionable, is the fact that we will never, ever, ever be able to have a viable independent colony on mars.

> Granted it doesn’t look like low-hanging fruit but never, ever is a very long time.

I believe the applicable qualifier here is, "on the surface of the planet." And since this would relegate any long-term occupation to be subterranean, the GP's assertion is difficult to refute.

The problems are many but the way I see it, we’ve had math for Newtonian mechanics for about 350 years and today we’re flying helicopters on Mars.

Long enough term, hard things are possible, if we don’t kill ourselves first.

“If we don’t kill ourselves first” is doing all the heavy lifting here. I’m not convinced that more time helps us, given that civilization itself is very fragile and we are continually a moment away from nuclear holocaust ending everything we’ve worked to achieve. And that’s not even bringing up the damage we’re doing to the environment we derive all this prosperity from.

> What isn’t questionable, is the fact that we will never, ever, ever be able to have a viable independent colony on mars.

Terraforming Mars isn't completely impossible. It's well within the realm of possibility... given about 10,000 years of continuous effort.

You'd think Venus would be much worse in this regard than Mars. Then you get these suggestions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI - and start thinking...

We could plausibly land a human on Mars within our lifetimes and they wouldn't immediately die. To get Venus to that point would take minimum hundreds, more likely thousands of years. Which is neat, but between the two it implies something about the better place to start.

I wouldn't say never. All the elements necessary to sustain life are present. With a certain level of tech and energy production it becomes viable. Not any time soon, though.

You could also ionize particles from the surface of Phobos and then accelerate them so they create a plasma torus along its orbit. This would create a magnetic field but we'll probably already be venturing outside of the solar system by the time we could do it.

https://www.universetoday.com/153368/an-absolutely-bonkers-p...

And Earth is way cooler and it's right here. I can see little dinosaurs flying and singing outside my window at the moment. Cool.

> 1. For one there’s the perchlorates. Basically the dust is poison.

Add water: perchlorate dissolves readily in water, so by bathing the dust in water, you remove the perchlorate from the dust and transfer it to waste water. You can then process the waste water further to remove the perchlorate from it and recycle it. (Assume this is happening inside a pressurised habitat/greenhouse/airlock where water can be liquid.)

Another option is heating it, which decomposes the perchlorate, liberating oxygen

There are also microorganisms which consume perchlorate

Heating perchlorate also liberates chlorine and other chlorine compounds. That doesn't sound great. Also water isn't exactly easy to come by on Mars. I doubt there will be a whole lot of bathing going on.

https://www.space.com/mars-water-ice-equator-frozen-ocean

> Heating perchlorate also liberates chlorine and other chlorine compounds. That doesn't sound great.

I think the main thing it produces other than oxygen is HCl. Filter the produced gas through water, the water will absorb the HCl and start to turn into hydrochloric acid. Then we just need to add a base such as NaOH to neutralise the acid. (Not sure what bases are readily available on Mars but I’m sure people will be able to come up with something.)

> Also water isn't exactly easy to come by on Mars. I doubt there will be a whole lot of bathing going on.

There is evidence that Mars contains substantial quantities of subterranean water ice, at varying depths and ease of access. SpaceX’s plan for fuelling Starship for return to Earth is to manufacture CH4 using atmospheric CO2 and mined H2O. If they manage to mine enough H2O to produce the fuel to refuel a Starship, they’ll have enough H2O to fill swimming pools for the crew to swim in - and to rinse perchlorate out of the soil.

The problem with Venus cloud cities is: what's the purpose? What are people going to do there? Sit around and write software?

At least on Mars, you could potentially do mining. On Venus, you can't do anything really, because you'd have no access to the natural resources there. So what's the point?

The Moon is the only place that really makes any sense at this point. It's close, it probably has lava tubes, it has lots of natural resources for mining, it would be relatively easy to set up habitats and maybe do things like build low-g factories (could be many industrial applications there that we haven't thought of), and aside from being airless, the surface isn't going to kill you like Venus will.

>At least on Mars, you could potentially do mining.

You can also take that idea further and just do mining in space. One of the most interesting regions is simply cislunar space. Human development there means you can haul asteroids in, you could potentially move polluting industry there, do science in environments that you can't do on earth, and so on. It's much safer than being stranded far away, it's relatively easy to get people back to earth, etc.

The entire idea of going to another planet simply has the huge problem that you need to waste a ton of energy to get things off the damn planet again so really why not just built habitats in space.

This is exactly my position. It would be easier to just build habitats (like O'Neal cylinders) in space that have the exact parameters you want, rather than trying to terraform worlds like Venus to be somewhat-habitable after millennia.

And yes, asteroid mining looks very promising. Facilities on the Moon might be good for this industry, by providing a place with some gravity to do work, and not be worried about environmental issues (or an atmosphere to get in the way of transport). And it's not far from Earth, so you can take all the products of asteroid mining and easily ship them to where they'll be used on Earth, or launch them out into orbit to build space habitats.

> you could potentially move polluting industry there

The reason industry pollutes is that they either DGAF, or it's part of the process. Those industries either won't care to move to space in the first place, or the re-design of the whole process would have been better spent improving the process on earth.

> At least on Mars, you could potentially do mining. On Venus, you can't do anything really, because you'd have no access to the natural resources there. So what's the point?

Depends what you're trying to make. The atmosphere soup on Venus contains more interesting chemicals than the Martian surface, and there's a whole lot more energy going around to power whatever you're doing.

> The Moon is the only place that really makes any sense at this point. It's close, it probably has lava tubes, it has lots of natural resources for mining, it would be relatively easy to set up habitats and maybe do things like build low-g factories (could be many industrial applications there that we haven't thought of), and aside from being airless, the surface isn't going to kill you like Venus will.

IMO Phobos is actually the best option - most of those advantages apply, and being smaller makes it easier for spacecraft to go to or from.

The energy requirements are the least of the problems. We have the tech for that today. It's almost everything else that is the issue.

> The problem with Venus cloud cities is: what's the purpose? What are people going to do there? Sit around and write software?

I mean, that sounds freaking awesome tbh.

You can already live in a tiny cabin and never go outside in any major city of your choice (or even outside a city, but you might need to provide your own cabin). You can even choose to pay the vast proportion of your salary to pay for the right to live there.

But you may have to make do with fresh air and water unless you make your own recirculating scrubbers.

Give it a few years and Amazon will do housing and then you can even buy everything from the same entity that provides your living volume.

I wouldn't want to bet that the operators of a space habitat wouldn't take some cues from the company town era, except with even less oversight.

Crazy idea, since O2 is lighter than CO2 couldn’t we just terraform the layer of the atmosphere where the cloud city is? Air is a lifting gas, so theoretically could you float breathable air on top of CO2?

> The problem with Venus cloud cities is: what's the purpose? What are people going to do there? Sit around and write software?

Retirement homes. 90% Earth gravity probably high enough to keep you fit and avoid weightlessness adverse effects, but low enough to help with joint pain, reduced motility and fall risk.

This is actually a pretty good idea I think, aside from the huge cost of course, and possibly the high amount of radiation seniors will experience just traveling to their retirement home in the clouds.

Room is not the resource that retired people take up in homes on Earth

> Room is not the resource that retired people take up in homes on Earth

Proximity to friends and distance from crime has real value. It’s absolutely classist. But every social system we invent contorts to provide it to its elite.

Right but you can just move the poor elderly people to all of the empty space we have on Earth rather than Venus cloud cities

It sounds like the big benefit of Venus cloud cities as a retirement destination is the lower (0.9g) gravity, plus possibly distance from problems on Earth, so it wouldn't be a destination for poor elderly people, but rather rich ones (esp. ones who don't care about visiting with family).

I imagine it would resemble a giant cruise ship, with luxurious surroundings, plenty of stuff for older people to do, etc. Of course, there would be a very large crew/staff aboard to clean and maintain it and provide services, such as medical care. Salaries for the staff would have to be huge, since they wouldn't be able to go home for years, and gigs on this floating city would probably be contracted fixed-length terms, similar to Saudi Aramco workers, so prices to live in this city would be enormous, making it something only very wealthy retirees could afford.

Considering the view would be pretty boring after a while, and the prices astronomical, it's hard to believe that 0.9g gravity would be enough of a draw to make this project economically viable.

Distance from Earth seems like a huge downside, not a benefit. Even if our climate goes to shit it will still be far more livable than Venus.

So, as you say, there's only one benefit, 0.9g, and is that really enough to justify this entire thing?

To be honest it seems like people are clutching at straws to justify space colonisation

Distance from Earth would be a benefit in case of nuclear war, which currently looks highly likely at some point. Even if humans aren't eradicated, it would probably be a civilization-ending event, and not many places would be safe. However, it does seem like some kind of giant submarine might be more feasible and cheaper.

But yeah, 0.9g doesn't seem like enough of a draw to make it economically feasible.

> it would probably be a civilization-ending event, and not many places would be safe

But you need a civilisation on Earth in order to maintain a Venus cloud city anyway

That's absolutely correct I believe. I don't see how such a colony would be self-sustaining without some big advances in technology (at which point you might as well just build a space habitat with low gravity).

Yeah, but sadly anyplace we can send a bunch of humans to, we can figure out how to send a nuke to as well. And if leaders on the homeworld are crazy enough to turn Earth into a wasteland, I'm not sure how confident I'd be they wouldn't point their threat at your colony (which might look like an enticing bargaining chip).

Bargaining chip for what exactly? The colony wouldn't have any kind of resources, except the wealth of its residents, but that wealth would all be tied up in bank accounts back on Earth. If Earth gets turned into a wasteland, the colony will probably die because I don't see how it could possibly survive without regular supply missions from Earth, and that depends on things on Earth not getting too horrible. Also, if Earth became a literal wasteland, all the wealth those rich people on Venus had would be gone: it's just numbers in computers after all.

Bargaining chip as in "We'll raze the last hope for humanity unless you yield concession X".

You're not answering the question. What concession? What do a bunch of old people in the clouds of Venus have to bargain with? What resources do they control?

They aren't bargaining with the colony, they're bargaining with the nation that sent its citizens there (or any nation that views the survival of the colony as important enough to make other concessions).

It's like a criminal that points a gun at your kid and threatens to shoot unless you do X.

> Retirement homes.

Ok I love this as a sci-fi premise. Especially as a spiritual successor to Logan’s Run.

But how does this actually work? Who cares for these people? Are these retirees the opportunity young caregivers will seek?

> Who cares for these people?

Robots. I think we're way closer to having robots care for elderly people than having an independent colony on Venus :-P.

Robots could do some of the care work, but some work will probably still need humans, like repairs and some medical work I would imagine. To do that, the colony would have to hire people to live there, for years at a time or more. Pay would probably need to be very high unless Earth has gotten really, really horrible.

> Sit around and write software?

It'd be a pretty extreme way to make web developers think about latency of their bloated websites, sorry "immersive app experiences", but it might actually be the one that works.

> The problem with Venus cloud cities is: what's the purpose?

Cloud computing, duh. We need big clouds and big cloud cities for that.

3 isn't a huge issue, it's a factor of 2 power loss; the real difficulty there is global dust storms.

Searching for "bacteria use perchlorate as terminal electron acceptor" it seems that the perchlorate thing is a simple matter of bioremediation, just give some bacterial an electron source (reduced carbon substrate).

Perchlorate reductase, might be possible.

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

https://www.nasa.gov/general/detoxifying-mars/

> Perchlorate reductase is usually encoded as a combination of four genes, denoted pcrABCD. ... The function of pcrD is uncertain, but may encode a molybdenum-containing chaperone protein specific to assembling the pcrABC system

Odd, why would a chaperone protein require Mo?

edit: Ok, I see. Seems like pcrD is homologous to a part of the DMSO reductase and that has a chaperone that inserts the Mo cofactor (Molybdopterin) into the complex

See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6650914/

Yeah I always like the sound of a Venus colony more, similar gravity being one of the main benefits but guess being stuck in a habitat in the clouds doesn't satisfy the same explorative instinct as Mars where you could actually walk on a new land

Not immediately, but we could put a gigantor solar panel up as a sun shade and literally freeze out the CO2 on Venus and beam all the power to earth.

Wouldn't it be far easier to solve our own problems here than to engineer a solution which could make Venus habitable?

Looking at the current state of humanity, I don't think so.

Are you letting ChatGPT do all the engineering and construction for Venus or are you gonna run into those pesky "human" problems there too?

If all the Venus-related activities are controlled by a single political entity, those pesky human problems probably won't be a big problem.

Indeed, when opening a hatch and allowing scalding ultra-high-pressure sulphuric acid into the habitat is an option, dissent will be fairly easily handled!

That's not what I mean. If you look at many of the problems in the world now, they're geopolitical, caused by conflicts between countries. If you had a bunch of different countries trying to all colonize Venus or wherever all at the same time, it would inevitably lead to war. But if only a single country were doing it and no one else was involved, they would only be limited by their own technical or economic or manpower limitations.

Beaming the power to Earth is probably not going to work very well because of the diffraction limits involved.

Also Venus and Earth orbit at different speeds, so in best case you have to beam the power "only" about 40 million km, and sometimes it's over 250 million km and the sun is in the way. The cycle is a little under 2 years long, so there are many-month-long periods of time where your power capacity is reduced massively, and you need alternative sources on Earth anyway.

If you were going to generate power from the Venusian sunshade, you may be better to use it to locally refine something very energy dense like nuclear fuels and physically ship them back. Luckily for us, refining Venusian CO2 into synthetic hydrocarbon fuel and shipping that back is probably not practical either (you'd need to move millions or billions of tonnes of it) or we'd have to contend with VenuGas Inc. adding "alien fuel" carbon to the atmosphere as well.

You could also put a sunshade up at earth and use it to offset the global heating problem (but not things like ocean acidification). Due to the magnifying effect of greenhouse gases, blocking solar radiation before it enters the atmosphere is disproportionately effective, rather like putting shutters outside a window rather than leaving it clear and using air-conditioning.

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