Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus
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1. It has essentially Earth-normal gravity. Zero-G long-term is a death sentence for humans. The long term effects of Martian gravity are unknown. It seems safe to assume that Venus gravity is fine.
2. It is protected from impact and radiation by an atmosphere in a way that Mars or asteroids never will be.
3. It has an essentially limitless supply of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur available to it.
4. It is reasonably well-positioned for solar power.
5. It is relatively temperate.
6. Low pressure differential between inside a habitat and outside of one means that leaks are less severe and containment breaches are easier to react to.
But there is at least one huge disadvantage:
1. Everything besides carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur needs to be imported, either from a fantastically hostile surface, or down through reentry into an atmosphere in a deep gravity well and rendezvousing with an aerostat.
That disadvantage is a pretty goddamn significant one for human habitation.
But it's not a disadvantage for long-term robot probes, and it's... less... of a disadvantage for a minimal-population scientific base.
And, more so, while human life per se requires very small amounts of non-carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen elements, human technology requires very large amounts of non-carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen elements.
EDIT: FTFA -- "Moreover, while both planets boast ample amounts of volatile life-sustaining materials like hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, only Venus’s dense atmosphere would be helpful in shielding human colonists from the harsh assault of solar radiation."
Running an economy on mostly carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulphur would make for an interesting hard sci-fi book!
The notion that a single planet has to be largely self-sufficient as an independent unit is a bit of prejudice that comes from our upbringing on Earth. On Earth, in terrestrial economic terms, it's generally relatively expensive to get things off the planet and back onto its surface in one piece. For this reason, we think of planet Earth as a practical (if not absolute) boundary for economic transactions and resources. In the larger context of a solar system spanning society, it's costly in absolute terms by current-day Earth standards, but in the larger context, it's also relatively cheap to ship things down into the Venusian atmosphere from Mercury, Venus-crossing asteroids, and even Mars. In fact, one can make it materially inexpensive by applying lots of energy, which shouldn't be nearly as expensive by that point.
It's probably true that Earth's gravity well will limit trade of material goods between itself and the rest of the solar system. But there's no reason that a solar system spanning culture couldn't exist as a largely separate entity. I suspect people will live out there just for the idea of it, and that nation-states will help in the endeavor just to propagate their own cultures.
What about rendezvous of a rotating tether with a hypersonic craft? We can make cables now that are strong enough to support a "rotorvator" rotating tether at the lengths required. What about very large, very long, aerostat facilities that are mostly huge electromagnetic cannon for launching robot hypersonic craft? These could be built to withstand 1000's of gravities, to allow ballistic launch from high altitiude facilities, but have a return flight profile suitable for passengers and other fragile cargo. We could also have Venusian hybrid jet/rocket hypersonic craft that are fueled with liquid carbon monoxide. This technology could mean that getting to the colonized Venusian ecosphere would be a lot cheaper than getting off of it, if you are a biologically standard Homo sapiens.
EDIT: So, how this would play out in a cyberpunk space opry: Many people choose to emigrate to Venus because of the price of labor there. However, economic pressures cause a large fraction of the Venusian populace to undergo radical cybernetic modification, because it opens up job opportunities on the hostile surface and makes it less expensive to get back to Earth and other parts of the Solar System. This pathway is chosen by desperate and marginal people, who often take advantage of the radical modification surgery to shed their old identities. Voila! Gritty Sci-Fi cyberpunk future based on chemistry, physics, and economics.
EDIT: It turns out that the energy cost for getting between Mercury and Venus isn't so large. Also, there are a good number of Venus-crossing asteroids. So anything you can get from a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid shouldn't be precious to the point of rarity on Venus. Among other things, both silicon and hydrocarbons could be mined in industrial quantities.
EDIT: An interesting Selenian Boondocks blog post about the chemistry and physics of extracting various resources out of the Venusian atmosphere at human-aerostat altitudes! http://selenianboondocks.com/2013/12/venus-isru-condenseable...
EDIT: An interesting idea for surface resource extraction -- bombard the surface with rocks from orbit, with the intention of creating clouds of dust which can be harvested by specially designed airships. Though this is inefficient materially, it might result in far less wear and tear on equipment, which gets to remain at higher and friendlier altitudes.
EDIT: Carbon monoxide and sulphuric acid can be used as a fuel/oxidizer pair in a rocket engine! Both can be condensed right out of the Venusian atmosphere. Granted, these are a bit cantankerous even as far as rocket fuels go.
There's a social taboo against human genetic experimentation (hell, some people seem to struggle with vegetables) but that will eventually pass.
Or just engineering some. Biological organisms seem overly tuned to their environment and complex ones need a supporting biological ecosystem to thrive (so far that we've seen). It may be more effective to get robotics to our level and expand intelligence into the galaxy 'synthetically'.
by that point I'd say the distinction between robot and organism would be pretty blurry. ;-)
Create intelligent self replicating machines and a large part of the problems related to space travel just disappear. If creating an AGI is possible I would be surprised if the universe isn't already full of artificial life.
So step 1 in venusforming humans is to create a non-DNA-based life form. That might take a while.
Granted, I'm not sure I would want to show up to a blind date with a human/portuguese man-o-war hybrid.
You should read K.W. Jeter's "Farewell Horizontal"; he makes it seem a lot more palatable.
Exactly what the Venusians thought before starting work on ATP!
Is your statement about "roll differently" mean that there is no ATP synthesis? Certainly not, as your link shows. Is your statement that thermophilic bacteria isn't alive? I strongly doubt it. What then does it mean to "roll differently" in the context of ATP presence being a requirement for all life on earth, and hence a 52C upper limit?
Even without deliberate intervention, humans in space and on other worlds will evolve quite rapidly if interplanetary intercourse--as it were--ever breaks down.
We're all humans here on Earth and yet it seems that that is not always enough to relate on a personal level and keep a human attitude over each other in order to prevent destructive escalations and the risk of wiping out each-other in mass. Just imagine the dirty politics that would arise around the (hypothetical) results of your idea.
The pressure on the surface is that of about 3000 feet of water, so that's not too bad, and the reducing atmosphere can be handled, but the temperature is tough. Still, with practice, you could probably build such machines. Dunno how you make electronics survive long term at ambient 465 °C (oil wells have a hard time with electronics at much lower temps) but some combination of active cooling, limited duration, and novel fabrication should be possible.
Perhaps the easiest solution is to load up your Venus Mining Hopper with a whole bunch of liquid nitrogen, extracted from the atmosphere and compressed and liquefied using solar power falling on your floating platform. It deflates its balloon and drops to the surface, and starts scooping up material into its hopper as the LN2 boils off, cooling the electronics and other temp-sensitive systems. (These are buried in lots of insulation.) When the hopper is close to full, you start venting the N2 into the balloon, and the whole system takes off again, to rendezvous with a solar-powered tug to pull it to your ore-processing factory. That may be a long haul, because the upper atmosphere of Venus moves at 100m/s. Maybe you design your system to stay on the ground long enough for the platform to come back around the planet, a mere 4-5 days. Or maybe it just takes a big bite and goes straight back up so it doesn't get too far behind.
So maybe doable, but it makes the hurdle for setting up a self-sustaining colony much higher. Not that it's a much lower hurdle anywhere else.
A first step could be to lower the CO2 content (my current favourite would be to release engineered bacteria into the atmosphere that can bind the Cs and after death collect it on the ground), and enhance the albedo (so more sunlight is reflected away).
In the longterm we will need climate control anyway since Earth's climate is somewhat unstable (global warming is just as bad as a new ice age, which, extrapolating from the past, would be about due by now, if not for mankinds influence). Testing it on a planet we are not critically dependent on should be a better strategy.
Geologically, Venus is very different from Earth due to the lack of water (which enables plate tectonics and all its implications). Some changes we can make would even influence the geology. (Hm, I wonder what would happen if we dumped enough water meteroids.. )
All of this of course premises a lack of preexisting life with planetary ownership rights and no natural reserve rules (which we kind of have at the moment - http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/about).
It bothers me why we didn't just sit down on the edge of the world, as it is the Neanderthals, by the virtue of being there first (we call dibs!) who must have had planetary ownership rights to Earth. Not our usurping "natives".
You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag...
Your last sentence refers to the anti-copying campaigns, right? Since their analogy is so flawed, I don't see what you mean by that.. (Most people wouldn't steal a car, but they would totally copy one (as soon as they can).) If we could copy planets without disturbing orbit mechanics, there wouldn't be a problem?
[1] I'm talking about the ethics of using another species for one's own gain without dire need. [2] For it's own beauty, but more importantly as a collection of ideas and examples for what is possible, as an information ressource, so to say. Since our state of knowledge is low, we cannot collect all the information without preserving the found state. Of course [1] also applies.
What ticked me off was this pretentious pseudolegal neologism of "planetary ownership rights". (No offence)
I would agree that humans should think twice - and some more - before damaging or contaminating an alien ecosystem, but that's even if it was only bacterial. Speaking about "ownership rights" in case of bacteria would be downright ridiculous.
Putting the entire moral problem under the category of "ownership" feels imposed to me. Not unlike the narration behind "copyrights" - and that's the association I hinted at. Not the idea of copying planets, although I can think of reasons why that would be your first guess.
Adding your point of view to mine, and taking into account the memes concerning planetary settlements I've aquired, ownership might be a bad word choice indeed.
The idea that plate tectonics and water are intrinsically linked (at given circumstances) is pretty solidified. The theory of why not such much; the idea above fits our current data best, but data from the planet's interiour is hard to come by and I expect some updates to the theory within a few decades. It's nice that this is currently not critical knowledge for humanity.
So global warming bought us all a huge chunk of (comfortable) time? Why is it a bad thing then?
Global warming probably isn't inherently bad if spread out over enough time, but large temperature fluctuations within a few centuries doesn't leave time for non-human species to adapt.
Yes .. or Maybe .. but that all still sounds preferable to an ice age, if kaybe is right, right?
> Global warming probably isn't inherently bad if spread out over enough time, but large temperature fluctuations within a few centuries doesn't leave time for non-human species to adapt.
Eh, I don't know about that - you're not wrong but I don't think this is a relevant/useful consideration given that
(1) given that reasoning "spread out over enough time" everything and anything will work out fine
(2) in the long run (or rather the "even longer run", considering the first point) we're all dead anyways
I do agree though, an actual ice age would probably have a much more severe impact that global warming...but I'd definitely prefer that neither occur.
I'd not even be sure how to show evidence for that unless we waited a few hundred thousand years to make sure the temperature curve does not behave as before. I can, however, give some links to the discussions (e.g.[3][4]). The people in [4] ran a model, here's the paper: [5], and found a small effect (contact me if you can't access it). It's hard to say how good model evidence is, however. A lot of influences are missing, and we'd need to validate the model with more data, which isn't there. (So yeah, I wouldn't count that as evidence, just a hint.)
At this point, this is just an idea discussed by people with domain knowledge and experience, nothing more. It doesn't change the fact that we have a problem, it just influences how people look at details of climate models, and which questions to ask the models.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer...
or even longer for all of the planet's existence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Causes_of_ice_ages
[3]http://www.technologyreview.com/article/416786/global-warmin...
[4]http://www.news.wisc.edu/16083
[5] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379104...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379104...
You mentioned that you could likely get that to me- it would be very appreciated. I'll send you a quick email as well. Thanks again!
You're right that cooling would be bad, and maybe a certain amount of controlled geoengineering through CO2 emissions would have been in order by now. But the level we currently have is past that, to the point where we're going to get far too hot, which is worse than being a bit too cold. If you're about to drive into a ditch then turning left a bit is good, but driving into oncoming traffic is worse than doing nothing.
Why not get other resources from near-Venus asteroids and Mercury? It would be easy to imagine a near-sun economy that mostly involves people, information, and raw materials making the trip up and down the Venusian gravity well -- with most raw materials and finished goods making the trip down. Most of the energy would be dissipated by aerobraking. In essence, Venus could participate in such a solar-system spanning economy by supplying relatively friendly radiation-shielded Real Estate and fluorine. Raw materials would largely go down, and people, culture, intellectual property, and fluorine would come up.
The exact same reason we don't get our resources from near-Earth asteroids and Earth's neighboring planets: It's freaking expensive. One of the aspects that makes Venus attractive for colonization--similar surface gravity--also makes it expensive to launch anything. More-so, given that you'd be doing it with a frontier outpost's industrial base.
> Raw materials would largely go down, and people, culture, intellectual property, and fluorine would come up.
So why bother going to Venus at all, as opposed to creating such an economy around Earth? Barring catastrophe, Earth will certainly have a lot more people, culture, intellectual property, value-dense high-tech goods, etc., as well as significantly nicer/cheaper real-estate.
All successful colonies require an economic driver, and Venus is no exception. "Like Earth but less-profitable" is unlikely to do much.
Remember that I referenced its relative price. We don't get Earth's resources from near earth asteroids because we can get them more cheaply from Earth. Obviously, this wouldn't apply to Venus. Likewise, lots of things on the west coast of Alaska come from Seattle, not because it's cheap in absolute terms, but because it's the cheapest.
> So why bother going to Venus at all, as opposed to creating such an economy around Earth?
For the express purpose of not living on Earth. For the express purpose of spreading our civilization beyond the confines of one planet. Such an Earth independent economy and culture might be more likely to exist around Venus than Earth, simply because the proximity of Earth is more likely to pull investment away.
> All successful colonies require an economic driver, and Venus is no exception.
Not all colonies on Earth were motivated primarily by economics. People have lived in a variety of places on Earth motivated by religious and military concerns. Successful colonies will need economies to keep themselves going, but economic concerns are merely the strongest motivator for settlement, not the only ones. Granted they are in the minority, but there are people who live in the middle of deserts, in pressure vessels at the bottom of the ocean, in all kinds of remote wilderness, in many cases for the sake of living in such places as private citizens.
Granted, it will be a long time before such civilizations would begin to remotely rival the scale of Earth's, but I'm sure they will come to exist and that they will achieve near self-sufficiency.
Summary: People will live in space because they want to be there. Once a spacefaring population reaches a certain threshold, it will become self sufficient.
1. Don't underestimate the human psychic. People are said to be rational, but we often come to surprise ourselves. As a joke, if you don't have sane/rational volunteers, just create a religion!
2. Don't overestimate the general conditions on our home planet. I hope I won't come to see it in my lifetime, but escaping from here could be similar (at least in sentiment) to escaping from one's home-town/home-country or worse. Things can always get worse in a lot of different ways, and then when comparing again, the Venus option could start to appear as a pragmatic one.
This is what made the fundamental plot kicker of 'Interstellar' so daft. "Oh, we have a crop disease problem and dust storms? Clearly we must move the human race to another planet, even if it's a frozen hellscape with no breathable atmosphere." As opposed to, say, building some greenhouses, or ramping up aquaculture or aeroponics.
The moving to the new world involved taking on all sorts of new risks, but people still did it for non-economic reasons. Instead of religious freedom, perhaps others will be attracted by the prospect of starting new civilizations or escaping oppression?
The decision of some individuals to move from the british isles to N. America for religious reasons happened in a specific economic, geopolitical, and technological context. If the available vessels and navigation were poorer or more expensive, it would not have happened, and they would have done something else. You have to consider these things in their specific context.
So, given a strong enough desire for people to live "in space" or "on Mars" or "on Venus" combined with the technological and economic wherewithal to do it, people are going to try. Combine this with very wealthy national powers led by a class of engineer-technocrats with a demonstrated track record of implementing multiple decades long-term payoff projects (China) and the conclusion I come up with is that there is a significant chance that we will wind up with civilizations elsewhere in the solar system.
Also, the specific environment they're talking about in the article isn't anywhere close to the Mariana Trench. It's at about 1 atmosphere pressure. The most hostile thing about it would be constantly encountering sulphuric acid clouds. (This would also be a tremendous benefit, however.) Another important difference: The physics of building livable volume favors by far Venus human-aerostat altitudes over the Marianas Trench. Equipment for working "outside" in that specific Venus environment is something we already have a good idea about implementing inexpensively. The basic physics of the Marianas Trench makes doing the same down there orders of magnitude harder. Likewise, other basic physics around energy would preclude economically feasible agriculture in the trench, but indicates that it's quite doable at those altitudes on Venus.
A Venus colonist would probably sing songs praising PTFE. (One's already been written: "Polytetrafluoroethylene -- that's Teflon, you @ssholes!") Fortunately, we already know that one could condense fluorine directly out of the atmosphere of Venus with basically just energy as input.
I just can't imagine Venus specifically ever making it the top of anyone's list. Where's the plus to compensate for the many many minuses? It's certainly not the view.
Given enough energy, you can get water from the Venusian atmosphere. Granted, you basically can't have Venusian civilization without exploitation of space resources and having solved transportation costs to and from orbit, but water is not a hard barrier for a technological civilization.
Where's the plus to compensate for the many many minuses?
It may well become the cheapest place in the solar system to build human-habitable volumes. If you posit that there will be a solar system-spanning civilization in the first place, then physics and chemistry seems to suggest Venus has a lot of plusses in that particular context.
Granted, the only way that such a thing can come about could be properly termed sheer insanity. However, human history is practically made out of sheer insanity, chief of which can be called "nationalism". My money is on some power or powers at the scale of an industrialized nation-state eventually solving the problem of cheaply getting to and from orbit, motivated by the same sort of geopolitical insanity that motivated the Cold War. Given that, such a solar-system wide context of civilization will inevitably exist. All you need is one faction that makes it look like they might eventually establish such a civilization in their own image. Then competition will drive the rest. Look at it the other way: basically all such programs must 1) fail then acquire the aura of impossibility or insurmountability 2) forever remain out of the reach of private entities. It's entirely possible civilization may fall or some other circumstance would bring about those two conditions, but it's far from a certainty. Viewed in this way, completely earthbound humanity doesn't look like a stable configuration.
Is this even remotely possible anywhere with current technology? Can we even make completely self-sufficient colonies on Earth (like the technologically advanced kind we want to make in space, not just people living in the woods.)
(Of course most parts of space are much more hostile than an Earth desert)
Citation urgently needed.
A short ton (907.2 kg) of oxygen is 635 cubic meters or 24160 cubic feet as a gas and 794.5 liters as a liquid ( http://www.uigi.com/o2_conv.html ) so they would have needed 5 tons to raise the O2 levels by 2%. For what it's worth, the concrete depleted the O2 levels from 21% to 15%, so about 30 tons would have been need to fully restore the O2 levels.
800,000 mL/ton means that it was not the case that it needed "a few millilitres of liquid oxygen injected every 6 months or so." More like a few thousand liters every 6 months.
(A similar example, some submarines use electrolysis for oxygen)
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/treadwell-supplies-oxyge...
A new planetary economy would certainly have to be very tightly circumscribed in terms of materials and techniques, and even then I think it would be dismayingly huge, though modern techniques like 3D printing would help. It would be a worthwhile exercise just to plan such a thing on paper. Might make an interesting if overly-complicated game with sort of a Dwarf Fortress feel.
Bonus: you have to launch by dropping it into a hell-cauldron of poison gases miles above a crushing, melting surface, better hope you don't have an engine out, because there are no launch aborts or do-overs. Then you have to fly it out through a hot corrosive acid atmosphere which I don't imagine would be very friendly to machined aluminum.
Condense Carbon Monoxide and Sulphuric Acid from Venus's atmosphere for use as fuel and oxidizer in a hypersonic rocketplane that tops out at about Mach 11. Have the rocketplane rendezvous with the end of a rotating tether.
http://www.tethers.com/papers/HASTOLAIAAPaper.pdf
No multi-stage rocket. No expendable launch vehicles. That's probably not the actual solution, but it shows that you don't have to have a Falcon 9 equivalent.
> Then you have to fly it out through a hot corrosive acid atmosphere which I don't imagine would be very friendly to machined aluminum.
It should be possible to condense HF out of the Venusian atmosphere, so we should be able to manufacture PTFE locally with input from non-Earth resources. (Mining chondrites from Mercury and Venus-crossing asteroids.)
It's still not trivial, but it's not like there are a whole lot of do-overs when launching valuable human cargo from Earth, either. (What happens if the space shuttle's engines go awry? Everyone on board dies, and everyone on the ground speculates as to whether they died within 30 seconds, or survived to hit the ocean.)
The sulfuric acids should be fine with enough protective coating. Earth's atmosphere isn't all that friendly either with rust able metals. Thus we have corrosion-resistant paint.
Uh, no. Sit down with the equations yourself. The main way one counteracts gravity is by gaining orbital velocity. Astronauts aboard the ISS experience almost as much pull from Earth's gravity as you do on the surface. It's that their orbital velocity puts them in a frame of reference that has "microgravity."
When I posit launcher platforms on Venus, the point is to launch from a higher altitude, thus avoid some losses to air friction, and also to use the entire station as reaction mass for launching the payload from an electromagnetic cannon. Doing this avoids the near-exponential nastiness of the rocket equation.
The good news there is that space elevator climbing efficiencies could be gained without having to worry about flying some kind of aircraft.
A day on Venus is 224.65 earth days long. That is a long night so perhaps the solar power thing isn't that clear cut.
Are you able to provide a rough summary of how the quantities of these materials compare with the quantities available on earth?
It wasn't that long ago that humans spoke about things like the number of fish in the sea, the ability of the earth's atmosphere to absorb waste gases etc as being effectively infinite until we eventually discovered that this was unfortunately not true. It is just something that pops into my head whenever the word unlimited, infinite or limitless get used when talking about energy, resources and so on.
If we really must think of a planet to terraform, it seems like the best body in the solar system to work on might be... Earth. There are large swaths of it that are more or less currently uninhabitable in its polar regions, and most changes to the atmosphere we make have their greatest effects in those same polar regions. A 5C increase in global average temperatures might be a 10C or more increase in those polar regions, opening up millions of square miles for human habitation and intensive agriculture. It's even self-sustaining: about a quarter of known fossil fuel reserves are available in the Arctic, and those will become much more accessible with warming temperatures.
Needless to say, there are costs elsewhere on the planet for that kind of intervention, but those are very definitely far, far smaller costs than building floating cities on Venus or reheating Mars' core. Many of those costs could even be recouped by adding a terraforming tax on new residents of polar regions and redistributing them to Bengali refugees fleeing their homes.
Economically, it makes a lot more sense than investing resources in terraforming other bodies in our solar system, though it doesn't offer the same risk mitigation.
Disclaimer: I think terraforming Earth, purposefully or not, is a bad idea. I think it's just a better idea than investing real resources into terraforming other planets.
The second though, pretty related to the first, is the ethical one. Do we have the "right" to do what we want to our planet, including probably causing mass extinction of existing animal life in order to terraform our planet? I'm not sure if I'm even willing to argue that one either way.
Like I said, it's interesting to consider your idea. If we can be sure that anything we do to "terraform" our planet isn't at all risky in terms of human survival, you're probably right!
Right now we already are playing around with the climate, but very uncontrolled and destructive. I'm also not in favour of using methods designed for climate control in our situation due to the risk (which is different for the different methods, and the failure results are very different also, but still) - the better solution is clearly to stop emitting CO2 - but longterm, we will need the knowledge. Best to test it on another planet first..
You have a right to make good decisions. Don't sweat about whether we have rights to modify the planet, and instead worry about whether it is a good decision.
At this point there is not enough data or control to ensure success. We are already changing our planet, and we can't even tell if it's good or bad, so this is not the year to make that kind of determination.
I think there's probably some limit to how much Earth-resources should be used to terraform other planets, but with what we spend on bombs I don't think it'd be a big deal. Terraforming Earth is a spectacularly bad idea, so it would take a lot of spending to be in any sense worse than that.
Like... reshaping the Earth in a Earth-like shape! Cool, isn't it? Now, getting the tongue off the cheek, you're right, it makes a lot of (at least an economical) sense to look under our nose at the swaths of unexploited but with a higher promise land and, you know, use them?! Only that the thing is, Venus colonization is more than just a new place that we could find useful to extend into for a current-way of day-to-day human life. It is a lot more! Some may tell you that it is bad to have all the eggs put in the same basket and Venus would be a good second basket, but again it would be a lot more than that. Imagine that so far we haven't had any signs of another life-form living in our universe. As small the chance for this to stay this way as it may be, we can assume for now that the entire universe is ours to extend into. And we need to become capable of doing it. We may "start" doing that by colonizing our own galaxy. For that we should become capable of colonizing planets in some reasonably-close star systems first. And for that it would be desirable for us to learn how to do that using a planet somewhere nearby, in our solar system. And yes, for that we should become capable of colonizing without much struggle harsh places like deserts (in polar or other regions), subterranean and ocean depths here on Earth. And more, those should become self-sustained, to mimic conditions of some far-away colonization prospects. In the long run Venus is just one of the intermediary steps, but an important one. We as a species need that kind of colonizing experience. Of course it won't happen right away, but setting the goal of colonizing Venus is in itself a task that rise awareness and spurs in the meantime other important intermediary necessary goals. Biosphere 2 falls in this category, but we need more, and more - we need context for which these kind of projects would come to make sense.
To put this in perspective, a balloon that is one kilometer in diameter is capable of lifting about 700,000 tons, or the weight of two Empire State Buildings. Add a second balloon of the same size and the lift capacity of these two balloons increases exponentially: it’s now capable of supporting nearly 6 million tons of weight.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28%28%284%2F3%29+*+...
Then, if we assume that the gravity on Venus is 90% of Earth standard, you get about 656,000 short tons of lift. Note that this doesn't take into account the different air density on Venus.
No idea about the "doubling" bit, though :-P
We think in terms of "flying" through the atmosphere, but once it gets dense enough you can make the equivalent of fish to "swim" through it. With internal bouyancy compensation bladders, and a skin impervious to the atmosphere. Smaller probes swimming down into the clouds to collect data about the surface and other conditions.
If nothing else it would be completely different than exploring Mars :-)
Which is likely why it hasn't been done. If it's something completely different, it takes more time and money to get it working. Starting from nothing, exploring Mars and exploring Venus might both cost $100b. But if the research has already been done to research Mars exploration, sending another probe there might only cost $2b, whereas Venus still costs $100b.
https://books.google.com/books?id=vpilMLP7OHQC&pg=PA112
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/001/f9guide.pdf
(page 22)
The conservative thing to do is to stick with what works. I do think you're right that the conditions are very different from Mars and this makes it possible to explore alternative approaches that may be better suited to the planet. I also believe that innovation entails some degree of risk taking. Just gotta get SpaceX onboard.
I'd wager that the real reason is that Mars is more interesting to explore than Venus's atmosphere. Mars has the potential to have (or have had) life, and it has interesting geological features that may be directly applied to what we know about Earth.
Plus, the whole "we might go live on Mars!" mentality doesn't hurt, and Venus is only recently getting this kind of attention.
They basically built a retro-rocket¹. Rockets existed, the principle of retro-rocket-like descent braking existed too (usually deployed on parachute drops of heavy equipment like tanks).
"I'd wager that the real reason is that Mars is more interesting to explore than Venus's atmosphere."
As you also noted, it's about public attention, which was fed with a lot of Mars stories. Mars' surface was more observable and thus made it more easily for Sci-Fiction writers to speculate about. It had less to do with practical considerations like those related to its atmosphere.
In comparison to the Venusian surface, the religious notion of hell would be a tropical beach.
One other interesting possibility is colonizing Mercury. It turns out to not be as crazy an idea as it seems at first. Mercury does have water, there's plenty of solar energy, and it's not too hot at the poles. The trickiest part would really be getting there. As deep as it is in the sun's gravity well, it would take 6 years to get there!
The atmosphere and gravity situation on the other hand are about the same as Mars.
Ref: http://www.space.com/27450-messenger-mercury-water-ice-photo...
Why? If it works it's exponential so it should be faster than other methods.
I'm trying to think of some kind of space-elevator-siphon, but there's no getting around the fact that, unless you want to expend energy to pump it, you have to have an equal amount of mass coming down as is going up.
I've read that comets could be slammed into Venus, modifying its rotation, and somehow reducing or eliminating the runaway greenhouse effect. Of course, if mankind is at the point of being comfortable terraforming with comets, it may make more sense to point them toward the desert planet Mars.
Not to mention the nuclear fallout that would drift for a long time all around in the atmosphere - basically anything but "safe for Humanity".
Couldn't bio-genetics create some sort of virus that inhabits on Mars' or Venus' atmosphere and grows on it while converting it into friendly environment? Or am I speaking pure sci-fi?
Bacteria or algae is your best bet.
Up north in the US the average ground temperature is maybe 40F at 10ft down (which is why there are basements up north, to get below the frost line) but here in Texas the average ground temperature is about 70F. At the equator it's probably more like 90-100F.
Given that Venus' atmosphere is so hot it seems likely that the deeper you go the hotter it gets.
And no possibility to live on the surface?
At least we know how to transform CO2 into oxygen.
Mars just seems orders of magnitude more friendly.
Honestly, probably the realistic view is that it never makes sense to colonize, or even send long-term human presence to, any planet besides Earth. But to the extent that we want to dream of human presence on another planet, I think that the big obstacle to Venus is not the hostility of the upper atmosphere, it's the difficulty in getting any non-gaseous resources out of it.
At the very least, it seems like sending a robotic balloon probe to Venus to try to tool around in the upper atmosphere for an extended period of time is at least as worthwhile as sending another lander to Mars.
I don't know, establishing a second, independent biosphere is sound from a risk management standpoint.
But I suspect you mean something different than independent biospheres. If so, what risks are you thinking of?
We're nowhere close.
That's an interesting proposal. I'd love to read a study on that.
> But I suspect you mean something different than independent biospheres. If so, what risks are you thinking of?
Well there are degrees of independence. Perhaps "isolation" in the systems engineering sense is a better term. There are a lot of high-risk probabilities that arise as technology advances - and the Fermi paradox isn't encouraging about our chances. For some example risks, let's say grey goo, cybernetically enforced self-destructive tyranny and unexpected stable artificial black hole. In some case, the light-minutes of separation may make the difference.
It might make more sense to build an artificial orbital habitat at L5 or the like, but these seem so fragile compared to biospheres that could be constructed on Mars. Being out of the gravity well is a huge advantage, but the gravity on Mars is low enough that space elevators become a real possibility. Perhaps Ceres is a good compromise - lots of water, metal rich asteroids all around.
It's very hard to model those risks. A non-terrestrial habitat will certainly be more fragile than one on Earth, and easier to fall prey to a malicious computer attack by rogue AIs. A gamma ray burster would be more survivable in a shelter 1,400 m underground[1] than anything we are likely to build soon on another planet, or Ceres. A "Dark Star" scenario as in Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air" feels more likely than an unexpected stable artificial black, and in that story, access to nuclear fuels, along with a stockpile of liquid atmosphere and frozen materials, helped keep civilization going. Or perhaps the Free Peoples of Ceres will send an asteroid killer our way, to keep the solar system from being infested by flatlanders.
So while there are scenarios where separation is important, there are also scenarios where separation won't help, and might end up taking funding away from something which would have helped. With probabilities that low, and with such high error estimates, it's hard to tell which approach is best. The cheapest is self-sufficient here on Earth. If that works, then there's the base knowledge for how to set that up off-planet.
([1] I refer to the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, which is a neutrino lab. While not the deepest lab, it's one with an access road instead of an elevator. Very handy if you want to supply your colony.)
I think it could make sense when we have robots that are able to mine material and construct habitats without requiring human supervision. Just build the robots, drop them off on Venus, Mars, etc, then come back in 30 years and sell condos.
Exactly. Enough with Mars already. Red sky, red sand and red rocks : it gets old, frankly.
We can get non-gaseous resources out of Venus accessible asteroids. Venus could supply two things -- a beautiful and relatively friendly place to live and also fluorine condensed out of its atmosphere.
I could envision huge aerostat supported structures hundreds of kilometers long that house electromagnetic accelerators to launch raw materials into orbit. Rotating tethers could deposit cargo carriers into the Venusian atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, to deploy ballutes and slow down through aerobraking and then to float awaiting retrieval. In doing so, the tethers would re-accelerate themselves to haul other cargo up from hypersonic aircraft.
Maybe it's not economically and politically feasible now or ever, but it's tons of fun to think about. This sort of thing also demonstrates that it's not physically impossible.
The sole point is the experience of colonizing other planet. We're not looking to get there for the resources (stop for a second and just think out of the box), we're looking to get there to be able to live there as a species.
That's so, but the atmosphere on Mars is so thin it's not as if you can step outside there either - you'd die quickly as it's well below the Armstrong limit. You still need a full-body pressure suit on Mars.
Venus, FWIW, is 96.5% CO2 and has a surface pressure of 93 bar. That's a lot of oxygen if you just want to make some for your space station.
Personally I hold out hope for terraforming Venus. Adding gravity or atmosphere to Mars seems like it'd be much more difficult.
Then you get to rebalance both the planets atmospheres at once.
However, Mars has pretty weak gravity so even if you could, I don't know if it would stick around.
Of course, at some point we have to ask questions about how renewable a resource various elements are...
Nothing to sneeze at, but I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that a flying habitat of sufficient reliability is orders of magnitude more difficult. Are there studies that suggest otherwise?
They'll just pass away during the next big extinction event, despite knowing another will eventually come.
We are no better than the dinosaurs so far. Setup outposts on Mars, the moon, Venus, learn to deal with radiation.
Cat lovers.
While I'm a fan of long term thinking, that's a bit too long to enter into any equation about which planet to colonize first.
And this is a laughable concern. The Sun's main sequence is predicted to last another 4 billion years. That's more time than life has existed on Earth, about 16,000x as long as homo sapiens has existed.
If we're concerned with the survival something vaguely descended from homo sapiens in 4 billion years, there's little enough harm in taking another million years for our tech to get a little better before starting the project.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...