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Floating Cities On Venus
Geoffrey.landis writes "Some of you may have heard me talk about colonizing Venus. Well, for those who haven't, Universe Today is running story about floating cities on Venus. It's a reasonable alternative for space colonies — after all, the atmosphere of Venus (at about 50 km) is the most Earth-like environment in the solar system (other than Earth, of course). '50 km above the surface, Venus has air pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0C-50C range, a quite comfortable environment for humans. Humans wouldn't require pressurized suits when outside, but it wouldn't quite be a shirtsleeves environment. We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.'"
And our reason for going to Venus is...?
We can mine the Moon and possibly Mars, but what does Venus offer us? Fuel? I would think it is too hot for mining the surface (robotic miners capable of operating in the heat may not be cost-effective)
I think before we talk about other places, we should probably get the kinks out of everything by putting something on our own moon. A lot of science could be done on a moon base, as well as learning just HOW to put something on another large rock. Lots of reasons why the moon is reasonable:
1) We can already get to the moon. We've been there already. So there's not real jump in tech needed to get there.
2) We can get OFF the moon. The big gotcha with any other landing. Go to Mars? Yeah, could probably get there and land now. Getting off is the hard part. Don't have that problem with the moon.
3) It's speedy to get there. No months of travel. Need to swap people out or something goes horribly wrong--can get there pretty quickly.
Landing on Mars, or floating cities on Venus sound nice. But I'd like to see something a bit more practical in my lifetime of a moon base. It's possible, but there haven't been any major plans to do it.
Don't post Interesting things next to Funny stuff, it confuses the moderators!
Venus has a magnetic field. It's about 10^-5 that of Earth's but there is one there. If it weren't present, wouldn't the solar winds have stripped the atmosphere from the planet by now?
The game.
"Well, we'd need all that plus the floating cities."
Haven't read TFA, but I've already seen similar ones. Breathable air is buoyant in the venusian atmosphere.
CO2 will react with all sorts of things. The reaction with water produces carbonic acid. Add something alkaline and you get salt + water. Using lime water (a saturated calcium hydroxide solution) is the shortcut version (you get calcium carbonate + water). Once artificial photosynthesis is developed, you can always turn the CO2 into O2 - no shortage of sunlight.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The suit doesn't need to withstand excessively high or low pressures, it just needs to cover you with something that wont react with the sulfuric acid and provide air. Think of a full body SCUBA suit, no good for work in space but assuming it's made out of the right materials would be quite handy for work on Venus.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
As many people have pointed out this is obviously infeasible in the foreseeable future (and I believe we're talking at the very least 50 years here), however it may be an interesting idea as a space probe. Technically gets there like a lander probe, except that at some point during the descent after the parachute slowed things down enough the probe would inflate a blimp, and thus float in the atmosphere at tolerable temperatures and pressures.
That would be good to study the atmosphere and also study the surface a bit closer, but what would be really really neat is if it could be the "aircraft carrier" for a UAV or two specially designed to go fly close to the surface, take pictures, and come back for a refuelling, which would be electrical, the source of energy being the solar panels on the blimp (or "solar paint") during day time (which would last I believe about 120 days). It should work fairly well because the skies must be pretty clear at a 50 km altitude, and a blimp can be pretty large so if its entire surface can be covered in "solar paint".. And during night the whole thing could stay idle.
Scientifically this would be very interesting as it would allow to study the atmosphere in situ for an extended period of time (several Venus days) on distances (since the blimp would be carried by the winds, but also the UAVs would explore up and down thereby teaching us so much about the atmosphere, its temperatures, pressures, winds, clouds, chemical compositions) and also we would get to see a lot of Venus' geology thanks to the UAV that would fly close enough to the ground. The question would be how hard would it be to conceive an electrical UAV that could fly in such an atmosphere with the chemistry it has under pressures of up to 95 bars and temperatures of up to 500 C? If it's impossible, would there be any chance to have a camera on the end of a 50 km long cable? (the question being I believe how much would such a long cable weight, considered it can't melt at 500 C or be corroded)
You just got troll'd!
Why just limit yourself to creating orbiting or shielded habitats when you can just create the real thing? With self-replicating robots you could throw enough material to Venus to simply sequester the huge amount of C02 and pave the way to a human friendly environment.
I think if humans are going to one day seriously consider terraforming other bodies in the solar system (we've already been doing that to our own for about 12,000 yrs) we ought to start long term terraformation on Venus as soon as possible.
Venus, although nearly identical in gravity, size and distance from the sun to Earth, does not contain any native water and has severe atmospheric issues. Mars, has water and serious atmospheric issues (such as insufficient gravity to retain one) and no magnetic field.
To successfully transform Venus would require first to construct large scale reflectors to reduce the sunlight reaching Venus thus cooling it down, implement a process to sequester the excess carbon in the atmospher, direct large numbers of comets at Venus to introduce sufficient water and then seed the planet with simple anaerobic biotic life to begin to oxygenate the atmosphere. Of course these are outstanding complex and far-future possibilities, but not impossible so far as I know.
In the long run (thousands of years or even tens of thousands), I speculate Venus will likely be Earth II to a greater extent that mars will; it may take Venus a bit longer to become habitable, but once it does payoff in quality of environment would be significant. All the more incentive to encourage twin terraforming endeavors rather than simply focus on Mars.
The author, Yukito Kishiro always documents himself a lot before drawing and has the humans on Venus use floating cities in the "Last Order" series of his manga.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Angel_Alita:_Last_Order
Well, that's actually the point: they did strip it of all hydrogen, for example. The solar winds ionize the atmosphere something fierce and break the molecules all the time. Heavier elements like C, N and O recombine, but H from (H20 or CH4) escaped into space.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But why bother even to colonize Mars or Venus? That's like trying to run or jump before learning to stand.
;).
What we should do is learn to build practical and sustainable space stations with artificial gravity (the classical spinning wheels, or the tethered ones, or whatever that _works_).
It's not as difficult as colonizing another planet since:
1) you don't have to fight yet another gravity well.
2) you can do it just "outside" your planet - much cheaper.
And you're going to have to do it anyway. If you send people to Venus/Mars - it will take months for them to get there, where will they live during those months? My answer is a space station. Not a NASA Suicide Vessel.
Once you've worked out how to build a practical and sustainable space station, you can use such space stations to go elsewhere in the Solar System - Mars, Venus, the asteroid belts and beyond. There is no _rush_ then. And it stops sounding like a "one way" trip.
To me it is a really stupid idea to try to colonize other planets before we figure out how to do space colonies.
Once people work out how to do space colonies, I bet most colonizers would rather live in a space station than live on inhospitable planets in something that is just as restrictive as a space station ( if not more so - it's trapped on the planet and can't move) - it's not like you'd be able to walk outside in Venus without a protective suit. So what's the difference?
If you want to send people on one way trips to other planets, maybe you should start with certain politicians (you could hold a reality show - Vote Them Off The Planet or something), in that case there could be a significant benefit
Anyway, I find it telling that the NASA and other "space" people keep talking about sending humans to Mars without seriously developing and advancing space station technology. So many stupid people making stupid decisions.
Learn to stand first, then walk, then run, then jump. Not the other way round.
Couldn't one create a layer of floating trees then, at 50 km above the surface ? All you'd need is a (admittedly very large) grid to walk/root on. The trees would slowly convert all the CO2 to oxygen. How's the sunlight at 50 km above Venus ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
"floating trees to convert all the CO2 to oxygen"
... http://www.physorg.com/news135820173.html). It would only be a partial solution as its more complex than just CO2, but its a step in the right direction.
You would need to develop a way to filter out the acids but trees on their own, don't seem a likely way to remove that much CO2. However I think you are on to something about finding a way to deal with its CO2. One solution to Venus maybe to engineer a way to deal with its overall chemistry rather than trying to endure its current state. The planet is in some ways similar to Earth, but would require some awesome advances in technology, not least terraforming to alter its chemical composition.
Maybe in the distant future, humans could combine billions of tonnes of lime with an artificially created seawater like solution and then bombard/rain the planet with it, over the course of a few centuries. (Its an idea thats been suggested to deal with CO2 on earth
Its engineering way beyond anything we could do I guess for many centuries, but its theoretically possible to deal with the CO2, plus it would give us small ocean like lakes over time. Plus once there are more favorable conditions for some life on the surface, then I think plant life, like your ideas about trees, would then add to the process of terraforming the planet. It would be an awesome engineering project.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
We have a space faring capability which is sufficient to allow us to move LARGE masses of material to Venus and construct massive structures there. That would presuppose we had already a very large scale space based manufacturing capability (or else an equivalent which would be the ability to manufacture under the surface conditions prevalent on Venus).
What would motivate a society with that kind of technological and industrial capability to want to live on the surface of ANY planet? I don't see it. You would just live in space! Space, where practically limitless energy is free for the taking, construction is simple and easy, and whatever goods you need or produce can be shipped anywhere without needing to go up a massive gravity well.
The same argument applies for ANY planetary surface. Perhaps the Moon, being close to Earth and possessing a gravity well 1/81st as deep as that of Earth is a bit different case, but colonizing either Mars or Venus fails, under any conditions I can imagine, to be an economically sensible scenario.
In fact I will propose Tod's Laws of space exploitation.
1) The viability of colonization or exploitation of any area of space is inversely proportional to the energy required to enter or leave that region of space, and directly proportional to the amount of raw material and energy available in that location.
2) No autonomous space based facility can remain under the control of Earth.
Think about it, if you were 'the Republic of The Moon' why would you need anything from Earth? What would Earth have that was of value they could exchange with you? Not raw materials, they will ALWAYS be cheaper to obtain outside the Earth's gravity well (in that sense the main belt asteroids are cheaper sources of raw materials even from LEO than the Earth itself is). Energy? Obviously Earth has nothing to provide there. People? Maybe to some extent at first, but once a population existed in space that grew on its own there would be little incentive to import 'landlubbers'. Culture? Yeah, but in the longer term that isn't a substantive basis for trade. Luxury Goods? This is the only category I can think of, it probably would be hard to produce a good Merlot on the Moon...
The same arguments would apply to any other planet. Planetary surfaces are actually the SLUM real estate of the Solar System. They're 'dirty', they come with stupidly expensive gravity wells, and the more valuable raw materials all sank to the core billions of years ago.
No, space itself, and the minor bodies found in it are the natural home of technological spacefaring civilization.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
We have already. They are called Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.
They would be insignificant specks in the ocean compared to Project Habakkuk if it had been built.
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
Yeah, but the sunburn you'd get on mercury would be awesome.
And the radiation burns you'd get from living in the upper atmosphere of Venus would be no less impressive! (at least, I assume you'd get a wicked dose of radiation as Venus lacks a planetary magnetic field)
I'm surprised I haven't seen a copy & paste from a wiki...this is my favorite topic and I frequently refer people to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_habitats_and_floating_cities
Some of the difficulties that /. posters have mentioned have been dealt with in the wiki, but there are some others that have not been mentioned that the wiki deals with.
Personally I think the most difficult aspect would be mining the surface (and that is mentioned in the wiki.) Until we get more data I think this is a pipe dream (that I really want to happen.)
Speaking as someone t
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Both of which someone posted solutions to later.
1. I don't know how we would get the materials there. Moon stopover maybe?
2. Floating in Sulfuric Acid/CO2: O2 and hydrogen/helium are all much more powerful lifting gasses in Venus' atmosphere, so while letting us breathe they would also serve to lift.
3. Not corroding in said Acid/CO2: Carbon nanotube mesh or graphene sheeting, or some kind of ceramics or metal sulphites etc (probably some metallurgical thing we haven't really looked for yet?)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...