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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.'"
Just move closer to the Sun.
Yes yes, and while we're at it, why don't we get IPv6 rolled out too, hmmmm?
Do we know enough about the atmospheric dynamics of Venus? Is there something similar to a jet stream that might catch your city and throw it around?
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)
Cool idea, but until we have much more economical rockets, I can't see us sending nearly enough material to Venus to be supporting a manned expedition, much less a semi-permanent settlement.
We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.
Well, we'd need all that plus the floating cities. Plus a way to get there would be nice, and a regular ferry to keep the supplies like food and such arriving. But aside from all that we are ready to move in.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
...that turn to goo in a few months!
The game.
I wonder if we should be spending money making other worlds livable when our own world needs it so badly to make it a place worth living in.
http://projectleader.wordpress.com
We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.
It's so simple!
Wait a minute...
Your ad here.
they'll betray you and freeze you in kryptonite as soon as the empire comes knocking on their door.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
It is always this way. I've been saying that we should attempt manned missions to Venus using balloons for years, and now that somebody else suggests it I feel compelled to start poking holes in the idea.
It is quite nice as a there-and-back science mission but for a long term colony it's a terrible environment. The local resources are incredibly difficult to get hold of if you have to send a balloon down to get them, remember that the record for longest lasting machine on the Venusian surface is slightly over an hour.
The only reason to go there and take humans along is if space travel has become cheap and easy enough that you can do it on a whim.
Rather than try to change planets, it may be easier to genetically engineer people who are resistant to sulfuric acid ( or they may evolve naturally in China if nothing is done about their acid rain which is reaching a pH of 3.5 )
[ Please, no jokes about acid-resistant Chinese overlords ]
1) Wear suits to protect us from the poisonous atmosphere and lack of oxygen.
2) Stay under cover to protect us from the various radiation (no magnetic field as I understand it).
3) Keep a complex life support system functioning in a complex artificial environment where failure means death.
So how exactly is this different from the moon, mars or even space itself? It actually seems more difficult and worse environment for humans than any of those.
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.
Not enough vespene gas.
100 years?
There are places that are like that NOW. You just don't hear too much about it on a regular basis.
I have actually been to China, and I can tel you.. I BELIEVE that 16 out of 20 of the worlds most polluted cities are in that country.
We don't need to go to Venus to have to take those kinds of precautions. I think we will need to take similar precautions in 25 years in certain parts of the world. Actually, scratch that. Those parts of the world will have people that cannot AFFORD to take those kinds of precautions.
Considering the cost of colonizing Venus though, I highly doubt that "regular" people will get to go at all.
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.
While possible in theory, I think it is incredibly unlikely that humans will build any kind of colony on other planets. Simply put : the projected technological growth curve suggests that we will have self replicating robots (and possibly artificial intelligence smart enough to control them) within a century.
Why would we go to the hassle of creating compromise habitats on other planets (moon, mars, the rest) when we could simply place linear accelerators (aka railguns) to launch raw materials into orbit? Self-replicating factories on the moon would mine materials and manufacture more robots and parts. The finished bots as well as raw materials would be launched into orbit, to be used to manufacture gigantic rotating habitats.
The habitats would be MUCH posh-er than anything that could be made on a planet, with near perfect control of the internal environment.
He's talking about the far future.. of course, you probably think human-kind doesn't have a far future.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Those parts of the world will have people that cannot AFFORD to take those kinds of precautions.
Which means that they will eventually die or move out and thus the pollution will diminish a level of equilibrium again.
The invisible hand of free market will once again make everything come right!
You just got troll'd!
...You put de Lime in de Venus and She drink it all up
You put de Lime in de Venus and it stop de Global Warming.
Doctor...
Yeah, loads of elbow room on a boat to sustain such rampant population growth as ours now? Enough resources on a GAS giant to build something that supports the weight of a city that houses a population? Unless you can build a city mined from the outer shell of a gas giant where the pressure is plausible, you are going to have to do a lot of trips with the U-Haul to get your material to the place to build your city. Sounds expensive to me. Sounds like it goes against the whole logic of making it worthwhile.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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 not a song for the rest of us pastafarians! Arrr, maties!
Aboard the good ship Venus,
You really should have seen us,
With a figurehead of a whore in bed,
And a mast of a phallic penis.
The captain of the lugger,
Was known as a filthy bugger,
Declared unfit to shovel shit,
From one ship to another.
The cabin boys name was Chipper,
A Randy little nipper,
He made a pass with a broken glass,
And circumcised the skipper.
The first mate's name was Morgan,
By gosh, he was a gorgon,
From half past eight he played till late,
Upon the captain's organ
The captain's wife was Charlotte,
Born and bred a harlot,
Her thighs at night were lily white,
By morning they were scarlet.
The captain's daughter, Mabel,
Though young, was fresh and able,
To fornicate with the second mate,
Upon the chartroom table.
The captain's younger daughter,
Was washed into the water,
Her plaintive squeals announced that eels,
Had found her sexual quarter.
The ship's dog's name was Rover,
We turned that poor thing over,
And ground and ground that faithful hound
From Teneriff to Dover.
And when we reached our station,
Through skillful navigation,
The ship got sunk, in a wave of spunk,
From too much fornication.
I am glad that slashdot has a/c
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.
If we assume unstopped constant exponential growth a gas giant or two isn't going to be enough for long. Assuming, an exponent of 2, 20.000 earths per giant and three inhabited gas giant we're looking at sixteen generations tops; at 30 years per generation that's 480 years. We better use those 480 years to develop the Dyson sphere or we're in big trouble.
Or, of course, at some point we could instead stop multiplying exponentially. That would solve the problem, too. Given the fact that the first world countries generally have very low birth rates (and not because they historically had!) raising the living standard for everyone to our level might make a couple regular planets go a long time. Of course we still need to figure out where to get all the water and electricity, but we need to figure that out anyway.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
aciiiiiiiid raaaaaaaaain
on venus in your lungs it causes pain
aciiiiiiiiid raaaaaaaaain
to colonize some say is just insane
aciiiiiiiid raaaaaaaaain
see cities well they just don't fly like planes
Sometimes my arms bend back.
No, it's not: It's in 3:2 resonance with the sun. One mercury year is 1.5 mercury days.
Hard work pays off tomorrow, but procrastination pays off NOW!
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.
How about building cities that float in the oceans on earth first?
We have already. They are called Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.
Because people here know that pressure drops as altitude increases. For others, this fact might be "news" or "rubbish".
Note that there are hazards when you're outside that floating city, but pressure isn't one of them. Lack of oxygen, presence of sulfuric acid, and of course the need for SPF measured in powers of ten are.
**i move away from the planet to breath in
At the time you have the technological capabilities to start building cities that float in the atmosphere of Venus, one is probably well into the era of molecular nanotechology. That means one probably already has restrictions on the removal of CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere (don't want to kill all the plants, cyanobacteria, plankton, fish, etc.) and one is well along on stripping the ice-caps from Mars and the atmosphere of Venus of the easily available carbon. This is because carbon availability becomes a limiting resource and of significant concern in the nanotech era.
Depending upon how much carbon is stripped from the atmosphere of Venus, one doesn't have the hellish temperature problem which exists now and it can be made quite comfortable on the surface. The magnetic field problem and lack of water are more significant problems and one may need to consider a phase of planetary comet bombardment to replenish the water. And unless means are developed to restart core circulation to beef up the magnetic field one is facing the problem of a very dry planet (all water circulating in pipes rather than streams or rivers). Though one could speculate as to whether sufficient particle accelerators could be developed to split the available C or O back into H so one could maintain the atmospheric H2O content even with a solar wind stripping away the H.
Now, of course if one has the capabilities to play with planets and the solar system as a whole like this, as I discuss in my chapter in "Year Million", then one is also likely to have the resources which can dismantle the whole planet, presumably to contribute to the construction of our solar system's Matrioshka Brain. Now whether to use the material in Venus for this purpose, or whether to turn it into a water world with lots of islands upon which many different evolutionary scenarios are played out (using real matter as the computronium for evolution). [For those of you who don't see this, think hundreds of thousands to millions of independent "Jurassic Park"s] is going to be one of the fierce debates we have later in this century or perhaps the next one.
Are the stairs that steep?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"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.
Sulfuric acid...yes, that's quite a pickle, that atmospheric sulfuric acid...gets you every time...might want to think carefully about ways to deal with that one....
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
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
...floating cities on the oceans of THIS planet...
What is all-important is the composition of Venus' atmosphere, which is largely made up of C02 and other greenhouse forcing gases.
What does CO2 have to do with planetary warming? I thought that was still a theory? ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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...
Mars as lots of c02, it aint god damn hot.
Only about 8 times as much as Earth. And it would be even colder if it wasn't there.
You could have HIGH PRESSURE fart gas or xenon gas, its still going to get HOT if its 800 PSI.
I have a couple of books on thermodynamics that disagree with your hypothesis. You probably have a refrigerator that also disagrees with your hypothesis, or it would not work. What pressure a fluid is at has absolutely nothing to do with its temperature. You'll only see changes in temperature when you change one of the other parameters (volume, pressure), and I don't think there's any proof of billions of compressors on the surface of Venus. But you probably know all that and are just trolling.
Actually, I thought when freon expands, it rapidly cools. It is a lot warmer freshly compressed, which is why the condensing coils are f'ing hot in addition to dumping their newly acquired "heat" from the ice box. As the compressed vapor cools, it returns to liquid form where it is a lot easier to dump heat. This is where the GP messes up, assuming the 800 PSI is constantly going thru state changes with heat exchanges.
Hence why you need to keep you A/C unit's compressor coil airflow unobstructed.(For those not familiar with A/C's, it is the big unit they put outside).
Again, correct me if I'm wrong here. I'm not the Thermodynamics fella, just a guy who vaguely remembers working with an A/C man two summers.
Though your point is all the same. If things under pressure were always hot, then why don't propane tanks explode all the time? Volatile gases are fine well over 800psi. (though whether the GP meant explosive or flammable gasses we won't know)
import system.cool.Sig;
Thus, the curious mind might be tempted to reasonably ask, why is Venus not 2250 times as hot as the earth?
Because no one who knows the science behind it and is in their right mind would suggest a completely linear relationship between "mass of CO2 in the atmosphere" and "surface temperature of planet". You can linearize it around a point, but the difference between Venus and Earth is so massive that a linearization for one of the planet will be completely bogus if applied to the other. (The heat loss by radiation, for example, is proportional to the fsckin' 4th power of the temperature. And that's just one of lots of nonlinearities.)
Or, conversely, if we examine the two knowns of CO2 planetary heating in the entire human experience, we could probably conclude that a doubling of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere would yield a fraction of a degree in heating, not the massive amounts of heating preached to us by the IPCC.
CO2 amounts for about 10% of the total greenhouse effect on Earth (i.e. the difference in temperature between an atmosphere-less black body receiving the same solar irradiance (-18C), and the actual avergae temperature of Earth's surface (14C) ) ... so about 3.2 degrees.
The problem with Earth is that _any_ warming will trigger a number of positive feedback effects, such as increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere (which is also a greenhouse gas, and amounts for a whopping 36% of the total greenhouse effect mentioned above), liberating trapped methane from clathrates and previous permafrost areas, reducing the planets albedo by reducing ice cover, etc, etc.