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Why Mars Is Not the Limit For Human Space Flight
"Mars is not just the next or most accessible human destination, it is the ultimate one," writes Louis Friedman, executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society. He says the concept of manned spaceflight is progressing so slowly, and robotic developments so swiftly, that Mars will be the first and last planet humans set foot on. "By the time human spaceflight technology is theoretically capable of journeys beyond Mars, humans in modern space systems will be virtual explorers interacting with the environments of distant worlds, but without the baggage of physical transportation or presence." Mark Whittington disagrees, saying Friedman is demonstrating Clarke's First Law, and that the history of human exploration is rife with periods of stagnation interrupted by technological achievement that led to swift progress.
if it's possible for humans to go somewhere, they will go there. History has proven that. Only reason we haven't been to Mars or Titan or Ceti Alpha V is that we didn't have the means to. But Elon and others are trying to change that...
It seems this person has never heard of the speed-of-light limit to communication delays....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Problem with virtual space exploration is the speed of light. When thing go wrong (and they will) you're limited by how fast you can respond to disaster. By the time you know about a situation, it will probably already be over. Useful and robot artificial intelligence capable of picking up the slack is probably further off than manned spaceflight is.
Mars will be the first and last planet humans set foot on.
I believe Earth would be the first planet humans set foot on.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
When he says "virtual explorers", he doesn't mean you'll be sitting in New York while playing on Alpha Centauri I via VR. He means uploading your mind to the probe before launching it.
tl;dr: rtfa.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Sort of. While Mars may be the only other planet that humans set foot on in our current state of evolution, he fails to consider genectic/cyber changes that would make future humans more adaptable to space travel.
Mercury, not impossible to land on in certain regions -- Venus unlikely due to extreme heat and pressure, Mars a given, Jupiter no solid surface, Saturn no solid surface, Uranus no solid surface, Neptune no solid surface, Pluto -- not a planet.
So technically, assuming that no one wants to go to Mercury for some reason (unlikely), then outside of Mars, there are no other "planets" nearby anyway. If we call planets around other stars by a different name, and again assuming that Mercury is just to uninteresting to visit, then he might be right. Of course this still leaves lots of other real estate out there to visit.
There are plenty of interesting moons, planetoids and asteroids upon which we could land and explore. Limiting the discussion to only "official" planets is too limiting.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
Obligitory XKCD
We have the technology, we can escape the gravity well if we REALLY want to... but thanks to our robot friends and other tools, we also know how little there is right away out there for us.
I agree with the overall idea that technology will advance faster than we can travel. Robots and engineered life will quickly advance to the point of making terraforming plausible to start within a lifetime, possibly making nearby planets worth the extreme costs of travel.
Moreover though, by the time we have a place to travel to to live long-term, we may find it easier to alter ourselves than our environment. What was a robot before may have the mind of a 'real' person in a dozen generations or so, or close enough to it.
As far as we've advanced in the past few centuries, I'd think we'd advance in all kinds of directions before the fruits of terraforming/long-term offworld housing would pay off.
Near-earth technology Sci-fi books always had to postulate that offworlders end up always clever enough to somehow advance scientifically at a rate many times faster than their home planet, and always seem to take place after the incalculable mass was already in place to have terraforming and long-term living already transferred to the moon/mars/wherever. But I don't think that romantic notion of offworld hyper-competence would ever get a chance to play out, compared to the rate of change we've been riding for centuries at an ever-increasing rate, even with revolutions and depressions.
Ryan Fenton
We could be biological robots as well: Interacting and learning about this planet and developing constantly to gain deeper understanding of the surrounding.
When we die our data gets sent back home for further analysis.
Thankfully, we don't have faster than light (FTL) comms. Without them, virtual exploration light years away is a joke.
We will eventually push our way out there in the space equivalent of wagon trains (a bunch of settlers on a one-way trip enduring long periods of no communication with home.)
I expect that we'll see FTL transportation before we see FTL communications across vast distances.
Of course, that presumes we start teaching rigorous science and get society engaged in the goals of space exploration again. Many (fools) like to call space projects wasted money, but they sure like the stuff we got (sat comms, ICs, dialysis machines, etc..) as spin-offs.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
I'm surprised no one is mining venus for minerals that would take millions of years to form here.
[Pedant]
For one thing, the headline and the summary contradict. The headline says "not" the limit, while the summary says it will be for manned missions.
[/end pedant]
But for the rest: still nonsense. Once you get people willing to go on a one-way trip, it removes a lot of other burdens for a deep space mission. For instance, using cryonics, or chemically reduced metabolism to hibernate the crew for 100+ years. The problem with current impulse technologies is that they will never get you even outside the solar system before you die of old age. (Look at the 40 years or so it has taken voyagers 1 and 2 to simply HIT the heliopause! Those things are about the size of a tall garbage can. Imagine how long something the size of a colony ship would take, at max thrust!) Using hibernation, and the pre-condition of it being one-way, and all that matters then is the robustness of the vehicle (includes software reliability), how resistant to radiation it is, how much fuel it can carry, how long it can maintain engine impulse, and how long you can keep humans in the freezer.
Who cares if it will take 10,000 years to reach the nearest goldilocks planet at current engine speeds. You have already signed off on ever seeing anyone on earth ever again anyway, and as long as your life support system doesn't fail, and you don't get cooked like a christmas goose from the interstellar medium, you will simply go to sleep, and wake up at the destination. 10,000 years later. (In what is likely to be a rusty tub by then....)
All that's needed are materials and vehicles that can meet the challenges, heavily vetted software and computer hardware, and reliable hibernation.
That is VERY doable. The automated craft can very well function as an automated telemetry probe in the interim, broadcasting data back behind it. The people on earth get hundreds or thouands of years of scientific measurement data, and the colonists get a ride. Both win. (And if the ship has problems, it can wake some of the crew temporarily as needed.)
I don't see any reason why we couldn't be sending people to other star systems, other than political ones.
It may look like we'll never get past Mars right now, but forever is a long time and Extrapolating can lead to faulty conclusions.
Knowledge Brings Fear
I'm pretty sure he's trying to be a pedantic twit...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I think we should send a manned mission to Titan. I would suggest using uranium fission power and ion thrusters, with continuous acceleration over most of the flight. Titan is far enough away to make a worthy goal, like the moon in the 1960s. Landings are dead easy and launches would require relatively low energies.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
that sounds great, and I'm sure by the time it's the future, robotic adventurers will be capable of independent action to the point that when the human species is wiped out or wipes itself out, they will be able to go right on exploring all by themselves. maybe they wont even miss us. so keeping all our eggs on one planet is a great strategy.
I've been a member of the Planetary Society. But, I disagree with the basic thrust of their scientists' stated position on manned space flight.
First, manned flights weren't eating the money that would have gone towards unmanned science missions. We've cut manned flight for over forty years. We've it down to zero, right now. And no money seems to be newly flowing to the unmanned side of the house, is it? False enemy they've made.
Second, we are proceeding at a glacial pace! And even if we launched a fleet every two years, we are still communicating at a top speed of 8 kilobits a second. We've high def cameras that can transmit 4K, yet we are still looking at 1976 Viking-speed photos slowly uploading from Curiosity. What use is this? We can't see nary a damned thing. We need a high speed relay in orbit around Mars, preferably nuclear powered, to beam back a laser signal, or at least short wavelength radio. This is ridiculous. We were supposed to launch one, but, no money. A trillion for other things tho...
Third. The hell with Apollo. Kids, that was a political stunt. No, no NO. We do not send a manned expedition to Mars. We send a colonization wave to Mars, or why bother? Send people to land and stay for life. No get-rocks-and-come-back-yay-science. Live there. And you will get science in petabyte amounts, a whole new world of science. It costs far less to land them without the enormous complexity necessary to send them back. Anyone who wants to spend 9 months in transit most likely never wanted to come back in the first place - these will be true believers. I'd go. Not to mention that if a meteor hits Earth and wipes out all life, Mars will still be there, the backup drive.
Fourth. Space scientists for thirty years have been banging the is-there-life-on-Mars gong, because it was the one facet they thought they could interest Americans in. Give it up. I don't give a damn about the cellular life that might have lived there once. We will never find it, launching a lander every ten years or so. Only humans can find such things, and they have to be there to do it, with hammers and drills and microscopes, right next to the damned rock. Besides which, if you send life to Mars, there WILL be life on Mars. And if we don't, inevitably there won't be any on Earth, either. We can't keep all our bets on the blur marble; it will be hit someday by Lucifer's Hammer.
This is nothing new from Friedman. He's preferred robotic missions to manned for decades.
The only reason he'd be in favor of Mars is that in the 1980s, Planetary Society came out in favor of Mars as a way of enhancing relations with the Soviets (to help avoid what was seen as an ultimately inevitable nuclear war unless relations were normalized). The reason was political rather than scientific. For other missions, manned flight was viewed as taking away funding for unmanned. Van Allen was another of the "stay at home" crowd at Planetary Society.
Since then, events changed some of the rationale for that, but he's on record as being in favor of a manned Mars mission, and it's a little hard to go back on it and not look silly. I really doubt that his antipathy to manned space exploration has changed at all.
Human space flight has so far consisted of series of expensive demo projects. Our one big attempt at building an affordable, reusable low orbit vehicle (the space shuttle) has finally sputtered out. The various private efforts at building spacecraft are steps in the right direction, but very tiny ones. The ISS does some cool science, but doesn't represent the beginning of a real space infrastructure — it can't even provide its inhabitants with clean clothes!
If we want people in space, we need to spend a lot of money on long term goals. That means big, high-orbit reusable vehicles, and finding some way to bootstrap the whole thing economically (asteroid mining? zero-gee factories?), so we don't have to keep coming back to taxpayers who are less and less likely to shell out for blue sky projects. It's technically feasible, but do you see any politician motivated to stake his career on making it happen?
Unless things change drastically (like some genius inventing a practical alternative to chemical rockets, or the Overlords invade and give us some motivation), even a return to the moon is a pipe dream, never mind a trip to Mars. And yet I hear people talking as if it's a done deal.
Jeez, what are you taking, and where can I get a prescription?
What minerals would those be?
The venusian surface is over 500C. It is so hot that there is no mantle convection, and the crust is squishy. There are no carbon compounds in the crust, and all the chemistry in the crust is high temp chemistry.
Unless you are talking things like lead sulfide, which can be made in just a few minutes in a lab, I don't know what you could be referring to.
What venus potentially offers is a geoengineering opportunity.
I have contemplated what I would do concerning venus. That planet will *never* have a natural biosphere containing more than microbes without human intervention. So, here is what I would do:
Genetically engineer atmospheric terrestrial microbes to produce long flagella out of polyaramid plastic. Poly aramid has a thermal breakdown temperature approaching that of venus's surface, but venus also has mountains. The polyaramid "snow" would slowly sequester atmospheric co2, reducing surface temps until the snow could last on the surface, then the process would rapidly accellerate.
The venusian atmosphere is mostly co2, with anhydrous sulfuric acid, nitrogen, and some trace gasses.
The sulfuric acid and co2 are the primary items of interest here: we need microbes that can use anhydrous H2SO4 as their cytoplasmic solvent instead of water, and which can produce any water they would otherwise need through photosynthetic reactions powered by a sulfur cycle metabolism. Once venus cools enough, it has sufficient mass to produce a magnetic dynamo once there is crust convection currents to power it. That means venus will become a lot more interesting, and all we have to do is drop the surface temp.
That's what the germs do; the drop the surface temp, and rain out the CO2 as white plastic fibers. The plastic has a high albedo, and reflects energy back into space, and is sufficiently nonreactive that it will stick around for very long periods. Coupled with continued biological activities, simply seeding the atmosphere with such microbes would initiate the biological transformation of the planet.
The cost of sending fragile, needy bags of meat is far too high with any current, or currently conceivable technology. The energy costs alone make the idea completely silly. Humans in space are a mostly symbolic gesture, and we don't have much use for nationalistic dick waving at this point in our history.
In my lifetime, however, I've seen advances in computing and robotics technology that are staggering. What we really need to do is create machines that can surpass a human's usefulness in space exploration. We've pretty much done that already, actually. What would a human do on mars that the new car-sized rover cannot? What would be the point of sending a human be?
I could think of plenty of reasons why we wouldn't go landing humans on Mercury. Why do you think this is unlikely?
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...
Mercury, not impossible to land on in certain regions
But you'd better not miss...
#DeleteChrome
"blue screen of death" will take on a whole new meaning
David Brin's "Existence". I'm not providing a link to it because while the first 2/3rds was OK the last 1/3 was utter crap. It was like he ran out ideas and just cut and pasted one of his previous short stories into this book solely for the sake of supporting another plot line. And when I mean cut and pasted I mean word for word except where he did a search and replace on *one* of the characters names.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
is mercury full of mercury?
I like this. Is this similar to something Carl Sagan proposed?
And how about Mars? Would it be possible to genetically engineer some organism that could sequester its co2 as well? Some sort of plant that could live on its surface, maybe a darker color to absorb energy and heat the place up rather than reflect it? Would there be any chance of a planetary magnetic field forming? And would there be some way of "applying the brakes" when the process reaches the goldilocks point so that it doesn't overheat?
Pardon my ignorance.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
when i become a biological robot, i want a first birthday to get rid of all the bloatware that has infected my system, so that i can then get a clean linux install
...my only condition would be not to install /usr/bin/toejam.eat
Humankind first set foot on Golgafrincham!
My wife and I were watching a documentary series called 'Wild Pacific' (which was called 'South Pacific' in the UK) which describes islands in the Pacific starting at Indonesia and working eastward. The common theme in the series is that the islands become more spaced out and less and less wildlife gets to each territory. Starts with monkeys and crocodiles, then birds, then just about nothing. What you end up with is Hawaii before humans. If I remember correctly, very few insects, fewer birds, no mammals and no reptiles. A normally loud rain forest in Indonesia is quiet and desolated of life in Hawaii. The estimation for new species showing up before human population is once every 35,000 years.
And this is where Mars is: surrounded by absolute nothing with no way for a species to reliably get there. It may take a long time (and let's hope not 35,000 years) but we will get there.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Mars does not have sufficient mass for the "heat of crystallization" reactions necessary for a stable geomagnetic dynamo to develop. It has a partial one now, but the effects are not sufficient to create a homogenous magnetic envelope, and as such, the planet does not have a magnetosphere. Unlike venus, most of mars' atmosphere has been blasted off by solar radiation.
To make mars naturally interesting would take herculean efforts. You would have to increase the planet's mass considerably, and also replace the missing atmosphere. Inless you want to spend a few millenia dropping meteorites onto mars to bulk it up, mars will always require habitat structure type colonies.
Venus? Spray it, forget it for awhile, then when it has change sufficiently, pay it another visit.
Much cheaper.
No, I don't buy that. Imagine a mechano-electric race advanced enough to be our equals. Now, recall the events surrounding our historic practice of enslaving a race of peers... Now you see the problem with robotic exploration. Once the bots are able to replace the organic explorers, it opens a whole other can of worms.
I don't see us saying: Oh well, our organic bodies are too fragile to live in the harshness of space. I think that merging with the machines and also treating them as independent peers is our best and only hope for long term exploration and survival. Much like clothing technology is our portable shelter solution, we continue to embrace ever more advanced forms of personalized technology: Stone tools / Power tools / Prosthetic limbs; Defibrillator / Pace Maker / Artificial hearts; Magnifiers / Glasses / Contacts / Artificial Eyes; Gramophone / Microphones / Hearing aides / Cellular earpieces / Cochlear Implants / Telepathy... Technology makes us more human.
Think about it: We have the perfect Solar system for a fledgling race... We've got a lush world with various environments to adapt to, a mostly clear sky to see the cosmos through, a huge moon to tease us into space colonization, a nearby planet (Mars) with a similar day/night cycle only lacking atmosphere and magnetic field (which we'll need to overcome for any real space exploration / colonization), An asteroid field rich with resources free of deep expensive gravity wells (and harboring a huge source of water, Ceres), a Brown Dwarf (Jupiter) to study (and use as a gravity slingshot), planets with moons full of rocket fuel (ethane, methane), the list goes on and on -- No other race would be able to contain itself, content with such a sad state of space exploration! The Stars are practically BEGGING you to make the leap! The drake equation won't solve itself!
The machines may be able climb the hurdles first, but you can bet we'll be close behind. Here's hoping we learn form our past mistakes so they'll be willing to give us a hand up and both races can enjoy the view together, as we always have. Otherwise the humans are doomed to die orbiting their Sun. If that's truly the case, then so be it -- The drive to create and explore will be carried on by our mechanical sons -- Those which we value as human traits arise naturally due to neural networks craving new inputs to experience, for that is their primary function and is central to their existence. If Mars is the last stop for us then our spark of life deserves to go out of this Universe. Personally, I wouldn't accept a couch potato's fate.
Mars is a great Training mission, we really should have already been there, and although I am excited by the advances we've made we should be much further along. Is Titan out of the question? well the Moon certainly was and yet we put several vehicles and men on the Moon. It may take us years to develop all of what is needed but it can be done and the only thing really holding us back is budgets. I am all for commercial space but I am more interested in properly funding NASA so the discoveries attained from the mission can be shared in the public domain. NASA needs a bailout, the banking system received a bailout that would pay for NASA operations for decades.
Chief Thinker www.devotedskeptic.com
what about useing stargates or something like them to go past mars.
As long as we stay in this part of the galaxy, we are doomed as a species. When the "big crunch" happens, everything is doomed. Yes, I know that current science says there will never be a "big crunch", but if other people can believe in imaginary super-all-knowing-beings, then I can believe in something more likely.
I don't believe FTL comms or travel will ever happen either. Sorry, I'm an engineer and rocket scientist.
C isn't just a good idea, it's the law.
The farther out humans spread, the better for everyone. That should be intuitively obvious. All our eggs are in 1 basket (Earth). As our basket gets larger (Solar system), we need to keep spreading outside it to reduce risk for the species.
As I said just above, Venus could be terraformed (though not anytime soon obviously) to make it cooler and replace the atmosphere with a human-breathable one. It'd be a great candidate for it. Mercury is likely too hot (and not as easy to terraform, it's just too close to the Sun). However, there's plenty of moons that might be habitable by humans, though of course we'd probably have to always stay in airtight habitats. There's tons of asteroids and dwarf planets (like Ceres) that might be good candidates for mining. There's quite a few very large moons around Saturn and Jupiter, and of course there's our own Moon which has 1/6g gravity; Io, Ganymede, Titan, Europa, and Callisto all have about the same gravity.
Mercury seems to be quite cold in certain regions. According to the Wikipedia article, there's craters where it's believed there's ice. Those would be good locations for human habitats. I don't know why anyone would want to live there, however, except for research and for mining, but it looks like it could be done.
Going into the sci-fi area, since we know so much about Mars' atmosphere, is it possible to develop a strain of bacteria or other life form of life that could be transported to Mars to terraform it?
yea but we could decrease the complexity of the habitat to a great degree probably, with few nicely chosen microbes, and maybe eventually plants.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
1. We aren't adapted to cold weather. Naked humans will quickly die in any climate more than around 25-30 degrees north or south of the equator. Science fiction has speculated that someday we will find a way, perhaps with genetic engineering, to live in these cold climates. Pipe dreams. It will never happen. Instead we will send robots with cameras to live in these places for us.
2. Human beings are land animals. We have lungs, not gills and no flippers to allow us to move efficiently. We will never be able to explore or spend any significant amount of time underwater. Nor will we ever be able to cross oceans are any large bodies of water. Unless we can genetically engineer humans with gills and flippers or just send robots.
3. Human beings are slow. We will never be able to travel great distances because of this. Human beings are too slow to outrun most animals. Surely we are doomed to extinction since we have no way to escape from the certain death of any predator's jaws.
4. Human beings are weak. We will never survive as a species because we cannot defend ourselves with our pathetic fists and feet and a mouth not adapted for defense.
5. Human flight is perhaps the most absurd pipe dream of them all. Totally ridiculous. If we were intended to fly we would have wings and feathers like birds and a much lighter body. This will only ever happen in science fiction. Instead we will design and build robotic birds with video cameras.
The real reason human beings haven't already established permanent bases on many of the Jovian moons is that we as a species just haven't cared enough to do so. We could have had missions to those places in the 1970s. We could have had bases on Titan. Cassini-Huygens took only 7 years to get there. It's really not that far even with current technology. Since it isn't a technology issue, humans could have made it to Titan in the 70s. Certainly by 1980. We probably could have had a permanent base restocked by resupply ships every 5 years by 1990. The fact that we could have had a permanent lunar base since the 70s should make it obvious that the lack of human presence in space is an issue of will (money) and not technological impossibility.
Not only could humans have been walking around on Titan right now sending videos of that dark, smoggy world back to us, but we could have Humans almost halfway to Alpha Centauri by now as well. We discovered a means to do this in the 1960s with the Orion project. Admittedly the method is untested with full scale prototypes, but no one has shown why it cannot work. If the project had continued we could probably have built an interstellar capable craft by the late 80s after having launched many interplanetary craft.
If you assume an interstellar Orion launched from the earth or from an Earth-Moon Lagrange point by, say, 1987 then it would already have been traveling for a quarter century by now. About 28% of the 88 year journey at 0.05c. At the very least we could have been working on a giant city-sized Orion with parts constructed on the moon and ferried to the nearby Earth-Moon L1 or L2 Lagrange point for final assembly and have partially completed the giant craft by now. But, for better or worse, our species has chosen not to engage in such grand projects. That's fine, but don't ever forget that it was a matter of choice. We have simply chosen not to spend the money or the time on such grand schemes. An alien species, noting how far our space travel abilities exceeded our actual accomplishments, might wonder how such a lazy species could have survived for so long. We tend to flatter ourselves by thinking that we are a curious species motivated by the possibility and awe and wonder of new discoveries, but really we are not.
I was expecting some kind of chemistry argument about how oxygen is impossible to recycle or generate and CO2 is impossible to scrub, but he never made one. Robots have the advantage that they are cheaper and that they don't require oxygen or even a pressurized, temperature controlled, radiat
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Yeah, Mars is probably the limit for a long time. Don't compare this to any voyage of discovery we've undertaken before. Tis is like is transition of life from water to land. Space travel is moving into a completely different, hostile environment. It may take a new form of life... robotic life... to make that transition.
If the only thing you can see from space travel is picking up rocks and taking pictures, I pitty you. We have the technology, NOW, to build generational spaceships. As it stands, it's only a matter of time before we build one, nevermind what future technology might bring. Also, the idea that we will be "interacting virtually" with robots on distant plantets is complete idiocy. It has the exact same problem as manned space travel, the speed of light. It already takes at least a half hour for radio signals to get to Terra from Mars, from MARS. We have already reached the limit of interactivity, and that's on the nearest planet in our little stellar system on the bleak edge of the galaxy.
You are failing to grasp just how *blindingly fast* our technological capabilities are progressing.
You think we would progress faster if we were all scientists? Do you also fail to grasp that every great technology needs a great economy (full of specialization in every domain) to support it? Are you really blind to our need to farm food, scrub toilets, process income tax documents, and make video games?
If you want to lament something, lament your own ignorance, because *you* are the one who is missing the big picture.
The problem with Venus is a hydrogen shortage caused by the lack of a magnetosphere. Whether one would start up by cooling is very questionable as the planet is barely rotating and I don't believe the crust has anything to do with the magnetic dynamo operating thousands of miles below the crust.
Would be interesting to land a few seismometers and get an idea of the internals of Venus. The assumption that it is similar to Earth is just that, an assumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The problem with Jupiter's large satellites is radiation. Ganymede might be doable but the rest are too radioactive.
Titan seems the best bet, air pressure just a bit higher then Earths but you would need good insulation as it's damn cold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
... will gain nothing.
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/grav/primer.php
Though perhaps your confusion is the fault of the person who coined the misleading name in the first place.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Venus does have a hydrogen shortage. That's why it would have to get the hydrogen from the sulfuric acid.
The sulfuric acid itself would actually rain like water if the temperature equilibrium was punctured. Interestingly, the aramid plastic is soluble in concentrated sulfuric acid, and it doesnt get more concentrated than anhydrous. This means that if an ocean of the shit could be coaxed into existence, a considerable amount of aramid could be dissolved.
The oxidation of the sulfuric acid (removal of hydrogen, rather than addition of oxygen in this case) would create free oxygen and sulfur dioxide gas. The free oxygen would be bound to the hydrogen inside the organism, allowing it to create water from the sulfuric acid, and exrete sulfur dioxide waste. It would only do this to a limited extent, as needed. the organisms would need to be designed to be very miserly with biotically produced water.
As for the lack of convection being a supposed source for the lack of a magnetosphere, that is not MY supposition, I do have a cite:
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/30/11/987
The geochemistry of venus would be radically different from earth when cooled down enough, (sulfuric acid oceans, crustal deposits of sulfur, and atmospheric sulfur oxides, dissolved aramid plastics in the ocean, etc.) but hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. Being closer to the sun, the solar wind near venus will be stronger. It may be possible for venus to capture hydrogen ions from the solar wind over time if a magentic dynamo could be established. Other options would be to purposefully get comets to smash into venus, as they often contain methane and water ice, both rich in hydrogen. It being uninhabited, the damage to the ancient crust would actually help poke holes in it and help it release trapped mantle heat better. Of course, it would destroy comets, which arent particularly common in a solar system that is as old as ours.
Other sources could be radiogenically produced hydrogen from alpha particle emission from man-made fusion devices on venus. (Fusing heavy elements at a loss, simply to make the missing hydrogen. The excessive sulfur would be a good candidate, being considerably lighter than iron, and as such far easier to coax into this role. Widespread deployment of farnsworth fusors working with elemental sulfur dimer plasma might work, but a reliable energy supply would be needed. It would also be nasty to the fusor..... but you win some, and lose some.)
Genetically engineer atmospheric terrestrial microbes
Just curious, what would the flagella producing engineered terrestrial microbes do for water once they were in the Venusian atmosphere?
Here's an interesting question, If you could wrap a superconductor all the way round Mars' equator, how much current would need to be flowing in it to give it a decent protective magnetic field? .5 gauss field in a 3500km radius coil. Seems like a lot, but not impossible. Assume a thousand turns, then its only 280 thousamd amps. :)
I found a calculator that seems to say about 280 million amps would give you a
You'd probably want to do it with multiple coils at higher lattitudes though. Maybe two coils at 45 North and South?
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
the problem is the time scale of venus.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Yup. There is an epic shitton of carbon dioxide to snow out. (pretty much the whole damned atmosphere.)
But then again, the microbes would be growing in "ideal" conditions, (for them anyway.. they are engineered for it.) without natural predators.
Also, the lower atmosphere is almost thick enough to swim in. As a human. The microbes would have very little trouble staying suspended. There could be whole clouds of the things on venus in just a few years.
We are narrow-minded and arrogant to believe that we are the only fish in the sea.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I wonder if he wasn't misunderstood, he could be saying that by the time we wish to travel to distant worlds, we'll have brain scanning and other tech to where we have already given up the need for physical bodies with hard limits on life spans and no backup copies, opting to be virtual / uploaded consciousnesses - able to construct bodies at the far end if we wish but not having to physically transport our hairy human carcasses all that way. By the time we physically installed a transmitter at the far end most of the interstellar travel might be by laser or radio communication.
Yes, by definition. Just like Venus is full of Venus.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.