Slashdot Mirror
First Human Colonies Should Be Among Venus' Clouds
StartsWithABang writes: When we talk about humans existing on worlds other than Earth, the first choice of a planet to do so on is usually Mars, a world that may have been extremely Earth-like for the first billion years of our Solar System or so. Perhaps, with enough ingenuity and resources, we could terraform it to be more like Earth is today. But the most Earth-like conditions in the Solar System don't occur on the surface of Mars, but rather in the high altitudes of Venus' atmosphere, some 50-65 km up. Despite its harsh conditions, this may be the best location for the first human colonies, for a myriad of good, scientific reasons. NASA proposed something similar last year and released a report on the subject.
When you think of space colonization, you very likely think of the important things that humans need for life:
water,
sunlight,
the right temperatures,
sources of food,
sources of energy,
and the ability to create or exist in a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Well not having an atmosphere that consists of 900 degree sulfuric acid also comes to mind.
At least with the moon or mars you aren't quite that dependent on active no fail technology to keep you alive.
Ya moving to the closest planet to the sun being the first planet to get eaten by our sun when it expands and their is no question that will happen, is a great idea..Not. . Might make a great Movie plot though.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Yes, but Mars has toxins like no air in the atmosphere.
On both planets, if you stick your head out the window, you're going to die. On one of them though, you have ready sources of water etc.
From TFA:
build a 1" thick hull out of steel in our desired shape,
fill it with the same gases at the same temperatures and pressures in Earth's atmosphere,
and let that baby loose on Venus.
I'm no aerodynamicist, but common sense tells me that the volume of your balloon city will have to be very large and the amount of 1" thick steel you need to bring from Earth will be so massive, most Mars colony proposals will seem lightweight in comparison. Might as well just go to Mars.
On Venus, no need to stick your head out the window into the atmosphere. The atmosphere will eat through the walls and into you.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I always get a kick out of the fact that some of the same people who think solar energy will never be viable will embrace the idea of human colonies in the clouds over Venus or on Mars.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Say, people are beginning to pay attention. High enough, the climate is nice. Possibly not as nice as Jamaica. But nicer than, say, the moon:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...
or
http://www.universetoday.com/1...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It would be interesting to see how human beings from different colonies on different planets evolve to adapt to their new environments, and I don't think it would take long at all for changes to happen. I believe nature moves quicker than we realize.
Venus? A floating colony in Venus's atmosphere is the very definition of "fail deadly". Anything goes wrong you are dead, whether dead quickly or dead slowly. Plus, given the conditions on Venus, if there ever was an ecology, it has long been reduced to ash. It is also not likely we could terraform Venus (reduce the atmosphere and spin it up) given the resources of the entire solar system to do so.
If I were planning humanity's journey to the stars, I'd go with the moon first, followed by Ceres. Resource rich, low gravity, and far enough out of the Earth's (in the moon's case) and the Sun's (in Ceres' case) gravity well to make exploring other places much easier.
Place large, thick glass domes on the surface of Venus. Would be impervious to the acid and could withstand the atmospheric pressure.
Not at 900 degrees they wouldn't!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The Venusian women are much sexier than Earth women... or so I read.
Sure 16 cm of borosilicate glass could do the job of holding back 1300 PSI but where is the air conditioner going to dump the heat? And people will go outside through a "lock" in a "suit" to do what on plains of hardened lava? That's a weird kind of hot loving robot's job, exploring the surface of venus.
Yes, but Mars has toxins like no air in the atmosphere.
I'm having trouble with that sentence. Are you defining "no air" as a toxin? Because, if so, you don't know what a toxin is.
On one of them though, you have ready sources of water etc.
I like that "etc". Yes, on Venus you ready sources of water, "et cetera". Ready sources of atmospheric sulphuric acid, ready sources of carbon dioxide, ready sources of ridiculous atmospheric pressure (densest atmosphere), ready sources of extreme heat (hottest planet), ready sources of constant hurricane-force winds, ready sources of organic life sterilization, ready sources of a surface resembling classic descriptions of Hell, you know, "et cetera". Also, in the same sense as "no air" is a toxin, Venus also has a ready source of no magnetic field and a ready source of no carbon cycle.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
How about large, thick glass domes on the surface of Mars? Then you only need to worry about things going on inside the domes instead of outside. Venus still has volcanoes, you know. And those constant hurricane-force winds, combined with surface particulates like sand, have a certain effect on glass that you might not be too thrilled about.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
A lot of the brainstorming and preliminary engineering requirements have already been rigorously tested.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki...
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
Venus is an ideal planet for terraforming. Just purge the toxins from the atmosphere and drop the pressure a bit and you've got a really nice place. This living in a balloon? Your resource usage (mostly energy) is going to be rather high.
It always struck me as kind of crazy that anybody talks about building colonies on Mars, the moon, Venus, or anywhere off-world. I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but the fact of the matter is that we already have a planet with suitable gravity, and breathable air.
We're not even close to using up all of the available space on this planet. Why would we build on Mars when we have Antarctica? Why build on Venus when we have giant empty deserts in Nevada?
On Earth, a cracked window doesn't mean that everybody will suffocate or be pulled apart by a vacuum. Plus, it comes with plenty of raw materials and suitable gravity.
No matter how bad Earth gets pollution-wise, I just can't see off-world colonies as realistic until we use up the land we already have.
leak in your bio-dome doesn't
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
I wish there were an easy way to do that. No one seems to have a workable solution.
My proposal would be to build a reflective artificial ring around the planet to divert the sunlight away and help Venus cool off enough to where we can work on the chemistry issue. The ring would be a sort of shield -- one we could even expand and contract to regulate the cooling and stabilize at a comfortable temperature.
Venus's atmosphere has a lot of CO2 and sulfuric acid we'd have to find a way to chemically alter and/or store.
The other thing people forget about Venus is that it rotates retrograde -- a year on Venus is 225 days ( no big deal), but a day on Venus is almost 117 Earth days. Any base would have to take into account the lack of sunlight for months at a time - so, something to augment solar panels and any crops need to adjust to the odd seasonality or be grown indoors. I suppose the same reflective ring could be used to reflect some light to the dark side of the planet to help with that issue.
Eh, it's nice to think about, but we'll never approve the resources to build a planet-wide ring around Venus. We barely support a tiny international space station as it is.
The Soviet landers lasted more than a half hour. But they did require massive cooling systems.
Table-ized A.I.
We can finally visit our "cloud servers" while there
Table-ized A.I.
And I never realized why they live in the sky, it was because of climate change!
I had an idea a while back, that actually relates to TFA. Genetically engineered bacteria or simple organisms that could float and live in the Venusian atmosphere and gradually begin to 'fix' the sulfides and whatever - maybe pooping out metallic sulfur. For the first long while, they would be working at the top of the atmosphere. Their poop would drift down and re-vaporize (absorbing energy and lowering the temperature). When they died, they would drift down into deeper layers and get to the point where their bodies would be heated back up to the point where the materials would be turned back into gas. But as they became more populous, gradually they would reduce the amount of solar energy (especially if their bodies were reflective), and the temperature. Eventually the might be able to reduce the temperature to the point where their poop, or that of their successors, would fall to the surface, permanently eliminating the sulfides from the air.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
"men [are] from Mars and women from Venusâ"and that each gender is acclimated to its own planet[...]"
and relationship books are from Uranus
I'm not sure Venus is very ideal for terraforming. You have to make assumptions like 1) we develop a bacteria that absorbs sunlight and splits CO2 into C and O2, 2) that bacteria is 100% efficient, and 3) We have 3000 years to wait.
If you can make it to Mars, land and build a self-sufficient colony there you probably have developed the technology to build ships that can serve as the same thing, permanently in space. i.e. You have solved fusion power, space radiation deflection and the atomic level reconstitution of matter, nano deconstruction and manufacturing. We are not there yet, but the technology will exist within the next 50 years if technological progress continues to accelerate. So why would you want to deal with all the problems a big gravity well (massive object like a planet) causes? Why mess with planets when there is an entire asteroid belt to convert in to materials?
Why? Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere. Until this is remediated, any atmosphere will be whisked away by the solar winds.
Venus has a magnetosphere. We could and should start not terraforming Venus, but "atmosphere-ing" Venus so that it can then be terraformed. Develop bacteria that live in the Venusian extremes, eat sulfuric acid and output fixed sulfur and H2O. Let the process run. We can then handle the rest.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Why don't we just explode loads of H-bombs on the side nearest the Sun, so it gets blown further away from the Sun and cools down naturally?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
One of Arthur C Clarke's books - I think it was the last Odyssey one - featured people slinging comets from the kuiper belt towards Venus. No idea how realistic that is, but they were expecting it to take centuries or even millennia, can't quite remember now. I imagine the impacts and ejecta from the impacts would have all sorts of effects on the surface.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
No I'm not kidding.
Sure, glass doesn't need to be brought to melting point to be weakened though.
Glass starts to become malleable around 580C or so.
This is still above the surface temperature of Venus. But I'm still not convinced that, long term, such a construct would retain structural integrity.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yes a Colony on Venus would have water and sunlight but they would still be at the bottom of a gravity well(same for Mars). It would make more sense to establish a colony in space where you could find water and minerals in asteroids. Supply ships would not need to overcome gravity and return flights could take back precious minerals that would help fund the expense.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Sure, you could float your colony in the atmosphere of Venus. But since you're basically creating a fully sealed, self contained system, why not just put it in space? Why bother with Venus at all?
Ok, it does have a few advantages over that. You get gravity for free (91% of Earth gravity). You get radiation shielding. You have access to some raw materials - but only what you can get from the upper atmosphere. You're not heading down to the surface to mine anything there! But all of those things are easily achieved in space. Rotate the colony to get gravity. Mine raw materials from asteroids or the moon. Use a physical barrier or a magnetic field to block radiation. And you have two huge advantages:
1. You don't have to worry about the outside of your colony frequently being exposed to clouds of sulfuric acid.
2. Venus is a really long way away! Having your colony much closer to Earth will make building it much cheaper and easier, and also make transportation a lot easier once it's built.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Terraforming Venus may be no easier than terraforming Mars. Both are probably practically impossible, given that adapting human technologies to subsist on either planet will probably involve less tech than allowing humans to live on either planet. We'd still get the large majority of our living area from the asteriods.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Go away, you idiot. You have no value beyond the production of noise and a foul smell. Face it APK, your efforts have amounted to little more than fart gas.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Did you read this APK? Other people here see you for what you are. We don't post to help you - we post in the hope that you'll eventually go away and let the adults enjoy their conversation. Nothing I or anyone else say will affect your behaviour though because you're incapable of critical thought.
Prove me right by crap-flooding some more!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
What the hell would be the point of an orbiting colony? The expense is astronomical (er, sorry...), the logistics are mind-boggling, and the huge technological barriers to colonizing another planet are flippantly brushed away with as-yet nonexistent sci-fi solutions. There's nothing to be gained by having humans living in orbit of another planet. None of the hinted-at scientific discoveries, no miraculous breakthroughs in materials science have occurred, nothing. The great advances made in astronomy and space exploration since the moon landing have been achieved with unmanned probes: this is the future of space exploration. Sending people up there is not beneficial in relation to its extremely high cost: hell, if huge amounts of gold were as close as orbiting the earth, there's no possible way it could even be cost-effective to retrieve it.
Funny how you don't count the -1 posts against your ratio. I expect that would change it significantly.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
maybe something could survive in the high atmosphere that could then work its way down as change progressed. Really this might even be within our current grasp, sending the probes to distribute the stuff is a solved problem. Phase two would be for the future, of diverting comets to rain down some water (pun intended) on the place. And there's no worry of screwing up a planet as there might be in say Mar's or certain gas giant moon cases; Venus is as screwed already as can get