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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.
Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.
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.
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.
The timescale required to move to another planet at our current rate of technological advancement is trivial compared to the length of time that will pass before the sun expands to a diameter that would significantly affect temperatures on the planets in the solar system -- let alone "eat" them.
Even if it took us one hundred thousand years to settle Venus, the sun would have barely changed in that time frame.
On Venus, no need to stick your head out the window into the atmosphere. The atmosphere will eat through the walls and into you.
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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.
This is the only reason people live in Canada. Because if you're high enough, you don't really care about the climate.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Excellent job extrapolating from 50 to infinity. Malthus would be proud.
Every end has half a stick.
I don't think it would take long at all for changes to happen. I believe nature moves quicker than we realize.
It's all relative, really. Since evolution is inherited then the pace of change is measured in the number of generations. It might only take a hundred generations to start showing noticeable changes. Of course, we could just bring fruit flies and bean plants and start to see their changes much faster.
Of course, if evolution has any say at all then it needs to be related to breeding. Anyone with a trait more suited to their environment needs to pass on their genes more than others. If some guy is born one day with red eyes that let him see through the clouds and hair all over his face that protects him from the things in the atmosphere then that's going to be for nothing if no woman wants to have his kids.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
NASA had proposed several Apollo to Venus back in the 1970's, including a triple flyby that would take 800 days. The rational back then was to keep funding to manned space program going after the Moon landings were completed.
https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/manned-venus-flyby/
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.
IMO, it's mainly that the rest of the Universe is so much more vast than this one world, and inhabiting any part of it besides Earth will likely require some kind of artificial environment. If humans figure out how to live indefinitely on Mars or Venus, we can eventually do the same in most other star systems, of which there are billions just in this galaxy.
The Soviet landers lasted more than a half hour. But they did require massive cooling systems.
Table-ized A.I.
By the time off-world colonies are viable, pollution on Earth will be a non-issue, because the exact same technology needed to sustain an offworld colony is the technology that would allow us to clean and recycle absolutely everything here on Earth. Because that's exactly what you need for a self-sustaining offworld colony: recycled everything. On Earth, we're lucky enough to have a natural biosphere that gives us tons of recycling capacity for free: just dump wastewaster and CO2 and feces into the wilderness and, like a miracle, fresh air blows back, clean water falls from the sky, and food grows out of what was once someone's shit. Up to a certain capacity at least. If we can't even manage to recycle the excess of ours that that massive free hand up nature gives us can't handle, then we're nowhere close to being able to settle offworld where we have to do all of that work ourselves.
Like you say, Antarctica or the desert or, hell, the ocean floor, would all be a cakewalk compared to anywhere off Earth.
There is good reason to settle offworld when we can (not keeping all our eggs in one basket), but until we're capable of even settling all of the comparably idyllic places on our own planet that aren't "worth settling" at the current difficulty levels, then we don't stand a chance of settling anywhere offworld.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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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.
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Better to have all your eggs in one basket than to throw your eggs on the floor.
If survival of the human race in case of catastrophe on earth were the goal, building underground bunkers or underwater would be the sensible course of action. You could much more easily survive deep under the earth even in the event of huge asteroid impact that kills the entire surface population, compared to surviving on Mars or Venus.
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I expect those who grow up in space, or in a colony, to be habitually _very careful_. This puts 'kidproofing' at a whole new level.
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As someone who is involved (peripherally) in the "New Space" movement, IMHO the first purpose of space development will be the availability of new resources and technologies. An economist a couple of years ago predicted that space development would have the potential to increase the standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10. That seems optimistic to me, but a reasonable goal. One popular example (see Planetary Resources, Inc.) regards the availability of Platinum, which is a very useful industrial metal, but is unfortunately $1300 per ounce. Platinum mining is expensive, dangerous, and disastrous both ecologically and socially. This greatly restricts is usefulness although it is used in those expensive catalytic converters in your car - that's why they're expensive. The best astronomical physicists believe that some of the Near Earth Asteroids contain single-digit percentages of Platinum. If this is true, then a 100 meter asteroid would contain a dozen times as much Platinum as has ever been mined. Retrieving this material to Earth could drop the price to between $10 and $100 per ounce, and this would still be economically viable for the company to process in space and ship it down to Earth.
There are many other examples. Technologically, the range of industrial processes that are presently either expensive or impossible on Earth due to gravity and air, that could be done in the high vacuum and microgravity of space is broad but it is likely that an order of magnitude more new processes that have not even been envisioned yet will be discovered or invented. Orbital production of high quality integrated circuits might well be one - one of the most expensive aspects of IC manufacturing is the requirement to build a huge facility and maintain a high level clean room environment. In space that could be done with not much more than a bit of Mylar.
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"men [are] from Mars and women from Venusâ"and that each gender is acclimated to its own planet[...]"
and relationship books are from Uranus
Viability isn't just technological know-how. If we aren't ready to build biodomes in Anarctica or the Sahara or the seafloor, or to deploy the technologies used in them to regulate the "biodome" that is the whole planet -- even if it's just for economic or political reason -- then we're obviously not ready to build them in space either.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."