Momentum is building to explore Venus

> Why couldn't you vacuum insulate the electronics and place some kind of radiative cooling on top of them?

Radiative cooling only works if you have a hot source and a relatively cooler sink - on Earth, usually the atmosphere.

On Venus the atmosphere is ~462 °C at the surface, so it's going to be much hotter than your electronics - so your sink will be hotter than your source, so the "raditaive cooling" will run in reverse.

Also, the atmospheric pressure on Venus is very high - 92 atmospheres at the surface - the equivalent of being 1km underwater on Earth. Maintaining a vacuum chamber with this much outside pressure (not to mention temperature) would be an incredible feat of materials engineering - and would probably by extremely heavy.

You would also still need sensors and communications outside your vacuum chamber, otherwise your expensive probe can't actually do anything useful.

I know this isn't what you mean by "studied," but here's a NASA produced video mockup of manned blimps over Venus: https://youtu.be/0az7DEwG68A

From the link:

> This year, the Venera-D team released a report that covered a number of potential additions, including a balloon that could explore the cloudy atmosphere.

my comment was in response to parent saying venus was a better candidate for colonization than mars.

but i am totally on board with exploring venus, although im not convinced the atmospheric issues are significantly lesser than the surface, just different (hurricane winds, sulfuric acid, etc)

> I see no reason why intelligent life with high technology could not have developed on Venus. Say, several hundred million years ago. And perhaps they triggered runaway greenhouse warming, which vaporized the oceans. And so perhaps it was the loss of the oceans that ended plate tectonics, not the other way around.

The only way that thought experiment could make sense is if they had the technology to do that, but not the technology to escape Venus and get to Earth.

Think about it; several hundred million years ago, Earth was habitable; maybe not for modern humans (but I bet we could do it - though uncomfortably), but definitely life existed in some form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

So there was liquid water, and the Earth wasn't a Dante-esque hellscape of volcanos and lava, etc. It was probably much warmer and more humid, but overall not crazy to live on.

So if your situation was dire enough, and you had the technology to escape the planet (which you'd almost have to, if you had the energy resources to cause your own global warming and demise scenario) - wouldn't you at least try?

So either they tried and failed in some manner (never reaching Earth), or they succeeded (meaning?) or something in between.

Even if they didn't try, with the level of technology, wouldn't they at least have left something behind in the solar system that we'd recognised as created by intelligent life long ago? Some artifact somewhere?

Maybe they did, and we haven't found it (space is big - the solar system is a big place); but I'd almost expect there'd be something orbiting Venus that was artificial (though maybe again, we can't detect it from here - too small, likely inactive, etc). I guess a good question would be, if you were on Venus (or even in Venusian orbit) - could you detect Earth's satellites currently orbiting Earth? Could you detect a singular one (last of its kind) in a degraded, virtually inert state? Again, I don't know.

It's a bit fascinating to think about; part of me wants to say "we should be able/have found something by now" if such a scenario were real - but at the same time, I can think of reasons why we haven't or can't...