Momentum is building to explore Venus • Hacker News Board

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#91

Post by mandevil » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:37 PM UTC

SaberTail wrote: post #54

I'm glad Venus is getting more attention. Mars seems to get the most attention as a place to visit, but we seem to ignore Venus. Venus has a few things going for it that I think make it a better choice for permanent human habitation than Mars. * Venus has nearly Earth-like gravity (8.9 m/s² instead of 9.8 m/s²) * The atmosphere 50 km above the surface is the right temperature for liquid water, and has a similar atmos…

The Soviet Union always put more attention on Venus, and the US more on Mars. From what I can tell this dates back to before there were actual space programs, so I strongly suspect this has to do with the science fiction in the respective languages.

For example in H.G. Wells 1898 War of the Worlds, the bad guys are from Mars, Edgar Rice Burroghs John Carter series is about Mars, etc. whereas engineer cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktsitov wrote that when he was 10 (~1936) he came to a sad realization. Since going into space was better than everything else, any effort he put into anything other than going into space was wasted effort, BUT by the time he got the Ph.D he would need to contribute to that program men would already be on Venus, so he would never be the first to anything[1]. I don't know Russian language sci-fi well enough to guess what the source for this (or maybe was it Tsiolkovsky? dunno), but that suggests to me that the Soviet interest in Venus wasn't just because the US had a stranglehold on Mars or anything like that, it was because Venus spoke to them in the same way that Mars did to Americans. Any Russian speakers can confirm?

[1]: He ended up as Sergei Korolev's right hand man, and was tasked by the Chief Designer himself with stripping all the safety devices out of the Vostok capsule so that it could hold three men [Vokshod]. When Feoktistov objected, Korolev told him if he did a good job, he'd get to take it into space, and Feoktistov accepted the challenge.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#92

Post by FrojoS » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #79

mirimir wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I doubt that runaway greenhouse warming could get so extreme for Earth. I recall reading that solar input…

> 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…

Pure speculation, but agriculture or the the equivalent of the industrial revolution might have been enough to create a runaway greenhouse effect. I find it easy to imagine how our civilization could have gone extinct due to fossil fuel use without ever getting anything close to orbital velocity.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#93

Post by tfha » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

wuliwong wrote: post #87

hathawsh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to cool it down. We could float a platform about 49.5 km above the surface of Venus, where the temperature and pressure nearly match the earth at sea level. To launch a probe, we could simply drop it from the platform. This article about Venus is very enlightening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus

Just because you are at sea level, you can't suddenly float stuff in the air. I like your optimism though. :) I was imaging a floating city like cloud city in star wars [0]. [0] https://www.starwars.com/databank/cloud-city

This is a bit more thought out than perhaps OP applied, several theretical investigations have been done into floating cities on venus and it more or less comes down to building blimps out of gasses like nitrogen and oxygen. Because the venus atmosphere is so dense, this would actually work.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#94

Post by modzu » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:40 PM UTC

sfkdjf9j3j wrote: post #85

modzu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well you said it: we know exactly how to heat up mars (greenhouse gases) but its not so clear how to cool down venus. also mars has water.

I wouldn't say we know exactly how to heat up Mars. Without a magnetic field, any atmosphere we conjure out of the polar regions would escape into space. We are far, far closer to completely reversing the effects of climate change on Earth than we are to teraforming Mars.

well obviously we'd need orbiters that generate an artificial magnetic field my man!

http://www.nifs.ac.jp/report/NIFS-886.pdf

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#95

Post by gnulinux » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

theseadroid wrote: post #41

gnulinux wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know? Can we go to Mars today? What if earth gets destroyed before we can emigrate to Mars? (assume that Mars is a clone of earth i.e. the same conditions we have in Earth) Also it's possible earth wasn't suitable for Venisian life back then.

Say if we suddenly realize earth is going to be unsuitable for all life forms in a year. What would we do? I would fire as many rockets as possible to Mars, carrying all kind of life forms on earth, and hope a few of them will survive and possibly evolve to Mars' environment.

We do know at this rate earth will be unsuitable for human life in the future and we do almost nothing about. If it were just next year, maybe we would do more about it. But my point is we can't do much since we don't have the technology to go to Mars. Emigrating to Mars is an unsolved problem and it can remain unsolved before we wreck the planet.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#96

Post by hathawsh » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

tfha wrote: post #93

wuliwong wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you are at sea level, you can't suddenly float stuff in the air. I like your optimism though. :) I was imaging a floating city like cloud city in star wars [0]. [0] https://www.starwars.com/databank/cloud-city

This is a bit more thought out than perhaps OP applied, several theretical investigations have been done into floating cities on venus and it more or less comes down to building blimps out of gasses like nitrogen and oxygen. Because the venus atmosphere is so dense, this would actually work.

I would love to read about those investigations. Do you have any pointers?

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#97

Post by aweawesome » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:47 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #89

modzu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well you said it: we know exactly how to heat up mars (greenhouse gases) but its not so clear how to cool down venus. also mars has water.

Mars' atmosphere is 95.3% carbon dioxide, which means that the problem we have to solve is not "how do we inject craptons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere" but "how do we stop the solar wind from stripping away the atmosphere," which is not a problem we have a clear idea as to how to solve.

Sure but we got to survive till we could clear carbon dioxide

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#98

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #79

mirimir wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I doubt that runaway greenhouse warming could get so extreme for Earth. I recall reading that solar input…

> 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 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.

If you have the technology to do that, but don't have the civilization infrastructure to support it, then escape/colonization might well cease to be a viable option. A global warming catastrophe could well precipitate a collapse of global civilization, in precisely the initially slow, sneaking way which might catch a global civilization unprepared. The Romans knew things were breaking down, but the generation which was invaded by the Vandals didn't think it was quite that time yet. Global civilization might well kick the can down the road with building their sun-shield, then get caught with its pants down, when civilization starts crumbling, and it loses the industrial know-how to pull it off.

How about a downer Sci-fi story, where the closing scene is of a Flat-Venuser enclave surviving in a subvenusian tunnel, telling half understood mythological stories of the long dead Eloi and their plot to blot out the sun?

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#99

Post by Robotbeat » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

gnulinux wrote: post #18

albemuth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they would have just gone to Earth

How do you know? Can we go to Mars today? What if earth gets destroyed before we can emigrate to Mars? (assume that Mars is a clone of earth i.e. the same conditions we have in Earth) Also it's possible earth wasn't suitable for Venisian life back then.

We're trying.

I think these things are path dependent. There's not a particularly good, short-term, economic reason to go to Mars and build it up enough to be self-sustaining. However long term, it probably does improve our civilization's and species' (and perhaps life's) chance at survival. Unfortunately, we're not terribly good at long-term decision making.

It could very well be that there was a window when the hypothetical Venusian civilization had the capacity to leave en masse to Earth but by the time the matter had become pressing enough, it was too late.

For instance, it could be that advanced geoengineering techniques were able to hold off the effects of warming for thousands or tens of thousands of years which reduced the urgency leaving Venus, but over time the cost to maintain such systems became much too expensive and then some crisis (global war?) destroyed the geoengineering scheme, quickly heating Venus and destroying the advanced technological civilization and/or putting it into terminal decline.

Point is you have to do such things when you have the chance, not necessarily when it seems most pressing.

As Randall Monroe has said, "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." https://xkcd.com/893/

We went to the Moon ~50 years ago and soon stopped. It was somewhat of a historical accident that we went at all. It's not obvious that we will return in the future (even those efforts to go to the Moon or Mars face voices calling on even private efforts to be stopped). The future has not been written, and we don't know that it'll end up in the positive direction. But we, today, have the power to try.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#100

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #49

gnulinux wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know? Can we go to Mars today? What if earth gets destroyed before we can emigrate to Mars? (assume that Mars is a clone of earth i.e. the same conditions we have in Earth) Also it's possible earth wasn't suitable for Venisian life back then.

Because the level of destruction imposed on Venus implies a degree of power a great deal beyond what we have now. Venus has 93 times the atmosphere of Earth. Wrecking Earth's atmosphere to that extent on a short time frame due to intelligent life's activity isn't just burning a tons of hydrocarbons, it would be going out to the Solar System and pulling in mass in quantity to be dropped in to the atmosphere. By the ti…

They wouldn't have had to wreck their atmosphere to that extent so quickly. What if they wrecked their atmosphere more slowly, then experienced a slow global collapse of civilization due to the climate change? There could have been a "phase change" event where they retained technology, but quickly lost the ability to engage in the magnitude of project required to save their planet. "We of Souvenusia do not trust the people of Norvenusia to act in good faith in the sun-shield project!" Venusian civilization devolves into global war. Then the climate has warmed up to the point, where their wartime activities trigger a global methane clathrate catastrophe.

It's especially not particularly plausible that it just so happens that life did it to Venus using exactly what happens to be a fashionable thing to talk about here on Earth at this exact time.

But it could make for a timely, marketable, ripping good novel!