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Momentum is building to explore Venus

nature.com

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Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#111

Post by aeternus »

thebooktocome wrote: post #39
theandrewbailey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which environments are you referring to? Venus is the closest planet to Earth. The Moon is the only significant body between the two. And by 'we've failed to terraform', did you mean 'we haven't tried yet'?

As far as I'm aware, nobody's succeeded in turning deserts into farm land on a large scale. Various parties keep trying but the water, fertilizer, and maintenance costs are astronomical.

We definitely have. There's huge environmental impact, but that is to be expected.

California's Central Valley project is an example, and China has some that are even larger.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#112

Post by colordrops »

aeternus wrote: post #108
yholio wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By attaching it to a steel balloon filled with breathing gas, which can provide lift in the Venusian atmosphere. Inside the baloon you get a really nice habitat with the correct Temperature, pressure and gas composition for humans to live in.

Other than a basically unlimited supply of CO2 however, what would the advantage be compared to a just a space station? With Mars, you can mine building materials from the surface.

You can live there long term since there is gravity.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#113

Post by HALtheWise »

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.

Contrary to popular belief, the rate that solar wind strips Mars atmosphere is so ridiculously low that we can comfortably kick the problem of stopping it down the road a few hundred thousand years. If we manage to generate a habitable climate by terraforming with additional heat and atmosphere, adding a magnetic field becomes a very low priority.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#114

Post by ianstallings »

bluGill wrote: post #48
gubbrora wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like nimbyism on steroids. "No one build anything what if there is Rare Science in our backyards". I mean yes I do kinda see your point, but priorities man. There are ridiculously large advantages to colonizing the universe and destroying a few samples is a low price.

Particularly when we don't even know have reason to believe there are samples. If/when we detect life elsewhere we can talk about leaving it alone, but there are plenty of rocks in the universe with no life that we can work with.

We can still explore them. It's the contamination of them that is at question.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#116

Post by stcredzero »

colordrops wrote: post #112
aeternus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than a basically unlimited supply of CO2 however, what would the advantage be compared to a just a space station? With Mars, you can mine building materials from the surface.

You can live there long term since there is gravity.

Also, there is a lot of protection from radiation, from the mass of atmosphere above you and the mass of the planet below you.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#117

Post by stcredzero »

hathawsh wrote: post #90
stickydink wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would we float a platform at that height?

Most methods of flying things through Earth's lower atmosphere should apply well to Venus at 50 km: balloons, planes, helicopters, etc. To gather energy for rotors, maybe we could siphon heat from below to power a generator or other type of converter. Just playing with ideas. :-)

Send your mining robot below. It cools itself with phase change liquids, but also opens high pressure tanks to the 90 bar atmosphere. When you hoist it back, just plug those pressure tanks in to turbines connected to generators. That wouldn't be a huge amount of power, but maybe wildcat prospectors could operate like that in the early days.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#118

Post by autokad »

mandevil wrote: post #91
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 Konsta…

i think the primary reason for US interest in mars is due to the fact that it is much more likely that mars #1) previously contained life and #2) we will be able to find evidence of #1 on mars, vs venus.

Re: Momentum is building to explore Venus

#119

Post by heurist »

thebooktocome wrote: post #39
theandrewbailey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which environments are you referring to? Venus is the closest planet to Earth. The Moon is the only significant body between the two. And by 'we've failed to terraform', did you mean 'we haven't tried yet'?

As far as I'm aware, nobody's succeeded in turning deserts into farm land on a large scale. Various parties keep trying but the water, fertilizer, and maintenance costs are astronomical.

All of Los Angeles/most of southern California was a desert, wasn't it? Massive water redistribution is the reason tens of millions of people can live there. Much of California's agriculture comes from the same water redistribution projects.

Plus, there's no life that we know of on Venus. A bacterial population capable of living, evolving, and growing exponentially in that environment would be a huge change.

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