Because we are built for Earth. Next question.
Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
161–170 of 358 posts
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#162The funny thing is that an oxygen-rich environment is a hell-hole! Oxygen is insanely reactive and will corrode anything. Even early life on earth found oxygen toxic. It was released as a waste product by early life and they were so successful that all that oxygen accumulated resulting in the Great Oxidation Event ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event ). That likely resulted in many species going exti…
I often like to quip that the [21%] corrosive gas is pretty nice today, and I think I'll go consume a big container of industrial solvent to help counteract the radiation from the uncontrolled nuclear [fusion] explosion in the sky.
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once heard a similar point and it has fascinated me ever since: an alien observing human culture would be appalled at how dangerous our lives are. Everything around us is bathed in warm oxygen, just waiting to catch fire! Our homes, our clothes, our fields, our possessions, … our hair . Ready oxidation brings vitality to Earth but it’s also ridiculously dangerous.
It's very unlikely the aliens would not have something very similar going on in their own biosphere. Life needs energy to operate, after all.
It might be a lot more sedate, imagine crystalline creatures from deep below the surface of an ice-ball that rely on indirect chemical gradients or geothermal.
"Your planet is how close to that star!? H20 would be liquid! How do you protect yourselves from the polar solvent leaking down into the rock?"
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#164> For a time, the mantle would get hotter, since the shell around it would trap heat generated by radioactively decaying compounds inside it. As heat accumulates in the interior, the Earth in Kane’s simulations would experience an uptick in volcanism lasting for about 15 million years. That totally surprised to me. I had no idea radioactive decay played such a role for earth. It turns out I must have fallen sleep in…
> It turns out I must have fallen sleep in one of the classes when that was explained. Unless you've studied this at a post-secondary level, I'm afraid that it's quite likely that you've never had it explained to you. My highschool discussed at length the role that the sun, the greenhouse effect, oceans, forests, agriculture, mountain ranges, etc, play on weather and climate, but never actually went through the exerc…
Radiogenic heating as a primary factor in Earth's heat budget and geologic processes might very well not have even been firmly established when the OP was in school. Alot of what is now confidently taught about Earth's geology and geological history is surprisingly recent compared to other scientific fields. Plate tectonics wasn't firmly established until the 1960s. The Chicxulub impact was highly contentious until the 1990s and not conclusively proven until the 2000s, and AFAIU even today there's still some debate about its role in the Cretaceous extinction, e.g. the interaction with other concurrent events. I wouldn't be surprised if the importance of radiogenic heating wasn't canonical until 1980s, 1990s, or even later and therefore not mentioned in a standard curriculum until Millennials reached high school. I don't remember it being mentioned at all in the 1990s, though re other facts my high school geology and biology textbooks were often many years out of date in some areas--an important and useful coming of age lesson for me, that even academic text books can be and often are sorely antiquated and even outright wrong; and a lesson I might not have learned so early if I hadn't had the advantage of the early Internet.
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great, and rats will become super adapted to space. Then they'll become endemic to any space habitats humanity builds. Terraforming planets sounds more plausible than not ending up with rats and cockroaches.
> and rats will become super adapted to space That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. I suspect, unfortunately, we'd have to iron out some kinks first [1]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/
> That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too.
Animals in their natural habitat and humans (especially with modern healthcare) are responding very differently to environmental pressure: we would need to accept a high infant and child mortality rate to be able to evolve.
And the humans having a much longer lifetime and a much smaller amount of descendant means that even without technology we would evolve orders of magnitude slower than rats.
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#166Earth's internal heat regulation is such an underrated hero in the climate story. Half of Earth’s heat comes from internal sources, constantly driving plate tectonics and helping regulate CO₂. Venus lacks that it’s like a pressure cooker with no release valve.
How does Earth's internal heat regulate CO2?
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. But my understanding is the main idea is Mars is supposed to be a "backup" for humanity in the event of a very-low-probability catastrophic event on earth (total nuclear war, solar flare, meteorite collision). In our lifetimes, unlikely. Over the next 1 million years? Maybe.
I think people misunderstand this goal. It's not 'backup' as in, 'ok, Earth is toast - everybody go live on Mars now.' One of the thing critics get right is that in the overwhelming majority of species ending events on Earth, Mars would still be less hospitable than Earth would. For instance take a massive asteroid impact. It's not the impact that kills you, at least not most people. But what would happen following a…
2033 is really not conservative estimate for crewed Mars mission.
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#168The funny thing is that an oxygen-rich environment is a hell-hole! Oxygen is insanely reactive and will corrode anything. Even early life on earth found oxygen toxic. It was released as a waste product by early life and they were so successful that all that oxygen accumulated resulting in the Great Oxidation Event ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event ). That likely resulted in many species going exti…
I often like to quip that the [21%] corrosive gas is pretty nice today, and I think I'll go consume a big container of industrial solvent to help counteract the radiation from the uncontrolled nuclear [fusion] explosion in the sky.
Industrial solvent? Does this mean "inside air"?
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble-but I’m no physicist.
> I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble No more than for a floating platform on the ocean. (Or frankly any sea or airborne firing platform.) If your launch mass is a significant fraction of station mass, and you can't counterweight, you could float it off to the side and then have the baloon detach when its engines fire. But none of this is in even the top thousand problems that come with colonising Venus.
You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out. Assuming these cloud cities have landing strips, right?
Managing ballast might be a challenge…
Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Literally how floating works. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) > Where are materials manufactured for…
> By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble-but I’m no physicist.
It’s not even science fiction