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Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

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Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#211

Post by wkrsz »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #186
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #147

Earlier 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 believe they are having trouble envisioning how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rockets thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from. I also find t…

I have a silly take on this: to avoid rocking the floating city you throw the rocket overboard, let it re-orient itself upright, then use the main thruster to slow down the fall and then move up.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#212

Post by akk0 »

rkagerer wrote: post #124

Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system From another perspective, its atmosphere is "one of the most Earth-like in the solar system", and scientists long ago postulated the idea of establishing floating cloud cities. Big balloons filled with nitrogen and oxygen would naturally settle at the right altitude, 30 miles above the surface, where gravity, ambient pressure, and radiation aren't far off that of…

Living like little organelles inside a giant cell membrane

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#213

Post by thaumasiotes »

eru wrote: post #117
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even Mercury is better than Mars ...how? It's further. It has no atmosphere. There is no water or carbon.

How is Mercury further? On average it's the closest planet to earth. Mars's atmosphere is pretty useless for humans.

To be fair to JumpCrisscross, he never claimed Mercury was further away. It's just "further".

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#214

Post by thaumasiotes »

dismalaf wrote: post #29
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tectonics isn’t the issue There would be little point in terraforming Mars. There’s plenty of places on Earth to terraform

The whole point of Mars (or any other second planet) is redundancy. If something happens to earth we have a backup plan, as a species.

There isn't anything that can happen to Earth that would make it worse than Mars.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#215

Post by vidarh »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #169
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Or you just drop it off the side.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#216

Post by shrx »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #186
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #147

Earlier 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 believe they are having trouble envisioning how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rockets thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from. I also find t…

Launching the rocket from a balloon is not a problem. You can have a platform with a hole underneath the rocket's exhaust and the balloon itself can be a torus through which the rocket flies upwards. There would be minimal impact of a rocket launch on the platform if designed properly.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#217

Post by shrx »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #85
kulahan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mars, interestingly, was just determined to have a core almost identical to Earth’s as I understand it. This is not the sole determinant of course - you still need enough volatiles, enough gravity to maintain a hold on the lightest elements across billions of years, and tectonics to keep refreshing the atmosphere. Unfortunately for us all, Mars has none of those. There may be other significant factors as well.

I've seen increasingly credible arguments that you also need a large satellite. To stabilise the planet's wobble. And, more importantly, create the sort of tidal cycles that prompt RNA worlds in the lab.

Where can I read more about the tidal cycles' influence on RNA synthesis?

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#218

Post by bregma »

o1bf2k25n8g5 wrote: post #185
eloisant wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure we can figure out stuff, but I guess my point is, why would we do that at all? How fucked up Earth needs to be than living on a floating oil platform above Venus is better? The point is already hard to make for the Moon or Mars.

> why would we do that at all? This question is one of a whole genre of "why" questions that come from supposed pragmatists, but I can't help but think the existence of the question misses the entire point. Luckily, one of the older questions of this genre was about why anyone would bother to climb Mount Everest, and ol' Mallory had such a good answer that I'll just paste the whole thing here: > People ask me, 'What…

    We choose to go to the Moon ... and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#219

Post by nayroclade »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #204
stavros wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less about the earth being uninhabitable and more about redundancy of species.

Aye, this! Redundancy of species... As in sending a part of species to a hostile place where all living is confined into a one big life support machine, without fresh air (which is very different from freshly uncanned or chemically generated air), without fresh and varied food (which is very different from artificially grown), without open sky and Sun above, without seas, rivers, forests, mountains, without anywhere…

I'd much rather be on a cruise ship than a lifeboat, but that doesn't mean cruise ships shouldn't have lifeboats.

No serious advocate of settling Mars, Venus or anywhere else in space seriously believes it will be easier than remaining on Earth, nor are they suggesting that it means we can abandon the Earth entirely, or care less about protecting its biosphere. They simply understand that, no matter much of a relative paradise the Earth is, so long as 100% of humanity exists there then we are placing all our species' eggs at the bottom of a single basket's gravity-well. It will do us absolutely no good if we solve climate change, war, poverty, disease, etc. only to get wiped out by the next comet or mega-asteroid that smashes into us. And, statistically, eventually one will.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#220

Post by teekert »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #210
rkagerer wrote: post #124

Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system From another perspective, its atmosphere is "one of the most Earth-like in the solar system", and scientists long ago postulated the idea of establishing floating cloud cities. Big balloons filled with nitrogen and oxygen would naturally settle at the right altitude, 30 miles above the surface, where gravity, ambient pressure, and radiation aren't far off that of…

Just don't fall off the side of those platforms. It'd be interesting to see what additional "personal atmospheric floatation" devices would be needed.

You can't because you need to be encapsulated in a balloon to keep the toxic atmosphere out.
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