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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?

#341

Post by jmsaucier »

SwtCyber wrote: post #315
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…

Like, Mars gets all the hype, but you're dealing with bone-dry cold, no atmosphere to speak of, and brutal radiation. Meanwhile, Venus has breathable pressure, decent gravity, and no need for pressurized suits... you just have to float above an acid bath.

I think part of it is that everyone knows that the sun will expand. Why move closer when you can get further away?

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#342

Post by eru »

kulahan wrote: post #335
eru wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus, it's nice to split our eggs into multiple planetary baskets. Multiple baskets is good, but why planetary?

We probably won't get hit by a planet-ending meteor any time soon, but who really knows? Good for that not to be our end.

Yes, so? You can have spinning space habitats, instead of needing another planet.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#343

Post by eru »

ben_w wrote: post #158
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too many dickheads with a bright idea of putting nuclear warheads on submersibles with a dead man’s switch on this planet If we're nuking each other on Earth, I find it unlikely we wouldn't aim a nuke or two at that group's colony on Mars. The only thing a Martian colony is a hedge against is ecological collapse on Earth. Because we did something exceptionally stupid accidentally. Or because a rock came by to say h…

> The only thing a Martian colony is a hedge against is ecological collapse on Earth. Because we did something exceptionally stupid accidentally. Or because a rock came by to say hi. Even then, Mars is colder than the Antarctic, drier than the Sahara, has lower air pressure than the top of Mount Everest, has soil poisoned like a superfund cleanup site, has no meaningful ozone layer, has no magnetosphere protecting ag…

Mostly agreed, though the dust storms aren't really that much of a problem, exactly because the atmosphere is so thin.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#344

Post by eru »

jrussino wrote: post #330
dredmorbius wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the concentration into BIFs, banded iron formations, was all but certainly the result of biological activity. Our present technology based on iron and steel owes itself to early life on Earth, from 1.6 to as much as 4 billion years ago. As with petroleum and coal-bed formation, a process unlikely to repeat in Earth's future. Iron ores are abundant, but still a finite resource. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banded…

Human civilization feels so much more fragile to me since I realized how much we owe our technological progress to the accumulated effects of biological processes over geological timescales. Fossil fuels seem like the most obvious part of this story. If we had to start over "from scratch", would it even be possible? Or have we already so thoroughly exhausted the low-hanging energy stores that a second "industrial rev…

> Or have we already so thoroughly exhausted the low-hanging energy stores that a second "industrial revolution" would be effectively impossible if our present civilization collapsed deeply enough?

There's plenty of coal left, and we will likely never exploit it, because solar is getting so cheap.

Also, despite long prophecies, peak oil never arrived either. So it doesn't look like we are running out of that stuff.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#345

Post by brnt »

jmsaucier wrote: post #341
SwtCyber wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, Mars gets all the hype, but you're dealing with bone-dry cold, no atmosphere to speak of, and brutal radiation. Meanwhile, Venus has breathable pressure, decent gravity, and no need for pressurized suits... you just have to float above an acid bath.

I think part of it is that everyone knows that the sun will expand. Why move closer when you can get further away?

It'll be a minute before that becomes a concern.

Also, if we can deal with Venus, we can reverse global warming in Earth first?

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#346

Post by Podrod »

antonvs wrote: post #331
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Room temperature is 21°C Debated, was 23 or 25 in my college textbooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_temperature > I have no idea how many freedom fries units that is. Kind of a bad attempt at humor? Imperial units is fine.

The US doesn't use Imperial units. It uses US customary units, which are different from Imperial in several significant ways, because the Imperial system evolved after the US split from the British Empire. Also interestingly, US customary units are defined in terms of metric. So in a sense, the US does use the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

I often correct people regarding the US not using Imperial as well but to be fair the only significant difference these days is in fluid measurements. Weight and length measurements were standardised between US customary and Imperial back in the 1950s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#347

Post by somenameforme »

kulahan wrote: post #337
somenameforme wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simply a flyby, not a landing, which will likely happen in 2035 for them. NASA was laying out various plans for exactly this in the 60s, with a timeline of the first crewed flight to Mars somewhere between the mid 70s and early 80s. And it was completely viable. The only reason this didn't happen is because Nixon defacto cancelled human spaceflight in 1972, in part because he was worried that a loss of life in s…

A Mars flyby?? With humans? I don't doubt it, but at the same time I can't imagine spending months in a ship just to look at your destination without ever getting out. Talk about cabin fever.

Haha, well depending on the exact ship they go on they'll probably have substantially more room than the ISS. That was the main motivation for things like people staying 370+ days on the ISS. And long before the ISS even existed, the USSR was also actively pursuing this. In 1988 Valeri Polyakov stayed aboard the Mir Space Station for 240 days. His first words after landing were, "We can fly to Mars." [1]

After that he spent a whopping 437 days on Mir (which had about 1/3rd the pressurized volume of the already claustrophobic ISS) to see how the human body would respond to long-term duration in minimal gravity. Upon landing back on Earth this time he decided to get up and walk from the capsule to his rest point (astronauts are normally carried/rehabbed due to muscular atrophy + dysfunctional balance/orientation, even for far shorter stays), making a point of the fact that he was just fine. Dude was just a complete badass. The USSR would have beaten us to Mars if they hadn't collapsed in 1991.

In any case, it's probably a good idea to do a flyby because there will be, with near 100% certainty, some thing things we hadn't considered and others that we simply were not aware of. By first doing a flyby and then a landing you increase the chances of success. And the people doing the flyby will probably be mostly the same people doing a landing a couple of years later - so it'll be more like "See you soon."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeri_Polyakov#Cosmonaut_care...

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#348

Post by ben_w »

eru wrote: post #343
ben_w wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing a Martian colony is a hedge against is ecological collapse on Earth. Because we did something exceptionally stupid accidentally. Or because a rock came by to say hi. Even then, Mars is colder than the Antarctic, drier than the Sahara, has lower air pressure than the top of Mount Everest, has soil poisoned like a superfund cleanup site, has no meaningful ozone layer, has no magnetosphere protecting ag…

Mostly agreed, though the dust storms aren't really that much of a problem, exactly because the atmosphere is so thin.

My understanding is the dust storms still block out a lot of sunlight, so even there a base needs something more than PV + overnight batteries.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#349

Post by actionfromafar »

euroderf wrote: post #284
actionfromafar wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcing function + making a stretch of land which is neither dry nor enterily wet. A gradient. If there are no tides the leap life has to make is much bigger.

And perhaps the advantages of this gradient extend up as far as aquatic apes.

Not sure what this means.

Re: Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?

#350

Post by sleepy_keita »

stavros wrote: post #194
sleepy_keita wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was just rereading - it was the radioactivity and the large natural satellite that was unique in his universe. Tides are interesting because once you have life in the oceans, it's a kind of forcing function to adapt to land conditions

Why are tides a forcing function? Marine life has been perfectly content just not going near a beach.

I was thinking more on the lines of "if marine life never found itself stranded on land, it wouldn't need to evolve to survive on the land"
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