Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-we-should-build-cloud-cities-on-venus

by cryptoz • 11 years ago

253 190 11 years ago

motherboard.vice.com

imaginenore• 11 years ago

Would you rather be surrounded by very thin CO2 of Mars or clouds of sulfuric acid of Venus?

And no possibility to live on the surface?

At least we know how to transform CO2 into oxygen.

Mars just seems orders of magnitude more friendly.

Arnavion• 11 years ago

I imagine Venus being closer to the Sun (and having a higher temperature in general due to the greenhouse effect of its atmosphere) makes it easier to generate usable energy there, RTGs notwithstanding.

aetherson6• 11 years ago

Venus has a LOT more CO2 than Mars does. And the band that people are envisioning putting the aerosats in has, well, less sulfuric acid than does the denser lower atmosphere.

Honestly, probably the realistic view is that it never makes sense to colonize, or even send long-term human presence to, any planet besides Earth. But to the extent that we want to dream of human presence on another planet, I think that the big obstacle to Venus is not the hostility of the upper atmosphere, it's the difficulty in getting any non-gaseous resources out of it.

At the very least, it seems like sending a robotic balloon probe to Venus to try to tool around in the upper atmosphere for an extended period of time is at least as worthwhile as sending another lander to Mars.

_rpd3• 11 years ago

it never makes sense to colonize, or even send long-term human presence to, any planet besides Earth

I don't know, establishing a second, independent biosphere is sound from a risk management standpoint.

unabridged• 11 years ago

Honestly, probably the realistic view is that it never makes sense to colonize, or even send long-term human presence to, any planet besides Earth.

I think it could make sense when we have robots that are able to mine material and construct habitats without requiring human supervision. Just build the robots, drop them off on Venus, Mars, etc, then come back in 30 years and sell condos.

grondilu2• 11 years ago

At the very least, it seems like sending a robotic balloon probe to Venus to try to tool around in the upper atmosphere for an extended period of time is at least as worthwhile as sending another lander to Mars.

Exactly. Enough with Mars already. Red sky, red sand and red rocks : it gets old, frankly.

stcredzero13• 11 years ago

I think that the big obstacle to Venus is not the hostility of the upper atmosphere, it's the difficulty in getting any non-gaseous resources out of it.

We can get non-gaseous resources out of Venus accessible asteroids. Venus could supply two things -- a beautiful and relatively friendly place to live and also fluorine condensed out of its atmosphere.

I could envision huge aerostat supported structures hundreds of kilometers long that house electromagnetic accelerators to launch raw materials into orbit. Rotating tethers could deposit cargo carriers into the Venusian atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, to deploy ballutes and slow down through aerobraking and then to float awaiting retrieval. In doing so, the tethers would re-accelerate themselves to haul other cargo up from hypersonic aircraft.

Maybe it's not economically and politically feasible now or ever, but it's tons of fun to think about. This sort of thing also demonstrates that it's not physically impossible.

userulluipeste12• 11 years ago

"Honestly, probably the realistic view is that it never makes sense to colonize, or even send long-term human presence to, any planet besides Earth."

The sole point is the experience of colonizing other planet. We're not looking to get there for the resources (stop for a second and just think out of the box), we're looking to get there to be able to live there as a species.

Amezarak• 11 years ago

At least we know how to transform CO2 into oxygen.

That's so, but the atmosphere on Mars is so thin it's not as if you can step outside there either - you'd die quickly as it's well below the Armstrong limit. You still need a full-body pressure suit on Mars.

Venus, FWIW, is 96.5% CO2 and has a surface pressure of 93 bar. That's a lot of oxygen if you just want to make some for your space station.

Personally I hold out hope for terraforming Venus. Adding gravity or atmosphere to Mars seems like it'd be much more difficult.

SapphireSun• 11 years ago

They were talking about adding a jet to pump CO2 out of the atmosphere. Is there a chance you could direct the jet such that it intercepts Mars in a useful way?

Then you get to rebalance both the planets atmospheres at once.

However, Mars has pretty weak gravity so even if you could, I don't know if it would stick around.

henkboyd• 11 years ago

At 52km you don't need heating, and in the case of a breach the clouds would stay mostly out because of equal pressures on both sides of the dwelling. A scientific outpost, like those in Antarctica, would be highly appealing. For permanent settlement, Mars takes the cake.

_rpd3• 11 years ago

At 50 kilometers up, Venus is remarkably Earth-like ... The atmospheric pressure is a comfortable one bar, the gravity about 90 percent that of Earth's, and temperatures fall within a hospitable range of 0-50 degrees Celsius.

Nothing to sneeze at, but I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that a flying habitat of sufficient reliability is orders of magnitude more difficult. Are there studies that suggest otherwise?

ohitsdom2• 11 years ago

The gravity is what makes Venus appealing. Mars' gravity is so weak, and studies so far show that is a big problem on the human body.

danielweber2• 11 years ago

We don't know anything about what 3/8g does to the human body.

stesch• 11 years ago

"The Space Merchants" anyone? ;-)

mhurron• 11 years ago

Miners. Cloud miners specifically. They should probably try to keep the operation small.

nsxwolf• 11 years ago

Do we know what it would look like to float in these safe regions? Would it be all haze, or clear skies? What color would the sky be? What would you see if you looked down?

smeyer• 11 years ago

There are some interesting relevant plots in this presentation (found via a google search): http://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/meetings/STIM/presentations/Cr... .

agmcleod2• 11 years ago

I didn't read it through & through, but i think the benefits of going to mars over venus is longevity. As the idea would be (provided we last long enough) that when the earth starts to swell, earth will get too hot to live on, and therefore so would venus. We'd still have time on mars before having to move further away.

manachar• 11 years ago

Current estimates put any changes to the planets from our Sun to start about 1 billion years.

While I'm a fan of long term thinking, that's a bit too long to enter into any equation about which planet to colonize first.

agmcleod2• 11 years ago

Fair enough.

aetherson6• 11 years ago

You mean "when the sun starts to swell," not "when earth starts to swell."

And this is a laughable concern. The Sun's main sequence is predicted to last another 4 billion years. That's more time than life has existed on Earth, about 16,000x as long as homo sapiens has existed.

If we're concerned with the survival something vaguely descended from homo sapiens in 4 billion years, there's little enough harm in taking another million years for our tech to get a little better before starting the project.

ashark• 11 years ago

To nitpick, The End Of Life We Care About on Earth is only ~800 million years off[1], at the outside, barring some unforeseen catastrophe or some truly astounding planetary engineering. Still a long time, but no 4 billion years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...

mmanfrin• 11 years ago

Question to those with science backgrounds: Would it be possible to 'seed' venus with co2 crunching algae, provided we figured some way of suspending them in the atmosphere above the point where they'd cook to death? Some sort of superlight-algae that could live in the clouds and crunch the CO2 in to O2? It would grow and spread and begin reducing the pressure downwards, allowing it to also eat downwards.

jkot2• 11 years ago

Not really, venus atmosphere is way too thick and heavy. It would takes millions of years. Better would be ice ring on orbit to block sunlight, or bombarding surface with comets.

ajuc2• 11 years ago

It would takes millions of years.

Why? If it works it's exponential so it should be faster than other methods.

danielweber2• 11 years ago

You would need to import a lot of water for that.

FranOntanaya• 11 years ago

I think the problem could be water. The fraction of water vapor on Venus' atmosphere is ~200 times lower, although I don't know if that should factor that Venus' atmosphere would have many times Earth's mass.

scott_karana• 11 years ago

Didn't the article cover exactly such a proposal, in the 60s, by Carl Sagan? :P

seanflyon6• 11 years ago

I think you need some way of binding the O2 so that it does not just recombine with the C, perhaps by importing large quantities of H2 allowing you to turn the Oxygen into water.

userulluipeste12• 11 years ago

The carbon absorbed in the photosynthesis does not just go free to burn again in oxidation, it stays as a building material for the living creature itself. Considering a positive process, in which more organisms are created (reproduced through mitosis) than those that die, in time the raw quantity of CO₂ should decrease. I'm not sure what to do afterwards with that mass of algae though.

jkot2• 11 years ago

Only argument for Venus atmosphere is that it sucks much less than its surface. Any asteroid would be better place. Someone must really love Star Wars.

geuis• 11 years ago

I wish the article had expanded more on the idea of removing a lot of the atmosphere. I wonder if an asteroid could be sent in such a way that it tears through the atmosphere and rips a lot out into space. The rock would pass through and back out into space.

grondilu2• 11 years ago

Venus is almost as big as Earth. Any asteroid is much, much smaller. So the amount of atmosphere you would remove would almost certainly be minute.

lmm7• 11 years ago

Very unlikely; imagine swinging a pendulum through a water tank. Gravity pulls things down, not up; you're more likely to add some vaporized asteroid to Venus' atmosphere than have it "rip a lot out".

I'm trying to think of some kind of space-elevator-siphon, but there's no getting around the fact that, unless you want to expend energy to pump it, you have to have an equal amount of mass coming down as is going up.

userulluipeste12• 11 years ago

I don't like the idea of provoking the loss of mass of some colonizable planet that already has less gravity than it would be natural for us. A better solution would be to trap as much of that atmospheric mass in solid aggregation state somewhere on its ground. Our planet had a lot of atmospheric carbon too, which is now trapped mainly as coal or other kind of fossil fuels.

kingmanaz• 11 years ago

The ~50-megaton Tsar-Bomba reputedly "lifted" the atmosphere above its mushroom cloud off the Earth and into space. The Russians allegedly had or have a 100-megaton version which could presumably perform more "heavy lifting". There are probably more scientifically-minded readers here who possess a formula which will show the ridiculous number of Tsar-Bombas needed to make Venus safe for Humanity.

I've read that comets could be slammed into Venus, modifying its rotation, and somehow reducing or eliminating the runaway greenhouse effect. Of course, if mankind is at the point of being comfortable terraforming with comets, it may make more sense to point them toward the desert planet Mars.

pavel_lishin5• 11 years ago

Asteroids don't have gravity, forces you to figure out radiation shielding (which, granted, is probably as simple as digging into the asteroid), and requires you to keep a pressured environment with a 1-atmosphere difference.

j_baker3• 11 years ago

There's one gaping hole in the idea though: where are we going to get water?

One other interesting possibility is colonizing Mercury. It turns out to not be as crazy an idea as it seems at first. Mercury does have water, there's plenty of solar energy, and it's not too hot at the poles. The trickiest part would really be getting there. As deep as it is in the sun's gravity well, it would take 6 years to get there!

jlebar• 11 years ago

Does Mercury offer any protection from the solar wind? I (naively) expect the solar wind intensity to go as the inverse-square of distance, and I know that surviving the solar wind on Mars is a big challenge, given the lack of a magnetosphere there. I expect the difficulty would be worse by many orders of magnitude on Mercury? Not to mention that you have to survive six years with no protection just to get there; just surviving the trip to Mars is a challenge.

aetherson6• 11 years ago

If you wanted to build a habitation on Mercury, you'd either build a mobile one that stays on the dark side of the planet, or you'd stay in always-shaded areas at the walls of craters. So you're shaded from the solar wind by rock.

j_baker3• 11 years ago

No, Mercury actually has a magnetosphere. I don't know about what kinds of protection you would need to get there though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mercury

aetherson6• 11 years ago

In terms of human habitation, the big advantages of Venus' atmosphere are:

1. It has essentially Earth-normal gravity. Zero-G long-term is a death sentence for humans. The long term effects of Martian gravity are unknown. It seems safe to assume that Venus gravity is fine.

2. It is protected from impact and radiation by an atmosphere in a way that Mars or asteroids never will be.

3. It has an essentially limitless supply of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur available to it.

4. It is reasonably well-positioned for solar power.

5. It is relatively temperate.

6. Low pressure differential between inside a habitat and outside of one means that leaks are less severe and containment breaches are easier to react to.

But there is at least one huge disadvantage:

1. Everything besides carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur needs to be imported, either from a fantastically hostile surface, or down through reentry into an atmosphere in a deep gravity well and rendezvousing with an aerostat.

That disadvantage is a pretty goddamn significant one for human habitation.

But it's not a disadvantage for long-term robot probes, and it's... less... of a disadvantage for a minimal-population scientific base.

ohitsdom2• 11 years ago

Succinct and accurate summary.

astazangasta• 11 years ago

Your disadvantage 1 is the result of a failure of imagination. The vast majority of life on Earth is built from nothing but carbon, oxygen,nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., and human life requires not much else. We could easily subsist on just these elements.

aetherson6• 11 years ago

Note that "hydrogen" lists among your rather crucial elements necessary for life, and does not feature in Venus' atmosphere in significant quantities.

And, more so, while human life per se requires very small amounts of non-carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen elements, human technology requires very large amounts of non-carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen elements.

rgbrenner• 11 years ago

Sure.. except, nature has conveniently put those elements into forms we can use. So until we're able to do that ourselves, that's a disadvantage we'll have to deal with. It's less a failure of imagination, and more a failure of our current level of technology.

vacri• 11 years ago

'Subsisting' does not include 'artificial cities floating in the sky'. Similarly, getting a computer to run on nothing by carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and sulphur, none of which are metals or semiconductors, is a massive task, if doable at all.

stcredzero13• 11 years ago

reentry into an atmosphere in a deep gravity well and rendezvousing with an aerostat.

What about rendezvous of a rotating tether with a hypersonic craft? We can make cables now that are strong enough to support a "rotorvator" rotating tether at the lengths required. What about very large, very long, aerostat facilities that are mostly huge electromagnetic cannon for launching robot hypersonic craft? These could be built to withstand 1000's of gravities, to allow ballistic launch from high altitiude facilities, but have a return flight profile suitable for passengers and other fragile cargo. We could also have Venusian hybrid jet/rocket hypersonic craft that are fueled with liquid carbon monoxide. This technology could mean that getting to the colonized Venusian ecosphere would be a lot cheaper than getting off of it, if you are a biologically standard Homo sapiens.

EDIT: So, how this would play out in a cyberpunk space opry: Many people choose to emigrate to Venus because of the price of labor there. However, economic pressures cause a large fraction of the Venusian populace to undergo radical cybernetic modification, because it opens up job opportunities on the hostile surface and makes it less expensive to get back to Earth and other parts of the Solar System. This pathway is chosen by desperate and marginal people, who often take advantage of the radical modification surgery to shed their old identities. Voila! Gritty Sci-Fi cyberpunk future based on chemistry, physics, and economics.

EDIT: It turns out that the energy cost for getting between Mercury and Venus isn't so large. Also, there are a good number of Venus-crossing asteroids. So anything you can get from a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid shouldn't be precious to the point of rarity on Venus. Among other things, both silicon and hydrocarbons could be mined in industrial quantities.

EDIT: An interesting Selenian Boondocks blog post about the chemistry and physics of extracting various resources out of the Venusian atmosphere at human-aerostat altitudes! http://selenianboondocks.com/2013/12/venus-isru-condenseable...

EDIT: An interesting idea for surface resource extraction -- bombard the surface with rocks from orbit, with the intention of creating clouds of dust which can be harvested by specially designed airships. Though this is inefficient materially, it might result in far less wear and tear on equipment, which gets to remain at higher and friendlier altitudes.

EDIT: Carbon monoxide and sulphuric acid can be used as a fuel/oxidizer pair in a rocket engine! Both can be condensed right out of the Venusian atmosphere. Granted, these are a bit cantankerous even as far as rocket fuels go.

fredfoobar2• 11 years ago

Why aren't people thinking about sending various robots/devices that could terraform planets before humans going in to live there? Is this something that is impossible to do/imagine? what am I missing?

stickfigure2• 11 years ago

Alternatively, why aren't we talking about venusforming humans? All space operas seem to start with the earth-standard human in a suit. Compared to geoengineering a whole earth-standard atmosphere, bioengineering an intelligent organism that can thrive in nonearth environments seems fairly sane.

There's a social taboo against human genetic experimentation (hell, some people seem to struggle with vegetables) but that will eventually pass.

seanflyon6• 11 years ago

With the order of magnitude of resources we are talking about (enough to colonize) yes it would be impossible to terraform either Mars or Venus. People are thinking about it, but not in the near-term. I think that the easiest way to terraform Venus involves scooping a gas giant for hydrogen to burn with Venus' CO2.

jccooper2• 11 years ago

Mining the surface is required; importing any significant quantity of material from Earth is a non-starter. Unless you can come up with something insanely valuable to export to Earth, any planetary colony has to be almost-entirely self-sufficient. Interplanetary transit is too long, and too expensive. (This is true on Mars as well, and probably Luna and asteroids as well, though you might find some edge cases there due to lesser gravity or greater proximity.)

The pressure on the surface is that of about 3000 feet of water, so that's not too bad, and the reducing atmosphere can be handled, but the temperature is tough. Still, with practice, you could probably build such machines. Dunno how you make electronics survive long term at ambient 465 °C (oil wells have a hard time with electronics at much lower temps) but some combination of active cooling, limited duration, and novel fabrication should be possible.

Perhaps the easiest solution is to load up your Venus Mining Hopper with a whole bunch of liquid nitrogen, extracted from the atmosphere and compressed and liquefied using solar power falling on your floating platform. It deflates its balloon and drops to the surface, and starts scooping up material into its hopper as the LN2 boils off, cooling the electronics and other temp-sensitive systems. (These are buried in lots of insulation.) When the hopper is close to full, you start venting the N2 into the balloon, and the whole system takes off again, to rendezvous with a solar-powered tug to pull it to your ore-processing factory. That may be a long haul, because the upper atmosphere of Venus moves at 100m/s. Maybe you design your system to stay on the ground long enough for the platform to come back around the planet, a mere 4-5 days. Or maybe it just takes a big bite and goes straight back up so it doesn't get too far behind.

So maybe doable, but it makes the hurdle for setting up a self-sustaining colony much higher. Not that it's a much lower hurdle anywhere else.

kaybe7• 11 years ago

The temperature is a reason why Venus would be a good place to test out the ideas for climate manipulation we have collected so far.

A first step could be to lower the CO2 content (my current favourite would be to release engineered bacteria into the atmosphere that can bind the Cs and after death collect it on the ground), and enhance the albedo (so more sunlight is reflected away).

In the longterm we will need climate control anyway since Earth's climate is somewhat unstable (global warming is just as bad as a new ice age, which, extrapolating from the past, would be about due by now, if not for mankinds influence). Testing it on a planet we are not critically dependent on should be a better strategy.

Geologically, Venus is very different from Earth due to the lack of water (which enables plate tectonics and all its implications). Some changes we can make would even influence the geology. (Hm, I wonder what would happen if we dumped enough water meteroids.. )

All of this of course premises a lack of preexisting life with planetary ownership rights and no natural reserve rules (which we kind of have at the moment - http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/about).

stcredzero13• 11 years ago

Mining the surface is required

Why not get other resources from near-Venus asteroids and Mercury? It would be easy to imagine a near-sun economy that mostly involves people, information, and raw materials making the trip up and down the Venusian gravity well -- with most raw materials and finished goods making the trip down. Most of the energy would be dissipated by aerobraking. In essence, Venus could participate in such a solar-system spanning economy by supplying relatively friendly radiation-shielded Real Estate and fluorine. Raw materials would largely go down, and people, culture, intellectual property, and fluorine would come up.

Houshalter2• 11 years ago

any planetary colony has to be almost-entirely self-sufficient.

Is this even remotely possible anywhere with current technology? Can we even make completely self-sufficient colonies on Earth (like the technologically advanced kind we want to make in space, not just people living in the woods.)

JulianMorrison2• 11 years ago

1g at 1 atmosphere has disadvantages. Namely: to get off the planet, you will need a fully fuelled multistage rocket with an almost identical profile to rockets you'd launch from ground level on Earth. Something like a Falcon 9. That's a bit heavy to lug all the way from Earth.

Bonus: you have to launch by dropping it into a hell-cauldron of poison gases miles above a crushing, melting surface, better hope you don't have an engine out, because there are no launch aborts or do-overs. Then you have to fly it out through a hot corrosive acid atmosphere which I don't imagine would be very friendly to machined aluminum.

fenaer• 11 years ago

Why not a space plane? Surely reaching orbital velocity on a platform that is already moving at a decent speed around the planet would ease it somewhat?

stcredzero13• 11 years ago

1g at 1 atmosphere has disadvantages. Namely: to get off the planet, you will need a fully fuelled multistage rocket with an almost identical profile to rockets you'd launch from ground level on Earth.

Condense Carbon Monoxide and Sulphuric Acid from Venus's atmosphere for use as fuel and oxidizer in a hypersonic rocketplane that tops out at about Mach 11. Have the rocketplane rendezvous with the end of a rotating tether.

http://www.tethers.com/papers/HASTOLAIAAPaper.pdf

No multi-stage rocket. No expendable launch vehicles. That's probably not the actual solution, but it shows that you don't have to have a Falcon 9 equivalent.

Then you have to fly it out through a hot corrosive acid atmosphere which I don't imagine would be very friendly to machined aluminum.

It should be possible to condense HF out of the Venusian atmosphere, so we should be able to manufacture PTFE locally with input from non-Earth resources. (Mining chondrites from Mercury and Venus-crossing asteroids.)

pavel_lishin5• 11 years ago

Not quite an identical profile; it's not quite 1g, since Venus is less massive, and you're already quite a ways off the surface.

It's still not trivial, but it's not like there are a whole lot of do-overs when launching valuable human cargo from Earth, either. (What happens if the space shuttle's engines go awry? Everyone on board dies, and everyone on the ground speculates as to whether they died within 30 seconds, or survived to hit the ocean.)

lmm7• 11 years ago

With a denser atmosphere balloon-based launches become more feasible (on Earth we're already close to the margin where they'd become a good idea).

starwaver4• 11 years ago

For the first problem, we can probably build small "launcher" platforms from lighter gases so it brings the spaceship to an altitude with much less gravity.

The sulfuric acids should be fine with enough protective coating. Earth's atmosphere isn't all that friendly either with rust able metals. Thus we have corrosion-resistant paint.

crusso• 11 years ago

down through reentry into an atmosphere in a deep gravity well

The good news there is that space elevator climbing efficiencies could be gained without having to worry about flying some kind of aircraft.

shirro• 11 years ago

4. It is reasonably well-positioned for solar power.

A day on Venus is 224.65 earth days long. That is a long night so perhaps the solar power thing isn't that clear cut.

andrewflnr• 11 years ago

You're moving with the wind, though, not the surface.

andyjdavis2• 11 years ago

It has an essentially limitless supply of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur available to it.

Are you able to provide a rough summary of how the quantities of these materials compare with the quantities available on earth?

It wasn't that long ago that humans spoke about things like the number of fish in the sea, the ability of the earth's atmosphere to absorb waste gases etc as being effectively infinite until we eventually discovered that this was unfortunately not true. It is just something that pops into my head whenever the word unlimited, infinite or limitless get used when talking about energy, resources and so on.

TeMPOraL4• 11 years ago

As long as we're talking about one mostly self-contained city, resources available will likely be infinite from practical point of view. The problem with Earth is that there are 7 billions of us living now; our impact thus becomes significant.

starwaver4• 11 years ago

but it did last for thousands of years, pretty sure we'll get a lot more efficient at resource management by then.

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

I've always been surprised that NASA hasn't gone for a blimp type 'probe' for Venus. Something which floated above the clouds and allowed us to do long term observation from that point.

We think in terms of "flying" through the atmosphere, but once it gets dense enough you can make the equivalent of fish to "swim" through it. With internal bouyancy compensation bladders, and a skin impervious to the atmosphere. Smaller probes swimming down into the clouds to collect data about the surface and other conditions.

If nothing else it would be completely different than exploring Mars :-)

freehunter• 11 years ago

If nothing else it would be completely different than exploring Mars

Which is likely why it hasn't been done. If it's something completely different, it takes more time and money to get it working. Starting from nothing, exploring Mars and exploring Venus might both cost $100b. But if the research has already been done to research Mars exploration, sending another probe there might only cost $2b, whereas Venus still costs $100b.

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

No doubt you are correct in that assessment. Time to fire up Kerbel to see how much payload a Falcon 9 Heavy can get into an Earth/Venus transfer orbit :-)

tachyonbeam• 11 years ago

My guess would be that NASA hasn't done this because they feel like they have the traditional "lander" or "descent" type of probe worked out. They've done the engineering, they know the difficulties involved. What you're suggesting requires more expensive R&D, and means that the new probe has more chance of failing.

The conservative thing to do is to stick with what works. I do think you're right that the conditions are very different from Mars and this makes it possible to explore alternative approaches that may be better suited to the planet. I also believe that innovation entails some degree of risk taking. Just gotta get SpaceX onboard.

pavel_lishin5• 11 years ago

I'm not sure that's the case; the latest Mars lander required some pretty incredible engineering - I mean, they basically built a rocket-powered hovercraft, something that's never been done before.

I'd wager that the real reason is that Mars is more interesting to explore than Venus's atmosphere. Mars has the potential to have (or have had) life, and it has interesting geological features that may be directly applied to what we know about Earth.

Plus, the whole "we might go live on Mars!" mentality doesn't hurt, and Venus is only recently getting this kind of attention.

rbanffy• 11 years ago

Nobody has the Venus lander thing figured out. Soviet landers could only last a short time before being roasted/crushed/corroded.

In comparison to the Venusian surface, the religious notion of hell would be a tropical beach.

simon_• 11 years ago

Could someone weigh in on the following quote? Sounds fishy / wrong to me:

To put this in perspective, a balloon that is one kilometer in diameter is capable of lifting about 700,000 tons, or the weight of two Empire State Buildings. Add a second balloon of the same size and the lift capacity of these two balloons increases exponentially: it’s now capable of supporting nearly 6 million tons of weight.

_nb• 11 years ago

I'd agree, that doesn't sound right at all. Perhaps they meant doubling the size of the balloon? Doubling the diameter of a sphere indeed increases its volume many times more than double.

someone13• 11 years ago

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that first number is in the right ballpark. From [0], the lift generated by helium vs Earth air at STP is approx. 1.03 g/L. This suggests a lift of approx. 590,000 short tons on Earth:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28%28%284%2F3%29+*+...

Then, if we assume that the gravity on Venus is 90% of Earth standard, you get about 656,000 short tons of lift. Note that this doesn't take into account the different air density on Venus.

No idea about the "doubling" bit, though :-P

[0] http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/lift.html

Tossrock• 11 years ago

I assume they meant that if you were to double the diameter of the balloon, it would be a superlinear increase in lifting capacity (since volume is cubic in radius). However, it wouldn't actually be exponential, and two balloons added together definitely does not equal more than the sum of their individual lift capacity.

jackcarter• 11 years ago

To be precise, it's 8x the lifting capacity (=2^3), which would be 5.6 million tons, or "nearly 6 million".

kissickas• 11 years ago

OK, so just the journalist misunderstood then? Because doubling the diameter is in no way compatible with "add a second balloon."

titanomachy• 11 years ago

You're right, that doesn't make any sense. The buoyant force is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced. Doubling the volume of your balloons doubles the buoyant force and therefore doubles the weight you can carry. The relationship is linear, not exponential.

cdwhite• 11 years ago

A related previous article: "NASA Study Proposes Airships, Cloud Cities for Venus Exploration" (http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-study-p...). Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8760732

scarmig2• 11 years ago

Thought of the day, which is said mostly tongue-in-cheek:

If we really must think of a planet to terraform, it seems like the best body in the solar system to work on might be... Earth. There are large swaths of it that are more or less currently uninhabitable in its polar regions, and most changes to the atmosphere we make have their greatest effects in those same polar regions. A 5C increase in global average temperatures might be a 10C or more increase in those polar regions, opening up millions of square miles for human habitation and intensive agriculture. It's even self-sustaining: about a quarter of known fossil fuel reserves are available in the Arctic, and those will become much more accessible with warming temperatures.

Needless to say, there are costs elsewhere on the planet for that kind of intervention, but those are very definitely far, far smaller costs than building floating cities on Venus or reheating Mars' core. Many of those costs could even be recouped by adding a terraforming tax on new residents of polar regions and redistributing them to Bengali refugees fleeing their homes.

Economically, it makes a lot more sense than investing resources in terraforming other bodies in our solar system, though it doesn't offer the same risk mitigation.

Disclaimer: I think terraforming Earth, purposefully or not, is a bad idea. I think it's just a better idea than investing real resources into terraforming other planets.

isaacdl• 11 years ago

Huh. That's a very interesting thought. The first thought that pops into my head is the risk. The appeal of trying to terraform Venus (or Mars) is that there isn't a huge existing population of humans. If we mess it up, well...that's unfortunate and expensive, but we didn't just make the only place we currently have uninhabitable.

The second though, pretty related to the first, is the ethical one. Do we have the "right" to do what we want to our planet, including probably causing mass extinction of existing animal life in order to terraform our planet? I'm not sure if I'm even willing to argue that one either way.

Like I said, it's interesting to consider your idea. If we can be sure that anything we do to "terraform" our planet isn't at all risky in terms of human survival, you're probably right!

kaybe7• 11 years ago

Longterm, we will have to find some kind of climate control. The last ice age was not too long ago, but mankind has almost entirely lived without. A return of the glaciers would be even worse than global warming (in my estimates), and extrapolating the curves shows that the next ice age is due (were it not for the fact that we changed the atmospheric composition sufficiently to avert that for sure).

Right now we already are playing around with the climate, but very uncontrolled and destructive. I'm also not in favour of using methods designed for climate control in our situation due to the risk (which is different for the different methods, and the failure results are very different also, but still) - the better solution is clearly to stop emitting CO2 - but longterm, we will need the knowledge. Best to test it on another planet first..

Retra• 11 years ago

Do we have the "right" to do what we want to our planet

You have a right to make good decisions. Don't sweat about whether we have rights to modify the planet, and instead worry about whether it is a good decision.

At this point there is not enough data or control to ensure success. We are already changing our planet, and we can't even tell if it's good or bad, so this is not the year to make that kind of determination.

me_again• 11 years ago

Bruce Sterling put this rather well 10 years back: "I'll believe in settling Mars when I see people settling the Gobi desert". http://boingboing.net/2004/01/08/sterling-ill-believe.html

Omniusaspirer4• 11 years ago

Desert habitation is actually something I've been really curious about lately- does anyone have links to some good source material I could read into? I'm currently envisioning construction like you'd see in passive homes- hyper insulated, probably powered by solar/wind, and some means of reusing water since it's obviously a limited resource. It's very possible I'm hugely naive though so I'd love to find some hard numbers on the actual viability of what I've described.

Houshalter2• 11 years ago

It's certainly possible, but who would want to fund or participate in that? Mars gets support because it sounds cool.

sethrin• 11 years ago

The thing about farming in the Arctic is you're gonna have a short growing season no matter what the temperature is. However, you're not going to get that far, because you're talking about an area that is substantially underlaid by permafrost. When that melts, it subsides and usually fills with water, which is why there are millions of boggy lakes on the North Slope of Alaska. Fertile topsoil is not just dirt, it's a complex ecosystem of its own, and it takes a great deal of time to produce. It's probably slightly easier to start farming in the melted Arctic than in your average desert, but it's a pretty near thing, and your 5C difference is going to wreak havoc on current farming areas. The odds of success on this one are not good.

I think there's probably some limit to how much Earth-resources should be used to terraform other planets, but with what we spend on bombs I don't think it'd be a big deal. Terraforming Earth is a spectacularly bad idea, so it would take a lot of spending to be in any sense worse than that.

userulluipeste12• 11 years ago

"terraforming Earth" = Terra-forming Terra

Like... reshaping the Earth in a Earth-like shape! Cool, isn't it? Now, getting the tongue off the cheek, you're right, it makes a lot of (at least an economical) sense to look under our nose at the swaths of unexploited but with a higher promise land and, you know, use them?! Only that the thing is, Venus colonization is more than just a new place that we could find useful to extend into for a current-way of day-to-day human life. It is a lot more! Some may tell you that it is bad to have all the eggs put in the same basket and Venus would be a good second basket, but again it would be a lot more than that. Imagine that so far we haven't had any signs of another life-form living in our universe. As small the chance for this to stay this way as it may be, we can assume for now that the entire universe is ours to extend into. And we need to become capable of doing it. We may "start" doing that by colonizing our own galaxy. For that we should become capable of colonizing planets in some reasonably-close star systems first. And for that it would be desirable for us to learn how to do that using a planet somewhere nearby, in our solar system. And yes, for that we should become capable of colonizing without much struggle harsh places like deserts (in polar or other regions), subterranean and ocean depths here on Earth. And more, those should become self-sustained, to mimic conditions of some far-away colonization prospects. In the long run Venus is just one of the intermediary steps, but an important one. We as a species need that kind of colonizing experience. Of course it won't happen right away, but setting the goal of colonizing Venus is in itself a task that rise awareness and spurs in the meantime other important intermediary necessary goals. Biosphere 2 falls in this category, but we need more, and more - we need context for which these kind of projects would come to make sense.

joering2• 11 years ago

"In more expansive visions, pumping Venus full of sulfur dioxide or hydrogen—or surrounding it in Sun shields—could terraform its climate into submission".

Couldn't bio-genetics create some sort of virus that inhabits on Mars' or Venus' atmosphere and grows on it while converting it into friendly environment? Or am I speaking pure sci-fi?

seanflyon6• 11 years ago

Even a sci-fi terraforming bacteria can't change one atom into another and Venus is very low on Hydrogen.

ajuc2• 11 years ago

Virus is just the software, it requires a living cell to reproduce (run it).

Bacteria or algae is your best bet.

davesque2• 11 years ago

I'll take one.

davesque2• 11 years ago

Whoops. Sorry humor police!!

glxc• 11 years ago

Elon Musk has got to step up god damnit

disputin• 11 years ago

At what depth underground does the temperature become tolerable?

msandford• 11 years ago

Probably none. The Earth's core is hotter than the surface and the surface temperature of the crust basically reflects the average atmospheric temperature.

Up north in the US the average ground temperature is maybe 40F at 10ft down (which is why there are basements up north, to get below the frost line) but here in Texas the average ground temperature is about 70F. At the equator it's probably more like 90-100F.

Given that Venus' atmosphere is so hot it seems likely that the deeper you go the hotter it gets.

feralley• 11 years ago

Humans are too cheap.

They'll just pass away during the next big extinction event, despite knowing another will eventually come.

We are no better than the dinosaurs so far. Setup outposts on Mars, the moon, Venus, learn to deal with radiation.

Cat lovers.

vatotemking• 11 years ago

Curious, how will they deal with the venusian storms?

userulluipeste12• 11 years ago

Even in a storm, you won't feel a thing on a big ship (over 300m) with stabilizers. And you have to understand that there is a difference between a storm which involves different mediums, like gas (atmosphere), liquid (sea) and sometimes solid maybe (the shore or some sea cliffs) and a storm which resides in one medium only. The Venusian equatorial winds which surround the planet in a few days (at 300-400 km/h) and which are pretty permanent, can be considered storm winds. Those plans with balloon deploying were designed especially to take advantage of such winds, in order to get shorter days.

Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus

Related Stories