Some questions from Jon Goff. It’s one of the places that we don’t need a gee lab to know that we can live and procreate there.
15 thoughts on “Settling Venus”
Comments are closed.
Some questions from Jon Goff. It’s one of the places that we don’t need a gee lab to know that we can live and procreate there.
Comments are closed.
When it comes to questions over settlements on Venus my answer will always be “stick up a big sunshade and freeze the sucker!”
If you’re going to be dragging around asteroids anyway, why not drag a few into Venusian orbit to be used for feed-stock to build a cloud colony?
OTOH if ever there was a planet begging for a fly-by mission this is the one. Would be a great way to incrementally test MCT hardware, assuming no miracle breakthrough in solar propulsion. 2 launch windows per year, slightly under/over 1year mission profiles end-to-end, etc…
solar -> solar-system, not solar-powered. My bad…
The big question is “why?”
I can see a temporary research facility on Venus, but it’s very hard to think of any good reason for a permanent base or colony there. Deep gravity well, so extracting resources for use elsewhere is hard; deep in the Sun’s well, so it’s not easy to send stuff to other planets either. And what resources are there? Carbon dioxide, maybe a little water, and sulfuric acid. All of which are available elsewhere.
Cambias,
The question of why is a legitimate one, worth a longer reply. Short answer though is that other than the Moon, I don’t really see any off-world settlement location that can likely justify itself off of resource extraction (well maybe spun settlements near particularly interesting NEOs could be a second). But Mars definitely isn’t that interesting from a resource/gravity well situation. Venus and Mars are both very interesting as locations that have different synodic periods relative to NEOs than Earth does, that also happen to have atmospheres that enable aerobraking, and atmospheres that enable atmospheric ISRU.
But really my guess is going to boil down to the question of “Is this a place people want to live?” and “Is it affordable enough for people to immigrate there?” There are plenty of places on earth whose sole reason for existence seems to be “this is a place people like living and/or visiting”.
As I said a longer blog post and more thinking on the matter, but other than lunar settlement, I think all offworld destinations, Mars included, suffer from the “why” question.
~Jon
Hi, Jonathan. I would suggest that your “why?” question may be answered very simply. The characteristic of modern civilisation which sets it apart from all previous ones is technology-driven growth and progress, and the associated revolutions in such things as political freedom which go along with that growth. Venus, Mars and other Solar System locations, being currently uninhabited, offer large opportunities for continued technological, population and economic growth for a period of some thousands of years into the future. So long as our society retains its basic drive for growth, those opportunities will remain attractive to entrepreneurs.
–Cambias
January 15, 2016 at 10:22 AM
The big question is “why?”
I can see a temporary research facility on Venus, but it’s very hard to think of any good reason for a permanent base or colony there. Deep gravity well, so extracting resources for use elsewhere is hard; deep in the Sun’s well, so it’s not easy to send stuff to other planets either. And what resources are there? Carbon dioxide, maybe a little water, and sulfuric acid. All of which are available elsewhere.–
Venus has a lot of CO2 and you need CO2 to grow plants.
Just simply one could grow huge forests on Venus- and if add “nanotechnolgy” or advanced “Genetically modified crops” Venus has potential in this regard.
Venus large gravity well like Earth is a problem, but one can imagine a time where Earth’s gravity well is less of a problem, and this will probably translate into Venus gravity well being also less of a problem.
Earth’s atmosphere is somewhat of a problem as far as getting into space, but possible that Venus more massive atmosphere is less of a problem rather being being big problem than Earth’s dense atmosphere.
One way to look at it, is if Earth had a big hole- 20 km deep and 100 km in diameter it could an advantage in terms of spaceflight. And such a big hole would very similar to Venus conditions.
Or earth lapse rate is about 6.5 C per 1000 meter elevation- so 20 times 6.5 is 130 C, bottom of hole would have air about 130 C warmer,
also 20 km deep gives higher air density.
Higher air density gives lower terminal velocity. Or if with sky diving if one’s terminal velocity is somewhere around 180 mph, then it might instead to about around 100 mph at bottom of the hole. Or lifting body flies slower, a first stage falls slower, or one use smaller parachutes.
Also one use this higher density on way up in terms of some kinds of an assisted launch- ie, balloons work better [a balloon which can accelerate upwards- nothing like it on earth, btw]..
But the main factor is Venus location in the solar system, from Venus with hohmann transfer one can get to Mars faster than from Earth. This extend outward beyond Mars and applies to going to Mercury. And Mercury is faster to Mars than from Venus or Earth.
Now I would think that Mercury is better choice to start than Venus.
So with Mercury [like the Moon] the focus is it’s polar region. And like the Moon, Mercury has cold dark craters with unknown amounts of volatiles, but it’s safe bet that Mercury has more quantities of volatiles
as compared to the Moon.
Whenever someone asks that question, just ask the similar question – why go to the Utah desert? Everything in Utah is also available in Europe, so why bother leaving Europe? Africa was fine, why leave Africa and go to Europe? Why on Earth did my wife leave Hawaii and move with me to Chicago?
People do things for many reasons, most of which involve avoiding all the rules that have been piled up by all the previous humans. When it becomes feasible, it will happen, and without government support.
I’ll run this by the experts and see what you all have to say.
I know this would upset the Venerian** Gaia folk, but is it possible to engineer bacteria to transform the atmosphere? We could begin terraforming Venus today.
** Venerian was good enough for Heinlein, and my idea is science fiction.
I’m not a big fan of “Venerian”. I can see the day coming when advocates of *Venusian* cloud cities get accused by their detractors of succumbing to “Venerian Disease”. You have been warned… :-p
One thing about Venus- if you don’t change it- is it’s safest planet to live on, because one can’t incinerate it, as it’s pretty much incinerate, currently.
As people should realize, one can’t really blow up a planet, nor can you vaporize one, though “somehow” turning into black hole or have nano machine eat a planet is possible.
But one can easily incinerate Earth and kill every creature on it- all requires
is a rock about the size of Vesta hitting Earth. Whereas hitting Venus with a Vesta size rock isn’t going to do much- in terms everything on the planet- or obviously the region on Venus directly hit by this Vesta size rock would be similar to direct hit with nuclear bomb [a very, very, very huge nuclear bomb]. Or it matters a lot if average temperature at sea level increases by 100 C on Earth- largely because things live on the Earth surface. On Venus one lives in the atmosphere and it’s a big atmosphere and were the average temperature to increase, one then can simply lives higher in the atmosphere.
Or a safe place to be on Earth during a large asteroid impact would be in the high atmosphere, though low orbit could be quite dangerous.
Virtually no water. Surface temperature above the melting point of lead. Poisonous atmosphere, with a surface pressure 92 times that of Earth’s, far more volcanoes than Earth, and a day/night cycle that’s longer than its year.
What’s not to like?
Better to go with the Venus Belt solution: blast the planet apart (hit it with a large asteroid) and mine the detritus for raw materials to build lots and lots of large space habitats.
Hittng Venus with a large asteroid will not blow it apart. If you could blow Venus apart, you wouldn’t get a belt of asteroids, you get a ring of dust — with dire effects on Earth. Hell, even just blowing Venus’s atmosphere into solar orbit would likely seriously damage Earth, when a nontrivial amount of the gas accreted onto our planet.
” jabrwok
January 16, 2016 at 8:23 AM
Virtually no water. Surface temperature above the melting point of lead. Poisonous atmosphere, with a surface pressure 92 times that of Earth’s, far more volcanoes than Earth, and a day/night cycle that’s longer than its year.”
Most of Earth’s rocky surface has far pressure than Venus- as most of Earth is oceans of saltwater.
And Earth doesn’t have much freshwater- Venus could have more freshwater in it’s atmosphere than Earth has freshwater in it’s lakes and rivers [and atmosphere]. Venus has a very, dry atmosphere, but it also has a large atmosphere.
There is no evidence that Venus atmosphere is poisonous- it’s not breathable but that not the same as poisonous, but the atmosphere does have have a huge amount sulfuric acid clouds- has lots of sulfur and hydrogen as a sulfuric acid compound and it is corrosive- it’s poisonous to drink it, and depending on concentration can be lethal to irritating to breath it.
But on Earth we manufacture a lot sulfuric acid, or:
“Sulfuric acid is one of the most important compounds made by the chemical industry. It is used to make, literally, hundreds of compounds needed by almost every industry.
…
Annual production of sulfuric acid
World 200 million tonnes”
http://www.essentialchemicalindustry.org/chemicals/sulfuric-acid.html
As for the length of day- the entire atmosphere rotates. And one would live in the atmosphere and roughly within the pressure range of 4 atm to say 1/3rd of Earth’s atmospheric pressure. Or roughly in temperature range of say 150 C to below 0 C. Considering that our tropical temperature averages as high as 25 C, the outside temperature where one lives on Venus would tend to be higher than this, though it’s certainly possible for average to be below tropical average temperature- and have highest “daytime” air temperature being lower than highest air temperature in say, Europe.