http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm has a neat set of pictures, history, and altimeter data from the Soviet Venera program. I find the pictures from the surface very eerie and awe-inspiring. These seemingly boring, peaceful looking pictures of rocky ground and clear sky come from a robot in a atmosphere of super-critical CO2, at 460 C, having just descended through clouds of sulfuric acid. Before this robot was melted, crushed, blown away or dissolved into oblivion it took a moment to send us a few pictures of the nearby landscape and tell us what color the sky was. Well done, brave and lonely explorer!
I had a dream once that life started on Venus, multiplied like crazy and fucked up the planet with overproduction of shitloads of greenhouse gasses ending in the acidic madness that is present today, and then jumping over to Earth.
In retrospect this does not seem THAT insane and I really do wonder why we have not focused more on Venus as a whole. It seems to me that in the long term it might be easier to terraform a planet like Venus than it is to terraform a planet like mars. Stripping something away is often easier than building it from scratch - and Venus has a whole lot of atmosphere on it!
It could also just be that my brain finds the idea of T-Rex's using their little tiny arms to operate computers and spaceships on the journey from ancient Venus to Earth extra hilarious.
It claims that, if we start in 2030, there can be ten billion people on Venus by 2200, and that the project can break-even by 2045 (after spending 150 billion British pounds)
That's .. not a lot. Not as much you might expect terraforming and colonising _another planet_ to cost over 15 years, anyway. The UK's annual budget is £770B.
Sorry, my question was whether this meant break even as in “we are extracting resources from Venus and selling them back on earth for more money than it cost to get them” or “Venus is now self sustaining”
If it is the first one, that seems hard to calculate, because if you are extracting that many resources you are going to distort the market on earth.
You comment makes it seem like they will break even by selling houses on Venus? How can they possibly know the market for Venus housing?
Unless I’m overlooking something, that paper doesn’t go into details, to say it extremely mildly. As far as I can tell, they only say “the first aerial space colony floats free and can be sold and inhabited”.
And as I said, the whole paper is highly optimistic. They’re suggesting huge space colonies (“the terraformed Venus is unlikely to be fully occupied until the population of the space colonies reaches ~3×10¹⁰”. That’s about four times the current population of earth)
I think I’m not alone in not seeing us put “several small space colonies” in the orbit of Venus and construct “a heavy orbital ring around Venus” ten years after we started planning.
I guess they extrapolated exponential growth of everything imaginable.
“It has until recently been assumed that the rotation rate or day-night cycle of Venus would have to be increased for successful terraformation to be achieved. More recent research has shown, however, that the current slow rotation rate of Venus is not at all detrimental to the planet's capability to support an Earth-like climate. Rather, the slow rotation rate would, given an Earth-like atmosphere, enable the formation of thick cloud layers on the side of the planet facing the sun. This in turn would raise planetary albedo and act to cool the global temperature to Earth-like levels, despite the greater proximity to the Sun.”
Plants grew just fine at the poles way back when the climate supported that. Humans and plenty of other animals have lived in the arctic for millennia. I don't think the day length is a big problem.
Weather maybe. The reason why we have wind is of course because of pressure differences. But those are also caused by the centrifugal powers moving air up and downwards in spirals. That would not happen in the same way on Venus
It's not so much terraforming, but one idea for colonizing Venus is to live on giant airships that hang out in the upper atmosphere where the temperatures and pressures are temperate.
You still need to deal with the nasty chemical composition of the atmosphere, but that might be doable somehow. Your airship also needs to be massive and sturdy enough to shrug off hundred mile an hour winds.
Humans have already measurably changed the angular velocity of the Earth with dams. Not sure why you think it will never be possible to change angular momentum, you just need minor planet collisions and/or flywheels.
Measurable but insignificant. It would take about 10^29 joules to speed Venus up to a 24h day.
The Chicxulub impact is estimated at 10^24-10^25 joules. So we need 10k-100k Chicxulub impacts in such a way that the energy is perfectly translated into Venus’s rotational energy.
That’s what, a billion tons of antimatter-matter reacting?
I don’t think we’re going to have a 24 hour day on Venus anytime soon.
I had read a couple of takes on staying in the clouds within Venus. Like just forget about the solid ground and treat that like the bottom of the ocean.
Make a floating city like Columbia in Bioshock Infinite.
I was convinced that its at least worth repeating, and that other people can tell me the problems with it.
More resources to harvest and convert within the atmosphere. Better positioning to explore other parts of Venus. Can't really think of any orbital advantages, as being in/at/near any planet is a disadvantage for space exploration - compared to being in space - but having the different orbit around the sun makes you closer to other objects at different intervals than being bounded to earth-orbit.
What are they going to grow with? I guess we're basically talking about an organic factory to extract carbon from the atmosphere and convert it to wood?
There was a bizarre story some years back about the Venera landers picking up signs of life:
According to the Russian news service Ria Novosti, Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences who worked on unmanned Soviet missions to Venus during the 1970s and '80s, has written a new article in the journal Solar System Research. In the article, he calls attention to several objects photographed by the Venera-13 landing probe, a spacecraft that landed on Venus in 1982. The objects — including features described as a disc and a scorpion — appear to change locations from one photo to the next. "Let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," Ksanfomaliti stated, according to Ria Novosti. ... In one image, the Venera-13 landing probe is seen parked on the rocky Venusian foreground, and an object shaped somewhat like a crab stands inches from the probe. In another image, also taken by Venera-13, this crab-like object appears to be in a different location.
Talk to Bill Stone about that - he's been one of the preeminent cave explorers and they've been working towards exactly that: https://stoneaerospace.com/ - look at Prometheus and Archimedes in particular.
And Enceladus, too! I've been reading about it lately, and I would be quite surprised (not to say I'm anywhere close to an expert) if there wasn't life there. It's got a rocky core surrounded by a deep ocean surrounded by a layer of ice. It's core gets a geological workout from tidal forces from Saturn (i.e., heat), and there's clear evidence of volcanic activity from the plumes that are ejected.
I'm a little surprised we don't more readily explore Europa and Enceladus. They are far more interesting than Mars.
I am not an expert in the field and happy to be corrected, but i think Europa is vastly underrated and i agree with your comment. I suppose the challenge is the thickness of its crust but in my view its worth exploring the options to reach its water ocean and potentially explore a research base. From water one can generate fuel, oxygen and do farming. Really wish someone knowledgeable would chip into why this moon is not getting more attention.
How difficult would it be to drill down through the ice? Would melting through the ice be a viable alternative or would that end up being less efficient?
What Venus needs is not another lander, but an aerostat with syntethic aperture radar. All of this can be done in plain silicon, no one's forcing anyone to descend into the hell.
EDIT: or maybe forget the aerostat thing and just put a satellite in orbit already. With a SAR.
400 meters relay race. 1st relay winner is USSR, 2nd relay winner is USSR, 3rd relay winner is USSR, 4th relay winner is US. Who won the race?
Not to mention for each of those firsts that USSR did US was not that much behind, and furthermore US did it over and over again with much more reliability than USSR.
How many countries have landed probes on Mars? If you are going to stop space history at the end of the 60s, I guess the achievements of the 70s aren’t that important to you?
> The Roadster is in a heliocentric orbit that crosses the orbit of Mars and reaches a distance of 1.66 au from the Sun.[6] With an inclination of roughly 1 degree to the ecliptic plane, compared to Mars' 1.85° inclination, this trajectory by design cannot intercept Mars, so the car will neither fly by Mars nor enter an orbit around Mars.
I think USSR fans generally dont care about safety. Its assumed there will be casaulties, the end justifies the means. One needs to either spend some time in Russia, or know Russians well to appreciate how much this influences everyday life in their country.
Nothing. The statement reeks of capitalist/american fragility. People can't tolerate the idea that capitalism isn't the absolute best choice in completely every aspect of our lives.
I enjoyed reading this article, thanks for sharing it. It would have been nice if the pictures that these probes took were also included in the article.
Not surprising I suppose, likely the inspiration, but the pressures and temperature and general inhospitable-ness sound an awful lot like the alternate life supporting planet for Rocky in Project Hail Mary. Good book!
