"Even the gravity on Venus (0.91g) is homelike, which means that airship habitats, sensors, smoke detectors, toilets, and all the rest can be developed on Earth instead of forcing us to build a space station that can simulate Martian gravity."
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Imagine living on an airship high above the Earth, with the hard rule that you can never land. You must be entirely self-sufficient save for a tiny amount of material delivered infrequently. Now imagine trying to land on that airship from orbit or get back into orbit (and beyond) from that airship. None of this is easy here on Earth.
A mission that merely orbited Venus and returned without attempting to muck about with airships might be an intermediate step on the way to Mars. Trying to get closer to the surface than orbit would make things a lot harder.
> Missions to the clouds of Venus are either going to find life or some kind of brand new chemistry, either of which will be a breakthrough discovery in planetary science. There’s basically a guaranteed Nobel prize waiting in the skies of Venus for whoever wants to collect it.
why dont they send a probe to scoop up some venus air and bring it back? seems much easier than going with humans around the moon
The biggest problem is it's spin rate: a Venus day is 116 days Earth days or so.
Being completely tidally locked would be better because near the transition zones the permanent sun would make solar power and plants quite productive.
But an ecosystem where the planet spends most of the year in darkness or dim light?
Basically it's relatively easy to redirect comets to provide gas and liquids for the surface of Mars: that's technically demonstrated technology now.
There's almost no plausible way we could add momentum to Venus to give it a more reasonable day night cycle (I have seen some suggestion that shearing asteroids into it might be possible, but just the magnitude of momentum you're trying to add is staggering).
I'm currently reading (Re-reading actually) Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and in a chapter where he talked about Venus and how hot Venus is (Venus is actually the hottest planet in the solar system despite Mercury being closer to the Sun - although this wasn't mentioned in the book), and how the space probes that were sent there met an ugly fate, he had this interesting footnote which I want to share -
"In this stifling landscape, there is not likely to be anything alive, even creatures very different from us. Organic and other conceivable biological molecules would simply fall to pieces. But, as an indulgence, let us imagine that intelligent life once evolved on such a planet. Would it then invent science? The development of science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely cloud-covered. The night is pleasingly long - about 59 Earth days long but nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the Sun would be invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over the whole sky - just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping radiance beneath the sea. If a radio telescope were built on Venus, it could detect the Sun, the Earth and other distant objects. If astrophysics developed, the existence of stars could eventually be deduced from the principles of physics, but they would be theoretical constructs only. I sometimes wonder what their reaction would be if intelligent beings on Venus one day learned to fly, to sail in the dense air, to penetrate the mysterious cloud veil 45 kilometers above them and eventually to emerge out the top of the clouds, to look up and for the first time witness that glorious universe of Sun and planets and stars."
I'll shamelessly resurface a comment I made a few years back.
There's a school of thought which views Venus as a better colonization candidate than Mars, and as early as the 70's scientists envisioned floating cities. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus:
In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 kilometres (31 mi) above the Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the Solar System beyond Earth itself – a pressure of approximately 1 atm or 1000 hPa and temperatures in the 0 to 50 °C (273 to 323 K; 32 to 122 °F) range. Protection against cosmic radiation would be provided by the atmosphere above, with shielding mass equivalent to Earth's.
Being able to wear a simple breathing mask while working outside instead of a full pressure suit is a boon. Of course high windspeeds and the constant bombardment of acid rain would be a problem.
I could imagine Venus one day being an exotic, cloud-top paradise for the rich (reminiscent of BioShock Infinity) that's expensive to maintain, and Mars a brute workhorse that eventually displaces it as a more resilient habitat over the very long term (eg. after terraforming).
The problem with that school of thought is that nobody explains how you get from the balloons to orbit. The low Venus orbit velocity is about 7.3 km/s (similar to the LEO velocity), you need Falcon-size rockets to go from 0 to 7.3 km/s with enough cargo capacity to carry astronauts. Are you going to assemble such a rocket in a balloon?
> Are you going to assemble such a rocket in a balloon?
Yes, or hanging off the side of it. What's the concern? If you want to launch a rocket from Mars you have to build it either inside your habitat (and then build an airlock big enough to fit a rocket through to take it out) or just outside it (which means working in vacuum the whole time), and I'm not sure being able to build a smaller rocket makes up for that.
That's not how people intend to colonize Mars. Nobody is thinking of building rockets on Mars for a very long time. A few decades, maybe a century or more. The idea is to only refuel the rocket on Mars. You land the rocket (which comes from Earth) using aerobraking and retroburns. You refuel there. You take off. The only thing that gets manufactured on Mars is the fuel (technically the propellant).
On Venus, you need to find a way to not land the rocket, but to make it stop gently next to the balloon, attach it to the balloon somehow, adjust the buoyancy of the balloon when this happens, so the balloon does not suddenly drop by 20 km where the pressure difference, and additional heat, can destroy it. Then you need to manufacture the propellant inside the balloon, then you need to find a way to make the rocket fire its engines and take off, but without destroying the balloon in the process, and you need to adjust the buoyancy of the balloon in reverse. Of all the steps, I'll grant that the manufacturing of fuel might be roughly as easy as on Mars (the Sabatier process and all that). But the rest have no parallel on Mars, and don't seem possible, no matter what technology we come up with.
Landing/recovering aircraft on an airship is proven technology, and hooking a tether onto something as it falls through a buoyant atmosphere is quite possibly easier than stopping a rocket precisely at ground level where any screwup will turn it into a crater immediately (as is the case for Mars). Yes the balloon needs to be able to adjust its buoyancy to maintain stability but that was always a requirement; sinking into the atmosphere is a relatively slow process as long as your balloon is big enough. Likewise air-launched rockets are already proven technology - you can either just let the rocket drop away far enough for clearance before lighting its engines, or if you're feeling fancy then the rocket uses its own sacrificial balloon to rise as high as possible in the atmosphere before launch (of course that means you have to be able to manufacture balloon fabric or arriving rockets have to bring their own until you reach that stage, but that doesn't seem insurmountable).
Venus is in what I call the thermolocks zone, not the goldilocks zone. The thermolocks zone is optimal for solar power and perhaps therefore for computation, although heatsink radiators are essential.
The atmosphere of Venus in particular is very resource rich, and so it would be incredible to mine it for heavy use by a space economy. This mining is supposed to use free solar power. All of this is a job for robots, not humans.
There was this project idea that some researchers at Langley developed in the mid-2010s called HAVOC (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) [0] for a 5-stage mission to send humans to Venus's habitable-ish cloud layers. It never really got anywhere, but there was apparently some media attention around it for some time.
Because the nitrox atmosphere we're used to is a lifting gas in the Venusian atmosphere, you could theoretically just fill a big balloon with our atmosphere and live inside it, with lots of Teflon on the outside and suits made of Teflon to work outside the habitat. I also (kind of?) remember reading about using metal nets to capture and condense H2SO4 from the clouds and process it into water, oxygen, and hydrolox rocket fuel.
Because, to be honest, whats the point? We can pretty much determine the composition of the atmosphere with spectroscopy, and we can't land without being crushed, boiled and dissolved at the same time. If we go to Mars, we can potentially find things on the surface (eg interesting geological formations) much faster than a rover could, and potentially run more in-depth scientific tests on what we do find, rather than just what we can send on a single rover
Venus is similar to Earth in volume but a little lower in density. So gravity there would be similar to Earth but a little less, despite that it would feel like being at the bottom of the ocean or sinking into Jupiter due to the increased atmospheric pressure.
Lets also not forget the 872F surface temp that will spontaneously ignite anything primarily composed of carbon or the dense sulfuric acid clouds that will destroy most metals in as little as 45 minutes.
I’ve had a hypothesis ever since studying biology and things like complexity and emergence years ago:
We will find life almost everywhere there is an energy gradient, a sufficiently rich substrate, and phase transition boundaries. Life is just a thing that forms in such places.
In our solar system that is Venus, Earth (of course), Mars, Titan (I predict very slow metabolism cryogenic life with a hydrocarbon solvent), and subsurface oceans like Europa if they have a heat source that creates phase boundaries and energy gradients.
It will be mostly simple life though. What we won’t find everywhere is complex life. That took billions of years on Earth. It probably takes a very stable very rich large scale ecosystem with a huge energy flux to cook things like complex multicellularity and cognition, and there are reasons to believe Earth is a rare sort of environment.
Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival.
Nitpick: the photos are labeled as "Colorized images of the surface of Venus taken by a Soviet Venera lander in 1981", but
1. those photos are from Venera 13 and 14, which were taken in color
2. the photos were taken in 1982 (though the probes launched in 1981)
and 3. those aren't the original photos, they're 'enhanced' ones that have been upscaled and extended to show more of the horizon and sky than the originals. The bottom 1/4 or so is the actual original, give or take a few details that have been changed/added in the upscale process, but the rest is artistic interpretation
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadhttps://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20...
I thought it was resolved as SO2, not phosphine
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Imagine living on an airship high above the Earth, with the hard rule that you can never land. You must be entirely self-sufficient save for a tiny amount of material delivered infrequently. Now imagine trying to land on that airship from orbit or get back into orbit (and beyond) from that airship. None of this is easy here on Earth.
A mission that merely orbited Venus and returned without attempting to muck about with airships might be an intermediate step on the way to Mars. Trying to get closer to the surface than orbit would make things a lot harder.
"So that’s the bad part. But once you move past it, you start to notice that everything gets easier on Venus."
If wishes were fishes ...
why dont they send a probe to scoop up some venus air and bring it back? seems much easier than going with humans around the moon
Being completely tidally locked would be better because near the transition zones the permanent sun would make solar power and plants quite productive.
But an ecosystem where the planet spends most of the year in darkness or dim light?
Basically it's relatively easy to redirect comets to provide gas and liquids for the surface of Mars: that's technically demonstrated technology now.
There's almost no plausible way we could add momentum to Venus to give it a more reasonable day night cycle (I have seen some suggestion that shearing asteroids into it might be possible, but just the magnitude of momentum you're trying to add is staggering).
"In this stifling landscape, there is not likely to be anything alive, even creatures very different from us. Organic and other conceivable biological molecules would simply fall to pieces. But, as an indulgence, let us imagine that intelligent life once evolved on such a planet. Would it then invent science? The development of science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely cloud-covered. The night is pleasingly long - about 59 Earth days long but nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the Sun would be invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over the whole sky - just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping radiance beneath the sea. If a radio telescope were built on Venus, it could detect the Sun, the Earth and other distant objects. If astrophysics developed, the existence of stars could eventually be deduced from the principles of physics, but they would be theoretical constructs only. I sometimes wonder what their reaction would be if intelligent beings on Venus one day learned to fly, to sail in the dense air, to penetrate the mysterious cloud veil 45 kilometers above them and eventually to emerge out the top of the clouds, to look up and for the first time witness that glorious universe of Sun and planets and stars."
. . .
Carl Sagan is an amazing author, and I've shared the famous excerpt from his book Pale Blue Dot multiple times before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565381
A few mentions of his books in my blog post here - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
There's a school of thought which views Venus as a better colonization candidate than Mars, and as early as the 70's scientists envisioned floating cities. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus:
In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 kilometres (31 mi) above the Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the Solar System beyond Earth itself – a pressure of approximately 1 atm or 1000 hPa and temperatures in the 0 to 50 °C (273 to 323 K; 32 to 122 °F) range. Protection against cosmic radiation would be provided by the atmosphere above, with shielding mass equivalent to Earth's.
Being able to wear a simple breathing mask while working outside instead of a full pressure suit is a boon. Of course high windspeeds and the constant bombardment of acid rain would be a problem.
I could imagine Venus one day being an exotic, cloud-top paradise for the rich (reminiscent of BioShock Infinity) that's expensive to maintain, and Mars a brute workhorse that eventually displaces it as a more resilient habitat over the very long term (eg. after terraforming).
Yes, or hanging off the side of it. What's the concern? If you want to launch a rocket from Mars you have to build it either inside your habitat (and then build an airlock big enough to fit a rocket through to take it out) or just outside it (which means working in vacuum the whole time), and I'm not sure being able to build a smaller rocket makes up for that.
On Venus, you need to find a way to not land the rocket, but to make it stop gently next to the balloon, attach it to the balloon somehow, adjust the buoyancy of the balloon when this happens, so the balloon does not suddenly drop by 20 km where the pressure difference, and additional heat, can destroy it. Then you need to manufacture the propellant inside the balloon, then you need to find a way to make the rocket fire its engines and take off, but without destroying the balloon in the process, and you need to adjust the buoyancy of the balloon in reverse. Of all the steps, I'll grant that the manufacturing of fuel might be roughly as easy as on Mars (the Sabatier process and all that). But the rest have no parallel on Mars, and don't seem possible, no matter what technology we come up with.
The atmosphere of Venus in particular is very resource rich, and so it would be incredible to mine it for heavy use by a space economy. This mining is supposed to use free solar power. All of this is a job for robots, not humans.
Because the nitrox atmosphere we're used to is a lifting gas in the Venusian atmosphere, you could theoretically just fill a big balloon with our atmosphere and live inside it, with lots of Teflon on the outside and suits made of Teflon to work outside the habitat. I also (kind of?) remember reading about using metal nets to capture and condense H2SO4 from the clouds and process it into water, oxygen, and hydrolox rocket fuel.
[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160006329/downloads/20...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
Lets also not forget the 872F surface temp that will spontaneously ignite anything primarily composed of carbon or the dense sulfuric acid clouds that will destroy most metals in as little as 45 minutes.
Melt, but not ignite. There's no free oxygen to allow burning. A nitpick, sure, but probably worth mentioning.
We will find life almost everywhere there is an energy gradient, a sufficiently rich substrate, and phase transition boundaries. Life is just a thing that forms in such places.
In our solar system that is Venus, Earth (of course), Mars, Titan (I predict very slow metabolism cryogenic life with a hydrocarbon solvent), and subsurface oceans like Europa if they have a heat source that creates phase boundaries and energy gradients.
It will be mostly simple life though. What we won’t find everywhere is complex life. That took billions of years on Earth. It probably takes a very stable very rich large scale ecosystem with a huge energy flux to cook things like complex multicellularity and cognition, and there are reasons to believe Earth is a rare sort of environment.
-CEO Nwabudike Morgan
"The Centauri Monopoly"
“Organic superlube? Great stuff, great stuff!”
definitely worth the price on GoG
Venus is the wrong direction, with useless challenges. And thus a waste of resources.
Outwards. Not necessarily Mars, but outwards. No compromises.
1. those photos are from Venera 13 and 14, which were taken in color
2. the photos were taken in 1982 (though the probes launched in 1981)
and 3. those aren't the original photos, they're 'enhanced' ones that have been upscaled and extended to show more of the horizon and sky than the originals. The bottom 1/4 or so is the actual original, give or take a few details that have been changed/added in the upscale process, but the rest is artistic interpretation
You can look at the actual photos here: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-...