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Space Technology

First Human Colonies Should Be Among Venus' Clouds 256

StartsWithABang writes: When we talk about humans existing on worlds other than Earth, the first choice of a planet to do so on is usually Mars, a world that may have been extremely Earth-like for the first billion years of our Solar System or so. Perhaps, with enough ingenuity and resources, we could terraform it to be more like Earth is today. But the most Earth-like conditions in the Solar System don't occur on the surface of Mars, but rather in the high altitudes of Venus' atmosphere, some 50-65 km up. Despite its harsh conditions, this may be the best location for the first human colonies, for a myriad of good, scientific reasons. NASA proposed something similar last year and released a report on the subject.
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First Human Colonies Should Be Among Venus' Clouds

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  • Really ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @04:34PM (#50028587)

    When you think of space colonization, you very likely think of the important things that humans need for life:
            water,
            sunlight,
            the right temperatures,
            sources of food,
            sources of energy,
            and the ability to create or exist in a self-sustaining ecosystem.

    Well not having an atmosphere that consists of 900 degree sulfuric acid also comes to mind.

    At least with the moon or mars you aren't quite that dependent on active no fail technology to keep you alive.

    • Re:Really ? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @04:44PM (#50028645) Journal

      You also don't have to worry as much about massive storms with 300km/h winds. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I'd want to be hanging out in a large zeppelin when a wind like that nailed me.

      • The zeppelin would not be "hit" by the wind because it would not be anchored to anything. Rather, it would move along with the wind. Turbulence (akin to airplane turbulence) would be the only concern.
        • That assumes the winds are perfectly linear and even fairly constant, which of course, is impossible on a sphere.

    • He has a ridiculous beard, shaves his head and paints himself blue. What qualifications in astronomy do YOU have, muggle?

    • Re:Really ? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tnk1 ( 899206 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:13PM (#50030107)

      The atmosphere does have 900 degree sulfuric acid at the surface and just above. It also has a surface pressure like being a mile underwater. Carbon dioxide is actually a fluid at that pressure, not a gas.

      However at the altitude where the atmospheric pressure is like Earth's, it's not actually livable by itself, but it it isn't a hellish, crushing inferno either. It may well offer advantages over Mars. Having gravity be Earth-similar is important for long term habitation. More of an atmosphere to deal with radiation without having to bore into the surface is pretty useful as well.

      More to the point, you don't have to have a fragile balloon or something to keep the settlement up there. Venus is made up of a lot more CO2 by far than Earth is. Carbon Dioxide is heavier than either Nitrogen or Oxygen. Your settlement's air supply would literally be your flotation gas. The only "no fail" tech you would need, would be the same no fail tech you'd need to live on Mars. And with significant CO2, you have a much more ready supply of something that can be turned into Oxygen with scrubbers than you would on a comparatively airless Mars.

      • by delt0r ( 999393 )
        At those temperatures its a gas. It is over the critical pressure/temp so its just gas...
    • by Maritz ( 1829006 )
      It's cooler 65k up where he's talking about. And most of the sulfuric acid haze is below that.
    • That atmosphere can be changed. CO2 -> C+O2 is easy if you have cyanobacteria and sunlight. Throw in some sulphur eating bacteria, and wait. It wouldn't smell all that great, but it could work.
  • Ya moving to the closest planet to the sun being the first planet to get eaten by our sun when it expands and their is no question that will happen, is a great idea..Not. . Might make a great Movie plot though.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.

    • by Glarimore ( 1795666 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @04:50PM (#50028685)

      Ya moving to the closest planet to the sun being the first planet to get eaten by our sun when it expands and their is no question that will happen, is a great idea..Not.

      The timescale required to move to another planet at our current rate of technological advancement is trivial compared to the length of time that will pass before the sun expands to a diameter that would significantly affect temperatures on the planets in the solar system -- let alone "eat" them.

      Even if it took us one hundred thousand years to settle Venus, the sun would have barely changed in that time frame.

    • Neither is Venus the closet planet nor is the sun expanding in the near future ...

      Also: the time difference between Merkur (first planet!), Venus, Earth and Mars eaten by the red giant our sun will become at some point in time is: insignificant.

      It s mere minutes ...

      • The time scale for the Sun expanding after the core hydrogen runs out is about 2 billion years, most of that will occur in the last 100 million years or so. Any people (or whatever) living on each of the inner planets will have plenty of time to see the Sun coming to get them.

        • Nevertheless the time difference between killing all life on Venus and later Earth and later Mars is just a few 100,000 years if not a few centuries at max.

        • I think life will be long gone or very few alive. I'm no scientist but i would think getting closer to the sun by a hundred thousand miles would be more then enough to over heat the earth. Im sure someone here is smart enough to figure just how much it needs to expand im betting not very much at all. At any rate i will be long dead unless an asteroid hits before i die lol
      • Ya brain fart but still wasted resources
  • by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @04:48PM (#50028671) Homepage Journal

    From TFA:

    build a 1" thick hull out of steel in our desired shape,
    fill it with the same gases at the same temperatures and pressures in Earth's atmosphere,
    and let that baby loose on Venus.

    I'm no aerodynamicist, but common sense tells me that the volume of your balloon city will have to be very large and the amount of 1" thick steel you need to bring from Earth will be so massive, most Mars colony proposals will seem lightweight in comparison. Might as well just go to Mars.

    • Why does it have to be very large? Genuinely curious, because I can't think of any physical/mobility reasons -- just ones linked to space requirements for supporting the growing of food, generating power, cleaning water, etc.
      • by angel'o'sphere ( 80593 ) <<angelo.schneider> <at> <oomentor.de>> on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:05PM (#50028793) Journal

        Erm ???

        It must be very very large so it can "float" in the high pressure atmosphere of Venus like a ship floats on the seas of Earth.

        That was actually a no brainer :-/

        • That was actually a no brainer :-/

          Much like the original article.

      • by CanadianMacFan ( 1900244 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:10PM (#50028813)

        The ISS has a mass of approximately 417,000 kg and it's made of comparatively light materials when you are talking about building something out of 1" steel. And that is only made for six people living in a pretty cramped lifestyle. Do you really expect a human colony to exist of just six people and live in basically a large submarine? The population size is going to be a lot larger and they are going to need a lot more space. Every person is going to need their own space. Take a look at what each astronaut has on the ISS, especially when there is gravity they won't be sleeping "standing up". Then you are going to need communal areas, kitchens, medical areas, and so on. Not every space will be dedicated to work. Plus a colony will probably have children at some point so you need that whole infrastructure too. Plus the ISS doesn't even have space for growing food.

        • by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:34PM (#50030207) Homepage Journal

          The ISS has a mass of approximately 417,000 kg and it's made of comparatively light materials when you are talking about building something out of 1" steel.

          Just for fun, I calculated what the weight would be for a balloon of the same size of the article (78,000 m^3) but coated with 1 inch of steel. The best you can get is spherical, radius 26.5 m, which would have a surface area of 8,800 m^2 and with 1 inch of steel weigh 1,800,000 kg. And that is just the outer surface -- though to be fair, the weight of air contained within wouldn't be that much. Also, at those numbers you'd need 31 atmospheres of pressure or so worth of (hot) Venusian atmosphere to equal the weight of the outer hull, so I have my doubts about being able to be at 1 atmosphere.

          The main problem I see is that you have seconds to live if your air conditioner dies, followed by where will you get raw materials? Seems to me that if your hull weighs this much you're better off building where you can mine metal and just import air, rather than the other way around. Like, say, on Mars, where you can also get as much nitrogen and oxygen as you want from the atmosphere, and metal from the ground, and only need to import some hydrogen.

          • Been done:

            https://diverswhowanttolearnmo... [wordpress.com]

            • No, you have it backwards. Compressive force of 30 atmospheres is a very different beast than tensile force of 30 atmospheres. Think balloon vs submarine.

          • by delt0r ( 999393 )
            Why in gods name would you coat it with 1 inch of steal? That is up there with Wookies on Endor.
          • The main problem I see is that you have seconds to live if your air conditioner dies,

            Not really, at ~50km altitude, atmospheric pressure is near 1 atm, and temperature is just a tad warm for humans. If you go a little higher, you get into the normal temperature ranges for human habitation.

        • Well the nice thing is that there would be plenty of open space. I'm not sure why one-inch steel - steel doesn't seem to be an ideal material for this. I don't know what the effects of all that sulfide would have on carbon, but if it can be made resistant I would think seriously about starting small with a probe that can produce a carbon-based skin and build a bigger balloon for itself.

    • Iron rich asteroid? Just have to tip it out of solar orbit and get a lucky aerobrake in the Venusian atmosphere, should melt and purify the iron nicely in the process...

  • Knock it off (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:01PM (#50028767) Journal

    I always get a kick out of the fact that some of the same people who think solar energy will never be viable will embrace the idea of human colonies in the clouds over Venus or on Mars.

    • Come on, not the same people. And there are more people who believe (terrestrial) solar energy will become economically viable but think castles in the skies of Venus are just that. Castles in the air.
      • And there are more people who believe (terrestrial) solar energy will become economically viable but think castles in the skies of Venus are just that. Castles in the air.

        To be fair, we have solar energy, getting more economical by leaps and bounds, while our rockets are still blowing up at launch.

      • I think there's a fair overlap, I see quite a few comments on here of the "why bother fixing global warming we can't afford it and soon we'll all be living on Mars" type. I really can't understand the level of cognitive dissonance this suggests.
    • Yeah, but the reason is simple: the believe they can fly a molten salt (insert current favorite imagined nuclear energy source of the day) weighting a million of tons by launching it from earth into any orbit they want, just because it is nuclear! Or even land it on another planet.

      • Just fyi, an MSR can be built small enough (both weight and dimensions) to be driven around in a pickup truck.

        • Define truck :D

          With an RTG perhaps. Certainly not with a meaningful power output via a steam driven generator, and certainly it wont produce any power useable to lift a spacecraft.

          But yeah, ofc you can build a small one, the smallest only need to be big enough to have enough fission able material to sustain a chain reaction.

  • It would be interesting to see how human beings from different colonies on different planets evolve to adapt to their new environments, and I don't think it would take long at all for changes to happen. I believe nature moves quicker than we realize.
    • As long as there is no selective pressure, they won't.

      Adaption/Evolution works by weeding out the unfit and only let the surviving breed.

      As Mars has no means to kill unfit settlers, there are no "fit" settlers and hence no adaption.

      At least that is how Darwin puts it.

      Would settlers there be taller and more fragile? Depends how the genes are expressed, what food they have, how hard they work, but not really on how they "adapt".

    • I don't think it would take long at all for changes to happen. I believe nature moves quicker than we realize.

      It's all relative, really. Since evolution is inherited then the pace of change is measured in the number of generations. It might only take a hundred generations to start showing noticeable changes. Of course, we could just bring fruit flies and bean plants and start to see their changes much faster.

      Of course, if evolution has any say at all then it needs to be related to breeding. Anyone with a trait more suited to their environment needs to pass on their genes more than others. If some guy is born o

      • If some guy is born one day with red eyes that let him see through the clouds and hair all over his face that protects him from the things in the atmosphere then that's going to be for nothing if no woman wants to have his kids.

        Given the pairings I've been seeing lately, that shouldn't be a problem.

      • If some guy is born one day with red eyes that let him see through the clouds and hair all over his face that protects him from the things in the atmosphere then that's going to be for nothing if no woman wants to have his kids.

        If everyone else has massive facial tumours he might not do so badly.

    • Venus has an excess of women, and Mars has an excess of men. Or so a book I once read seemed to make out.

  • Venus? A floating colony in Venus's atmosphere is the very definition of "fail deadly". Anything goes wrong you are dead, whether dead quickly or dead slowly. Plus, given the conditions on Venus, if there ever was an ecology, it has long been reduced to ash. It is also not likely we could terraform Venus (reduce the atmosphere and spin it up) given the resources of the entire solar system to do so.

    If I were planning humanity's journey to the stars, I'd go with the moon first, followed by Ceres. Res

  • It always struck me as kind of crazy that anybody talks about building colonies on Mars, the moon, Venus, or anywhere off-world. I like sci-fi as much as the next guy, but the fact of the matter is that we already have a planet with suitable gravity, and breathable air.

    We're not even close to using up all of the available space on this planet. Why would we build on Mars when we have Antarctica? Why build on Venus when we have giant empty deserts in Nevada?

    On Earth, a cracked window doesn't mean that everybo

    • IMO, it's mainly that the rest of the Universe is so much more vast than this one world, and inhabiting any part of it besides Earth will likely require some kind of artificial environment. If humans figure out how to live indefinitely on Mars or Venus, we can eventually do the same in most other star systems, of which there are billions just in this galaxy.
    • by Pfhorrest ( 545131 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @07:53PM (#50029799) Homepage Journal

      By the time off-world colonies are viable, pollution on Earth will be a non-issue, because the exact same technology needed to sustain an offworld colony is the technology that would allow us to clean and recycle absolutely everything here on Earth. Because that's exactly what you need for a self-sustaining offworld colony: recycled everything. On Earth, we're lucky enough to have a natural biosphere that gives us tons of recycling capacity for free: just dump wastewaster and CO2 and feces into the wilderness and, like a miracle, fresh air blows back, clean water falls from the sky, and food grows out of what was once someone's shit. Up to a certain capacity at least. If we can't even manage to recycle the excess of ours that that massive free hand up nature gives us can't handle, then we're nowhere close to being able to settle offworld where we have to do all of that work ourselves.

      Like you say, Antarctica or the desert or, hell, the ocean floor, would all be a cakewalk compared to anywhere off Earth.

      There is good reason to settle offworld when we can (not keeping all our eggs in one basket), but until we're capable of even settling all of the comparably idyllic places on our own planet that aren't "worth settling" at the current difficulty levels, then we don't stand a chance of settling anywhere offworld.

      • There are pretty good reasons for believing that a key to the improved environment on Earth will be the migration of many processes off the planet. I'm not a particular fan of Space Solar Power, but it's definitely in the running. According to experts in the field, SSP could eliminate all of the power plants on Earth (both fire-based and nuclear) and provide easy cheap power everywhere for less. (IMHO it would be cheaper in the short run to just build big solar facilities in the Sahara, 30 feet off the g

        • Is shade really a "resource" when it comes to agriculture? Plants are powered by sunlight. The wide open fields of the breadbaskets of the world aren't exactly shady. They just get plenty of rainfall in addition to all that sunlight, which is what the Sahara is really missing.

    • by garyebickford ( 222422 ) <gar37bic@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:54PM (#50030283)

      As someone who is involved (peripherally) in the "New Space" movement, IMHO the first purpose of space development will be the availability of new resources and technologies. An economist a couple of years ago predicted that space development would have the potential to increase the standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10. That seems optimistic to me, but a reasonable goal. One popular example (see Planetary Resources, Inc.) regards the availability of Platinum, which is a very useful industrial metal, but is unfortunately $1300 per ounce. Platinum mining is expensive, dangerous, and disastrous both ecologically and socially. This greatly restricts is usefulness although it is used in those expensive catalytic converters in your car - that's why they're expensive. The best astronomical physicists believe that some of the Near Earth Asteroids contain single-digit percentages of Platinum. If this is true, then a 100 meter asteroid would contain a dozen times as much Platinum as has ever been mined. Retrieving this material to Earth could drop the price to between $10 and $100 per ounce, and this would still be economically viable for the company to process in space and ship it down to Earth.

      There are many other examples. Technologically, the range of industrial processes that are presently either expensive or impossible on Earth due to gravity and air, that could be done in the high vacuum and microgravity of space is broad but it is likely that an order of magnitude more new processes that have not even been envisioned yet will be discovered or invented. Orbital production of high quality integrated circuits might well be one - one of the most expensive aspects of IC manufacturing is the requirement to build a huge facility and maintain a high level clean room environment. In space that could be done with not much more than a bit of Mylar.

      • An economist a couple of years ago predicted that space development would have the potential to increase the standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10.

        Any additional clues on how to find that prediction? My google-fu fails me.

        • An economist a couple of years ago predicted that space development would have the potential to increase the standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10.

          Any additional clues on how to find that prediction? My google-fu fails me.

          Yes, it would be good to be able to rigorously test his data integrity, modelling assumptions and forecasting methodologies

      • Unless my calculations are wrong the 100m asteroid would yield about 30,000,000 dollars worth of platinum at $10 per oz at a percentage of 1% and assuming a density of 2g/cm^3. So the mission would have to be very cheap.
    • by tsotha ( 720379 )
      Yep. Even if your concern is the survival of the species you'd be better off building a deep bunker on the Earth than trying to start a colony on Mars or Venus.
  • Longer (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @07:47PM (#50029771) Journal

    hot enough so that the longest any spacecraft functioned on the surface was mere seconds;

    The Soviet landers lasted more than a half hour. But they did require massive cooling systems.

  • And I never realized why they live in the sky, it was because of climate change!
  • Why? Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere. Until this is remediated, any atmosphere will be whisked away by the solar winds.

    Venus has a magnetosphere. We could and should start not terraforming Venus, but "atmosphere-ing" Venus so that it can then be terraformed. Develop bacteria that live in the Venusian extremes, eat sulfuric acid and output fixed sulfur and H2O. Let the process run. We can then handle the rest.

"Plastic gun. Ingenious. More coffee, please." -- The Phantom comics

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