It would be a colony constantly depending on Earth supplies and you would be constantly rebuilding it. Just like every other planet, nothing can permanently survive in upper atmosphere. It would be easier to have a massive ISS-style station in orbit, with a tethered cable elevator for research.
At 50 km altitude above Venus (where pressure is about 1 bar) you are not really in the "upper atmosphere" as there is still about as much atmosphere above you as on ground level on Earth. So UV radiation is not a problem.
The atmosphere of Venus is just very thick. Also it contains many useful elements, C, O and H, which can be used to build basically anything if you have enough solar energy. The problem is the (comparatively small) amounts of other elements.
From the point of view of exploitable resources, Venus is the opposite of Mars.
On Mars, metals are very abundant and easy to extract, and also minerals suitable for making glass or ceramic materials are abundant, but the raw materials for making food and organic materials, like plastics, are very scarce and expensive to concentrate.
On Venus, there are abundant resources for making organic materials and food (except for a few metallic bioelements required in small quantities, i.e. Fe, Zn, Mn, Cu, Mo, Co), but there are no resources for making metallic, vitreous or ceramic materials.
However, the materials that are missing on Venus are easier to transport from elsewhere, because they are required in smaller quantities and they are dense solids that occupy little volume. If not enough water would be found underground on Mars, that would be really difficult to transport from elsewhere.
> If not enough water would be found underground on Mars, that would be really difficult to transport from elsewhere.
I was under the (uneducated) impression that there was a fair amount of water ice locked up in asteroids that are fairly easy to redirect into a Mars capture orbit.
True... I had to look if wiki has some new information, but no - as expected it is frozen ice of co2 and not h2o. Getting that h from somewhere to make water is still going to be an issue on Mars.
> would be a colony constantly depending on Earth supplies and you would be constantly rebuilding it
To be fair, this is true for all planets with known science and engineering. I'm not sure it's obvious that Venus (with its higher pressure and better radiation shielding) has fewer fundamental problems than Mars (with its surface that doesn't melt metal).
The results of some experiments done with mice on the ISS have been published recently and they cast doubt about the possibility of living for a long time on the Moon.
For mice, at least a third of the Earth gravity was required to prevent serious health problems and at least two thirds to avoid any health problems.
So it seems that the gravity of Mars is close to the minimum compatible with long-term staying, while that of the Moon is insufficient. Therefore people would have to spend only a limited time on a Moon base, much like on the ISS.
> results of some experiments done with mice on the ISS have been published recently and they cast doubt about the possibility of living for a long time on the Moon
We’re too early in low- (versus zero-) g research to draw conclusions. And from drugs to resistance routines, we haven’t even started researching mitigation.
The best argument for Moon and Mars bases is to enable this sort of research at scale.
Untrue. You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (the vast majority of the elements used by life) can be extracted from the atmosphere, as well as sulfur. So from an elemental standpoint, it actually could be self-sufficient. Not that you’d WANT to avoid trade with other planets, but it is possible.
It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
Yes, but! It's very hard. But you are a million percent right that the Venusian surface has lots of fantastic metals, largely tied up in basalt and volcanic ash. The bad news to my understanding is that they're kind of pulverized and evenly spread out and requires lots of refining/processing, and not necessarily so much in the way of veins/ore deposits ripe for harvesting (though I could be mistaken).
But back to how hard it is. There's mid-atmosphere winds that are effectively persistent hurricanes. It's hotter than a pizza oven, and the thick co2 air might as well be an ocean, because it has that much crushing force.
In my opinion, people should get excited about the thick atmosphere, because it's also the secret superpower that unlocks all the near term possibilities. Floating in the upper atmosphere is more like being a ship in an ocean, and if we ever got materials strong enough (graphite-carbon composites?) we could do some really cool passive dragnet + air balloon lift kinds of things to recover surface resources and lift them to a hypothetical settlement.
The one need-to-have resource that, as far as I know, there's none of on Venus whatsoever, is iodine. So even in the best case you'd have to import that. Oh, and water. You can get some out of the sulfuric acid rain but probably not as much as you want.
Granted, these are all assuming technology advances and big time scales, but trying to practice a golden rule here and be as charitable to the exercise as possible and not bean soup the discussion to death, which is a pet peeve of mine.
It'd be interesting to try to imagine a Venusian colonization that's like two separated levels: an atmospheric area where most people live and where you grow food, and then a subterranean (yes, yes, sub... aphroditean?) where you mine and so forth, and there are brief, fraught transitions between the two layers but no actual habitation of the surface or lower atmosphere.
> It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
We are facing an existential crisis in the form of climate warming on Earth that we are unable to address properly. The thing is, terraforming Earth is the easiest thing to do: we already live on it, it's already liveable. Mars, Venus or any other body in the solar system is magnitudes harder to transform on almost every aspect.
So unless humanity demonstrates it can tackle the easiest terraforming endeavour that be, anything else is firmly in the science fiction realm.
Geoengineering of Earth is remarkably easy. The reason it’s not already being done is political, not technical or even necessarily economic. For less than NASA’s budget, it’s possible to do things like stratospheric solar radiation management. See: Mount Pinatubo. Some places (Florida, etc) have already made laws prohibiting it.
As far as being science fiction… obviously? Terraforming Venus is a very long term project. It’s scientifically possible but hasn’t already been done. I guess I don’t understand what “science fiction” is supposed to mean. Like, Jules Verne writing about long distance underwater submarines? Trips to the Moon launched from Florida?
Exactly. I used to be a lifelong fan of anything space. But right now it is limited to people conducting actual science to get a better understanding of our universe. All the dick-swinging billionaires and geopolitical vanity projects of going to the Moon and Mars are utter follies. Every billion spent there, a waste of money that could be better spent. And I am not even talking about outer atmosphere ultra-rich people tourism in literal penis rockets. Utter pollution and waste. Let's wait to colonize other planets until after we get our own house in order.
I really doubt your veracity about this. It’s literally illegal for billionaires to geoengineer the Earth to stop global warming (at least in several states). Doubtless you would also object to that as well. In which case it’s not actually about solving Earth’s problems but about not liking those who are doing it.
Billionaires could trivially fund uncontroversial projects like planting trees or solar electrification, especially in the developing world, both of which would help stop global warming. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for Elon or Larry to start doing either of those things, or anything else that would actually help mitigate or reverse climate change.
Musk could spend 10 or even 100 billion on more down to Earth efforts without affecting his quality of life in the slightest. Instead he's promoting a self-serving idea, one that relies entirely on his own rocket-company infrastructure.
Putting data centers in space is also a dumb idea due to the difficulty of dissipating heat, solar radiation, maintenance challenges and more.
I don’t understand this. Elon thought of a way to virtually eliminate the land, heat, water, and energy impacts of datacenters, and because it makes his companies money instead of being non-profit, this is bad?
Maybe I do get it. It’s not about the actual impact. It’s entirely about performing. Profit (which is literally just a measure of whether the return on something is greater than the inputs) is somehow evil, but losing money on something (ie it costs more in inputs than its outputs) is good.
> Elon thought of a way to virtually eliminate the land, heat, water, and energy impacts of datacenters
He has yet to do any of this. He had an idea that plenty of others have had, and have mostly dismissed due to concerns with feasibility. Granted, orbital DCs could one day be feasible with enough investment; I will not pretend that it is impossible. But for him to pretend that it is a solution for today's problems is at best the folly of a wealthy idiot and at worst a cynical attempt to juice the value of SpaceX before its IPO.
I wish I was as "dumb" as Musk is. Long before Musk, I fantasized that if I was a billionaire, I would blow it all on a mission to Mars. Musk is living the dream. I bought shares in his companies just to share in the dream a bit!
Yes, I don't care about these selfish sociopath billionaires, and certainly wouldn't want them to geoengineer Earth. Perhaps pay their due tax to society would be a better idea. Fixing Earth might include having a system where people don't get to be billionaires and soon trillionaires that dominate the planet.
Terraforming is so conceptual at this point that I wouldn't take a hard stance on either being easier or harder. You never know what a few generations of studies will teach us; and what misconceptions we hold dearly that our descendants will laugh at us for.
At this point we're so deep into the science fiction that it might be easier to just hop into a time machine and colonize Mars before its atmosphere boiled off.
From my experience there is a correlation between people who think science is nonsense while also believing in terraforming. I don’t think anybody can even remotely predict the outcomes of a terraforming project.
Terraforming is possible but colonizing worlds hostile to humans has always meant genetic engineering to me. We need to drop the Star Trek idea that we can explore space in the sacks of water we call bodies.
Let's take the idea further, and borrow cstross's belief that canned apes will never colonize or explore anything, and only digital uploads into mechanical bodies will be destined for space.
> You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals
By "surface" do you mean the ground of Venus? The odds of a mining operation happening on the ground of Venus seems like science fiction at best, impossible at worst. Between the high winds, corrosive atmosphere, outlandish heat and extreme pressure any vehicle on the surface would be torn to shreds likely within a few hours (which has so far been the case for all landers that actually survived the landing) - and that's not even getting into the idea of getting things off the ground. Extraction from the atmosphere would likely be the only method unless something significant changes with the entire planet. Refining those materials would require a lot of machinery being in Venus's orbit that we'd have to get there, as well. Speaking of the conditions though...
> It is also possible to terraform Venus
Everything is hypothetical at best regarding this and would require a level of time and resources no government nor company would want to invest for an outstanding "maybe".
>>>It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
I would argue that it is very much opposite. Venus has already 80% mass of Earth. Mars on other hand have not much different gravity than that of Moon and Moon is much closer to Earth if you plan to make something suitable for older folks that look for lighter gravity.
It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
We’ve not terraformed anything, ever, but now we can compare the difficulty of terraforming of one planet versus another? “It’s possible”? So is turning lead into gold.
I said it was possible. “…fleeting quantities of gold nuclei”, and probably worth far, far less than it cost to make. Given that, I stand by my statement. :-)
The issue with Venus and Mars is that there is no magnetosphere. Over geological time periods the hydrogen is slowly lost into space. All that CO2 in the atmosphere could become H20 given enough introduced hydrogen, and photosynthesis.
Yes, geologic times, so like 100 million years or more, not relevant to human life timescales. But even Venus has substantial atmosphere still, including substantial amounts of hydrogen still (with enhanced deuterium concentration due to the atmospheric loss… which could actually be worth mining for nuclear power export).
Making a magnetic field on those timescales is easy, tho, compared to the other challenges. If you cool Venus down, you can place superconducting wires around the equator to generate a magnetic field. This is much easier than the terraforming you had to do.
Venus has a lot of atmosphere but very little water, maybe 1/1,000,000 as much in the atmosphere as we have in the atmosphere + ocean.
If you are interested in hyperlarge structures you could maybe spread out a really big foil to catch hydrogen from the solar wind and react it with oxygen in one form or another to make a large ocean.
That induced hydrogen, which you're looking for, can very well be the material particles in the solar wind. They don't reach much the Earth because are mostly charged protons and thus collide with Earth's magnetosphere. However, the lack of a strong magnetosphere on Venus means that, once that carbon dioxide layer gets reduced to lower levels and the reactive (free) oxygen can stay below a certain altitude, that shower of hydrogen should naturally become water. Therefore, the key to water on Venus is the reduction of carbon dioxide levels and production of free oxygen.
My understanding is, insofar as we're talking about protection from radiation, Venus compensates for its lack of a magnetosphere with incredibly thick atmospheric cover that does the same work, in fact does it better than here on Earth. That's not to say we would say no to a magnetosphere if such a thing could ever be achievable.
There's a degree of induced magnetosphere on Venus. Coupled with the atmosphere, you're far more shielded from radiation even floating high up in the Venusian atmosphere than on Mars.
Every time I read about colonizing another planet, I think about how we correctly don't want to colonize the bottom of the ocean or the Sahara desert because it would be completely uneconomical, and yet either would be much easier than this.
It would be akin to a city floating on Earth's open ocean. With all food, household items etc, and even construction materials produced via extraction from the surrounding ocean.
For Earthlings, the open ocean is harder to survive on long-term than deserts like the Sahara. Maybe on par with living off the land on Antarctic. Never mind all that corrosive stuff in Venus' atmosphere.
Doable in theory, yes. But HARD (and then some). That's ignoring the economics of such an enterprise.
On the upside: still easier than interstellar travel.
I think atmospheric extraction is very important and valuable but we'd be missing heavy metals and some critical elements. You do have carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, a little bit of hydrogen, a little bit of chlorine and flourine, and you can do a lot with those. Not as much hydrogen as you would want or need.
But potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, silica, iron oxides, nickel, titanium etc. are available on the surface.
> It would be akin to a city floating on Earth's open ocean. With all food, household items etc, and even construction materials produced via extraction from the surrounding ocean.
Akin in some senses, but let's not omit that another planet would be far, far more difficult. Humans do live on boats and islands in oceans; we can breathe the air, drink the water (if desalinated), eat the fish, swim, build boats from resources, etc.
That and we'd soon do the same things to a new planet that we're doing to this planet. The more time humanity has to mature from a cooperation-over-conflict perspective (both with each other and other beings/the environment) before it starts spreading to other planets, the better.
I agree. And how all of our meager steps towards trying to learn the pre-requisites of sustainable colonies (eg. closed cycle ecology) have failed miserably. For example Biosphere program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 ).
And the only working ecological system we can study is being destroyed by humanity and capital on record pace.
Biosphere 2 had the problem, not least, that it didn't have enough of an atmosphere to buffer swings of CO2 concentration between day and night. It's like "what did they think would happen?"
I think it is more that you need a specific endpoint and a real business plan. Like how could Biosphere 2 have really made money?
A closed loop ecology for, say, survival on Mars, is an interesting question that somebody might need an answer to but there is no reason why it needs to look like the Earth with oceans and all and it might lean heavily on bacteria that live in vats or 24 hour illuminated agriculture or something.
Meanwhile it is not so clear that from a scientific point of view that some experiment in a greenhouse can give conclusive answers about the ecology of the Earth where so much is going on.
Yeah, and the fact that no one is doing "practice runs" on them is telling how serious any colonization effort really is. Zero chance of a successful mars city if we can't even colonize the trivial in comparison ocean.
There's no reason to colonize the ocean bottom. For one thing, it's completely dark and cold. For another, I don't see any way you could build a spacious structure that could resist the pressure.
If I remember correctly, the habitable-ish cloud layers have super-fast winds that circle the planet once every 4 days or so. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_super-rotation
If you could increase rotation somehow and place a moon sizes object in it's orbit, maybe you could improve the magnetosphere and reduce volcanism by inducing plate tectonics.
space colonization, even if there were habitable planets within our reach, is not possible anymore.
you could, for example, send a million settlers to Kepler-69420, and with the TFR of 1.5 - an unrealistically high number - the colony would be extinct in just a few centuries. 1m becomes 100k in 200 years and 10k in 400 years.
I bet the colonists would be highly (self-)selected for many traits not common in the majority of the population, likely including the willingness to have many children.
I suppose that colonists on other planets, like colonists on other Earth continents, would largely consist of people who are unhappy with the status quo at their origin, and would have some strongly-held ideas about a different way of living.
>likely including the willingness to have many children.
why exactly do you find it likely? on the contrary, most of the colonists would need to be highly educated professionals for the colony to be self-sufficient, so they would be even less likely to have many children than average people.
besides, in very near future, the TFR of 1.5 will pass for "willingness to have many children".
I don't think that the highly educated people who would join the expedition would at the same time be happy to se their colony die out, and would find it too onerous to have children and pass their knowledge and fervor to the next generations.
Again, I don't think that a self-sustained colony on another planet would be organized by Earth governments, and by people who are happy to live on Earth. I bet on projects like (the declared) Musk's Mars colony, and even more, on religious groups (remember Mayflower). It takes a lot of grit to leave the comforts of Earth and go live in highly inhospitable and limiting conditions of another world, for life. Do not compare it to traits of a typical middle-class college-educated coastal city dweller. Those are going to be very different people, with very different views on everything, including fertility and raising children.
From my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the research, education of women is the best correlate for lower birth rates. Once women have other options, staying home and popping out babies is less popular.
I don't know exactly how that might work in the scenarios we are discussing though.
If anyone wants breadcrumbs, I just did a deep dive and there are a couple of promising technologies that could terraform Venus on roughly a human timescale of 100 years:
* Sun shade/sail near L1 tipped up to 35 degrees to remain still: 5 micron polymer film (1.5-3.5 billion tons or 10-25 million SpaceX Starship launches at 150 tons each) or 50 layer graphene (15 thousand tons or 100 launches). Liquid CO2 ocean forms at 31 C or 88 F, or dry ice glaciers at -78 C or -108 F result in nitrogen atmosphere dropped from 92 times pressure to close to Earth's pressure. Shade rotation can simulate a 24 hour day.
* Comets to increase water and spin rate: 50-100 100 km diameter comets from Kuiper Belt at 30 AU, nuclear rocket using 1% of water to gravitationally slingshot comets by planets over 20-100 years to impact at equator, resulting in 50 day retrograde or 64 day prograde rotation (down from 243 days). Decreases temperature and sulphuric acid enough for microbes to start fixing CO2 and acid.
The "hard" parts are getting bots into orbit to blow graphene bubbles to form a honeycomb, and inventing open-ended fusion rockets to avoid containment issues.
I think the sun shade is probably how we'll slow global climate change until we can plant the 1-10 trillion trees it will take to reverse it (mechanical carbon capture can't be scaled enough practically), but I digress.
Note that the blocker is actually getting to low Earth orbit (LEO) since delta V is straightforward with ion engines. That will arguably be a solved problem once big "dumb" rockets like Starship scale. I'm a big fan of JP Aerospace's airship to orbit concept and other magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) craft, but it's unclear if they will be able to achieve heavy lift. Aerospike engines and exotic rockets are being evolved by AI currently.
Spitballing here, you might be able to use some sort of floating wind turbine, and trail it out on a long enough cable to catch a different windstream. There's all sorts of reasons why it's a pretty terrible idea.
Forgotten: genetically modified algae-like organisms that would float at the habitable-ish altitude due to having a gas bubble. These organisms should consume sunlight and transform gaseous substances into something more solid/liquid to rain it down onto the surface, thus making the atmosphere less thick and more transparent. Bonus points for binding and removing chlorine and leaving oxygen intact.
I still think humanity's far future is in orbitals in space, not on planets and certainly not on planets as hostile as Venus is. I'm not sure how well living at 50km above the surface would work. You still need a lot of buoyance to float large structures.
The atmosphere is also a solvable problem. One idea I've heard is using so-called "fusion candles". That is a fusion-powered device in the atmosphere that sends waste gas into space and waste matter to the ground in an equilibrium that keeps them airborne, all powered by fusion. You could extract carbon and/or oxygen this way from the plentiful atmospheric CO2.
Still, if you ever got the atmosphere down to a non-hellish level at surface, the surface would still be covered with all sorts of exotics and metals, many of them toxic. You'd probably be looking at geologic timescales to rehabilitate it.
But whenever these terraforming questions come up (often with respect to Mars), people really don't appreciate the scale and the energy budget required. The energy budget is many orders of magntidue what our civilization currently uses. If you have access to that much energy, there are far better options.
It would be a colony constantly depending on Earth supplies and you would be constantly rebuilding it. Just like every other planet, nothing can permanently survive in upper atmosphere. It would be easier to have a massive ISS-style station in orbit, with a tethered cable elevator for research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposing_Microorganisms_in_the...
At 50 km altitude above Venus (where pressure is about 1 bar) you are not really in the "upper atmosphere" as there is still about as much atmosphere above you as on ground level on Earth. So UV radiation is not a problem.
The atmosphere of Venus is just very thick. Also it contains many useful elements, C, O and H, which can be used to build basically anything if you have enough solar energy. The problem is the (comparatively small) amounts of other elements.
From the point of view of exploitable resources, Venus is the opposite of Mars.
On Mars, metals are very abundant and easy to extract, and also minerals suitable for making glass or ceramic materials are abundant, but the raw materials for making food and organic materials, like plastics, are very scarce and expensive to concentrate.
On Venus, there are abundant resources for making organic materials and food (except for a few metallic bioelements required in small quantities, i.e. Fe, Zn, Mn, Cu, Mo, Co), but there are no resources for making metallic, vitreous or ceramic materials.
However, the materials that are missing on Venus are easier to transport from elsewhere, because they are required in smaller quantities and they are dense solids that occupy little volume. If not enough water would be found underground on Mars, that would be really difficult to transport from elsewhere.
> If not enough water would be found underground on Mars, that would be really difficult to transport from elsewhere.
I was under the (uneducated) impression that there was a fair amount of water ice locked up in asteroids that are fairly easy to redirect into a Mars capture orbit.
"Fairly Easy" Is doing a lot of work there. Theoretically possible yes.
Mars also has two polar ice caps [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_polar_ice_caps
True... I had to look if wiki has some new information, but no - as expected it is frozen ice of co2 and not h2o. Getting that h from somewhere to make water is still going to be an issue on Mars.
Mars has a huge amount of water ice
No. Most of that is co2. There are a lot of comets that can deliver ice(of water), but if that is a solution then that works for Venus as well.
> would be a colony constantly depending on Earth supplies and you would be constantly rebuilding it
To be fair, this is true for all planets with known science and engineering. I'm not sure it's obvious that Venus (with its higher pressure and better radiation shielding) has fewer fundamental problems than Mars (with its surface that doesn't melt metal).
True fact, but not by much, as plans are already in-progress with Artemis V and a lunar colony.
The results of some experiments done with mice on the ISS have been published recently and they cast doubt about the possibility of living for a long time on the Moon.
For mice, at least a third of the Earth gravity was required to prevent serious health problems and at least two thirds to avoid any health problems.
So it seems that the gravity of Mars is close to the minimum compatible with long-term staying, while that of the Moon is insufficient. Therefore people would have to spend only a limited time on a Moon base, much like on the ISS.
> results of some experiments done with mice on the ISS have been published recently and they cast doubt about the possibility of living for a long time on the Moon
We’re too early in low- (versus zero-) g research to draw conclusions. And from drugs to resistance routines, we haven’t even started researching mitigation.
The best argument for Moon and Mars bases is to enable this sort of research at scale.
> plans are already in-progress with Artemis V and a lunar colony
Artemis aims to establish lunar and Martian colonies. Not self-sufficient settlements. That's still at least a generation away, probably two or three.
Untrue. You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (the vast majority of the elements used by life) can be extracted from the atmosphere, as well as sulfur. So from an elemental standpoint, it actually could be self-sufficient. Not that you’d WANT to avoid trade with other planets, but it is possible.
It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
Yes, but! It's very hard. But you are a million percent right that the Venusian surface has lots of fantastic metals, largely tied up in basalt and volcanic ash. The bad news to my understanding is that they're kind of pulverized and evenly spread out and requires lots of refining/processing, and not necessarily so much in the way of veins/ore deposits ripe for harvesting (though I could be mistaken).
But back to how hard it is. There's mid-atmosphere winds that are effectively persistent hurricanes. It's hotter than a pizza oven, and the thick co2 air might as well be an ocean, because it has that much crushing force.
In my opinion, people should get excited about the thick atmosphere, because it's also the secret superpower that unlocks all the near term possibilities. Floating in the upper atmosphere is more like being a ship in an ocean, and if we ever got materials strong enough (graphite-carbon composites?) we could do some really cool passive dragnet + air balloon lift kinds of things to recover surface resources and lift them to a hypothetical settlement.
The one need-to-have resource that, as far as I know, there's none of on Venus whatsoever, is iodine. So even in the best case you'd have to import that. Oh, and water. You can get some out of the sulfuric acid rain but probably not as much as you want.
Granted, these are all assuming technology advances and big time scales, but trying to practice a golden rule here and be as charitable to the exercise as possible and not bean soup the discussion to death, which is a pet peeve of mine.
It'd be interesting to try to imagine a Venusian colonization that's like two separated levels: an atmospheric area where most people live and where you grow food, and then a subterranean (yes, yes, sub... aphroditean?) where you mine and so forth, and there are brief, fraught transitions between the two layers but no actual habitation of the surface or lower atmosphere.
How high does the ocean-like CO2 extend? Usually the idea for a base is ~50 km altitude.
> It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
We are facing an existential crisis in the form of climate warming on Earth that we are unable to address properly. The thing is, terraforming Earth is the easiest thing to do: we already live on it, it's already liveable. Mars, Venus or any other body in the solar system is magnitudes harder to transform on almost every aspect.
So unless humanity demonstrates it can tackle the easiest terraforming endeavour that be, anything else is firmly in the science fiction realm.
Geoengineering of Earth is remarkably easy. The reason it’s not already being done is political, not technical or even necessarily economic. For less than NASA’s budget, it’s possible to do things like stratospheric solar radiation management. See: Mount Pinatubo. Some places (Florida, etc) have already made laws prohibiting it.
As far as being science fiction… obviously? Terraforming Venus is a very long term project. It’s scientifically possible but hasn’t already been done. I guess I don’t understand what “science fiction” is supposed to mean. Like, Jules Verne writing about long distance underwater submarines? Trips to the Moon launched from Florida?
Exactly. I used to be a lifelong fan of anything space. But right now it is limited to people conducting actual science to get a better understanding of our universe. All the dick-swinging billionaires and geopolitical vanity projects of going to the Moon and Mars are utter follies. Every billion spent there, a waste of money that could be better spent. And I am not even talking about outer atmosphere ultra-rich people tourism in literal penis rockets. Utter pollution and waste. Let's wait to colonize other planets until after we get our own house in order.
I really doubt your veracity about this. It’s literally illegal for billionaires to geoengineer the Earth to stop global warming (at least in several states). Doubtless you would also object to that as well. In which case it’s not actually about solving Earth’s problems but about not liking those who are doing it.
Billionaires could trivially fund uncontroversial projects like planting trees or solar electrification, especially in the developing world, both of which would help stop global warming. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for Elon or Larry to start doing either of those things, or anything else that would actually help mitigate or reverse climate change.
There are a lot of complaints about the environmental consequences of data centers. Musk is investing heavily in putting data centers in space.
Musk could spend 10 or even 100 billion on more down to Earth efforts without affecting his quality of life in the slightest. Instead he's promoting a self-serving idea, one that relies entirely on his own rocket-company infrastructure.
Putting data centers in space is also a dumb idea due to the difficulty of dissipating heat, solar radiation, maintenance challenges and more.
I don’t understand this. Elon thought of a way to virtually eliminate the land, heat, water, and energy impacts of datacenters, and because it makes his companies money instead of being non-profit, this is bad?
Maybe I do get it. It’s not about the actual impact. It’s entirely about performing. Profit (which is literally just a measure of whether the return on something is greater than the inputs) is somehow evil, but losing money on something (ie it costs more in inputs than its outputs) is good.
> Elon thought of a way to virtually eliminate the land, heat, water, and energy impacts of datacenters
He has yet to do any of this. He had an idea that plenty of others have had, and have mostly dismissed due to concerns with feasibility. Granted, orbital DCs could one day be feasible with enough investment; I will not pretend that it is impossible. But for him to pretend that it is a solution for today's problems is at best the folly of a wealthy idiot and at worst a cynical attempt to juice the value of SpaceX before its IPO.
Elon has been called an idiot for every single one of his ventures. Again and again and again.
Maybe he'll fail this time. Maybe he'll figure it out.
But I like the fact that he is trying rather than spending his money on mansions and yachts.
I wish I was as "dumb" as Musk is. Long before Musk, I fantasized that if I was a billionaire, I would blow it all on a mission to Mars. Musk is living the dream. I bought shares in his companies just to share in the dream a bit!
Which is, it should be said, also a dumb idea and a waste of money.
Which has also been said for every one of his enormously successful businesses.
Yes, Elon Musk, famous for not being interested in solar electrification projects.
But it is legal for them to fund politicians who believe greenhouse gasses should be limited. Strangely they don't do that, mostly.
Yes, I don't care about these selfish sociopath billionaires, and certainly wouldn't want them to geoengineer Earth. Perhaps pay their due tax to society would be a better idea. Fixing Earth might include having a system where people don't get to be billionaires and soon trillionaires that dominate the planet.
> although much more difficult than
Terraforming is so conceptual at this point that I wouldn't take a hard stance on either being easier or harder. You never know what a few generations of studies will teach us; and what misconceptions we hold dearly that our descendants will laugh at us for.
At this point we're so deep into the science fiction that it might be easier to just hop into a time machine and colonize Mars before its atmosphere boiled off.
Some infinities are bigger than others.
From my experience there is a correlation between people who think science is nonsense while also believing in terraforming. I don’t think anybody can even remotely predict the outcomes of a terraforming project.
Terraforming is possible but colonizing worlds hostile to humans has always meant genetic engineering to me. We need to drop the Star Trek idea that we can explore space in the sacks of water we call bodies.
Let's take the idea further, and borrow cstross's belief that canned apes will never colonize or explore anything, and only digital uploads into mechanical bodies will be destined for space.
> You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals
By "surface" do you mean the ground of Venus? The odds of a mining operation happening on the ground of Venus seems like science fiction at best, impossible at worst. Between the high winds, corrosive atmosphere, outlandish heat and extreme pressure any vehicle on the surface would be torn to shreds likely within a few hours (which has so far been the case for all landers that actually survived the landing) - and that's not even getting into the idea of getting things off the ground. Extraction from the atmosphere would likely be the only method unless something significant changes with the entire planet. Refining those materials would require a lot of machinery being in Venus's orbit that we'd have to get there, as well. Speaking of the conditions though...
> It is also possible to terraform Venus
Everything is hypothetical at best regarding this and would require a level of time and resources no government nor company would want to invest for an outstanding "maybe".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus
>>>It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
I would argue that it is very much opposite. Venus has already 80% mass of Earth. Mars on other hand have not much different gravity than that of Moon and Moon is much closer to Earth if you plan to make something suitable for older folks that look for lighter gravity.
> It is also possible to terraform Venus
We can't even properly terraform inhospitable places within Earth.
Hell, if anything we are very quickly un-terraforming Earth into a place inhospitable to human life.
We would have to work really hard to make Earth as inhospitable as other planets or moons in the solar system.
But we are giving it a shot!
If we could send all the terraformers from earth to mars we would so solve both problems at the same time
Sounds like a plan.
What do you call Phoenix?
No shit! We are probably dead even before we can build a habitat on our own orbit.
We are failing the great filter very hard.
It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
We’ve not terraformed anything, ever, but now we can compare the difficulty of terraforming of one planet versus another? “It’s possible”? So is turning lead into gold.
Your point is taken but we've turned lead into gold: https://home.cern/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc/
I said it was possible. “…fleeting quantities of gold nuclei”, and probably worth far, far less than it cost to make. Given that, I stand by my statement. :-)
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They are all impossible without supplies from Earth.
But wonder if a floating balloon contraption isn't more likely than a base on Mars. Which is more deadly?
Venus seems to have more potentially useful compounds in the atmosphere.
Mars is more deadly. Easily so.
Venus atmosphere has the right amounts of radiation, temperature, and pressure. And close to the right gravity.
The issue with Venus and Mars is that there is no magnetosphere. Over geological time periods the hydrogen is slowly lost into space. All that CO2 in the atmosphere could become H20 given enough introduced hydrogen, and photosynthesis.
Yes, geologic times, so like 100 million years or more, not relevant to human life timescales. But even Venus has substantial atmosphere still, including substantial amounts of hydrogen still (with enhanced deuterium concentration due to the atmospheric loss… which could actually be worth mining for nuclear power export).
Making a magnetic field on those timescales is easy, tho, compared to the other challenges. If you cool Venus down, you can place superconducting wires around the equator to generate a magnetic field. This is much easier than the terraforming you had to do.
Would it be possible to have the wires floating in space, instead of placed down on the surface?
So parallel inward orbiting solar sails?
Venus has a lot of atmosphere but very little water, maybe 1/1,000,000 as much in the atmosphere as we have in the atmosphere + ocean.
If you are interested in hyperlarge structures you could maybe spread out a really big foil to catch hydrogen from the solar wind and react it with oxygen in one form or another to make a large ocean.
That induced hydrogen, which you're looking for, can very well be the material particles in the solar wind. They don't reach much the Earth because are mostly charged protons and thus collide with Earth's magnetosphere. However, the lack of a strong magnetosphere on Venus means that, once that carbon dioxide layer gets reduced to lower levels and the reactive (free) oxygen can stay below a certain altitude, that shower of hydrogen should naturally become water. Therefore, the key to water on Venus is the reduction of carbon dioxide levels and production of free oxygen.
I've touched this idea before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26575155
My understanding is, insofar as we're talking about protection from radiation, Venus compensates for its lack of a magnetosphere with incredibly thick atmospheric cover that does the same work, in fact does it better than here on Earth. That's not to say we would say no to a magnetosphere if such a thing could ever be achievable.
There's a degree of induced magnetosphere on Venus. Coupled with the atmosphere, you're far more shielded from radiation even floating high up in the Venusian atmosphere than on Mars.
Does no one read Gerard K. O'Neill anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...
Blue Origin does. https://www.blueorigin.com/destinations And VAST https://www.vastspace.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885739
Every time I read about colonizing another planet, I think about how we correctly don't want to colonize the bottom of the ocean or the Sahara desert because it would be completely uneconomical, and yet either would be much easier than this.
It would be akin to a city floating on Earth's open ocean. With all food, household items etc, and even construction materials produced via extraction from the surrounding ocean.
For Earthlings, the open ocean is harder to survive on long-term than deserts like the Sahara. Maybe on par with living off the land on Antarctic. Never mind all that corrosive stuff in Venus' atmosphere.
Doable in theory, yes. But HARD (and then some). That's ignoring the economics of such an enterprise.
On the upside: still easier than interstellar travel.
I think atmospheric extraction is very important and valuable but we'd be missing heavy metals and some critical elements. You do have carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, a little bit of hydrogen, a little bit of chlorine and flourine, and you can do a lot with those. Not as much hydrogen as you would want or need.
But potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, silica, iron oxides, nickel, titanium etc. are available on the surface.
I get your point, but ...
> It would be akin to a city floating on Earth's open ocean. With all food, household items etc, and even construction materials produced via extraction from the surrounding ocean.
Akin in some senses, but let's not omit that another planet would be far, far more difficult. Humans do live on boats and islands in oceans; we can breathe the air, drink the water (if desalinated), eat the fish, swim, build boats from resources, etc.
That and we'd soon do the same things to a new planet that we're doing to this planet. The more time humanity has to mature from a cooperation-over-conflict perspective (both with each other and other beings/the environment) before it starts spreading to other planets, the better.
We’d have a settlement in the Sahara desert if it took six months to get there and there were something interesting there. We have one in Antarctica.
I agree. And how all of our meager steps towards trying to learn the pre-requisites of sustainable colonies (eg. closed cycle ecology) have failed miserably. For example Biosphere program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 ).
And the only working ecological system we can study is being destroyed by humanity and capital on record pace.
Biosphere 2 had the problem, not least, that it didn't have enough of an atmosphere to buffer swings of CO2 concentration between day and night. It's like "what did they think would happen?"
I assume the reason nobody has tried to fund a biosphere 3 is because we don't yet have enough knowledge to make it possible.
I think it is more that you need a specific endpoint and a real business plan. Like how could Biosphere 2 have really made money?
A closed loop ecology for, say, survival on Mars, is an interesting question that somebody might need an answer to but there is no reason why it needs to look like the Earth with oceans and all and it might lean heavily on bacteria that live in vats or 24 hour illuminated agriculture or something.
Meanwhile it is not so clear that from a scientific point of view that some experiment in a greenhouse can give conclusive answers about the ecology of the Earth where so much is going on.
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Yeah, and the fact that no one is doing "practice runs" on them is telling how serious any colonization effort really is. Zero chance of a successful mars city if we can't even colonize the trivial in comparison ocean.
What it would be much cooler
I know you're probably joking, but there is definitely a romanticism around "other planets." The "cool" factor is definitely a power variable.
There's no reason to colonize the ocean bottom. For one thing, it's completely dark and cold. For another, I don't see any way you could build a spacious structure that could resist the pressure.
If only Venus had a moon like ours to encourage rotation.
Duplicate of my previous comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47887938)
Moon actually slows down Earth's rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration#Effects_of_...
If you could increase rotation somehow and place a moon sizes object in it's orbit, maybe you could improve the magnetosphere and reduce volcanism by inducing plate tectonics.
space colonization, even if there were habitable planets within our reach, is not possible anymore.
you could, for example, send a million settlers to Kepler-69420, and with the TFR of 1.5 - an unrealistically high number - the colony would be extinct in just a few centuries. 1m becomes 100k in 200 years and 10k in 400 years.
I bet the colonists would be highly (self-)selected for many traits not common in the majority of the population, likely including the willingness to have many children.
I suppose that colonists on other planets, like colonists on other Earth continents, would largely consist of people who are unhappy with the status quo at their origin, and would have some strongly-held ideas about a different way of living.
>likely including the willingness to have many children.
why exactly do you find it likely? on the contrary, most of the colonists would need to be highly educated professionals for the colony to be self-sufficient, so they would be even less likely to have many children than average people.
besides, in very near future, the TFR of 1.5 will pass for "willingness to have many children".
I don't think that the highly educated people who would join the expedition would at the same time be happy to se their colony die out, and would find it too onerous to have children and pass their knowledge and fervor to the next generations.
Again, I don't think that a self-sustained colony on another planet would be organized by Earth governments, and by people who are happy to live on Earth. I bet on projects like (the declared) Musk's Mars colony, and even more, on religious groups (remember Mayflower). It takes a lot of grit to leave the comforts of Earth and go live in highly inhospitable and limiting conditions of another world, for life. Do not compare it to traits of a typical middle-class college-educated coastal city dweller. Those are going to be very different people, with very different views on everything, including fertility and raising children.
Because willingness to have many children depends on safety. Birth rate falls not (just) because "education".
From my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the research, education of women is the best correlate for lower birth rates. Once women have other options, staying home and popping out babies is less popular.
I don't know exactly how that might work in the scenarios we are discussing though.
Wouldn't education correlate with safety?
is it safer in Switzerland or Democratic Republic of Congo?
Exactly.
One shudders to think of the difficulties of launching and landing space vehicles on these balloon-supported platforms.
At least two...
If anyone wants breadcrumbs, I just did a deep dive and there are a couple of promising technologies that could terraform Venus on roughly a human timescale of 100 years:
* Sun shade/sail near L1 tipped up to 35 degrees to remain still: 5 micron polymer film (1.5-3.5 billion tons or 10-25 million SpaceX Starship launches at 150 tons each) or 50 layer graphene (15 thousand tons or 100 launches). Liquid CO2 ocean forms at 31 C or 88 F, or dry ice glaciers at -78 C or -108 F result in nitrogen atmosphere dropped from 92 times pressure to close to Earth's pressure. Shade rotation can simulate a 24 hour day.
* Comets to increase water and spin rate: 50-100 100 km diameter comets from Kuiper Belt at 30 AU, nuclear rocket using 1% of water to gravitationally slingshot comets by planets over 20-100 years to impact at equator, resulting in 50 day retrograde or 64 day prograde rotation (down from 243 days). Decreases temperature and sulphuric acid enough for microbes to start fixing CO2 and acid.
The "hard" parts are getting bots into orbit to blow graphene bubbles to form a honeycomb, and inventing open-ended fusion rockets to avoid containment issues.
5 cm by 50 cm graphene sheet grown in 20 minutes:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21152.pdf (warning PDF)
Direct fusion drive:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652... (PDF available)
Magnetic mirror concept for open-ended fusion rocket:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_mirror
Magnetic reconnection thruster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caM94mem5K4
I think the sun shade is probably how we'll slow global climate change until we can plant the 1-10 trillion trees it will take to reverse it (mechanical carbon capture can't be scaled enough practically), but I digress.
Note that the blocker is actually getting to low Earth orbit (LEO) since delta V is straightforward with ion engines. That will arguably be a solved problem once big "dumb" rockets like Starship scale. I'm a big fan of JP Aerospace's airship to orbit concept and other magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) craft, but it's unclear if they will be able to achieve heavy lift. Aerospike engines and exotic rockets are being evolved by AI currently.
Mechanical carbon capture is a joke. There's no way it can scale enough to be measurable. It also requires energy - coming from where?
Trees, on the other hand, can scale, and they get their energy from the sun.
Wind! Venus is full of it. (Making it so that your wind power can survive corrosion and the high speeds is an exercise left to the reader)
In order for a windmill to work, it has to be anchored. There's no wind if you're floating in it.
Spitballing here, you might be able to use some sort of floating wind turbine, and trail it out on a long enough cable to catch a different windstream. There's all sorts of reasons why it's a pretty terrible idea.
Forgotten: genetically modified algae-like organisms that would float at the habitable-ish altitude due to having a gas bubble. These organisms should consume sunlight and transform gaseous substances into something more solid/liquid to rain it down onto the surface, thus making the atmosphere less thick and more transparent. Bonus points for binding and removing chlorine and leaving oxygen intact.
clouds cannot be eaten yet to my knowledge.
The bulk of what you eat is harvested air.
Not this century. Just like Mars not this century.
Humans cannot survive long-term space travel, yet, the technology does not exist
The radiation alone will kill you and then there is the problem is you will go blind from changes in your body and brain fluids
Obligatory Isaac Arthur reference [1].
I still think humanity's far future is in orbitals in space, not on planets and certainly not on planets as hostile as Venus is. I'm not sure how well living at 50km above the surface would work. You still need a lot of buoyance to float large structures.
The atmosphere is also a solvable problem. One idea I've heard is using so-called "fusion candles". That is a fusion-powered device in the atmosphere that sends waste gas into space and waste matter to the ground in an equilibrium that keeps them airborne, all powered by fusion. You could extract carbon and/or oxygen this way from the plentiful atmospheric CO2.
Still, if you ever got the atmosphere down to a non-hellish level at surface, the surface would still be covered with all sorts of exotics and metals, many of them toxic. You'd probably be looking at geologic timescales to rehabilitate it.
But whenever these terraforming questions come up (often with respect to Mars), people really don't appreciate the scale and the energy budget required. The energy budget is many orders of magntidue what our civilization currently uses. If you have access to that much energy, there are far better options.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I
colonizers gonna colonize
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