Robert Walker

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17 September 2016

Venus is close and easy to get to and NASA has already designed floating living environments capable of sustaining life so why don't we colonize the second planet in our solar system instead of Mars? #Space #Science #Venus #Mars #NASA #Colonize #SolarSystem #Airships #Astronauts

Forget Mars, Why Not Colonize Venus Instead?

Elon Musk has announced plans to colonize Mars in the near future and NASA is planning a manned mission to the red planet in the 2030’s, but for some reason we aren’t talking about Venus.

INQUISITR.COM|BY COBURN PALMER

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Dario Toni Bertok, Es Sen and 32 others

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Christopher S Jannette That's what I'm saying

LikeReply417 September 2016 at 20:45

Ty Lockton I think a lot of people balk at the thought of going that far, just to stop short of walking on the surface. It would be like Columbus sailing across the ocean but not going ashore. I know it's never going to be my foot to step onto Mars, but you can b...See more

LikeReply317 September 2016 at 21:12

Amadeus Bojiuc because money

LikeReply117 September 2016 at 21:43

Timothy Tyler Do both

LikeReply217 September 2016 at 21:48

Aario Shahbany Because a colony must be able to extract some resources and in a balloon you can't extract anything!

LikeReply317 September 2016 at 22:50

Es Sen Really? You might want to re-think that assertion! Space is where there is nothing around you.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 11:20

Aario Shahbany Seems like poetry. I like it. But anyways. You can't touch soil, you can't extract it. It's easy. OK?

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 11:24

Es Sen Really? You don't see how an atmosphere rich in CHONS (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur) can be used for anything? Those are only THE most essential ingredients for LIFE, and also for rubber, plastics and composite materials. Extreme plast...See more

LikeReply225 September 2016 at 11:54

Aario Shahbany ... This is why we should not rely on governments to do it. When it comes to private part, they chose whatever they see easier and history shows us what way goes better.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 19:13

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Justin Hughes Nasty place.http://m.esa.int/.../Venus_Express/Acid_clouds_and_lightning

Acid clouds and lightning

space

M.ESA.INT|BY ESA

LikeReply517 September 2016 at 22:54

Scott Fricks What would they do for water?

LikeReply117 September 2016 at 23:18

Robert Walker

You get it from the atmosphere which has concentrated sulfuric acid, yes, that's a great source of both water and sulfur.

LikeReply419 September 2016 at 00:25

Scott Fricks If there's a water source, people can live there.

UnlikeReply220 September 2016 at 18:00

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Scott Middleton thought the same thing, found out that it has slow rotation (116.75 Earth days), no magnetosphere in addition to a messed up atmosphere. long night...

LikeReply218 September 2016 at 00:32

Robert Walker

Not in the upper atmosphere. It's a bit like our jet stream but much more so. You get carried all the way around Venus every 4 days. So you have a day and night four times that of Earth.

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 00:26

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Chris Caston https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqQB0WqOahc

(1 of 2) Terraforming Venus, Landis, Mars Society…

YOUTUBE.COM

LikeReply218 September 2016 at 00:45

TJ Allcot The resources of Mars are much easier to get to, more readily abundant, easier to extract, easier to utilize and there's less radiation that is easier to deal with. Although the atmosphere of Venus would offer some protection that the atmosphere Mars doesn't, even for a floating habitat.

LikeReply218 September 2016 at 01:24

Robert Walker

The upper atmosphere of Venus provides the same amount of protection as Earth's atmosphere equivalent to 10 meters thickness of water shielding. Far superior to Mars. It also completely shields from micrometeorites like Earth - and Mars anyway has ten ...See more

LikeReply319 September 2016 at 00:31

TJ Allcot I think the lack of a magnetic field and being closer to the sun are big down checks for Venus. That's despite having roughly the same amount of mass protection for a floating habitat that the surface of the Earth has. The near vacuum atmosphere of Mar...See more

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 00:53

Robert Walker

That's a bit of an urban myth I think that we need Earth's magnetic field to protect from solar storms. It does protect the ISS, makes a huge difference there. And it does protect long range transmission cables on Earth - the ones that span kilometers ...See more

LikeReply219 September 2016 at 01:05Edited

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Brice Ogdon if the em works it will change ev thing,,it would enable solar reflectors to block out most all the sunlight lowering the surface temp to below -110f,,,that would cause all the co2 to freeze, then we could go to the surface,,, i was wondering iifthat would maybe slow the volcano activity

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 01:36

Scott Middleton slow rotation..

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 01:38

Brice Ogdon whats that got to do w going to the surface

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 01:38

Brice Ogdon when we break out of here its not going to be an either ,or proposition ,we will be going ev where,, and we will have greatly increased robotics ans automation to help us do it

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 01:40

Scott Middleton not sure if the sun is the only factor with the atmosphere, the slow rotation might work for blocking and cooling the sunward side...

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 01:41

Scott Middleton and it has no no magnetosphere if that is what you meant by em...

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 01:42

Brice Ogdon em drive

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 01:43

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Brice Ogdon it will also enable solar reflectors to warm mars much more easily

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 01:38

Ricky Weinberg 800 degrees surface temperature might be a good reason.

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 01:53

Christopher S Jannette Who's going to the surface when a floating structure at 50kilometers enjoys 1bar pressure and 110 degrees F. Oh and breathable air is a lifting gas. #goodreason

LikeReply219 September 2016 at 00:59

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Yeshe Rabsal Why not both?

LikeReply318 September 2016 at 03:55

Joe Strout I'm skeptical that we need planets at all, but yeah, Venus makes as much sense as Mars.

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 05:46

TJ Allcot It will be both. The number of people heading to Venus is likely to be much smaller than the ones going to Mars.
Personally I'm in agreement with Joe above, just not too keen on planets. I'd be one of the ones aiming for asteroids.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 05:49

John O'Halloran I believe that eventually the majority of human colonies will not be on, in or orbiting rocky masses. The largest colonies I believe will be what will be called something like 'free orbiting' colonies. The will be completely of human manufacture (on "natural" parts) and will orbit the sun not bound to the gravity of any specific planet.

UnlikeReply218 September 2016 at 06:23

John Rumsey I think they could try orbiting reflectors to cool Venus to Earth temperatures. The same might work to warm Mars. The moon is close enough to colonize in mining tunnels. All have gravity wells that require fuel to escape. Mars would likely be coloni...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 06:30

Brice Ogdon you would need to go to the surface temp of liquid co2 to be able to get to the suface at a gas pressure somewhat like earths////800 atms i think it is now

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 10:37

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John O'Halloran I think planet will eventually be like mountains are on Earth. You go to them to get resources that are often only available there. Most people though do not live there because it is harder to live there than on the shores of the ocean.

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 06:43

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John Rumsey Kind of a long commute if you can't live where you work.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 06:55

John O'Halloran Not if you telecommute most of the time. Most of the work mining today is being heavily automated. Fifty years from now robots or teleoperated machines will likely do much of the underground mining on Earth.
Also a majority of jobs will not be resource...See more

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 07:10

Brice Ogdon in the end there was nothing much to do,,so we just kept on ,,rolling along beneth the stars---robert heinlen

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 10:33

John Rumsey John O'Halloran - I see the rock falling and press the button to retract the ore cutter. Time lag on the signal leaves your mining machine trapped. Millions of dollars wasted because you weren't close enough! Doh!
That is why even remote controll...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 17:25

John O'Halloran I quote myself since you seem to have only read half of what I said. "There are only a small percentage of jobs today that are involved in mining. A percentage of those will chose to live on the planets. I never said no one would live there, just that ...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 17:36

John Rumsey A second can be too long. Where are the most asteroids located? There is where the miners will be and there is where the people who support them will be. The local settlement they can get to easily, then the farms and factories. It will likely grow jus...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 19:21

Steven Lyle Jordan John Rumsey Even today's robotics are smart enough to react to a threat faster than a human on-site. In real life, the ore cutter would retract itself when detecting a threat, then notify the human operator so they could determine the next course of action. That could easily be handled by a remote operator.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:28

John O'Halloran John Rumsey if sci-fi is how you judge what real world problems will be I think you will find they come up short. Also your predictions do not even match with sci-fi like "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". In that Earth was mostly depopulated with ...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:43Edited

John Rumsey John O'Halloran -Not saying that miners are not a small part of the total. Saying that they need nearby support people just as miners do anywhere. "Near" is relative, in space a day away is "near". Near is where they can get supplies and repairs. "Near...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 21:29

John O'Halloran You may not be familiar with mining of the old west. Very few were hard rock mines that had and 'entrance'. Mining towns tended to be in the center of an area that would contain multiple mines and other claims. Many miners worked claims that were as much as a week's travel to the nearest mining town.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 22:48

Brice Ogdon John O'Halloran androids to maintain the robots

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 23:06

John O'Halloran I think humanoid AI robots will be all that popular.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 23:34

John Rumsey "Near" is a relative term and that depends on the people doing the mining and their needs. Why would it be any different in space than in the old west. Some mines were little one or two man outfits and others ranged up to large companies. Some did not ...See more

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 01:19

John Rumsey John O'Halloran - We want people in space and that is the whole point. Not giving up and letting our mechanical toys do everything. We want people out there. There are places for using robots and AI devices, even for such things as brainships, but the ...See more

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 01:43

John O'Halloran Have you ever seen a miner. It is not a job most people would even apply for much less move off planet. I believe that within the next century there will be people living their entire life in space. A majority of those people will have work related to manufacturing and R&D. Over half that number may be people supporting the workers of those jobs but they still owe their livelihood to manufacturing and R&D.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 02:13

John Rumsey John O'Halloran - I will not comment on your attitude toward miners. Bless your heart!

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 05:13

Brice Ogdon im a coal miners android

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 08:52

Brice Ogdon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9eHp7JJgq8

Loretta Lynn - Coal Miner's Daughter

Performed and written by Loretta Lynn (born Loretta Webb). Loretta, the coal miner's daughter, is famously from "Butcher Holler", a section of Van Lear, a mi...

YOUTUBE.COM

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 08:55

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Ken Nielsen in the issue #54 of "All About Space", there is a short bit about a all mechanical clockwork robot (Venus does have that 462 Celsius (864 Fahrenheit) surface temperature & a surface pressure that is 92 times that of Earth. ) It would be a way to get o...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 07:11

Harlo Lenning I vote for building habitats in the earth's La Grange points. There are materials that can be manufactured in zero-G that can't be made on earth. We could get the source materials from mining near-earth asteroids. We could do this all without the need to go to other planets or the moon. We can send robots there instead.

LikeReply218 September 2016 at 10:14

John Rumsey Murphy's Law says that robots will break down in ways only a person on the spot can fix. Economics says that a person is often cheaper to replace than a machine and is able to do more than a machine, plus by being there there is no time lag as in long ...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 17:39

Harlo Lenning Yes, sending people would be good because as of now, they are more adaptable and flexible than their machine brethren; however, robots are getting better and more sophisticated all the time. They do not need expensive environmental protections. They al...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 17:49Edited

John Rumsey Harlo Lenning - True, some robots worth a lot of money will need to be left behind. But the need for a quick reaction controller nearby will always be there. At first robots, then robots and people, then mostly people using robots. Gravity wells are a ...See more

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 19:55

Nathan Ryweck May be true for some things, but humans are very vulnerable in space.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 04:05

John Rumsey Nathan Ryweck - Try "Naked and Afraid" for real and with no time limit or pickup crew. See how vulnerable you are right here on Earth!
With the proper gear and supplies you can manage very well in space and likely with less risk of death.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 04:40

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Phillip Leech I'll sell you some land there...

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 11:39

Steven Lyle Jordan Venus would be so difficult to use as a resource base, extracting chemicals and materials for settlement use, that it would be incredibly impractical to build a habitat there. Rocky and low-gravity bodies that make it easier to extract materials make more sense, and there are plenty of those in Solar orbit.

LikeReply318 September 2016 at 20:08

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Brice Ogdon there will be a time when ,what needs to be done and what is practical may not be as much of a restraint,,having fun will be more important

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:11

Brice Ogdon i can see all the atmosphere being chilled ou just so ppl can go dn to the surface ,just to do it

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:12

Steven Lyle Jordan Chilling Venus' atmosphere... for recreation? Sorry, I didn't know we were on the Space Fantasy Alliance FB page! Seriously, I strongly doubt we'll be altering the state of any planets, just for kicks.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:23

Brice Ogdon they did it w the genesis bomb in star trek

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:25

Brice Ogdon we drop out of the upper atmosphere just for kicks now

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:26

Brice Ogdon edge of space rides on a soviet mig for 40k

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:26

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 20:28

Steven Lyle Jordan Parachute falls and Mig rides aren't quite the same as altering the biosphere of a planet, full stop. And even blocking the Sun isn't going to stop volcanic activity... or remove the atmosphere that is presently heavy enough to crush an automobile at the surface.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:32

John Rumsey Steven Lyle Jordan - A huge amount of reaction mass in excess atmosphere there though.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 20:41

Brice Ogdon Steven Lyle Jordan it would freeze it

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 21:29

Brice Ogdon if the volcanoes didnt AADD too much heat

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 21:30

Brice Ogdon its mostly sulfuric acid and co2 atmosphere

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 21:32Edited

Steven Lyle Jordan And you'd be standing, not on the surface of Venus, but on a miles-thick glacier of CO2 exposed to hard space. Not sure what the benefit to that would be.

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 21:32

Brice Ogdon it would be kewel cool-about - 100c

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 21:33

Brice Ogdon co2+h2so4---2h2o+,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,venus needs more nitrogen

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 21:39

Robert Walker

Venus has lots of nitrogen in its atmosphere to extract, 3.5% and remember at the cloud tops that's at Earth atmospheric pressure, not trying to extract it from a near vacuum less than 1% of Earth atmosphere. Abundant carbon, sulfur, trace amounts of chlorine and fluorine. It's a much more diverse mix than the Mars atmosphere. And includes all the elements CHNO that are most important for life. You could grow trees and vegetation for instance using only constituents from the atmosphere plus some trace elements, bringing the possibility of creating new dirigibles using wood and plastics produced from the Venus atmosphere itself. And the thick atmosphere and lack of a solid surface would make supply using parachutes and aeroshells easy, far easier than for Mars. You'd supply them with a hydrogen balloon to inflate when they reach the right level. But there's no hard surface so no precision fraction of a second timing needed to supply anything to the upper atmosphere colonies.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 00:42

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Shawn DeBoard Venus has less time than the Earth does what part of get away from our growing SUN do you not get?

LikeReply18 September 2016 at 21:50

Robert Walker

That's half a billion years into the future. That's long enough for humans to evolve again a second time from the simplest multicellular microscopic creatures.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 00:43

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Kimberly Kramer I wrote about both planets. Mars light gravity could wreak havoc for our health. Our spines would extend and our blood circulation would push our blood to our heads among other things. Light gravity also affects many things including fetus growth and plant growth. Geo-engineering on Mars to thicken the atmosphere would take a long time as well, to help resovle Mars cosmic radiation. Venus is extremely intriguing. If Venus could have floating cities, it might be the better option. Its the gravity it has, that is key. Almost the same as ours. Also the floating cities, well they may not be ON the planet but they might have several more advantages than landlocked on Mars. The first being flight! You would not have to deal with gravity to get on or off the cities. Also the temperature at a certain level is perfect, and I have read that it's thick clouds could protect the cities from cosmic radiation. Not only that, but we wouldn't need pressure suits like on Mars. Given the choices, the cities would still help solve overpopulation and interplanetary colonization. Water could be recycled. Food and supplies would definitely be problematic thought. Maybe haul regolith from the surface somehow, which is rich with volcanic ash for farming, and use it inside the cities. Perhaps some cities or even floating ships could be self contained farms to make room for the populations. I love the idea of Venus.

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 22:55

Mike Yamiolkoski The difference between Mars and Venus insofar as environment is something like the difference between Antarctica and the crater of an active volcano. Mars is a freeze-dried desert; Venus is Hell bathed in acid.

Furthermore, colonizing the surface of the ocean would be about 1000 times easier and cheaper than the surface of another planet, whether Venus or Mars. So, perhaps we ought to look into that, at least as a test run.

I am all for setting up BASES on Venus, Mars, and many other places. But long-term, permanent colonization may not even be desirable by the time we can do it. By then, we will likely be constructing fully-artificial orbital colonies, and there will be no reason to put them on the surface of hostile planets.

LikeReply318 September 2016 at 23:14Edited

John O'Halloran I completely agree. The disadvantage and advantage of orbital colonies are the same thing. The disadvantage of an orbital colony is that you have to manage every aspect of the environment. The advantage of an orbital colony is you control every aspect of the environment. Being able to control our environment has been the driving force of the evolution of civilization.

LikeReply118 September 2016 at 23:40

Steven Lyle Jordan I wrote 2 novels that postulated city-satellites orbiting Earth, the intention being to move the bulk of the population to the satellites, leaving small groups of people to supervise ground-based materials collection to send to orbit. I see it as the best way to "live lightly on the Earth," preserving its resources as long and well as possible.

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 00:41

Robert Walker

I agree also, I don't think this is the time to think about colonizing anywhere. For better or worse, Earth is where we make our stand and we have to protect and preserve it - and we don't risk extinction anyway - of all the species on Earth we are amongst the ones of least concern for extinction, if 90% of all species went extinct we'd be amongst the survivors for sure. With just minimal technology.

But as a place for a human occupied base ,then the Venus upper atmosphere is very intriguing. There's a small chance of life there and I think we need to explore it robotically first, just make sure that there is no chance of Earth life taking over when we don't want it to, not ready for that yet. And no chance of whatever is there being a risk to humans or Earth. If that pans out, and so long as it is not habitable to Earth microbes, I think it's a perfect place for a human base outside of Earth, and again - supposing there is some reason to be there, which to start with most likely would be to research the Venus atmosphere and surface itself. Like an Antarctic base, a few dozen people maybe. I can see that working.

If Earth life would grow in its atmosphere or it has native life I think it needs more thought as we just don't have the experience and understanding to set about transforming entire planets yet I think, lots to go wrong, things we might do through just not understanding the effects of our actions that might have irreversible repercussions for all future time for hundreds of millions to billions of years..

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 00:50

John O'Halloran Elon Musk always starts with the insurance against extinction line but if you listen to the rest of what he says it is not what he sees as the main reason. He seem to want to make it clear that what he is really concerned with the survival of humanity on a different level. Someone more spiritual might describe it as the survival of the human spirit.

I do not think we should be going to space to recreate Earth or build a fall out shelter from asteroids or a site to evacuate people to so we can save the Earth. What we should be seeking to build is a new frontier. A place where there are not just economic opportunities but the freedom to try to recreate society. Most of the social experiments in space will likely fail as they did in the new world. The ones that succeed will redefine humanity over the next half century at least.

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 01:54

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Robert Walker

In case any of you don't know it: this is my article on the topic http://www.science20.com/.../will_we_build_colonies_that...

Will We Build Colonies That Float Over Venus Like Buckminster Fuller's "Cloud…

SCIENCE20.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview119 September 2016 at 00:50

TJ Allcot The article mentions the JP Aerospace 'Airship to Orbit' concept. I'm pretty sure that John Powell of JP Aerospace has stated that he would like to retire to the clouds of Venus.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 00:58

Robert Walker

Oh has he? I'm impressed by them - by their steadiness and persistence. They are going in the slow lane but not stopping so many space startups go fast and then stop. They just continue year after year, as you can see from their blog, one slow step after another. I think they might possibly overtake everyone at some point and surprise us all . And have this policy of instead of doing grand gambles like e.g. SpaceX in its early years, they just do things they know they can afford and each stage paying for itself.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 01:07Edited

TJ Allcot I've never been able to find it online so I can't confirm that he has. Just skimmed 'Floating to Space' and with a quick look I didn't find it in there either.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 01:30

Robert Walker

I've just ordered his book, a day or two ago, only found out about it recently, not sure how I missed it before. I look forward to reading it.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 01:33

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Robert Walker

I've just added this as a comment: I don't see the landing as an issue - it's far safer than Mars. You can land with a parachute, and then an inflatable balloon - and there is no hard landing - the surface is 30 kilometers below, and in the thick atmosphere your parachute would go down very slowly. Of course you can have failures as with any landing. But the timing is far far less critical than a landing anywhere else in our solar system, even Earth. While Mars is probably the very worst place to land, because the gravity is just high enough so you can't carry enough fuel to abort, the atmosphere also is thick enough so that you can't abort easily for that reason, and parachutes are not nearly as effective as on Earth, leading to complex hybrid systems with lots ot go wrong and with a hard surface the steps have to be timed with fraciton of a second precision especially at the end. Venus over Mars any day for a safe landing if the destination is a cloud habitat on Venus.

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 00:55

Mike Yamiolkoski The hardiest spacecraft ever to land on Venus lasted about an hour. One might say that this was about forty years ago and technology has gotten better, and one would be right, but it's undeniable that the surface of Venus is extremely hostile. We have rovers that have been operating on Mars for years.

Furthermore, descending slowly through an atmosphere that's comprised of significant amounts of sulfuric acid is a mixed blessing at best. The faster one gets through those clouds, the better!

In many ways, yes, Venus is easier to land on. But once the landing part is done, it gets a LOT harder.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 01:05

Robert Walker

Ah we are talking about two things here. The Venus surface is surely amongst the hardest to land on in the solar system for sure. Not impossible for robots. We have a lot more expeirence in high temeprature electronics now. Not even impossible for humans in some speculative ideas. But very hard. But the upper atmosphere is the easiest place to "land" where landing means to end up floating at 30 km above the surface in the upper atmosphere where temperatures and pressures are the same as for Earth - and above the clouds or just sailing in and ou tof the cloud tops, with a clear sky above you.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 01:10

Mike Yamiolkoski That's so, but what's the advantage? Not from a scientific standpoint - I can certainly see the value there. But if one is looking to establish a colony rather than a scientific outpost, there has to be something to gain from it. A cloud-top colony on Venus would need pretty much the same degree of infrastructure as a freely orbiting one - perhaps even more. And I don't see what resources could be exploited.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 04:15

Robert Walker

I agree but that is much the same for Mars, nobody has yet got a commercial reason for going to Mars - if you mean exports. If just a place to live ,well Venus is the easiest place to live outside of Earth in my view, but anything you can do on Venus is much more easily done in a Buckminster Fuller cloud colony in the Earth's atmosphere or even more easily in a floating sea colony. I don't think we are going to have large scale colonization of space in the near future. But I think we will have small settlements of maybe hundreds through to thousands, even tens of thousands or people. To my mind it would be like Antarctica - that's my Earth model for space colonization. So if there is enough scientific and maybe tourist interest you could have thousands of people eventually in many of these places ,most of them temporary visitors who are there for a year or two.

To have a long term settlement then I think the main thing is not how easy it is to create the habitats, but how easy it is to maintain them. For instance if a habitat costs a trillion dollars to build for ten thousand people, but once built costs only million dollars a year to maintain - well eventually I think such habitats will be built and once built then it's a maintenance cost of a hundred dollars a year per person which is easily affordable. While if it costs a billion dollars a year to maintain, only a thousandth of the build cost, that's a hundred thousand dollars a year and only the very rich could live there.

So - I could see Venus cloud colonies being especially easy to maintain. The main thing is to have

1. an envelope that is low maintenance to keep out the sulfuric acid.

2. a closed system biosphere inside - we need this for any long term space habitat as the logistic requirements and expense is just too high otherwise.

3. Low maintenance equipment to keep it floating, for use by the inhabitants, suits to go outside etc.

There 1 is much lower maintenance than an envelope to hold in atmosphere at tons per square meter outward pressure. The only competitors here I think are habitats in caves where the cave itself may provide structural integrity, and lunar caves are topmost in my list there because some may be as huge as kilometers in diameter and over 100 km long because of the grail area, so probably the largest enclosed easy to make habitable areas in our solar system as large as an O'Neil colony in habitable area. And easily accessible from EArth.

2. is same as for any habitat.

3. is also much lower maintenance for Venus cloud colonies. And it is with 3. that Venus scores over everywhere else outside of Earth in my view. So long as you can have a closed system biosphere, then you can maintain all the equipment needed to survive with essentially Victorian era technology. Building new habitats is also low technology.

Once you have 1, 2 and 3 and a low maintenance cost of say $100 per year per habitant, then you may have your first permanent colonies rather than settlements. Then after that whether and how quickly it expands would depend on how easy it is to build a new habitat and there again Venus scores over almost anywhere else.

However it would need imports. This is true of any space colony anywhere. For instance - this might change with nanoscale printing - but at present Venus seems an unlikely place to build computers. The Moon is by far the best with the basic materials at hand, abundant solar power, and a high grade vacuum. Better even than Earth and low cost delta v to launch into space. So I see the Moon as the place where computer chips will be built in a future with thousands of people and commerce and a fair bit of infrastructure in space.

And so that leads to the question how could Venus finance itself for imports of luxuries? I think that for necessities it can be almost self supporting, it doesn't even need computers I think, though computer chips are very low mass so if you can create plastics locally, as you could from plants, then computers shouldn't be hard to build importing the chips. Import of trace elements for plants, or dredge them from the surface of Venus. But there will be many "luxuries" that inhabitants will want to have a lifestyle similar to Earth to have a reason to live there rather than all migrate back to Earth.

I totally discount the notion colonies can finance themselves by sale of intellectual property rights myself, for the reasons, see:

https://www.quora.com/Could.../answer/Robert-Walker-5

So what could make Venus cloud colonies profitable? Since I think they would be low maintenance, it wouldn't need to be very profitable. But what could earn the inhabitants that $100 a year if it can get as low cost as that?

Well I think that tourism and scientific research are possibilities for a starter. But tourism is symmetrical also like intellectual property - members of cloud colonies would as likely want to visit Earth as tourists as inhabitants of Earth would want to visit Venus. So I don't think that can be relied on as a net profit for Venus, same also for the Moon if it became a colony. And same also for scientific research.

Could be growing food. This depends on the cost to orbit going down hugely. Venus is an ideal place though for JP Aerospace's orbital airships. So if you had those then the cost to export food to orbit might be low enough that the lower cost of building greenhouses and the much lower maintenance cost of them in the Venus atmosphere could make it worth doing. I think a greenhouse protected from acid is far easier to build than a greenhouse that holds in tons per square meter of outward pressure.

Another possibility is some unique product of the Venus atmosphere. It would be the easiest place in the solar system to make sulfuric acid for instance, if that was a valued export. I don't know if it would be though, even with orbital airships. But perhaps as we study it more we find some component of the atmosphere, or something you can make from the atmosphere that is valuable enough for export. If there is life in the Venus atmosphere that only thrives there, hard to get it to grow elsewhere, and if it produces a biproduct that's useful to humans then that's another option.

I think though that Venus is not unusual here. It's really hard to put a commercial case for any space colony, and I think space settlement on the Moon is the best commercial case we have. But for a colony you need not just that it is economically viable but a reason to have lots of humans there rather than just a few humans overseeing robotic machinery. Otherwise a competitor who doesn't have a colony of humans to support will undercut your prices. That's where it gets hard I think and I don't see space colonies anywhere in the near future, but if human life support in space can be so easy and trouble free that you can add humans to a facility for almost zero cost, as might well happen with advances in technology, it could be possible.

Also unlike many in this topic area I'm not a space colonization advocate. Particularly I don't think we need to rush to colonize space as quickly as possible or turn everything into a copy of Earth as quickly as possible. I don't think humans on Earth are in any danger of extinction, we are one of the species in least danger of extinction here. Even if 99% go extinct, and I don't think it will come to that, then humans would be in the 1% of survivors. Suffering, shortage of food etc yes, but colonizing space won't help with that. Space settlement and exports back to Earth of materials ,solar power ,etc - that would help.

So I think our focus has to be protecting and supporting Earth and that that trumps colonization as a motive to me. To colonize space right now is like advocating colonizing Antarctica at the end of the nineteenth century in my view. But space settlement on the lines of Antarctic bases first - but with a mix of commerce as well more so than Antarctica - I think that's where it is at right now. And also a rush to colonization if we did succeed to have millions in space - well they'd be millions with the technology of more than ICBMs at their disposal, I am not sure whether as a species we are ready for that yet as by the time you get such huge numbers some of them will be terrorists etc, won't necessarily be the "good guys" and some just mentally unstable, sociopaths etc. I think steady as it goes is how to proceed at present.

Could colonizing Mars be a lucrative or potentially profitable venture?

QUORA.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview19 September 2016 at 11:26Edited

Write a reply...

Chris Caston MVCT or MVCJCT instead of MCT.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 01:19Edited

Robert Walker

Or MVMMACT (Mars Venus Mercury Moon Asteroids Callisto Colonial Transporter ).

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 01:25Edited

Chris Caston Maybe just SSCT

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 01:33

Robert Walker

Yes that's a good one.

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 01:34

John O'Halloran Word in the Space X group is that Elon just tweeted that it will be the ITS (Interplanetary Transport System).

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 02:16

Chris Caston So no C?

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 03:58

John O'Halloran Expanding the scope. With Tesla is was changing if from transportation to energy. With the BFG it is going from transportation to a colony to being the transportation system for the entire solar system.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 05:46

Write a reply...

Christopher Smyth Robert Walker

: Near earth conditions exist in the atmosphere of Venus at an altitude of 50-55 km. This altitude places any "floating habitat" in the midst of the upper cloud deck on Venus.

If you've ever been in an airplane flying through clouds you'll have noticed that there isn't much to see except water vapor. It's like being in a thick fog on earth.

The difference is, of course, that the "fog" of the clouds on Venus is sulfuric acid, not water. Thus, sightseeing excursions are unlikely, to say the least.

It's true that one needs a spacesuit to walk around on Mars since the atmosphere is equivalent to that at 100,000 feet on earth. Additionally, one would have to be wary of radiation exposure due to solar flares and cosmic radiation. Nonetheless, Mars is much more "habitable" than the acid drenched clouds of Venus.

So. one has to ask: "What is the advantage of a "floating habitat" in the clouds of Venus over a 1 g habitat orbiting in space?

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 02:21

Robert Walker

Oh, there are different cloud top levels depending whether you observe in UV light, Visible light or near infrared.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/.../pii/S0032063314004024

In Landis's paper he says that the 50 km level is above the cloud tops by which I think he means visible light cloud level.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/.../casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030022668.pdf

I don't agree that Mars is more habitable. It's far colder, it's got a near vacuum for an atmosphere, you need a multi million dollar spacesuit in place of an acid resistant suit with aqualung type air breather to go out, your habitat requires far more mass launched from Earth for the same interior volume, it's got the global dust storms.

I think the problem here as I also found for the Moon in Case for Moon first is that Mars colonization advocates have worked out how they would make use of Mars in great detail. Others just haven't worked it out in such detail - mainly because the Mars society is large and there are so many people involved in those studies. You have only Landis working on Venus cloud colonies in detail and only a few who are working on lunar colonies or settlement.

So there's a strong tendency to evaluate all other approaches based on whether the ideas worked out for Mars would work for them. And not surprisingly you end up concluding that the solutions worked out for Mars don't work as well for the Moon or Venus or Mercury or the asteroids or whatever other location is suggested. As a result Mars seems by far the most habitable of them all.

But when you look at them independently, and explore solutions that have been devised for Venus, or for the Moon then you get a very different picture. And those also have been worked out in a fair bit of detail enough to get a first idea even though in nowhere near as much detail as for Mars.

Six years of Venus winds at the upper cloud level from UV, visible and…

SCIENCEDIRECT.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview19 September 2016 at 02:51Edited

John Rumsey Robert Walker

- Actually, if Ceres has as much water (ice) as they think, it may be even more ideal than anywhere else, except for distance. Make vitrified walls in tunnels and install pressure locks and you have habitat. Low G means big lightweight solar panels on the surface for energy . Fiber optic cables to take concentrated sunlight into the tunnels for supplementing electric lights for growing plants. Space is relatively cheap as tunnels are constructed. Could even have mini- cows and chickens for protein. A BIG circular tunnel could hold an endless train to simulate a higher gravity to keep fit and Ceres is big enough to have a light gravity of its own. It is also near where space mining would begin in asteroids. It's main drawback is that it is farther away.
Metal ingots could be refined there and sent by robotic ships on slow trajectories toward Earth, where they could be retrieved and sent where needed. The dross could be shot to Mars and added to its mass. Rail guns could do that. Leftover tailings could even be powdered/vaporized and used as reaction mass to propel small mining stations. Ore could be contained and sent by slow robot ships to Ceres and return for another load.
The Ceres refined materials would be processed in orbit for use there or sent down to Earth for use. Most of it would likely be used in space for construction/manufacturing and then be sent down for use on Earth. It would be only the expensive stuff that cannot be made on Earth or that is rare at first. I doubt they would send steel from space, but definitely some of the rare and useful elements. The steel would remain in space to build more space factories and habitats or moonbases or the generation ship that will take about 20,000 people to a planet that unmanned probes have shown to be habitable. If we discover a better drive we can just catch up to them and replace their old drive with a better one and hurry them on their way.
But I am still convinced that if there is a profit to be made, people will risk their lives to make it. Only if we become the staid, safety-first, timid, collective, will we fail to achieve our dreams.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 06:16Edited

John Rumsey Cool Venus with orbital reflectors. Use the cooled excess atmosphere as reaction mass, in chemical processes, whatever, until it thins to a bearable pressure. In other words, Terraform it. Throw ice asteroids at Mars in little pieces to add water. Do the same with the rocky boulders and mining waste. It will all vaporize in the atmosphere and fall harmlessly to the surface. Eventually enough mass would be added to increase the gravity a bit too. Might take a long time though. Bigger would be faster. Might punch down toward the core and cause volcanoes and big craters and lava flows, but that might make it habitable faster yet. Might take centuries to complete, but it might give us 3 planets to live on.
That is if the colony ships to habitable planets around other stars don't get there first. It only took 60 years to go from the first airplane to outer space. Then the cautious took over, the frightened people and in the next 50 years very little was done by politicians more interested in buying votes and accumulating wealth and power to control everyone. If we try, we can be sure that it is our belief in freedom and exploration that wins out. Competition is the key to advancement, not consensus, one-world caution.

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 02:43

Robert Walker

The thing though - it's a major undertaking. You have to waste a huge amount of material that could be better used for space habitats. And what about spinning it up? And would it be more habitable like that? Being used to habitable planet surfaces there's a tendency to think we should change everything into a copy of Earth - but the Venus atmosphere actually has much more space for habitats since you have multiple levels in it, than a planetary surface. You also have the four day atmospheric circulation so don't have to spin up the planet. I'm not convinced that a "terraformed Venus" is actually more habitable given a civilization with the level of technology that would permit it to attempt it. And terraformign can go wrong. We don't know much about it at all. Earth "just works" but if we tried to make a copy of it on Venus, would it work? Even if we copied Earth almost exactly, spun up Venus, turned the CO2 into carbonates or shot it into space, transferred the plants, microbes ecosystem etc of Earth to Venus - with all that megatechnology, would it work? Or would it maybe start diverging into some totally different end state with an atmosphere maybe with lots of methane or sulfuric acid or in other ways poisonous to us, with lifeforms harmful to us etc etc.

From movies we are used to the idea that just adding life to a planet resembling Earth will automatically make it into a clone of Earth. But that's just fiction based on no observational evidence at all.

There may be many possible end states. We have Earth, Venus, Mars, and those are three totally different end states. Tendency to assume all planets around other stars will be one of those three if terrestrial or something in between them. But that's a very bold generalization from a sample of three, all different from each other.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 02:58Edited

John Rumsey Robert Walker

- Details to be worked out. The possibility is there. There is time to figure it out. I did not say it would be a copy of Earth either, just more inhabitable than it is now at the surface. Do I hear the mindset of a strict environmentalist coming through? Changing a a few miles of trout stream into a bass lake is not destroying an environment, just changing it. Bringing water to a desert allows life to live there. Changing a whole planet is just a bigger job, but if it allows life to exist where it did not, it is worth considering. The floating habitats would be just the start. It would likely take centuries anyway and there would be time to solve the problems as they came up. If every "what if" stops you from considering it, there is zero progress.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 06:35

Mike Yamiolkoski At what point does it get easier to just move Venus a little further from the Sun?

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 20:47

Mike Yamiolkoski I think it would be great if some future advance civilization hooked up some giant rockets to the Earth and fixed the orbit so we have a year of exactly 360 days, each day exactly 24 hours long, and exactly 12 lunar months of 30 days each. We could even get rid of Monday so that we have a six-day week, so that fits evenly too. It sure would make timekeeping less complicated.

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 21:18

Christopher Smyth John Rumsey: You propose constructing a planet wide reflector to cool Venus. Even if the insane amount of resources, manpower and money to do that could be found, you still have a planetary surface and an atmosphere at 464 degrees C (867 degrees F). The mass of the atmosphere alone is 4.8 X 10^20 kg. This is 93 times the mass of the Earth's atmosphere.

Unlike the earth, the cloud cover of Venus already reflects about 75% of the solar radiation that reaches it (see linked article below). Thus, shielding Venus from the sun will not have the dramatic effect you imagine.

The modest effect of shielding Venus from the sun coupled with an atmosphere that's 93 times more massive than earth's (and essentially opaque to infrared radiation due to its composition) coupled with the tremendous heat reservoir represented by a planetary crust at nearly 900 degrees F suggests to me that it would be many millions of years before Venus would "cool down" to the point where it would be survivable, let alone habitable.

http://lasp.colorado.edu/.../ASTR.../Titov_Et_Al-EVTP.pdf

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 07:02Edited

Robert Walker

Oh, interesting point. However what you are missing here is that
1. The atmosphere will change as it cools down and the upper layers will fall as rain into the lower layers and eventually all falls as rain onto the surface so that there are no clouds left at an early stage in the process.

2. Though there is a lot of internal heat, the thermal conductivity of the crust is low, so the actual heat flux is low. For instance on Earth at night rocks are cold and don't radiate heat due to the heat underneath them.

Birch calculated that it would take about 200 years for the Venus atmosphere to turn into dry ice with an atmospheric pressure of only 3 mbar of CO2, if shaded completely from the sun.

http://www.orionsarm.com/fm.../TerraformingVenusQuickly.pdf

LikeReply119 September 2016 at 10:53Edited

John O'Halloran Another point for this having a significant impact is while Venus reflect 75% of the Sun's radiation the Earth reflects 35%. In addition to that Venus receives almost twice the radiation from the Sun. That means that Venus is receives about 75% of the radiation of Earth.
If you shaded the Earth from the Sun for as little as a year it would likely trigger an ice age.
That is not saying this would necessarily make Venus any more habitable but a significant reduction in solar energy reaching it would have a dramatic effect on the surface temperature over a fairly short time period..

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 19:44

Brice Ogdon if the em drive works all this will be do able soon,we will know soon ,,b4 you could freeze up venus maybe even,, is pretty fantastic though ,delusions of grandeur,,,maybe way easier to hoof it on to mercury,,,maybe lots of precious metals there,,,get on the poles in the shade maybe best

LikeReply19 September 2016 at 23:09Edited

Christopher Smyth Robert Walker

: Your linked article conveniently avoids mentioning several key problems. Let's just assume that the incomparable human effort to manufacture and assemble the proposed reflector was achieved. A solar sail type reflector would have to maintain its station between the sun and Venus. If it's in orbit around the sun - presumably at the L1 Lagrange point - it will be unable to maintain its position without station keeping thrusters. Also, there's the matter of radiative pressure from the sun, discussed below.

If it's at the orbital distance of Venus, it will be drawn into the gravitational field of Venus. The only way to avoid eventually colliding with Venus would be for it to orbit Venus. Once again, it will be unable to maintain its position between Venus and the sun.

Then there is the issue of radiation pressure. Even at Earth's greater distance (and assuming a reflector efficiency of about 90%), the radiation pressure of the sun is about 8.17 μN/m^2 of solar sail (aka reflector) area. Your article proposes to erect a solar reflector covering an area of 2.5 X 10^14 m^2. This results in a radial thrust away from the sun of 2 BILLION Newtons. For comparison, the engines of the Saturn V produced a thrust of 35 million Newtons.

Thus, the radiation pressure pushing this reflector towards Venus would be the equivalent of more that 57 Saturn V rockets simultaneously and continuously running at full throttle towards the planet every time the reflector found itself between Venus and the sun for the 200 year lifespan of this project .

It's easy to blithely propose grand sweeping projects. The devil is, as they say, in the details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail...

Solar sail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Solar sails (also called light sails or photon sails) are a form of spacecraft propulsion using radiation pressure…

EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

LikeReply220 September 2016 at 11:09Edited

Christopher Smyth John O'Halloran: You say:

"...If you shaded the Earth from the Sun for as little as a year it would likely trigger an ice age.
That is not saying this would necessarily make Venus any more habitable but a significant reduction in solar energy reaching it would have a dramatic effect on the surface temperature over a fairly short time period..."

I'm not sure that the effects of shading Venus are comparable to the effects of shading Earth. The opacity of the atmosphere of Venus to infrared radiation and UV radiation is much greater than that of the atmosphere of earth:

"... The total solar flux at the Venus orbit is 2622
± 6 W/m2 (Moroz et al., 1985). Due to its high albedo the
planet absorbs only 157 ± 6 W/m2 on average, less than that
deposited on Earth (~240 W/m2), despite the fact that Venus
is 30% closer to the Sun. Both models and observations
show that less than 10% of the total solar energy incident on
Venus reaches the surface, and only 2.5% is absorbed there.
The largest portion of solar energy is absorbed above 57 km
by the unknown UV absorber at the cloud tops. This is in
contrast with the Earth, where 74% of the solar energy is
absorbed directly at the ground (Arking, 1996)..."

and:

"...Another difference between the entropy balances on Earth
and Venus is the vertical distribution of the radiative sinks
and sources of entropy. Earth receives solar energy and
entropy mainly at the surface and emits them to space mostly
from the atmosphere (Renno and Ingersoll, 1996; Renno,
1997; Goody, 2000). On Venus the sources of radiative
entropy at the surface and in the lower atmosphere represent
only 20% of the total balance (Figure 11). The largest sinks
and sources of radiative entropy on Venus are both located
in the upper cloud deck..."

The proposed terraforming process relies on shading Venus to effect a dramatic loss of the upper cloud deck and an attendant dramatic increase in the radiative heat loss from the surface and lower atmosphere.

I see no mechanism by which shading Venus would accomplish either of these objectives.

http://lasp.colorado.edu/.../ASTR.../Titov_Et_Al-EVTP.pdf

LikeReply120 September 2016 at 09:53Edited

Robert Walker

The calculations are in this paper where Birch reckons that it would take 200 years to freeze out all the CO2 given total shading from the sun: http://www.orionsarm.com/fm.../TerraformingVenusQuickly.pdf

Note I don't advocate this, I think the Venus upper atmosphere is more habitable than a cooled Venus rotating very slowly. And generally also don't think we have anything like the knowledge needed to set up an attempted clone of Earth even if we had an Earth twin in all respects except for lack of life. We have only the one example and no experience of terraforming and I am very skeptical of the idea that it would just naturally become a duplicate of Earth if you just add life plus do a small amount of tweaking within our capabilities. I'm skeptical of the strong Gaia hypothesis you see and think that to some extent at least, Earth was a lucky planet. Without the strong Gaia hypothesis there's no real reason to suppose the result would be to our liking.

LikeReply120 September 2016 at 11:08Edited

Christopher Smyth Robert Walker

: I wonder if shading Venus might have the opposite effect than the one intended. Birch assumes an atmospheric heat loss of 160 w/m^2 per present observations. He also assumes that this heat loss will remain the same or increase in the absence of sunlight.

I'm not a climatologist so I can't speak to the validity of his model. Still, I wonder if the removal of 160 w/m^2 from the cloud tops will have the effect he suggests.

Instead might the effect be, perhaps, a thickening and lowering of the upper cloud deck? Would this then produce a reduction in the heat radiated away at the cloud tops until a point of equilibrium is reached between the heat loss to space and the internal heat produced by the planet itself?

UnlikeReply320 September 2016 at 13:14Edited

Robert Walker

Yes, I'm not a climatologist either. But I know the relative humidity goes down as the atmosphere cools. So if the air is very hot then yes, it clears. But as it cools, though the clouds get thicker, also they get thick enough so the water vapour rains out. I think he is counting on the clouds first thickening, but then raining out into the lower layers where they would vaporize again. And this process would lead to convection currents up and down, and those currents themselves would increase the heat loss from the lower atmosphere. That's how I read it. He does say that stage 1 is the one with most uncertainty about how long it would take.

LikeReply120 September 2016 at 13:16Edited

Robert Walker

It's peer reviewed, published in the British Interplanetary Society Journal. I've also checked citations and come up with a couple of interesting sources that discuss it further. The first one explains a bit more about how it works - CO2 has a low heat capacity so there is less heat to dissipate than you might think which is why the atmosphere can cool down so quickly.

(The surface doesn't need to be cooled down much because of the low rate of heat flow through rock just the surface of the rocks needs to be cooled and there are no oceans to cool down either).

http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.../31693077/chapter7.pdf...

http://s3.amazonaws.com/.../327.../terraforming_venus.pdf...

This is a Universe Today overview of terraforming methods suggested for Venus.

http://www.universetoday.com/.../how-do-we-terraform-venus/

LikeReply120 September 2016 at 13:29

Christopher Smyth Robert Walker

: Hmm......I can see how variations in humidity work locally on earth, where water vapor vapor variability ranges somewhere between 1 and 4% of the atmosphere.

I'm not so sure it would work the same for the CO2 that comprises 96.5% of the atmosphere of Venus. No matter how much CO2 rain there is, the remaining atmosphere will still be very nearly 96% CO2.

I like the first article you linked. It's much more detailed and realistic in its analysis than Birch's proposal in my opinion. Nonetheless, it mostly accepts the time frames that Birch suggests. I'm just not sure things will work the way he imagines they will.

I have to agree with the conclusion that terraforming Venus is the sort of grand project that only a ubiquitous space based society searching for a monumental undertaking would consider. If earthly human nature is any guide, though, I suspect that a much higher priority will be given to diverting resources to acquiring (and keeping) whatever prime solar system real estate is considered more readily available.

LikeReply20 September 2016 at 14:52

Robert Walker

Oh I was talking about the water vapour clouds there. I don't know about clouds of liquid CO2, in a cooling CO2 atmosphere. He doesn't mention them as far as I know. Do they reflect a lot of heat radiation?

LikeReply20 September 2016 at 14:59

Jared Kohler which is harder to terraform? I thought they had acid storms on Venus?

LikeReply20 September 2016 at 18:03

Christopher Smyth Robert Walker

: You say "... I was talking about the water vapor clouds there..."

Actually, observations indicate that there are no water vapor clouds on Venus. The below linked Wikipedia article stipulates that the concentration of water vapor in the...See more

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 13:13Edited

Robert Walker

Yes sorry that's what I was talking about. More accurately, it has a sulfuric acid cycle. Sulfuric acid droplets fall towards the surface until eventually the water evaporates, and the sulfuric acid also decomposes, to sulfur dioxide (eventually) and w...See more

16 EVM - Dynamics 2

The dark in UV is due to some unknown absorber (ask Larry Esposito next week what he thinks it is). Visible is…

LASP.COLORADO.EDU

LikeReplyRemove Preview21 September 2016 at 13:13

Robert Walker

Jared Kohler - I'd say both are extremely hard to terraform, and that we shouldn't do it yet anyway. The thing is that even if we somehow constructed an Earth clone, would it turn into a copy of Earth by adding life and a bit of tweaking? That's the st...See more

Will We Build Colonies That Float Over Venus Like Buckminster Fuller's "Cloud…

SCIENCE20.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview21 September 2016 at 13:26

Aren Jay Don't colonise a planet you can't walk on, just live in space ships.

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 14:01

Christopher Smyth Robert Walker

: I think the notion of terraforming planets is a bit too arrogant and selfish for my taste. This discussion about Venus is a good example of what I mean. We propose that we can consciously change not only the climate, but the entire atmos...See more

LikeReply121 September 2016 at 14:19

Aren Jay If we go to a planet I think we will need to master the RV train, mobile base living. Any place other than Earth will need be indoors only, Mars is okay temperature wise in Short Southern Hemisphere summer. But no Air is a problem. Southern Hemisphe...See more

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 14:31

Robert Walker

Aren Jay - you can't walk on Mars or the Moon except in spacesuits, don't really see how that is much different from Venus where you can't go anywhere except in airships. Except some psychological thing that some people may feel happier living in a pla...See more

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 14:39Edited

Robert Walker

Christopher Smyth - I think the Biosphere II example shows how tricky it is to create an entire ecosystem - there were also issues with "weeds" taking over and loss of diversity. But just to say as for creating a closed system where you produce most of...See more

LikeReply121 September 2016 at 14:48Edited

Thomas Scott Mckaughan I heard that isis has its own space station.

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 04:53

Aren Jay Or telepresence in a robotic body that doesn't require going anywhere. I'm working on (very preliminary), a way to upload said information to people. Such that a planet friendly drone can rove the planet and send the info back to us for uploading.

UnlikeReply121 September 2016 at 14:49

Aren Jay Still by the time we need to leave Earth we might just leave our bodies behind and move into cyber space.

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 14:50

Christopher Smyth Aren Jay: Finding nitrogen on Mars for breathable air in a habitat isn't a problem. One doesn't even have to concern oneself with extracting it from the minerals known to be present in Martian soil. The Martian atmospheric constituents are as follows:...See more

Mars' Atmosphere: Composition, Climate & Weather

SPACE.COM

LikeReply226 September 2016 at 10:49Edited

Carl Bates If you could terraform Venus, then it would be many times better than Mars, which has no magnetic field and will blow away any atmosphere you give it.

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 16:03

Christopher Smyth Robert Walker

: You say about closed loop environments: "...But it's already demonstrated on Earth.."

I disagree. The Bios-3 experiment consisted of a 315 m^3 steel enclosure intended for three people. This is about the the volume of a small house (37 ...See more

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 16:15Edited

Christopher Smyth Carl Bates: Like Mars, Venus doesn't have an inherent magnetic field either.

"...Venus also has a magnetic field, though it is significantly weaker than Earth’s. What’s more, Venus’ magnetic field is induced by an interaction between the ionosphere an...See more

Venus Compared to Earth - Universe Today

Venus and Earth share many characteristics, being…

UNIVERSETODAY.COM|BY STORIESBYWILLIAMS

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 16:25

Kimberly Kramer Yes Christopher, but what about the scientist Jeffrey Landis who states atmosopheric protection against cosmic radiation (same equivalent mass as Erath's atmosphere), and the presence of useful atmospheric gasses, including carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 16:31

Mike Yamiolkoski All the ideas I've ever heard for terraforming worlds like Venus and Mars are far more difficult, complex, and uncertain than building free-orbiting space habitats from scratch.

Let's say a bunch of people get together and want to build a new town. T...See more

LikeReply321 September 2016 at 16:28

John Rumsey Ceres might be a candidate if we can get enough power. More likely to build a mile+ long tubular ship. Using light-sails would cut reaction mass and power needs.
The thickness of the tube would be habitat and landing craft and supplies could be s...See more

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 18:31

Mike Yamiolkoski The only problem with building on asteroids is one of gravity. Ceres would have the highest gravity of any asteroid, and a 200-lb human would weigh only about 5.5 pounds there, which may as well be zero-G as far as the physiological effects (bone loss...See more

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 19:32

John Rumsey Build the centrifuges in circular tunnels above or below the base and use them for sleeping and as needed to keep in shape. Solar electricity for power so starting and stopping would not be a problem. It could be a very long tunnel too so it would not ...See more

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 22:47

Mike Yamiolkoski Oh, it can be done - it's just simpler to build a freely spinning space station. If it's something like a circular train, one must power it; if it's a spinning wheel, you have moving parts and bearings and such. If it's floating in space, you just spin it and it essentially keeps spinning.

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 23:01Edited

Jared Kohler building a space station for a small town is easier than terraforming. Building a space station for a city with its own agriculture is about as difficult as terraforming. Building enough massive city sized space stations, or hollowing out asteroids, to meet the population requirements of a planet, is actually harder than terraforming some planets. Providing for 50 is not the same as providing for 5 billion.

LikeReply21 September 2016 at 23:48

John O'Halloran It is believed that terraforming will likely take 50 years to improve the environment of Mars in the least. It will take at the very least take 100 years before Mars will be as habitable as some of the harshest parts of Earth. At that point you will st...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 00:02

Robert Walker

No that's not in the least bit true. That's "movie science" or the science fiction "science" of the Mars trilogy - where they bend the numbers using artistic license for the sake of a good story - it wouldn't read so well if the steps to a co2 atmosphere took 1000 years and it then took 10,000 years to get an oxygen rich atmosphere.

LikeReply122 September 2016 at 00:08

John O'Halloran I actually completely agree. My estimates were unrealistically optimistic projection. It is not impossible to have that dramatic a change to the environment in that amount of time it just is completely unfeasible. It would cost trillions to reach even ...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 04:40Edited

Robert Walker

The Mars society must be amongst the most optimistic here, and they estimate 1000 years for a CO2 atmosphere with vegetation and trees, with megaengineering to keep it warm such as artificial greenhouse gases, and the atmospheric pressure high enough f...See more

Trouble With Terraforming Mars

Most science fiction and news stories describe Mars terraforming as a long term but simple process. You…

SCIENCE20.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview22 September 2016 at 00:19Edited

Aren Jay Think of it as a very small dyson sphere, with solar filtering windows.

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 15:23Edited

Robert Walker

Yes indeed, also caves and space colonies. The Stanford Torus was estimated to take about 22 years to construct. A big difference between 22 years and the terraforming estimates of somewhere between 1000 and 100,000 years (if it works).
http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Chapt6.html

Building the Colony and Making It Prosper

Critical gaps in present knowledge and experience, such as physiological limitations of a general population and dynamics of closed ecological systems, require extensive basic research before space colonies can be established. Parallel engineering efforts are also needed to develop suitable techniqu...

SETTLEMENT.ARC.NASA.GOV

LikeReplyRemove Preview22 September 2016 at 15:26

Robert Walker

A Venus colony wouldn't need anything like that much mass, for instance no regolith shielding needed at all and thin envelopes and no need to contain the pressure of an Earth atmosphere against a vacuum - you could probably just launch it all from Eart...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 15:29Edited

Aren Jay I'm thinking a mylar bubble around Mars, that is cinched tight and compresses the atmosphere to near human acceptable levels, lots of plants to change the CO2 to O2 and plants carbon. Add in Local nitrogen and have the mylar bubble cinched to a mile o...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 15:33

Robert Walker

Aren Jay The problem with any planet sized mega engineering is that if your film is only 1 gram per square meter (well below the density of mylar) that's a ton per square kilometer which makes the total mass 145 million tons. If it's a more realistic 1...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 15:45Edited

John Rumsey Light pressure turns the reflector into a sail. One idea had ice asteroids smashing into the polar regions and triggering any heat left in the core while adding water. Gaseous water is a better greenhouse gas than CO2. Also adds mass to increase gravit...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 00:47

Robert Walker

Yes water vapour is a greenhouse gas - but the problem is that it easily condenses to water droplets and falls out as rain. It's an amplifier, but it doesn't warm up the atmosphere by itself. So you can't count on it to warm up Mars except temporarily ...See more

Imagined Colours Of Future Mars - What Happens If We Treat A Planet As A Giant…

SCIENCE20.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview22 September 2016 at 01:02

Jared Kohler Attempts at terraforming Mars are going to be necessarily artificial. Similar technology to the giant carbon trap flyswatters that act as better carbon dumps than trees, will work orders of magnitude faster, but in a completely unnatural way. Then ther...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 01:08

Robert Walker

Well the main difference is that a Stanford Torus for 10,000 can be built now, indeed with 1970s technology. Lots of things to be sorted out, not saying we know how to do everything, but it seems like it could be within reach. While the ideas you are t...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 01:46

Robert Walker

I do think a self replicating city may be within reach - as NASA did a study - well I think it was them - for a self replicating lunar city - not inhabited by humans, just robotic, that would be able to make all of its own components and then make a co...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 01:49Edited

Aren Jay Why not just Terraform the Moon?

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 13:19

Christopher Smyth Jared Kohler: You say "... Again, I don't see how this could be technically more challenging than building a torus satellite station capable of supporting and feeding a million people...."

I would just like to see a demonstration that we can build any...See more

UnlikeReply122 September 2016 at 01:18Edited

Christopher Smyth Jared Kohler: You say "... You are still thinking of it in terms of rocket fuel and aircraft aluminum..."

Actually, I'm thinking in terms of people offhandedly talking about artificial environments as if they are commonplace. So far we don't have a single example of a successful long term artificial environment supporting and feeding anyone.

UnlikeReply122 September 2016 at 01:30

Jared Kohler electric vehicles and remote control go back to what? Tesla? But we didn't use them for the better part of a century. Some ideas have their time, regardless of the technical difficulty of building it. Micro organisms and psychological conflicts are th...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 06:22

Aren Jay We do have a few samples in a few cities of similar things. In the City of Calgary and in Minneapolis there are a set of enclosed buildings and walkways linking them. In Calgary we call them the plus 15 system. And there are some indoor gardens, this needs to be expanded... but the basis is there if you want it to be.

LikeReply122 September 2016 at 13:23

Aren Jay Air inside the system is all filtered and controlled, not created but not outside air, in winter outside air is very cold. Inside it is a pleasant 20+Celsius.

Another thing to look at is the big shopping malls. West Edmonton was at one time the biggest, current top 20. It shows how some of the compartmentalisation will work in Space ships and stations....See more

wem - Google Search

GOOGLE.CA

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 13:33

Thomas Scott Mckaughan So venus has stars around it in its selfie shot but we don't? No photoshoped planets please.

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 04:51

Mike Yamiolkoski That's a radar map showing the surface of Venus, not a visible-light photo. Venus looks featureless and white in visible light.

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 06:03

Thomas Scott Mckaughan I want that picture. This one looks stupid.

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 06:03

Thomas Scott Mckaughan Thanks. That one looks bad too. Who took that picture? That looks like 80s art. Is that a pingpong ball? I want better. What about a prob close up shot?

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 06:08

Mike Yamiolkoski Like I said... featureless and white. That photo was taken by Venera 9. Here's another shot of Venus which shows more detail:

Image may contain: 1 person, shoes and night

LikeReply322 September 2016 at 06:09

Mike Yamiolkoski But, this is probably what you're used to seeing... this is an ultraviolet-light picture which reveals details in the cloud tops:

LikeReply122 September 2016 at 06:11

Mike Yamiolkoski Finally, if you want to see the surface, here it is, taken by Venera 13 and 14. The bottom ones are the original pictures, taken through a wide-angle lens in black & white; on top, the "fish-eye" distortion has been corrected and they are colorized according to the light we would expect to see on Venus.

LikeReply122 September 2016 at 06:21Edited

John Phipps where's the "selfie" ANY Venera craft ever took of itself as Proof it was there??? huh??? {j/k}

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 09:28

John Phipps Mike Yamiolkoski just tell investors those are gold nuggets...

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 09:38

John Phipps And, actually, just how different IS this from what a shot of OUR OWN SEAFLOOR would look like??? Perhaps, all viable life on Venus exists In or Above the Clouds?

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 09:46

Thomas Scott Mckaughan Ghetto. We paid money for this crap? There is a robot on venus but no good pictures of venus? No video of approaching and landing of robots. I feel like something is not right here.

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 14:48

Mike Yamiolkoski Thomas Scott Mckaughan Don't worry, we didn't pay for it; the Commies did.

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 15:28

Christopher Smyth Jared Kohler: Okay. You seem to think bigger is better. The question is: "What's the minimum population and size of habitat that will sustain and feed the asteroid miners that you envision will be hard at work gathering the raw materials to make a big space station?

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 09:37

John Rumsey I'm guessing about an acre of floorspace per person to provide growing space for the plants and animals that would recycle air and waste and provide food. Might be a bit less with careful design. Figure you should have no less than 3 people on a mining...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 16:40

Jared Kohler An Ideal community where people get along is one in which you start to reach the limit of names you can remember to go with the faces. Most People aren't Dale Carnegie, but for a society to feel "not trapped", there should be more unknown than known fa...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 19:45

Todd Gillespie Because it's tidally locked with the sun.

LikeReply222 September 2016 at 15:06

Robert Walker

Actually it isn't quite. None of the planets are. Venus is the only planet with retrograde rotation - it's spinning slowly in the opposite direction from Earth once every f 244 Earth days, actually longer than its "year" of 224.7 Earth days. Its solar ...See more

LikeReply122 September 2016 at 15:17

Todd Gillespie Neat! Isn't it the only planet rotating in that direction, then?

UnlikeReply122 September 2016 at 16:53

Robert Walker

Yes the only one. And not too likely we'll find another one - surely the ones in the outer solar system beyond Neptune will also rotate the same way as all the others if they exist except as a result of some very unusual set of circumstances.

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 16:54

Shawn DeBoard The Sun is growing a day will come that Earth will lose it`s Goldilocks status Venus is closer to the Sun and one day Venus will become part of the SUN so if the idea of hum forming Venus as a call& response to The Earth`s overheating problem is a rea...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 15:26

Robert Walker

The Sun will become too hot 500 million years into the future. That's long enough for humans to evolve a second time all the way from the simplest multicellular microscopic animals. It probably won't even be us and if we do still have technology by the...See more

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 15:47

Shawn DeBoard The Future is wide open today why prepare f0r a future that we know will fail in the end Think out away from the SUN think other solar systems

LikeReply122 September 2016 at 15:56

Nathan Ryweck Any planet we go to is going accelerate our future in space. Given that all of human history is barely 5,000 years old, 500 million is totally irrelevant when choosing which planet to explore. Why not explore them all?

LikeReply22 September 2016 at 19:58

Robert Walker

You are talking about the surface there. The cloud tops are the same temperature as the Earth's surface also the same pressure as Earth.

LikeReply222 September 2016 at 16:51

Christopher Smyth Robert Walker

: I have trouble grasping what the interest in a floating habitat in the Venusian clouds would be. Such a habitat, bathed in sulfuric acid droplets, would be every bit as much a "closed environment" as an orbiting space station.

Whatever...See more

LikeReply125 September 2016 at 01:48

Robert Walker

The acid is only a minor thing compared to protecting against a vacuum. A thin layer of teflon will shield against the sulfuric acid in the Venus atmosphere, other plastics also that one can look into. It's the easiest landing site in our solar system,...See more

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 03:07Edited

John Rumsey Robert Walker

- I agree that there has to be a return on investment and wonder what a floating habitat on Venus would do to pay for itself. In the short period it would return information. Most habitats in space, colonies, would have to provide commercial return on investment, make a profit, in order to exist. Of course exploration has to come first, it always has.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 05:03

Es Sen Mike Yamiolkoski and others... You really don't see how an atmosphere rich in CHONS (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur) can be used for anything? Those are only THE most essential ingredients for LIFE, and also for rubber, plastics and com...See more

UnlikeReply125 September 2016 at 11:52

Shawn DeBoard Venus mining would be good though that would be about it also it would not expand humanity in the same way Mars would also human life would be shorter on Venus than Mars or the Earth by distance from the sun

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:04

Todd Gillespie Venus doesn't actually have much hydrogen, does it?

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:06

Es Sen I could just about follow your thoughts until that last part, Shawn DeBoard, about lifetimes being related to distance from the Sun. What are you referring to, UV damage to skin? Hardly an issue when the whole environment folks will live in will be Engineered Materials.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:09Edited

Es Sen Venus has massive amounts of hydrogen, combined with other types of atoms (Oxygen, Sulfur). Perhaps you are thinking of _free_ hydrogen, the element, Todd Gillespie?

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:10Edited

Es Sen Water is H2O, sulfuric acid is H2SO4. What more source is needed?

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:11

Todd Gillespie There isn't much water on Venus. Sulfuric acid is not an economical source for hydrogen.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:12

Es Sen LOL. Your statements are unfounded, Todd Gillespie. I suggest _you_ give sources.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:13

Todd Gillespie Yeah, you might want to check the facts there.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:14

Shawn DeBoard I am talking about the structure of cells the closer to the sun the greater the movement the more the cells become stretched this has the ability of turning the human body atomically toxic

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:14

Es Sen Liquid water, like we are used to on Earth, only exists as cloud droplets on Venus. But that is still an IMMENSE amount of water, and the high temperature of most of the _mass_ of Venus' atmosphere insures that a very significant fraction of that atmosphere IS water _vapor._

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:17

Todd Gillespie Es Sen Next you might try to explain to the class an economical method for extracting hydrogen from sulfuric acid.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:19

Shawn DeBoard Why chose to go towards the SUN the key factor of aging as well as death to all cells when Mars, the asteroid belt and beyond will slow aging even to the point the regrowth of cells would replace the cells faster than age strips them yes there is a fountain of youth in our solar system though it is beyond the asteroid belt

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:23

Es Sen ROFL, Todd. Just ROFL. Seriously, I must ask you to not "put words in my mouth." I never said it was preferable to get hydrogen from sulfuric acid. Water offers a far easier and perfectly well-known way: Electrolysis. But in a pinch, I daresay one could electrolyze H2SO4 itself. As for your pathetic graph of Venus atmospheric constituents... Exactly how many million megatons of hydrogen do you think you need?

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:26

Todd Gillespie Es Sen Here, have some more, from WikiP:

"Hydrogen is in relatively short supply in the Venusian atmosphere. A large amount of the planet's hydrogen is theorised to have been lost to space,[15] with the remainder being mostly bound up in sulfuric acid...See more

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:27

Es Sen The key word there seems to have escaped your notice, Todd: "relatively". Relative to what, to Earth? TOO funny.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:29

Shawn DeBoard http://sciencelearn.org.nz/.../Positive-and-negative...

Positive and negative effects of UV

Positive and negative effects of UV range from triggering Vitamin D development to causing…

SCIENCELEARN.ORG.NZ

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:29

Todd Gillespie Es Sen

> But in a pinch, I daresay one could electrolyze H2SO4 itself....See more

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:30

Es Sen Shawn, you have misconstrued and overgeneralized a restricted class of observation. Solar Distance, per se, is not ANY kind of issue. Levels of ultraviolet light (UV) is the issue being referred to, and that is a non-issue in an environment engineered to screen out UV.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:32

Robert Walker

Venus has a sulfuric acid cycle - the sulfuric acid descends and dissociates into water and SO2 and O2 which reacts with CO, then rises and recombines. So you can duplicate that. Remember that Venus has abundant solar power, more so than Earth, also th...See more

LikeReply125 September 2016 at 12:34Edited

Es Sen Twenty parts per million? It may be 20 ppm, it may be 30 ppm as in this: "The atmosphere of Venus is very thick and is about 90 times more massive than Earth's atmosphere. It is mostly carbon dioxide gas (about 96%), with some nitrogen (about 3%) and a...See more

Ask an Astronomer

What is the atmosphere of Venus like?

COOLCOSMOS.IPAC.CALTECH.EDU

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:45

Es Sen Note that 0.003% times 90 atmospheres means an Absolute Humidity of 0.27%, a much kinder figure.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 12:47

Shawn DeBoard I look for a world where we can adapt the ground to the point that it can produce life Mars will require extremely complex math though it can be dune with Venus we must live in the clouds like the Roman GOD`S

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 13:07

Shawn DeBoard We adapt the ground& the atmosphere of Mars to a life producing world this can be dune though unless we discover the way the Roman GOID`S did it a living ground on Venus can`t happen

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 13:13

Robert Walker

Es Sen - the average water at ground level is 20 ppm but in the clouds it's much denser. Assuming the droplets that form the cloud layer at 60 km are made of sulfiuric acid then it's an estimated 0.1 grams per cubic meter for the densest layer at 48.5 ...See more

LikeReply225 September 2016 at 13:15Edited

Shawn DeBoard the first had nothing the 2 it was there

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 13:18

Mike Yamiolkoski All those materials available in the Venusian atmosphere have one thing in common: They're cheap. There's no push to get them from space when they are abundant on Earth.

LikeReply25 September 2016 at 22:22

Robert Walker

Yes, they are mainly of interest for in situ resource utilization at present. But it's the same for Mars also. The Moon, and asteroids are the only places that have commercial potential at present.

There is a difference though, Venus habitats require...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 00:15Edited

Mike Combs Forget planets, why not colonize orbital space instead?

LikeReply125 September 2016 at 15:29

Es Sen Something like a "triangle trade" is needed, and empty space seems to strike most people as far too alien and forbidding. I like it though!

UnlikeReply125 September 2016 at 15:56

Carla Parsons Agreed, Chris put some "occupy Venus" slides at the end of his speech with our designs. Venus is our true goal.

LikeReply126 September 2016 at 01:39

Frank Glover A world where I have to land on a small mid-air target every time on arrival? Where, if there's a problem with he habitat, bailing out is possible, but still an unpleasant death? Where the surface conditions make it impossible to use any useful resources that might be down there?

Um, no....See more

LikeReply126 September 2016 at 02:32

Robert Walker

It's not much different from landing on a small island in an ocean or a small landing strip amongst mountains - where if the plane crashes in the mountains or lands somewhere else in the ocean, the most likely outcome is that everyone will die - and it...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 02:37Edited

Shawn DeBoard Robert Walker

dude man why so harsh Venus will not happen it will be Mars because the cash cow is the asteroid belt economics will always be the first choice Wake up!

LikeReply126 September 2016 at 02:51

Frank Glover Though the technology to get to Mars will lend itself to going farther, using the asteroids doesn't *require* a Mars presence.

LikeReply126 September 2016 at 02:54

Kimberly Kramer Cool. Good luck Robert. Let us know if Forbes publishes what you had to say on Quora. I've notice you have a lot ot say about Venus.

UnlikeReply126 September 2016 at 03:46

Robert Walker

Thanks Kimberly - yes - they've published my work before and quora said they will do this one. Of course it's always possible they change their mind, and I'm surprised that they want to publish such a long answer. and it's got longer since they said th...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 04:13

Robert Walker

Shawn - The Mars surface is not needed or even useful for asteroids. In orbit around Mars, Deimos and Phobos might be. But first, we surely won't start by exploiting the asteroid belt, but NEOs and Mars is not a staging post to NEOs. And for the astero...See more

The Case For Asteroids

CLOWDER.NET

LikeReplyRemove Preview26 September 2016 at 05:04Edited

Shawn DeBoard Robert Walker

Trust me with all the gadgets that are coming out over the next decade rare Earth Elements will be greatly required the Asteroid belt is Add to dictionary with them Venus has nun to a very finite amount of them Fallow the Money we have an economy that requires Elements that are abundant in the asteroid built so we will see where the future takes us!

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 04:48

Shawn DeBoard The Asteroids belt is between Mars& Jupiter I fail to see how flying past Earth as well as Mars would be a safer to rest your asteroid would be a shorter trip you confused me there?

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 04:54

Robert Walker

Oh you'd park an asteroid that is already in an orbit that takes it close to Venus, not transfer an asteroid from the asteroid belt to Venus . Same for Mars.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:05

Shawn DeBoard you do not understand the solar system to well do you?

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:13

Shawn DeBoard http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/menu/solar-system/

Solar System :: NASA Space Place

Paper models of your favorite solar system explorers. This link takes you away from Space…

SPACEPLACE.NASA.GOV

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:17

Robert Walker

Sorry what are you referring to? What about what I said doesn't make sense to you?

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:20

Shawn DeBoard the other side of Mars Venus is on the other side of the Earth

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:25

Robert Walker

Of course, if you mean closer to the Sun than Earth. Are you talking about the faster journey time? Venus orbits the Sun faster than Earth or Mars, has a shorter year and higher velocity. As a result, if you head out to the asteroid belt you have more velocity to get you going. Also because the Venusian year is shorter, then you have more opportunities to get there. Though the delta v is more as well of course.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:26

Robert Walker

It's a bit counter intuitive but is true. And though most asteroids orbit within the asteroid belt, many of them do flybys of Earth and of Venus and many are in orbits that don't even take them out to the asteroid belt.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:27

Shawn DeBoard The asteroid belt is on the other side of Mars The Asteroid Belt is the cash cow of the solar system Mars is the future of transporting rare Earth Elements

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:30

Robert Walker

Have a look at the NEO table. Every day we get many asteroids that do close flybys of Earth. The asteroids in the asteroid belt are not the only ones there are. There are asteroids of 1 - 10 km in diameter that are much easier to get to than those. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

NEO Earth Close Approaches

NEO.JPL.NASA.GOV

LikeReplyRemove Preview26 September 2016 at 05:32

Shawn DeBoard Trust me the big money billionaires' have their eyes on the asteroid belt

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:32

Robert Walker

I don't think they do. The asteroid mining companies are eyeing up the NEOs.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:33

Robert Walker

It doesn't make sense to mine the asteroids in the asteroid belt when there are asteroids doing close flybys of Earth with one year orbits much easier to get to.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:33

Robert Walker

See the astrorank database http://www.asterank.com/

Asteroid Database and Mining Rankings - Asterank

Asterank is a scientific and economic database of over 600,000 asteroids. We've collected, computed, or inferred important data such as asteroid mass and composition from multiple scientific sources. With this information, we estimate the costs and rewards of mining asteroids. Details on orbits and…

ASTERANK.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview26 September 2016 at 05:36

Shawn DeBoard corporations will set up on both though the Asteroid belt holds millions of asteroids I say the mass amount will get the money

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:36

Robert Walker

Well longer term maybe, but we have lots of NEOs to mine first, it will take a while to mine dozens of asteroids each multiple kilometers in diameter, so I don't think we will exhaust the NEOs any time soon. They are also good ones to mine because each one is a potential long term impact hazard for Earth and mining them gets rid of that hazard.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:38

Shawn DeBoard those billionaires' have Mars in mind

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:46

Robert Walker

I don't think so either. I've not seen any suggestion of a commercial case for Mars for mining. Apart from Elon Musk of course, and his motivation is different, not to earn money from Mars.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:52

Robert Walker

The problem with mining Mars is the gravity well. It's a lot of rocket fuel when you can just mine an NEO instead and the Moon is even closer in terms of delta v if you use Hoyt's orbital tether system.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 05:52

Robert Walker

And I've just added an extra section there as a result of this conversation, also added to the online book here, perhaps it will help to see it all in one place and with links to other places online?:
http://robertinventor.com/boo.../Online-Case-for-Moon.htm...

Case For Moon First: Gateway to Entire Solar System - Open Ended…

ROBERTINVENTOR.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview26 September 2016 at 05:54

John O'Halloran One thing that is forgotten by people that see the asteroid belt as the cash cow of the solar system is that the entire asteroid belt is only 4% that of the Moon. Half of that mass is contained in 4 known asteroids of which only one of which likely has...See more

UnlikeReply126 September 2016 at 06:39

Robert Walker

Yes, and the Moon has been hit by many asteroids in the past, so whatever materials you have in asteroids is also on the Moon or in it. This depends on future research but there are indications that the Moon may also have rich deposits of platinum etc ...See more

LikeReply126 September 2016 at 06:48Edited

Es Sen Frank Glover: "Land on"? Hardly the way I'd do it. Rather than use a parachute and be forced into the need for precision, I would inflate a gasbag and float, making a leisurely rendezvous.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 14:56

Frank Glover I was thinking active landing under rocket thrust (and to be fair, SpaceX has demonstrated the possible accuracy of such, many times), or if the floating structure is long enough, and the incoming vehicle is winged, then aircraft carrier-type landings are possible.

But you'd *better* have the ability to go around for another attempt, if there's a problem...there can be no 'ditching.'

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 22:28

Robert Walker

Frank Glover That's a case of trying to apply Mars solutions to Venus. It's the main problem with these things, that Mars ideas are worked out in such detail, there's a tendency to evaluate all other suggested missions based on whether the Mars archite...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 23:03

Frank Glover Most parachutes don't offer a lot of control on descent (though that meant for the X-38 lifting body is somewhat of an exception). Reliable balloon deployment on descent (and still requiring directional control once deployed, which means more of a blim...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 23:21

Robert Walker

Well yes - you could use the same objection to say that they can never land a sky crane on Mars or use the bouncing airbags solution because it's never been done before. Of course they would start with robotic missions and gradually develop the capabil...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 23:41Edited

Christopher Smyth Before one envisions space based mining, refining, foundry and fabrication industries, we should ask ourselves : "How do we get there?"

There is little doubt in my mind that the first commercial LEO space based facilities will be heavily subsidized pr...See more

LikeReply226 September 2016 at 11:46

Aren Jay Strip mine the Moon, robotically, then launch finished products into orbit and let it work its way to Lagrange points naturally. When it arrives it is assembled by more robots and built on a massive scale. If one wants to evacuate the Earth that is. ...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 14:07

Robert Walker

Actually I think He3 is one of the suggested resources least likely to be used on the Moon. Because we don't have a fusion reactor that runs on it, and some experts think we never will have one - the most promising one that might use it currently has a...See more

Case For Moon First: Gateway to Entire Solar System - Open Ended…

ROBERTINVENTOR.COM

LikeReplyRemove Preview126 September 2016 at 14:30Edited

Christopher Smyth Aren Jay: I hate to break it to you, but teleporting is every bit as much sci-fi as it sounds. As far as robotics are concerned, perhaps we should be able to demonstrate this ability you think we'll have right here on earth before we attempt it at an altitude of 250,000 miles.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 14:11

Wilfred F Drouin Jr By "teleport" I believe he means some sort of remote telepresence. Admittedly even that is still on the fringe of current science, and further complicated by speed of light lag.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 15:15

Shawn DeBoard WIRELESS commands programmed via joystick that are sent to robots that mine the Asteroid Belt now I will admit this is not exactly telepresence though the cause& effect of actions would yield the outcome as though it was. Picture itliving

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 15:29

Wilfred F Drouin Jr Aren Jay, you said "launch finished products into orbit and let it work its way to Lagrange points naturally."
The Lagrange points don't work that way. It may be fairly easy to get into the "horseshoe" orbit that cycles past L3, L4, L5, but without som...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 15:32

Christopher Smyth Shawn DeBoard: If you think that joystick control of robotic "miners' in the asteroid belt will work, you need to read up on how the Mars rovers are controlled by NASA - and why. The delay in signals from earth to Mars (about 1.5 AU) and vice versa is ...See more

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 16:12

Mike Yamiolkoski This thread is discussing a LOT of things that are not Venus... shouldn't we start new topics? Just sayin'.

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 16:14

Shawn DeBoard https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us/hardware

Microsoft HoloLens

Transform your world with holograms. Microsoft HoloLens brings high-definition holograms to life in…

MICROSOFT.COM|BY MICROSOFT

LikeReply26 September 2016 at 16:45

Michael McGinnis Venus? Really? No f---ing way! We can't even build machines that can survive on Venus.

LikeReply12 October 2016 at 05:59

Michael McGinnis This isn't real. The record for survival of a probe sent to Venus' surface is about 2 hours. Atmospheric pressure is 75 to 100 times that on Earth, surface temperatures are 455 °C to 475 °C (855 °F to 885 °F), sulfuric & phosphoric acid vapor.

LikeReply12 October 2016 at 06:14Edited

Chris Caston Yes. Records are meant to be broken. People here are talking about living above the clouds of Venus where conditions are far more suitable.

LikeReply2 October 2016 at 06:13

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