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There are perhaps ways to mine Venus surface materials; something like dredging. Dedicated development of high-temp computing may also make longer-term robotic
by jccooper 7y ago
There are perhaps ways to mine Venus surface materials; something like dredging. Dedicated development of high-temp computing may also make longer-term robotic operations possible. None of that's particularly convenient, of course, and I can't imagine why you'd want to do it. But one can say that about every other extra-terrestrial option, too.
- CydeWeys 7y agoYou would need a 50km long dredge. That seems completely unworkable; that's much longer than the deepest of deep mining operations we have here on Earth, and we aren't nearly as constrained on Earth as you would be on Venus. How would you even get such a thing to Venus? The only realistic way to do so would be to construct it of local materials, but now we have a chicken-and-egg problem. Plus, keep in mind that a lot of the materials you would use for such a dredge on Earth won't work on Venus, because the atmosphere will corrode them.
- svaigsq 7y agoIt is probably a typo, but Mars doesn't have enough atmosphere to corrode things more than on Earth. If you need 50km long dredge, then it is a viable project in future, just like now it is with space elevator. Apparently that type of dredge will be needed to extract materials from gas planets(and 50km might not be enough), so that dredge will have to be developed anyway. The most logical solution to make habitable world would be to bombard Venus with comets and small planets. They all have enough materials to stabilize Venus atmosphere and teraform it and also calculated bombarding can cause Venus to change axis and rotation.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThis is very far-future stuff though. In contrast, we can colonize Mars and Titan with today's level of technology (Mars more easily more likely, because it's closer).