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Mars Problems vs. Venus Problems
- rowanseymour 6y agoPotentially dumb question, but I keep reading that the average surface temperature of Venus is 450C and so completely hostile to life, but didn't we discover recently that the poles are much colder? [1] Aren't there thus regions on the surface with similar temperatures to earth? [1] https://astronomy.com/news/2016/04/esa-finds-a-frigid-surprise-hiding-at-venus-poles https://astronomy.com/news/2016/04/esa-finds-a-frigid-surpri...
- rm445 6y agoThe polar _atmosphere_ is colder than expected[1]. According to Wikipedia, the coldest point on the surface is 380 degrees C. https://sci.esa.int/web/venus-express/-/57735-venus-express-swansong-experiment-sheds-light-on-venus-polar-atmosphere https://sci.esa.int/web/venus-express/-/57735-venus-express-...
- rowanseymour 6y agoAh ok that makes more sense... 380C is still pretty toasty.
- kavi87 6y agoIt's 2 or 3 times what we use for "sterilization", if there's life it really loves the extreme
- gowld 6y agoThat's not quite how degree-based scales work. In Kelvin we see it's about 1.5x as hot. Or if you look at distance from "comfy" (25 C) to "dead" it's about 3x as far as dead from comfy so the conclusion still works .
- sergeykish 6y agoI think the comparison was to 0..100C - liquid water on Earth surface. Boiling point depends on atmospheric pressure. On Venus (93 bar) melting point is about 0C [1] and it boils at 305.6C. Interestingly under pressure "water becomes less polar and behaves more like an organic solvent such as methanol or ethanol" [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_melting_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_melting_point [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheated_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheated_water
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- typicalbender 6y agoThe other place where life could exist is in the upper atmosphere where apparently temperatures are much more hospitable. There's a really good write-up with more information here [1]. On earth there exists microorganisms that live in our atmosphere so one hypothesis to explain the phosphine is that there may be a similar situation on Venus. I believe its also been theorized that we could build floating cities on Venus [2] given the climate in the upper-middle atmosphere. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Andromeda321/comments/ismnrb/venus_has_phosphine_in_its_atmosphere_what_does/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Andromeda321/comments/ismnrb/venus_... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI assume the atmosphere microorganisms on Earth started in a terrestrial tidal pool though and evolved from there. There’s the rub for thinking about atmosphere organisms existing on other planets.
- ch4s3 6y agoVenus in the distant past had hospitable surface temperatures.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoOh I did not think about that or know that. That’s true. “Recent studies from September 2019 concluded that Venus may have had surface water and a habitable condition for around 3 billion years and may have been in this condition until 700 to 750 million years ago.”
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoIt is interesting that this timeline lines up roughly with the appearance of plant and animal life on earth.
- sergeykish 6y ago
- gostsamo 6y agoYou still have to consider 90 times the air pressure and the acid rains.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kavi87 6y agoThat plus the ~500°C at the surface and we have a little paradise to explore
- DamnInteresting 6y agoTo the best of our understanding, the surface of Venus is isothermal, meaning that there is little variability in temperature, whether on the pole or equator, day or night. That 2016 rash of articles about "cold poles" on Venus were rather misleading interpretations of a single scientific paper about a measurement from the upper atmosphere.
- ardy42 6y ago> There was a great paper in JBIS in April: Conceptual Design of a Crewed Platform in the Venusian Atmosphere (abstract only). It summarises two comprehensive studies of how to float crewed scientific missions in the clouds of Venus. The mock-ups look like a cross between dirigibles and the space station. Alien. I don't see the point of a crewed scientific mission like these to Venus's atmosphere, except to claim the credit for just having sent humans there. It seems like accepting a lot of risk for very little gain, since, unlike Mars, it's not like there'd be any complex manipulation or interaction with the environment to do there.
- genmon 6y agoThe British Interplanetary Society (JBIS is their journal) has a great history of publishing the first engineering studies for grand projects -- crewed Moon missions (1938), geosynchronous satellites (1945), interstellar missions (1973), and more: https://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/the-british-interplanetary-society/visionary-thinking https://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/the-british-interplanet... I agree with your general point (why send humans when robots will do?) but the engineering feasibility studies push the envelope of what we can imagine -- and reveal where more work is required. I tend to read JBIS from that perspective.
- ardy42 6y ago> I agree with your general point (why send humans when robots will do?) That's not my general point, actually. I'm generally supportive of sending humans on exploration missions, but blimps on Venus seems off. It's like a manned mission down into the lava pool of an active volcano. Sure, maybe you could actually do it, but there's little point to do so except for the bragging rights. If humans wanted to visit the atmosphere of Venus, it seems a lot safer and more practical to do it in a supersonic rocket plane. Then you don't have to worry about launching a manned return rocket from a dirigible.
- genmon 6y agoI see. Yes, in the paper the scope was set to be model it on the space station: there's a habitable zone of the atmosphere about 50km up, and the mission parameters were to base there for ~10 years with multiple human/robot missions to the surface and a rotating crew. Other approaches (such as a supersonic plane) weren't considered.
- arkanciscan 6y agoWe shouldn't go to Venus because it's like Africa?
- Teever 6y agoI've wondered about the feasibility of transporting the abundant CO2 in the Venus atmosphere to Mars for the purposes of terraforming both planets at the same time. It's been a while since I've done the the envelope math but if I recall correctly there is more than sufficient CO2 on Venus to provide an atmosphere for Mars the issue is just transportation. The last time I thought about it I considered some sort of massive floating solar powered comet builder that would cool the atmosphere into large chunks of dry ice that could then be wrapped in a metal sabot so that the comet could be accelerated to mars via a mass driver. As with everything in space and terraforming the key is scale so the equipment used would need to built in situ out of carbon from the Venusian atmosphere. We are of course still a ways away from mastering self replicating carbon based engineering but the idea of terraforming both planets at the same time is neat to me.
- baxtr 6y agoI love the thought. I also love the line of thinking here. I feel bad for having very different, mundane thoughts around getting rich with my next side project!
- raxxorrax 6y agoMars is probably not geologically active and has no protective magnetic field, so my first thought was to change that by hitting it up with a larger asteroid from the belt, preferably a metal rich one with significant mass. I first thought about its moons, but they are too small. I mean to achieve a complete planetary melting. That would be step one, step two would be waiting a few million years and see how it turns out.
- Teever 6y agoSuch a cataclysmic event isn't necessary. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo... The bigger issue with this idea would be getting enough hydrogen to Venus to create oceans. That would require hitting Venus with comets or possibly extracting hydrogen from a gas giant which seems impractical.
- avmich 6y ago> (“Geo”-logy? I’m not sure what the appropriate word is.) Planetology.
- Koshkin 6y ago> Planetology Unfortunately this has some astronomical ring to it. (I do not think most geologists think of the earth as a planet, to be honest.)
- avmich 6y agoI'm pretty sure they are all educated people and just know that. And it's hard for me to imagine such an unimaginative geologist who wouldn't be able to look at Earth as a planet.
- genmon 6y agoI was wondering about _exogeology?_
- genmon 6y agoPost author here. I realise I wasn't explicit about the metaphors I was trying to draw. Mars problems have grand scale but we can see them from the beginning. Google building the original web search index was a Mars problem: massive (at the time) but tractable. Robot cars probably similar: it's an engineering and world mapping problem, and it's tough but we can get there. Venus problems are knotty, hard to decompose, and characterised by discovering new problems as we go along. UBI is a Venus problem. Vaccines/CRISPR/biology are all Venus problems. Physics is a Venus problem -- notably at the time of the ultraviolet catastrophe which upended everything in the early 20C. My take is that technology has mainly dealt with Mars problems till now, but now we're facing Venus problems.
- kavi87 6y agoI don't think we have dealt with Mars problems at all, the road is still very long for any manned mission and I'm pretty sure the Moon will get its own base long before we even consider the possibility to explore Mars with humans. The base on the Moon being by itself a problem that we have not dealt at all. I mean we started space exploration like yesterday and each new problem seems to go on a logarithmic scale, they are hundred of times harder each time.
- phillipcarter 6y agoNaturally, nearly all the comments here are about space exploration and not what this article was actually about. I liked the comparison.
- rishav_sharan 6y agoI don't follow. Venus is a tractable problem as well. All we need to do is drop a blimp obseravatory on Venus. Its probably even cheaper to do it for Venus than it is to do the same for Mars. The reason why Mars feels more like a "tractable" problem is simply that we have chased it for decades. Noone gave Venus the attention and funding it could have used to become a tractable problem.
- dredmorbius 6y agoIt's not quite "title fever", but the point was buried too far in the essay and obscured by the title. HN frequently fails to read, and clearly has here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20title%20fever&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Interesting point, worth developing, but a less distracting label and clearer framing, with multiple strongly contrasting examples from different domains might help.
- JackFr 6y agoI think the crushing atmospheric pressure at the surface makes us think about Venus in the wrong way and leads us focus on the wrong things. Consider that for a very large portion of the earth's surface the crushing pressure makes it damned difficult to get a probe to the surface, and we already have the advantage of starting 5-6 miles away. And while I realize Venus isn't an ocean world, comparing it to our oceans does open your eyes to the idea that a focus on the surface, that is sea floor, ignores where a lot of the interesting stuff is going on. Of course there is still the temperature and the sulfuric acid . . .
- Gravityloss 6y agoThere's a really high mountain, 11 km, on Venus. Unfortunately still not very pleasant: "Due to its elevation it is the coolest (about 380 °C or 716 °F) and least pressurised (about 45 bar or 44 atm) location on the surface of Venus." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_Montes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_Montes
- DarthGhandi 6y ago> 44 atm Note that humans can and do work at higher pressures than this.
- kavi87 6y agoWork ? Maybe a diver can stay inert or do some small movement at 500 m but picking up rocks maybe not
- DarthGhandi 6y agoMore than 28 hours of work was done on the deepest saturation dive ever made, it was beyond your 500m mark: https://divingalmanac.com/deepest-saturation-dive-open-sea/ https://divingalmanac.com/deepest-saturation-dive-open-sea/
- legulere 6y agoApparently no: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32640/what-is-the-maximum-atmospheric-pressure-a-human-can-tolerate https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32640/what-is-the-...
- Santosh83 6y agoOn a slightly related note, what are you favourite science fiction works set largely on Mars or Venus?
- roland35 6y agoI like the Expanse series, but Mars is only a part of those books. I tried to get into Red Mars but I found it a little too dry for me, but I think if you're a fan of "hard sci fi" with realistic ideas of how people would live on Mars it is very interesting!
- Koshkin 6y agoTotal Recall
- genmon 6y agoRed Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is astounding, the benchmark. The Space Merchants (Kornbluth/Pohl) is an oddball novel about a hyper-consumerist future, where the settlement of Venus is driven by marketing. It's all about an advertising executive. Both highly recommended, for different reasons.
- kavi87 6y agoAs a note, Red Mars is the first volume of a trilogy (there's also Green and Blue Mars). It is quite hard SF with systems that are or were considered as solution for Mars terraformation, very good recommendation !
- guerrilla 6y agoDon't miss the PBS Space Time episode suggesting we should colonize Venus instead of Mars which gives some good arguments and goes through the basics. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag
- Koshkin 6y agoYou can find answers to all your questions in Stapledon’s Last And First Men.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoInterestingly, the most friendly environment for us in the Solar system outside of Earth is Venus's upper atmosphere: About 25C, close to 1atm pressure, and 0.9G gravity. It's just like home except for the nasty air. So, really as long as you have an air-tight membrane made of whatever material resists the atmospheric gases you're good to go. And if you keep a positive pressure then small ruptures of the membrane or leaks are not catastrophic for the occupants, who enjoy comfy conditions and plenty of solar power.
- mellavora 6y agoWhat about the recent finding that the atmosphere of Venus seems to contain badger farts? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-life-clouds.html?referringSource=articleShare https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-life-clouds... (read with a generous interpretation). Badgers are known as hardy animals. They also like to dig, which could help with the terraforming. Why aren't we talking about using badgers to colonize Venus?!? How do we know they haven't beat us to it?
- mas3god 6y agoO'Neill cylinders are cheaper and more effective than both planets
- soco 6y agoTerraforming is all nice and future oriented, but when I look at us rather failing to terraform Earth, I'm a bit more skeptical about our capacity to keep the climate on a different planet in check.
- jonshariat 6y agoGood point. I guess the difference is here on earth we have to coordinate the behavior of billions but with mars it may be one united group of people.
- rishav_sharan 6y agoOn the other hand, we have efficiently terraformed the hell out of Earth to increase shareholder profit. Of course long term habitability might suffer but hey, thats a problem for the next generation.
- chrisco255 6y agoPersonally, I think I enjoy greater habitability than my ancestors of 150 or 1500 years ago did.
- majormajor 6y agoDo you enjoy greater habitability or do you use technology to compensate for habitability? Using air and water filters to offset for pollution we've added to the natural environment, for instance.
- ape4 6y agoReminds me of the 1992 book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Are_from_Mars,_Women_Are_from_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Are_from_Mars,_Women_Are_f...
- nickbauman 6y agoGoodness, the number of folks who divide the world into "solved problems" and "problems to be solved" missed the entire point of the article. This article was not about "what we can do to the world for our own needs"; it's about "how can we change our minds and perspectives (our selves) to do the work that needs to be done."
- davidhyde 6y agoI think people miss the point of the article because the article itself doesn't make much sense. The opening paragraph states that scientists have found Phosphine and what conclusions they have draw about it (aka possible life). The next paragraph starts with the author stating, I quote, "I'm skeptical". The reason given that a mars rock that got scientists all excited 90's turned out to be a dead end. Come on. Then the author rambles on about how unfeasible it would be to explore Venus compared to Mars as if that has anything to do with life on Venus.
- nobody9999 6y ago>I think people miss the point of the article because the article itself doesn't make much sense. Perhaps that's so. It certainly doesn't directly address scientific issues with the exploration/exploitation of Venus and/or Mars. Rather, the main theme of the blog post seems to be: The challenges of exploring Venus/searching for life are metaphorically similar to current issues here on Earth (climate change, SARS-Cov2, etc.), while Mars represents the endless expansion/frontier attitudes of 18th-20th century mercantilism/capitalism. As such, I found the post to be more about how humans think about solving problems and a plea for a new kind of thinking. As Lincoln put it: "The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." While I certainly don't disagree with the sentiment, I'm not convinced that the metaphor is a good one. Exploring/colonizing/exploiting off-world resources, regardless of where they might be, will require us to "...think anew, and act anew." All that said, perhaps I completely misunderstood the blogger's point. But I don't think so. Edit: Clarified the amount of sense I think the author of the blog post was making and cleaned up my own verbiage/reasoning.
- blueblisters 6y agoI don't see living on Mars (or Venus) getting desirable anytime soon, even for communities most affected by climate change. As it stands right now, it is still way easier to fix problems on Earth than to set up a small colony on Mars. Not that we shouldn't do it - it's an extremely cool science experiment but I find it a bit facetious when Elon and Bezos imply that Mars is the backup plan in case things get too screwed up here.
- Santosh83 6y agoRight. When they're saying backup plan I guess they're talking about the super-rich and powerful who could move to Mars while culling the herd here so as to make space for more agriculture and industry to enable the settlements to thrive. They're not taking about the billions.
- TheBigSalad 6y agoDid someone imply that because of climate change the environment on Mars would be more hospitable to human life than Earth?
- nickik 6y agoIts a backup plan for humanity, not individual societies or people. There are many things that we can not get a way from however many of earths problems we solve. Even without climate change or any human made problems, nature could kick us out any time for reasons we don't even know about. Musk has two companies, Plan A, help not destroy earth. Plan B, inspire people and create backup. Bezos doesn't want to go to Mars, he want people living in space and have the earth be a nature park of sorts.
- portobell0 6y ago"Venus, planet of love Was destroyed by global warming Did its people want too much too?" - Mitsky
- carapace 6y agoLet's terraform the Earth. No, I'm seriously you guys. We have just figured out that we can (re)make forests out of deserts, let's do that. Let's do the hell outta that! "How to Grow a Forest Really Really Fast" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074473 Search on "Greening the Desert" E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_greening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_greening "Celebrating 10-Years at the Greening the Desert Project, Jordan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI9wMtTvWps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI9wMtTvWps This is a regenerative process: the forest produces the seeds, fauna, and materials needed to create more forest. We can totally do this, and many people are, the tricky bit is getting the economics to work.
- samatman 6y ago"Terraform Earth" is a great slogan for a 'bright green' viridian approach to our interlocking ecological crises. We're already doing it, after all. But we don't think about it in those terms, and we aren't getting the kind of results which we might, if we did. What you're proposing we can call silviforming, and it's a good idea. We spend too much energy making Earth more like Mars (dry and barren) or like Venus (a roiling greenhouse of carbon dioxide inimical to life); let's make Earth more like Earth instead.
- kaycebasques 6y ago> 'bright green' viridian approach Is this a reference? I don't understand what this means.
- samatman 6y agoAh, the late, lamented Viridian movement! Bruce Sterling tried, with some success, to promulgate a technologically-oriented and optimistic approach to the climate crisis, around the turn of the millennium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viridian_design_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viridian_design_movement That article, conveniently enough, contains a link to one on "bright green environmentalism", which bruces considered similar enough that he closed the chapter on the Viridians. Which, I wish he hadn't. But I can't fault him for finding other things to do with his time.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoIt is not mentioned often but distance to Venus = 25,000,000 mi distance to Mars = 34,000,000 mi
- sewer_bird 6y agoThat’s not really super meaningful in terms of interplanetary travel. For example, for most of the year Mercury is the closest planet to Earth. Change in orbital velocity matters more than distance
- 29athrowaway 6y agoFor manned travel, travel time matters too.
- grishka 6y agoI find it somewhat weird that no one considers gravity when choosing the planet to colonize. Martian gravity is 2.6 times weaker than Earth's and it's the one thing you can't fix. Living with gravity this weak for extended periods of time can't be healthy.
- restalis 6y agoYou're a visionary, and I'm so glad reading you rise the gravity issue. When it comes to it, this consideration and the whole extraterrestrial direction-setting exercise, as simple and rational I expect it to go when I speak with others or read their comments, become instead a maturity test I'm waiting for in people willing to take it, and sadly I rarely notice anyone passing it. Another related thought I've had the joy seeing echoed in this discussion thread was the first sentence of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24574145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24574145 Mars is a rock useful for many things, no doubt, but not for humans to live on. As challenging as it seem right now, Venus' problems are solvable, and it just happens to offer the necessary conditions for humans to live on and avoid speciation. If this kind of terrestrial gravity was nowhere to be found but on a planet somewhere as distant as Pluto, we'd still had to go for that (and be thankful for it to exist in our Solar system at all) instead of going for Mars-sized planet and orbit. It just fascinates me that it happens to be the closest us. Humanity will get there and will learn a lot from the process, which is nearly a must-have experience for any further much costlier colonization endeavor on another planetary system.