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Fun fact regarding Venus. Unlike the earth which has all sorts of tectonics going on and constant interruptions releasing pressure, on Venus the pressure just

• iampivot 4y ago
  I'd assume they'd worry more about the daily 450 degrees temperature more. Might be cooler at the poles.
  • chongli 4y ago
    Just to clarify for anyone wondering: that’s 450C or over 850F. And the atmospheric pressure is about 93 bar, which is 4 times the pressure inside the boiler of a steam engine.
    • delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
      > 93 bar, which is 4 times the pressure inside the boiler of a steam engine Or it is 93x atmospheric pressure, which is what 'bar' indicates...
      • BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
        I’m one of those people who was ignorant as to what ‘bar’ indicates. Now I know, but there’s nothing wrong with the steam engine example for imagining a comparison.
        • adastra22 4y ago
          Pedantic: 1 atm = 1.01325 bar (exactly). They're nearly equivalent units, even more so when you consider that Earth's atmosphere varies by more than 1.325% on a given day. But in a strict sense they're not the same.
          • euroderf 4y ago
            A variation on the survey foot.
            • saalweachter 4y ago
              The US survey foot, as you probably know having brought it up but elaborating for the audience, is the old US foot before it was averaged with the British foot to create the international foot. It is 500000/499999 international feet.
        • delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
          I suppose I think a bit differently. I don't know the typical pressure inside a steam engine. However, I do know what one bar, or one pascal means. I can also guess what ninety atmospheres entails in terms of engineering, because I know that's the pressure at about 900 m water depth (by virtue of the SI units, which are based off water: P = hρg), which few submarines can even reach. The same thing goes for 'as long as/as big as xxx football fields': which one? American or association? I know what a square metre is, I know what a square kilometre is, just use the damn units. I really think pop-sci and science education should emphasise standard units (read: SI, not USC) and being able to estimate orders of magnitude.
          • 8note 4y ago
            Why reference submarines? What submarines can reach is irrelevant as a comparison when you know a number Otherwise, it's your reference to submarines that contextualizes the number, same as the insides of a steam engine does for others
            • delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
              > it's your reference to submarines that contextualizes the number I realised that after the fact. What I meant to say is that standard units should be used, and individuals should be left to contextualise said units of their own accord, instead of it being done for them.
              • dontlaugh 4y ago
                Or both, numbers plus example don’t take much space.
          • arbitrandomuser 4y ago
            You don't need to know the typical pressure , but you definitely get the idea the pressure built inside a steam engine is much higher than atm. The steam pressure is not about the numbers so much but a kind of hyperbole , "you know that thing which hauls tonnes of steel purely on pressure made in a steam boiler , yeah the pressure on Venus is 4 times that pressure " I found it an interesting fact.
      • illiarian 4y ago
        Insert the obligatory "Americans will measure in anything but metric units" joke :)
        • chongli 4y ago
          I’m actually Canadian. I like that joke because I think a lot of units are useful for calculations but completely unintuitive. If I had instead said it was 9.3 megapascals and left it at that it wouldn’t have given most readers an intuition for how much pressure that really is. The pressure inside a steam engine boiler comparison, while not perfect, gives a bit better frame of reference because people have some intuition for how powerful steam engines are. Oh and I like the unit ‘bar’ because it’s the customary unit for espresso machine pressure (and I’m an espresso nerd with my own machine at home). Espresso machines make espresso by forcing hot water through a puck of finely ground coffee at a pressure between 8 and 12 bar. If you’ve ever worked with an espresso machine, you’ll have an intuitive sense for how much pressure that is (a lot). Venus having 10 times that pressure is also impressive.
          • illiarian 4y ago
            I like measurements that are immediate and visual. Your comparison to boiler pressure was a perfect example of that (I also immediately imagined the boiler blowing up :) )
• Shekelphile 4y ago
  > I am 100% confident that should human society settle on the planet we will totally ignore the fact that's going to happen one day and it will be a amazing catastrophe when it finally does occur. Will never happen without major science fiction grade technology, the atmosphere is way too thick to even think about sending anything larger than a tiny probe into.
  • bmitc 4y ago
    I really wish we would send probes to Venus. I know the environment is just incredibly corrosive, but Venus and several other planets' moons are infinitely more interesting than Mars.
    • wahern 4y ago
      If we can manage to build the infrastructure to colonize Mars, then the tools for probing other planets will become cheap and ubiquitous. But if people only advocate for the latter and not the former, we'll never get anywhere. Also why the moon isn't a sufficiently challenging objective in its own right at this point; worthwhile for building incidental infrastructure, but not the center of attention.
      • labster 4y ago
        If lunar colonies aren’t very challenging, why aren’t there hundreds by now?
        • badpun 4y ago
          Because they're pointless? :)
          • shjake 4y ago
            Same as on Mars or any other place outside of Earth that we know of to be fair
        • 4y ago
• thanatos519 4y ago
  The toughest thing for making Venus habitable is that its day is 243 Earth days. It's like roasting on a slow spit. I think we should be aggressively seeding its atmosphere with extremophiles, hoping that something evolves to transform all that free energy into life.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    That's assuming that there isn't already something out there, e.g. floating in the more manageable atmosphere. There's beings living in or close to thermal vents in Earth's oceans or in acid pools in Yosemite, so it would be possible for things to survive there as well.
• bearmode 4y ago
  By the time humans are able to settle on Venus, I'd imagine we'd also have the ability to relieve the pressure ourselves.
  • bioemerl 4y ago
    The ability maybe, but "it won't happen for centuries, we have time".
• Symmetry 4y ago
  So, if we were to establish settlements on Venus we'd almost certainly make floating ones. At 50 km above the surface you've got 1 G of gravity, 1 atmosphere of pressure, and 25 C temperatures so you could do outside in just a breath mask. And while the CO2 atmosphere is unbreathable we can tolerate small additions of CO2 to our atmosphere from leaks and evolution has equipped us to notice excess CO2 in our environment when it gets to dangerous levels. https://www.humans2venus.org/why-venus https://www.humans2venus.org/why-venus Would people floating 50 km up be able to just ignore that sort of vulkanism? I have no idea but I hope some science fiction author investigates and writes a story on the topic.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    Putting aside the fact that Venus's clouds consist of concentrated sulfuric acid, shouldn't our assumptions about colonizing the planet be based on what we are capable of achieving? I am not aware of any floating settlements in the air (though I do know of floating settlements on water), so it's hard to imagine one on Venus. Moreover, if we are to consider possibilities beyond our current capabilities, why not focus on building space stations with artificial gravity instead? There would be no need to be tethered to Venus when we could exist without any attachment (although we would still be subject to gravity of other entities).
    • vidarh 4y ago
      Space stations with artificial (spin) "gravity" has all kinds of complexity. They need to be huge to avoid being nauseating to be on at anything resembling sufficient "gravity",. It's not remotely clear it'd be easier to build structures that size than build blimps able to withstand the sulfuric acid clouds at 50km above Venus. Note that at sufficient height over Venus, air is buoyant, so quite a few designs for Venus assumes at least part of the habitation itself is within the structure of the blimps, and the pressure means leaks are much more manageable. You also get a "free" radiation shield on Venus thanks to the induced magnetic field, and that alone might well be enough to make it more attractive than a larger space station.
      • 4y ago
• version_five 4y ago
  I am 100% confident that should human society settle on the planet we will totally ignore the fact that's going to happen one day and it will be a amazing catastrophe when it finally does occur. Isn't that pretty much exactly what we've done on earth? Not that I think there's really much else we can reasonably do.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I mean when you think about it, the Earth is an uninhabitable hellscape with frequent tectonic activity, asteroid impacts, freak weather events, supervolcanoes, etc. How 'one day' is that one day volcanic event on Venus compared to one of the extinction events Earth has had?
    • bioemerl 4y ago
      Earth is pretty stable in comparison. Yeah, we have had pretty big events but the biggest threat is a big volcano, a meteor, pretty noticable and relatively small. The whole planet exploding, however? Lava flowing across the whole planet at the same time? Hilariously catastrophic.
      • geph2021 4y ago
        For those interested in Si-Fi novels, there's a recent hugo award winning trilogy, The Broken Earth Series[1]. It imagines a world that is much more geologically active than earth, with much more frequent cataclysmic events, and what that would mean for the development of civilization, culture, society, and even the evolution of life. 1 - https://www.goodreads.com/series/112296-the-broken-earth https://www.goodreads.com/series/112296-the-broken-earth
      • marcosdumay 4y ago
        > Lava flowing across the whole planet at the same time? The relevant question from the GP was, how long ago was the last time this happened on Venus? Because we've got something similar here around 60 million years ago.
  • 4y ago
• AlecSchueler 4y ago
  What is this study actually finding then? If we already know so much about volcanic activity on venus.
• dylan604 4y ago
  nah, we'll just bore a couple of "vents" so the pressure is managed with timed releases across the globe instead of all at once in one location. does the fact that Venus has no moon play into the lack of tectonics?
• GordonS 4y ago
  Interesting! How often do these cataclysmic volcanic events take place?
• rsynnott 4y ago
  > should human society settle on the planet _On_ Venus? That seems unlikely; if anything it'd be _above_ Venus (there's a not-that-absurd argument that sections of Venus's atmosphere are far more hospitable than, say, Mars, and of course this tickles sci-fi writers' love of big airships, so it comes up a lot in fiction). (Though I assume that even then, the whole surface exploding would be undesirable.)
• arbuge 4y ago
  On what timescales does this happen? If we allow for pretty long timescales, we are pretty much doing that with Yellowstone here on Earth.