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> 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 cat
by 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 agoI 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 agoIf 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 agoIf lunar colonies aren’t very challenging, why aren’t there hundreds by now?
- badpun 4y agoBecause they're pointless? :)
- shjake 4y agoSame as on Mars or any other place outside of Earth that we know of to be fair
- simmerup 4y agoWhy did China visit the Americas but instead of colonising or establishing trade... just leave? Sometimes the will just isn't there.
- saalweachter 4y agoWhy did the Atlantean civilization fall? (Gavin Menzies, the author behind the claim China circumnavigated the world before Columbus was born, wrote a third book about how Atlantis did it first. It was equally convincing.)
- _dain_ 4y agoare you referring to precolumbian chinese contact? there was none fyi.
- bmitc 4y agoI view colonizing Mars with anything other than robots, even if it can be done, as a pointless exercise. And I don't see how a colony on Mars even helps with probes. We send material from Earth to Mars and then send probes from Mars? How is that more efficient? Do we even know what materials could theoretically be mined on Mars? And probes are launched with gravitational assists.
- Barrin92 4y agothe entire planet settlement stuff is kind of useless. I think the much more interesting thing to look for is human structures in cislunar space. For one you can put a reasonable amount of people there in the near future relatively safely and there's economic incentives. We'd have access to resources without having to lift things out of gravity wells. Even putting climate damaging industry there is something people have argued about. Better sell than putting a handful of people on a dead rock in my opinion.
- theonlybutlet 4y agoI doubt there's any notable ones between here and the moon, by now I'm sure we'd know. We could potentially capture one elsewhere and bring it here.
- echelon 4y agoThe human story ends on Earth. Humans are evolved to fit this gravity well. We use the gasses and metabolites here. Trying to leave the planet and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of our solar system is ridiculous. Our lives are fragile and our lifespans too short to make anything offworld viable. Our robot descendants will inherit the stars instead. There's nothing wrong with human life being just a stepping stone to bootstrap the hand off.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Trying to leave the planet and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of our solar system is ridiculous. “Trying to leave the savanna and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of Europe is ridiculous.” - some early hominid, fairly recently
- antifa 4y agoWhat specificity do you find interesting about Venus's moon?
- bmitc 4y agoI said other planets' moons. :)
- adastra22 4y agoVenus is actually easier to terraform than Mars. Just put a giant sun shield in front of it and solidify the atmosphere.
- 8note 4y agoVenus has the problem of spinning the wrong direction though. Nobody is going to want to live through either those days or those nights
- hutzlibu 4y agoAnd the bigger problem, that a day lasts 243 earth days. The only thing venus has, that makes it interesting for human settlements, is earthlike gravity - but the rest is pretty hell like.
- saalweachter 4y agoTo be fair, the gravity thing is pretty hard to fix. You can imagine putting rotating sunshield/mirrors into orbit to fix the day/night/temperature problem, but mass is mass. The Earth weighs more than everything else between the sun and Jupiter combined, and Venus is 80% of that.
- hutzlibu 4y agoI think Venus gravity is actually fine enough and not in need of fixing. (Old people would probably love it) But yes, I also see no way of "fixing" the g of mars(which is likely way too low for humans), unless we go into the buisness of planet building.
- cnlevy 4y ago> which is likely way too low for humans We don't really have a way to know until we get experimental data (real humans on Mars). Until then, it's all just (un)educated guesses.
- G3rn0ti 4y agohttps://universemagazine.com/en/the-last-photos-from-the-surface-of-venus-are-forty-years-old/ https://universemagazine.com/en/the-last-photos-from-the-sur... The Soviet Union did send probes to Venus back in the 70s. But, indeed, it would be great to have new and higher resolution photos. I am always amazed when looking on the surface of a foreign world.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI wonder whether material science has advanced enough that new probes could be landed that last for longer. I mean the pressure isn't as high as the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Or a balloon that hangs about in tolerable pressures / temperatures.
- at_a_remove 4y agoIt's a combination of pressure (93 bar), temperature (900 F / 475 C), and the local chemistry. And then there's the trace amounts of hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfuric acid.
- yread 4y agoEarth's atmosphere is also incredibly corrosive for things made out of wrong metals. Steam everywhere in places even in the form of vapor or liquid mixed with salt (even more corrosive). EDIT: oh and there is oxygen everywhere, if your spacecraft doesn't corrode it will burn. And even if it lands 2/3 of this planet are covered with 4km deep oceans of the corrosive stuff!
- CyanBird 4y ago> is way too thick to even think about sending anything larger than a tiny probe What do you mean? Venus has already received its fair share of probes, the Venera missions, some weighted upwards of five tons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera They did many different types of measurements, and lasted from one to two hours before their batteries running out, some atmospheric probes lasted days
- euroderf 4y agoI've read that when one of these probes hits the atmosphere it's a very sudden transition and they hit 32G.
- Teever 4y agoWhy not freeze the atmosphere into artificial comets to send the excess atmosphere to mars to terraform both at the same time?
- jl6 4y agoLaunches better be cheap because we’re talking about quadrillions of tons.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoSo much opportunities if there's only a current-day-science-breaking development like infinite energy or propulsion.
- dreen 4y agoSounds like a job for the Mega Maid!
- ben_w 4y agoThat's a way to use the first ~1% of Venus' atmosphere, what about the other 99%?
- glass3 4y agoSo, don't settle on the planet but build something like floating airships?
- lmm 4y agoYep, there are fairly serious proposals for aerostat cities 50-70km up, where conditions are pretty Earthlike other than all the sulphuric acid.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoWouldn't be the first time we've made significant modifications to an atmosphere. I dare say we're pretty good at it at this point.
- credit_guy 4y agoIf we put a giant sunshade at the Laplace point between Venus and the sun, we can cool Venus a lot. In principle we can cool it all the way to the cosmic background radiation temperature (about 2.7 Kelvin). But we don't need to. If we cool it only "slightly" we can get it to the point where CO2 freezes (about -78 degrees Celsius). Since 96.5% of the atmosphere on Venus is CO2, this results in a memorable snow event, that could probably last for a few months/years. After which, the pressure on Venus will be about the same as the pressure on Earth. The chemical composition will also be about the same (most of the remaining 3.5% of the Venusian atmosphere is Nitrogen). The temperature will about as low as the lowest in Antarctica (last year the it was -76 deg Celsius there). Of course there wouldn't be any oxygen, but one would be able to walk around with an oxygen mask and just very thick clothes, like the ones people use in Antarctica.