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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
by 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 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!