4 ms·

Why Not Venus?

155 points by zdw 6mo ago

Kaibeezy 6mo ago
Colonization of Venus, Geoffrey A. Landis, NASA Glenn Research Center, 2003 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20030022668.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20...
- idlewords 6mo ago
  Landis has a ton of good papers around Venus for those who want to nerd out deeper.
dvh 6mo ago
> The phosphine detection was controversial when it was first announced in 2022, but it has since been corroborated by multiple measurements. I thought it was resolved as SO2, not phosphine
- idlewords 6mo ago
  I thought so too, but the phosphine signal turns out to be small but real. What everyone involved in the back and forth debate over it agrees on is the need to send better sensors.
beloch 6mo ago
"Even the gravity on Venus (0.91g) is homelike, which means that airship habitats, sensors, smoke detectors, toilets, and all the rest can be developed on Earth instead of forcing us to build a space station that can simulate Martian gravity." ----------- Imagine living on an airship high above the Earth, with the hard rule that you can never land. You must be entirely self-sufficient save for a tiny amount of material delivered infrequently. Now imagine trying to land on that airship from orbit or get back into orbit (and beyond) from that airship. None of this is easy here on Earth. A mission that merely orbited Venus and returned without attempting to muck about with airships might be an intermediate step on the way to Mars. Trying to get closer to the surface than orbit would make things a lot harder.
- brazzy 6mo ago
  > A mission that merely orbited Venus and returned without attempting to muck about with airships might be an intermediate step on the way to Mars. I think that's exactly what the article is arguing for. The part about manned airships is just a whimsical aside to the much safer, entirely feasible, and nearly as scientifically valuable prospect of using unmanned balloons.
- lou1306 6mo ago
  > Now imagine trying to land on that airship from orbit or get back into orbit (and beyond) from that airship. None of this is easy here on Earth. Also, if anything goes wrong on Earth and you're in the atmosphere, there's still a chance you might soar to lower altitudes, eject, parachute, and get rescued. On Venus it's a death sentence.
guenthert 6mo ago
The average lifetime of probes landing on Venus counting in minutes might have something to do with that? "So that’s the bad part. But once you move past it, you start to notice that everything gets easier on Venus." If wishes were fishes ...
- roer 6mo ago
  Did you read the rest of the post? The author acknowledges the lander issues as well
  - dingaling 6mo ago
    Yes, but he only looked at Venus from the aspect of research which is missing half, or more, of the point of a Mars mission. The advantage of Mars is that it is ( hypothetically ) acceptably compatible with persistent surface-based habitation. Not an easy life, certainly not compared to Earth, but more sustainable than balloons floating in sulphuric clouds. Venus doesn't offer an 'alternative cradle' option unless we invent anti-gravity. Until then the emphasis will be on finding a way to improve human civilisation's resilience.
    - decimalenough 6mo ago
      The point of the blog post is that while flying humans across the solar system to Venus so they can float in clouds of opaque sulfuric acid above a hellscape of certain death sounds and objectively is ridiculous, it's still easier and arguably more sensible than trying to send humans to Mars and back.
      - childintime 6mo ago
        So they solved the refueling problem you'll have when "floating" in the Venus atmosphere? Seems to me going to Venus is a one way trip.
        decimalenough 6mo ago
hfjtnrkdkf 6mo ago
> Missions to the clouds of Venus are either going to find life or some kind of brand new chemistry, either of which will be a breakthrough discovery in planetary science. There’s basically a guaranteed Nobel prize waiting in the skies of Venus for whoever wants to collect it. why dont they send a probe to scoop up some venus air and bring it back? seems much easier than going with humans around the moon
- ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
  "Scientists are overjoyed to announce that the Venus Sample Return Mission has successfully scooped out a significant quantity of deadly sulfuric acid, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride, and other mysterious chemicals that have no business being in anyone's atmosphere. Scientists are describing components of the atmosphere as a 'supercritical fluid'. "The probe's cargo vessel has a really awesome ablative heat shield on it, as well as some extremely reliable parachutes, and Mission Control is projecting a very soft touchdown in the Utah desert within the next 12 hours. If anyone in the Western United States sees a huge fireball going slower than most meteors, it is probably the Venus Sample Return vessel full of dangerous chemicals! Go VSRM!"
- ur-whale 6mo ago
  > why dont they send a probe to scoop up some venus air and bring it back? Well, there's the scenario where a Venusian superbug, having evolved in the roughest possible conditions (temp, acidity, etc...) in the upper Venusian atmosphere, will find Earth's conditions warm, balmy, and altogether ideal to reproduce at 1000x the rate it was constrained to back home :D
  - AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
    Pretty sure it's not going to find earth conditions to be warm. If it's an upper atmosphere bug, it may not find Earth to be too cold, but it won't find it to be warm.
- Qem 6mo ago
  > why dont they send a probe to scoop up some venus air and bring it back? Better, why don't they do some sort of "ocean fertilization" experiment on Venus cloud decks. Putative life high on Venus atmosphere must be limited by low levels of minerals. Sending a probe with a few tons of salts to disperse in a cloud patch should be enough to produce a local equivalent to an algal bloom, detectable through imaging from orbit.
XorNot 6mo ago
The biggest problem is it's spin rate: a Venus day is 116 days Earth days or so. Being completely tidally locked would be better because near the transition zones the permanent sun would make solar power and plants quite productive. But an ecosystem where the planet spends most of the year in darkness or dim light? Basically it's relatively easy to redirect comets to provide gas and liquids for the surface of Mars: that's technically demonstrated technology now. There's almost no plausible way we could add momentum to Venus to give it a more reasonable day night cycle (I have seen some suggestion that shearing asteroids into it might be possible, but just the magnitude of momentum you're trying to add is staggering).
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > But an ecosystem where the planet spends most of the year in darkness or dim light? If you're floating you don't have to track the ground.
  - XorNot 6mo ago
    True but you basically lose the benefits of being on a planet. The point at which you're just floating in atmosphere I would argue you might as well be in orbit for all the resupply complexities, but few of the benefits - I.e. an orbital structure without significant atmosphere around it means high Isp low thrust engines like ion drives are practical to come and go from it and a lot of the energy is free from solar.
    - swiftcoder 6mo ago
      There are other advantages versus orbital habitats, not least that your station doesn't have to be a pressure vessel - equal pressure within and without makes big structures a lot simpler.
      - AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
        All right, but if outside is one atmosphere of sulfur dioxide, you still don't want any air leaks.
chistev 6mo ago
I'm currently reading (Re-reading actually) Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and in a chapter where he talked about Venus and how hot Venus is (Venus is actually the hottest planet in the solar system despite Mercury being closer to the Sun - although this wasn't mentioned in the book), and how the space probes that were sent there met an ugly fate, he had this interesting footnote which I want to share - "In this stifling landscape, there is not likely to be anything alive, even creatures very different from us. Organic and other conceivable biological molecules would simply fall to pieces. But, as an indulgence, let us imagine that intelligent life once evolved on such a planet. Would it then invent science? The development of science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely cloud-covered. The night is pleasingly long - about 59 Earth days long but nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the Sun would be invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over the whole sky - just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping radiance beneath the sea. If a radio telescope were built on Venus, it could detect the Sun, the Earth and other distant objects. If astrophysics developed, the existence of stars could eventually be deduced from the principles of physics, but they would be theoretical constructs only. I sometimes wonder what their reaction would be if intelligent beings on Venus one day learned to fly, to sail in the dense air, to penetrate the mysterious cloud veil 45 kilometers above them and eventually to emerge out the top of the clouds, to look up and for the first time witness that glorious universe of Sun and planets and stars." . . . Carl Sagan is an amazing author, and I've shared the famous excerpt from his book Pale Blue Dot multiple times before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565381 A few mentions of his books in my blog post here - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
- iberator 6mo ago
  Sagan is good for high schoolers maybe. Not really scientific books at all. He is popular because he was hyped in the media for being accessible. Those people dumb down science for the masses - it harms society on the long run imo
  - 6mo ago
aaron695 6mo ago
[dead]
rkagerer 6mo ago
I'll shamelessly resurface a comment I made a few years back. There's a school of thought which views Venus as a better colonization candidate than Mars, and as early as the 70's scientists envisioned floating cities. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus: In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 kilometres (31 mi) above the Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the Solar System beyond Earth itself – a pressure of approximately 1 atm or 1000 hPa and temperatures in the 0 to 50 °C (273 to 323 K; 32 to 122 °F) range. Protection against cosmic radiation would be provided by the atmosphere above, with shielding mass equivalent to Earth's. Being able to wear a simple breathing mask while working outside instead of a full pressure suit is a boon. Of course high windspeeds and the constant bombardment of acid rain would be a problem. I could imagine Venus one day being an exotic, cloud-top paradise for the rich (reminiscent of BioShock Infinity) that's expensive to maintain, and Mars a brute workhorse that eventually displaces it as a more resilient habitat over the very long term (eg. after terraforming).
- usrnm 6mo ago
  Zeppelins on Venus are the perfect mix of scifi and steampunk, I would really wish to see that one day
- Balgair 6mo ago
  Likely the Moon or Mars will be where we do a lot of bulk commodities, since the Delta-V to get the goods off of them will be lower. Then you'll have raw resource extraction in the asteroids and other very light moons. Earth will remain as the furnished goods and services location due to labor availability. A classic triangle trade ala the sugar, rum, and slave markets in the North Atlantic in the 17-1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade
  - sidewndr46 6mo ago
    The way you capitalized the 'V' in Delta-V had me thinking that somehow the Delta rocket family was back for a fifth iteration
OutOfHere 6mo ago
Venus is in what I call the thermolocks zone, not the goldilocks zone. The thermolocks zone is optimal for solar power and perhaps therefore for computation, although heatsink radiators are essential. The atmosphere of Venus in particular is very resource rich, and so it would be incredible to mine it for heavy use by a space economy. This mining is supposed to use free solar power. All of this is a job for robots, not humans.
- actionfromafar 6mo ago
  Fuel for interplanetary rocket barges (coal lined tubes fed from liquid tanks oxygen), produced in the floating factories of Venus. Sure, why not?
  - AlotOfReading 6mo ago
    The advantage is that the inevitable chemical spills won't make the atmosphere any more hazardous.
    - OutOfHere 6mo ago
      I think it's important to preserve the integrity of the Venus surface for when we have substantially mined its atmosphere. That's when Venus could begin to present an opportunity for limited human habitability. We'd then have to use mirrors to redistribute sunlight evenly and boundedly across its slowly-rotating lit and dark sides. We could try to create an artificial ozone layer to block UV. We'd still have to neutralize the residual corrosive substance (unreacted chlorine, sulfur, fluorine) using water and alkali chemistry and scrubbers. The raw materials for alkali would come from the planet itself. Water would have to be imported from the space economy, probably from asteroids, also as hydrogen from Neptune's atmosphere using fusion powered lift.
thedailymail 6mo ago
Why not the Sun?
- fragmede 6mo ago
  People laugh, because we can't do it because it's so hot, but what they don't get is we'll go visit at night.
  - shaftway 6mo ago
    What are you going to do 12 hours later when it's daytime again?
    - sodacanner 6mo ago
      We'll just launch from the Arctic during winter.
      - charles_f 6mo ago
        I'm pretty sure the sun is on the equator
ultratalk 6mo ago
There was this project idea that some researchers at Langley developed in the mid-2010s called HAVOC (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) [0] for a 5-stage mission to send humans to Venus's habitable-ish cloud layers. It never really got anywhere, but there was apparently some media attention around it for some time. Because the nitrox atmosphere we're used to is a lifting gas in the Venusian atmosphere, you could theoretically just fill a big balloon with our atmosphere and live inside it, with lots of Teflon on the outside and suits made of Teflon to work outside the habitat. I also (kind of?) remember reading about using metal nets to capture and condense H2SO4 from the clouds and process it into water, oxygen, and hydrolox rocket fuel. [0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160006329/downloads/20160006329.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160006329/downloads/20...
weregiraffe 6mo ago
Why not Zoidberg?
voidUpdate 6mo ago
Because, to be honest, whats the point? We can pretty much determine the composition of the atmosphere with spectroscopy, and we can't land without being crushed, boiled and dissolved at the same time. If we go to Mars, we can potentially find things on the surface (eg interesting geological formations) much faster than a rover could, and potentially run more in-depth scientific tests on what we do find, rather than just what we can send on a single rover
- brazzy 6mo ago
  Please read the article.
- SJMG 6mo ago
  We shouldn't set foot on Mars for a long, long time. Read the bit about contamination. https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
- ur-whale 6mo ago
  > We can pretty much determine the composition of the atmosphere with spectroscopy I don't believe (could be wrong, not an expert) that spectroscopy is sharp enough to tell you about the structure of complex molecules in Venus's upper atmosphere.
chasil 6mo ago
Kurzgesagt's Venus video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI
austin-cheney 6mo ago
Venus is similar to Earth in volume but a little lower in density. So gravity there would be similar to Earth but a little less, despite that it would feel like being at the bottom of the ocean or sinking into Jupiter due to the increased atmospheric pressure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus Lets also not forget the 872F surface temp that will spontaneously ignite anything primarily composed of carbon or the dense sulfuric acid clouds that will destroy most metals in as little as 45 minutes.
- Rooster61 6mo ago
  > spontaneously ignite Melt, but not ignite. There's no free oxygen to allow burning. A nitpick, sure, but probably worth mentioning.
Symmetry 6mo ago
Selenian Boondocks did a whole series on Venus and what could be usefully extracted from the atmosphere a decade back. https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/ https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/
blueboo 6mo ago
Why not the Pacific Ocean
api 6mo ago
I’ve had a hypothesis ever since studying biology and things like complexity and emergence years ago: We will find life almost everywhere there is an energy gradient, a sufficiently rich substrate, and phase transition boundaries. Life is just a thing that forms in such places. In our solar system that is Venus, Earth (of course), Mars, Titan (I predict very slow metabolism cryogenic life with a hydrocarbon solvent), and subsurface oceans like Europa if they have a heat source that creates phase boundaries and energy gradients. It will be mostly simple life though. What we won’t find everywhere is complex life. That took billions of years on Earth. It probably takes a very stable very rich large scale ecosystem with a huge energy flux to cook things like complex multicellularity and cognition, and there are reasons to believe Earth is a rare sort of environment.
- red-iron-pine 6mo ago
  Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival. -CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Centauri Monopoly"
  - mock-possum 6mo ago
    Goddamn it I’m gonna have to go back and play it again arent I “Organic superlube? Great stuff, great stuff!”
    - red-iron-pine 6mo ago
      to the uninitiated, we're making references to the classic game Alpha Centauri, a Civ 2 spinoff. definitely worth the price on GoG
ur-whale 6mo ago
https://archive.ph/bmAae https://archive.ph/bmAae
GuestFAUniverse 6mo ago
Very longterm the human species needs to get further away from the (growing) sun. Venus is the wrong direction, with useless challenges. And thus a waste of resources. Outwards. Not necessarily Mars, but outwards. No compromises.
ksymph 6mo ago
Nitpick: the photos are labeled as "Colorized images of the surface of Venus taken by a Soviet Venera lander in 1981", but 1. those photos are from Venera 13 and 14, which were taken in color 2. the photos were taken in 1982 (though the probes launched in 1981) and 3. those aren't the original photos, they're 'enhanced' ones that have been upscaled and extended to show more of the horizon and sky than the originals. The bottom 1/4 or so is the actual original, give or take a few details that have been changed/added in the upscale process, but the rest is artistic interpretation You can look at the actual photos here: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-...
- bcraven 6mo ago
  This site suggests it's just a remap: The Venera panoramas are spherical projections. They can be remapped to perspective projections and overlayed (using Adobe Photoshop CS2) to produce views that give a better subjective impression of the Venusian surface http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
  - ksymph 6mo ago
    That does seem to be what the page is implying at first glance; though the images clearly show features not visible in the raw photos, so it can't be the case. I'm guessing that paragraph is actually referring to the 'overhead' image [0] next to the one in question, since it mentions how the remapped perspective makes the uniform shadows apparent. [0] http://mentallandscape.com/C_Venera13_Overview.jpg http://mentallandscape.com/C_Venera13_Overview.jpg
gitowiec 6mo ago
Lol Instead of article about Venus I read the one linked in the article https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.htm https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...
euroderf 6mo ago
As an aside, I read somewhere that when a Venus probe hits the atmosphere there it gets 22 G.

155 points by zdw 6mo ago

Colonization of Venus, Geoffrey A. Landis, NASA Glenn Research Center, 2003 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20030022668.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20...

idlewords 6mo ago
Landis has a ton of good papers around Venus for those who want to nerd out deeper.

dvh 6mo ago

> The phosphine detection was controversial when it was first announced in 2022, but it has since been corroborated by multiple measurements. I thought it was resolved as SO2, not phosphine

idlewords 6mo ago
I thought so too, but the phosphine signal turns out to be small but real. What everyone involved in the back and forth debate over it agrees on is the need to send better sensors.

beloch 6mo ago

"Even the gravity on Venus (0.91g) is homelike, which means that airship habitats, sensors, smoke detectors, toilets, and all the rest can be developed on Earth instead of forcing us to build a space station that can simulate Martian gravity." ----------- Imagine living on an airship high above the Earth, with the hard rule that you can never land. You must be entirely self-sufficient save for a tiny amount of material delivered infrequently. Now imagine trying to land on that airship from orbit or get back into orbit (and beyond) from that airship. None of this is easy here on Earth. A mission that merely orbited Venus and returned without attempting to muck about with airships might be an intermediate step on the way to Mars. Trying to get closer to the surface than orbit would make things a lot harder.

brazzy 6mo ago
> A mission that merely orbited Venus and returned without attempting to muck about with airships might be an intermediate step on the way to Mars. I think that's exactly what the article is arguing for. The part about manned airships is just a whimsical aside to the much safer, entirely feasible, and nearly as scientifically valuable prospect of using unmanned balloons.
lou1306 6mo ago
> Now imagine trying to land on that airship from orbit or get back into orbit (and beyond) from that airship. None of this is easy here on Earth. Also, if anything goes wrong on Earth and you're in the atmosphere, there's still a chance you might soar to lower altitudes, eject, parachute, and get rescued. On Venus it's a death sentence.

guenthert 6mo ago

The average lifetime of probes landing on Venus counting in minutes might have something to do with that? "So that’s the bad part. But once you move past it, you start to notice that everything gets easier on Venus." If wishes were fishes ...

roer 6mo ago
Did you read the rest of the post? The author acknowledges the lander issues as well
- dingaling 6mo ago
  Yes, but he only looked at Venus from the aspect of research which is missing half, or more, of the point of a Mars mission. The advantage of Mars is that it is ( hypothetically ) acceptably compatible with persistent surface-based habitation. Not an easy life, certainly not compared to Earth, but more sustainable than balloons floating in sulphuric clouds. Venus doesn't offer an 'alternative cradle' option unless we invent anti-gravity. Until then the emphasis will be on finding a way to improve human civilisation's resilience.
  - decimalenough 6mo ago
    The point of the blog post is that while flying humans across the solar system to Venus so they can float in clouds of opaque sulfuric acid above a hellscape of certain death sounds and objectively is ridiculous, it's still easier and arguably more sensible than trying to send humans to Mars and back.
    - childintime 6mo ago
      So they solved the refueling problem you'll have when "floating" in the Venus atmosphere? Seems to me going to Venus is a one way trip.
      - decimalenough 6mo ago

hfjtnrkdkf 6mo ago

> Missions to the clouds of Venus are either going to find life or some kind of brand new chemistry, either of which will be a breakthrough discovery in planetary science. There’s basically a guaranteed Nobel prize waiting in the skies of Venus for whoever wants to collect it. why dont they send a probe to scoop up some venus air and bring it back? seems much easier than going with humans around the moon

ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
"Scientists are overjoyed to announce that the Venus Sample Return Mission has successfully scooped out a significant quantity of deadly sulfuric acid, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride, and other mysterious chemicals that have no business being in anyone's atmosphere. Scientists are describing components of the atmosphere as a 'supercritical fluid'. "The probe's cargo vessel has a really awesome ablative heat shield on it, as well as some extremely reliable parachutes, and Mission Control is projecting a very soft touchdown in the Utah desert within the next 12 hours. If anyone in the Western United States sees a huge fireball going slower than most meteors, it is probably the Venus Sample Return vessel full of dangerous chemicals! Go VSRM!"
ur-whale 6mo ago
> why dont they send a probe to scoop up some venus air and bring it back? Well, there's the scenario where a Venusian superbug, having evolved in the roughest possible conditions (temp, acidity, etc...) in the upper Venusian atmosphere, will find Earth's conditions warm, balmy, and altogether ideal to reproduce at 1000x the rate it was constrained to back home :D
- AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
  Pretty sure it's not going to find earth conditions to be warm. If it's an upper atmosphere bug, it may not find Earth to be too cold, but it won't find it to be warm.
Qem 6mo ago
> why dont they send a probe to scoop up some venus air and bring it back? Better, why don't they do some sort of "ocean fertilization" experiment on Venus cloud decks. Putative life high on Venus atmosphere must be limited by low levels of minerals. Sending a probe with a few tons of salts to disperse in a cloud patch should be enough to produce a local equivalent to an algal bloom, detectable through imaging from orbit.

XorNot 6mo ago

The biggest problem is it's spin rate: a Venus day is 116 days Earth days or so. Being completely tidally locked would be better because near the transition zones the permanent sun would make solar power and plants quite productive. But an ecosystem where the planet spends most of the year in darkness or dim light? Basically it's relatively easy to redirect comets to provide gas and liquids for the surface of Mars: that's technically demonstrated technology now. There's almost no plausible way we could add momentum to Venus to give it a more reasonable day night cycle (I have seen some suggestion that shearing asteroids into it might be possible, but just the magnitude of momentum you're trying to add is staggering).

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> But an ecosystem where the planet spends most of the year in darkness or dim light? If you're floating you don't have to track the ground.
- XorNot 6mo ago
  True but you basically lose the benefits of being on a planet. The point at which you're just floating in atmosphere I would argue you might as well be in orbit for all the resupply complexities, but few of the benefits - I.e. an orbital structure without significant atmosphere around it means high Isp low thrust engines like ion drives are practical to come and go from it and a lot of the energy is free from solar.
  - swiftcoder 6mo ago
    There are other advantages versus orbital habitats, not least that your station doesn't have to be a pressure vessel - equal pressure within and without makes big structures a lot simpler.
    - AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
      All right, but if outside is one atmosphere of sulfur dioxide, you still don't want any air leaks.

chistev 6mo ago

I'm currently reading (Re-reading actually) Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and in a chapter where he talked about Venus and how hot Venus is (Venus is actually the hottest planet in the solar system despite Mercury being closer to the Sun - although this wasn't mentioned in the book), and how the space probes that were sent there met an ugly fate, he had this interesting footnote which I want to share - "In this stifling landscape, there is not likely to be anything alive, even creatures very different from us. Organic and other conceivable biological molecules would simply fall to pieces. But, as an indulgence, let us imagine that intelligent life once evolved on such a planet. Would it then invent science? The development of science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely cloud-covered. The night is pleasingly long - about 59 Earth days long but nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the Sun would be invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over the whole sky - just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping radiance beneath the sea. If a radio telescope were built on Venus, it could detect the Sun, the Earth and other distant objects. If astrophysics developed, the existence of stars could eventually be deduced from the principles of physics, but they would be theoretical constructs only. I sometimes wonder what their reaction would be if intelligent beings on Venus one day learned to fly, to sail in the dense air, to penetrate the mysterious cloud veil 45 kilometers above them and eventually to emerge out the top of the clouds, to look up and for the first time witness that glorious universe of Sun and planets and stars." . . . Carl Sagan is an amazing author, and I've shared the famous excerpt from his book Pale Blue Dot multiple times before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565381 A few mentions of his books in my blog post here - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know

iberator 6mo ago
Sagan is good for high schoolers maybe. Not really scientific books at all. He is popular because he was hyped in the media for being accessible. Those people dumb down science for the masses - it harms society on the long run imo
- 6mo ago

aaron695 6mo ago

[dead]

rkagerer 6mo ago

I'll shamelessly resurface a comment I made a few years back. There's a school of thought which views Venus as a better colonization candidate than Mars, and as early as the 70's scientists envisioned floating cities. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus: In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 kilometres (31 mi) above the Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the Solar System beyond Earth itself – a pressure of approximately 1 atm or 1000 hPa and temperatures in the 0 to 50 °C (273 to 323 K; 32 to 122 °F) range. Protection against cosmic radiation would be provided by the atmosphere above, with shielding mass equivalent to Earth's. Being able to wear a simple breathing mask while working outside instead of a full pressure suit is a boon. Of course high windspeeds and the constant bombardment of acid rain would be a problem. I could imagine Venus one day being an exotic, cloud-top paradise for the rich (reminiscent of BioShock Infinity) that's expensive to maintain, and Mars a brute workhorse that eventually displaces it as a more resilient habitat over the very long term (eg. after terraforming).

usrnm 6mo ago
Zeppelins on Venus are the perfect mix of scifi and steampunk, I would really wish to see that one day
Balgair 6mo ago
Likely the Moon or Mars will be where we do a lot of bulk commodities, since the Delta-V to get the goods off of them will be lower. Then you'll have raw resource extraction in the asteroids and other very light moons. Earth will remain as the furnished goods and services location due to labor availability. A classic triangle trade ala the sugar, rum, and slave markets in the North Atlantic in the 17-1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade
- sidewndr46 6mo ago
  The way you capitalized the 'V' in Delta-V had me thinking that somehow the Delta rocket family was back for a fifth iteration

OutOfHere 6mo ago

Venus is in what I call the thermolocks zone, not the goldilocks zone. The thermolocks zone is optimal for solar power and perhaps therefore for computation, although heatsink radiators are essential. The atmosphere of Venus in particular is very resource rich, and so it would be incredible to mine it for heavy use by a space economy. This mining is supposed to use free solar power. All of this is a job for robots, not humans.

actionfromafar 6mo ago
Fuel for interplanetary rocket barges (coal lined tubes fed from liquid tanks oxygen), produced in the floating factories of Venus. Sure, why not?
- AlotOfReading 6mo ago
  The advantage is that the inevitable chemical spills won't make the atmosphere any more hazardous.
  - OutOfHere 6mo ago
    I think it's important to preserve the integrity of the Venus surface for when we have substantially mined its atmosphere. That's when Venus could begin to present an opportunity for limited human habitability. We'd then have to use mirrors to redistribute sunlight evenly and boundedly across its slowly-rotating lit and dark sides. We could try to create an artificial ozone layer to block UV. We'd still have to neutralize the residual corrosive substance (unreacted chlorine, sulfur, fluorine) using water and alkali chemistry and scrubbers. The raw materials for alkali would come from the planet itself. Water would have to be imported from the space economy, probably from asteroids, also as hydrogen from Neptune's atmosphere using fusion powered lift.

thedailymail 6mo ago

Why not the Sun?

fragmede 6mo ago
People laugh, because we can't do it because it's so hot, but what they don't get is we'll go visit at night.
- shaftway 6mo ago
  What are you going to do 12 hours later when it's daytime again?
  - sodacanner 6mo ago
    We'll just launch from the Arctic during winter.
    - charles_f 6mo ago
      I'm pretty sure the sun is on the equator

ultratalk 6mo ago

There was this project idea that some researchers at Langley developed in the mid-2010s called HAVOC (High Altitude Venus Operational Concept) [0] for a 5-stage mission to send humans to Venus's habitable-ish cloud layers. It never really got anywhere, but there was apparently some media attention around it for some time. Because the nitrox atmosphere we're used to is a lifting gas in the Venusian atmosphere, you could theoretically just fill a big balloon with our atmosphere and live inside it, with lots of Teflon on the outside and suits made of Teflon to work outside the habitat. I also (kind of?) remember reading about using metal nets to capture and condense H2SO4 from the clouds and process it into water, oxygen, and hydrolox rocket fuel. [0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160006329/downloads/20160006329.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160006329/downloads/20...

weregiraffe 6mo ago

Why not Zoidberg?

voidUpdate 6mo ago

Because, to be honest, whats the point? We can pretty much determine the composition of the atmosphere with spectroscopy, and we can't land without being crushed, boiled and dissolved at the same time. If we go to Mars, we can potentially find things on the surface (eg interesting geological formations) much faster than a rover could, and potentially run more in-depth scientific tests on what we do find, rather than just what we can send on a single rover

brazzy 6mo ago
Please read the article.
SJMG 6mo ago
We shouldn't set foot on Mars for a long, long time. Read the bit about contamination. https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
ur-whale 6mo ago
> We can pretty much determine the composition of the atmosphere with spectroscopy I don't believe (could be wrong, not an expert) that spectroscopy is sharp enough to tell you about the structure of complex molecules in Venus's upper atmosphere.

chasil 6mo ago

Kurzgesagt's Venus video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI

austin-cheney 6mo ago

Venus is similar to Earth in volume but a little lower in density. So gravity there would be similar to Earth but a little less, despite that it would feel like being at the bottom of the ocean or sinking into Jupiter due to the increased atmospheric pressure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus Lets also not forget the 872F surface temp that will spontaneously ignite anything primarily composed of carbon or the dense sulfuric acid clouds that will destroy most metals in as little as 45 minutes.

Rooster61 6mo ago
> spontaneously ignite Melt, but not ignite. There's no free oxygen to allow burning. A nitpick, sure, but probably worth mentioning.

Symmetry 6mo ago

Selenian Boondocks did a whole series on Venus and what could be usefully extracted from the atmosphere a decade back. https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/ https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/

blueboo 6mo ago

Why not the Pacific Ocean

api 6mo ago

I’ve had a hypothesis ever since studying biology and things like complexity and emergence years ago: We will find life almost everywhere there is an energy gradient, a sufficiently rich substrate, and phase transition boundaries. Life is just a thing that forms in such places. In our solar system that is Venus, Earth (of course), Mars, Titan (I predict very slow metabolism cryogenic life with a hydrocarbon solvent), and subsurface oceans like Europa if they have a heat source that creates phase boundaries and energy gradients. It will be mostly simple life though. What we won’t find everywhere is complex life. That took billions of years on Earth. It probably takes a very stable very rich large scale ecosystem with a huge energy flux to cook things like complex multicellularity and cognition, and there are reasons to believe Earth is a rare sort of environment.

red-iron-pine 6mo ago
Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival. -CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Centauri Monopoly"
- mock-possum 6mo ago
  Goddamn it I’m gonna have to go back and play it again arent I “Organic superlube? Great stuff, great stuff!”
  - red-iron-pine 6mo ago
    to the uninitiated, we're making references to the classic game Alpha Centauri, a Civ 2 spinoff. definitely worth the price on GoG

ur-whale 6mo ago

https://archive.ph/bmAae https://archive.ph/bmAae

GuestFAUniverse 6mo ago

Very longterm the human species needs to get further away from the (growing) sun. Venus is the wrong direction, with useless challenges. And thus a waste of resources. Outwards. Not necessarily Mars, but outwards. No compromises.

ksymph 6mo ago

Nitpick: the photos are labeled as "Colorized images of the surface of Venus taken by a Soviet Venera lander in 1981", but 1. those photos are from Venera 13 and 14, which were taken in color 2. the photos were taken in 1982 (though the probes launched in 1981) and 3. those aren't the original photos, they're 'enhanced' ones that have been upscaled and extended to show more of the horizon and sky than the originals. The bottom 1/4 or so is the actual original, give or take a few details that have been changed/added in the upscale process, but the rest is artistic interpretation You can look at the actual photos here: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-...

bcraven 6mo ago
This site suggests it's just a remap: The Venera panoramas are spherical projections. They can be remapped to perspective projections and overlayed (using Adobe Photoshop CS2) to produce views that give a better subjective impression of the Venusian surface http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
- ksymph 6mo ago
  That does seem to be what the page is implying at first glance; though the images clearly show features not visible in the raw photos, so it can't be the case. I'm guessing that paragraph is actually referring to the 'overhead' image [0] next to the one in question, since it mentions how the remapped perspective makes the uniform shadows apparent. [0] http://mentallandscape.com/C_Venera13_Overview.jpg http://mentallandscape.com/C_Venera13_Overview.jpg

gitowiec 6mo ago

Lol Instead of article about Venus I read the one linked in the article https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.htm https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

euroderf 6mo ago

As an aside, I read somewhere that when a Venus probe hits the atmosphere there it gets 22 G.