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Mining the surface is required; importing any significant quantity of material from Earth is a non-starter. Unless you can come up with something insanely valua

Mining the surface is required; importing any significant quantity of material from Earth is a non-starter. Unless you can come up with something insanely valuable to export to Earth, any planetary colony has to be almost-entirely self-sufficient. Interplanetary transit is too long, and too expensive. (This is true on Mars as well, and probably Luna and asteroids as well, though you might find some edge cases there due to lesser gravity or greater proximity.) The pressure on the surface is that of about 3000 feet of water, so that's not too bad, and the reducing atmosphere can be handled, but the temperature is tough. Still, with practice, you could probably build such machines. Dunno how you make electronics survive long term at ambient 465 °C (oil wells have a hard time with electronics at much lower temps) but some combination of active cooling, limited duration, and novel fabrication should be possible. Perhaps the easiest solution is to load up your Venus Mining Hopper with a whole bunch of liquid nitrogen, extracted from the atmosphere and compressed and liquefied using solar power falling on your floating platform. It deflates its balloon and drops to the surface, and starts scooping up material into its hopper as the LN2 boils off, cooling the electronics and other temp-sensitive systems. (These are buried in lots of insulation.) When the hopper is close to full, you start venting the N2 into the balloon, and the whole system takes off again, to rendezvous with a solar-powered tug to pull it to your ore-processing factory. That may be a long haul, because the upper atmosphere of Venus moves at 100m/s. Maybe you design your system to stay on the ground long enough for the platform to come back around the planet, a mere 4-5 days. Or maybe it just takes a big bite and goes straight back up so it doesn't get too far behind. So maybe doable, but it makes the hurdle for setting up a self-sustaining colony much higher. Not that it's a much lower hurdle anywhere else.

kaybe 12y ago
The temperature is a reason why Venus would be a good place to test out the ideas for climate manipulation we have collected so far. A first step could be to lower the CO2 content (my current favourite would be to release engineered bacteria into the atmosphere that can bind the Cs and after death collect it on the ground), and enhance the albedo (so more sunlight is reflected away). In the longterm we will need climate control anyway since Earth's climate is somewhat unstable (global warming is just as bad as a new ice age, which, extrapolating from the past, would be about due by now, if not for mankinds influence). Testing it on a planet we are not critically dependent on should be a better strategy. Geologically, Venus is very different from Earth due to the lack of water (which enables plate tectonics and all its implications). Some changes we can make would even influence the geology. (Hm, I wonder what would happen if we dumped enough water meteroids.. ) All of this of course premises a lack of preexisting life with planetary ownership rights and no natural reserve rules (which we kind of have at the moment - http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/about http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/about).
- V-2 12y ago
  Planetary ownership rights? Is that even a thing?
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    Ask the native Americans, Canadians and Australians.
    - 1971genocide 12y ago
      Didn't know there were natives in Venus, I must be living under a rock.
      - kaybe 12y ago
        Probably not, especially suitably advanced life, but we don't know. Our world is still very narrow. It's an ethical question that should be discussed before we destroy stuff. If the consensus was to go ahead anyway, that's fine too.
    - V-2 12y ago
      What about native Europeans, I mean the Neanderthals? They were the OG's before homo sapiens wiped them out... It bothers me why we didn't just sit down on the edge of the world, as it is the Neanderthals, by the virtue of being there first (we call dibs!) who must have had planetary ownership rights to Earth. Not our usurping "natives". You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag...
      - kaybe 12y ago
        You can probably use half the arguments for vegetarianism here [1], and a lot more if there is sufficiently intelligent life (probably not on Venus; the argument is the same for other planets). Of course, not everyone agrees to those. Other extendable arguments include those for the preservation of species on Earth [2]. Your last sentence refers to the anti-copying campaigns, right? Since their analogy is so flawed, I don't see what you mean by that.. (Most people wouldn't steal a car, but they would totally copy one (as soon as they can).) If we could copy planets without disturbing orbit mechanics, there wouldn't be a problem? [1] I'm talking about the ethics of using another species for one's own gain without dire need. [2] For it's own beauty, but more importantly as a collection of ideas and examples for what is possible, as an information ressource, so to say. Since our state of knowledge is low, we cannot collect all the information without preserving the found state. Of course [1] also applies.
stcredzero 12y ago
> Mining the surface is required Why not get other resources from near-Venus asteroids and Mercury? It would be easy to imagine a near-sun economy that mostly involves people, information, and raw materials making the trip up and down the Venusian gravity well -- with most raw materials and finished goods making the trip down. Most of the energy would be dissipated by aerobraking. In essence, Venus could participate in such a solar-system spanning economy by supplying relatively friendly radiation-shielded Real Estate and fluorine. Raw materials would largely go down, and people, culture, intellectual property, and fluorine would come up.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  > Why not get other resources from near-Venus asteroids and Mercury? The exact same reason we don't get our resources from near-Earth asteroids and Earth's neighboring planets: It's freaking expensive. One of the aspects that makes Venus attractive for colonization--similar surface gravity--also makes it expensive to launch anything. More-so, given that you'd be doing it with a frontier outpost's industrial base. > Raw materials would largely go down, and people, culture, intellectual property, and fluorine would come up. So why bother going to Venus at all, as opposed to creating such an economy around Earth? Barring catastrophe, Earth will certainly have a lot more people, culture, intellectual property, value-dense high-tech goods, etc., as well as significantly nicer/cheaper real-estate. All successful colonies require an economic driver, and Venus is no exception. "Like Earth but less-profitable" is unlikely to do much.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    > The exact same reason we don't get our resources from near-Earth asteroids and Earth's neighboring planets: It's freaking expensive. Remember that I referenced its relative price. We don't get Earth's resources from near earth asteroids because we can get them more cheaply from Earth. Obviously, this wouldn't apply to Venus. Likewise, lots of things on the west coast of Alaska come from Seattle, not because it's cheap in absolute terms, but because it's the cheapest. > So why bother going to Venus at all, as opposed to creating such an economy around Earth? For the express purpose of not living on Earth. For the express purpose of spreading our civilization beyond the confines of one planet. Such an Earth independent economy and culture might be more likely to exist around Venus than Earth, simply because the proximity of Earth is more likely to pull investment away. > All successful colonies require an economic driver, and Venus is no exception. Not all colonies on Earth were motivated primarily by economics. People have lived in a variety of places on Earth motivated by religious and military concerns. Successful colonies will need economies to keep themselves going, but economic concerns are merely the strongest motivator for settlement, not the only ones. Granted they are in the minority, but there are people who live in the middle of deserts, in pressure vessels at the bottom of the ocean, in all kinds of remote wilderness, in many cases for the sake of living in such places as private citizens. Granted, it will be a long time before such civilizations would begin to remotely rival the scale of Earth's, but I'm sure they will come to exist and that they will achieve near self-sufficiency. Summary: People will live in space because they want to be there. Once a spacefaring population reaches a certain threshold, it will become self sufficient.
Houshalter 12y ago
> any planetary colony has to be almost-entirely self-sufficient. Is this even remotely possible anywhere with current technology? Can we even make completely self-sufficient colonies on Earth (like the technologically advanced kind we want to make in space, not just people living in the woods.)
- lmm 12y ago
  In Biosphere 2 the human volunteers ended up IIRC needing a few millilitres of liquid oxygen injected every 6 months or so. Perfect? No, and we'll probably never get to 100% perfection. But it's pretty damn close; if that was all you needed you could ship a big supply from Earth every decade or so, and it starts to look relatively affordable. (Of course most parts of space are much more hostile than an Earth desert)
  - onnoonno 12y ago
    > [...] the human volunteers ended up IIRC needing a few millilitres of liquid oxygen injected [...] Citation urgently needed.
    - lmm 12y ago
      I don't have one, hence the IIRC; I'm remembering a television documentary (I think BBC's Horizon) from years ago.
  - dalke 12y ago
    http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/05/science/the-environment-oxygen-loss-causing-concern-in-biosphere-2.html http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/05/science/the-environment-ox... says "Project leaders, expecting the decline to continue, have made arrangements to pump tons of pure oxygen into the 3.15 acres of glass domes. ... "If we decided to raise the level by 2 percent, that would be 100,000 cubic feet of gaseous oxygen,"" A short ton (907.2 kg) of oxygen is 635 cubic meters or 24160 cubic feet as a gas and 794.5 liters as a liquid ( http://www.uigi.com/o2_conv.html http://www.uigi.com/o2_conv.html ) so they would have needed 5 tons to raise the O2 levels by 2%. For what it's worth, the concrete depleted the O2 levels from 21% to 15%, so about 30 tons would have been need to fully restore the O2 levels. 800,000 mL/ton means that it was not the case that it needed "a few millilitres of liquid oxygen injected every 6 months or so." More like a few thousand liters every 6 months.

kaybe 12y ago

The temperature is a reason why Venus would be a good place to test out the ideas for climate manipulation we have collected so far. A first step could be to lower the CO2 content (my current favourite would be to release engineered bacteria into the atmosphere that can bind the Cs and after death collect it on the ground), and enhance the albedo (so more sunlight is reflected away). In the longterm we will need climate control anyway since Earth's climate is somewhat unstable (global warming is just as bad as a new ice age, which, extrapolating from the past, would be about due by now, if not for mankinds influence). Testing it on a planet we are not critically dependent on should be a better strategy. Geologically, Venus is very different from Earth due to the lack of water (which enables plate tectonics and all its implications). Some changes we can make would even influence the geology. (Hm, I wonder what would happen if we dumped enough water meteroids.. ) All of this of course premises a lack of preexisting life with planetary ownership rights and no natural reserve rules (which we kind of have at the moment - http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/about http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/about).

V-2 12y ago
Planetary ownership rights? Is that even a thing?
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Ask the native Americans, Canadians and Australians.
  - 1971genocide 12y ago
    Didn't know there were natives in Venus, I must be living under a rock.
    - kaybe 12y ago
      Probably not, especially suitably advanced life, but we don't know. Our world is still very narrow. It's an ethical question that should be discussed before we destroy stuff. If the consensus was to go ahead anyway, that's fine too.
  - V-2 12y ago
    What about native Europeans, I mean the Neanderthals? They were the OG's before homo sapiens wiped them out... It bothers me why we didn't just sit down on the edge of the world, as it is the Neanderthals, by the virtue of being there first (we call dibs!) who must have had planetary ownership rights to Earth. Not our usurping "natives". You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag...
    - kaybe 12y ago
      You can probably use half the arguments for vegetarianism here [1], and a lot more if there is sufficiently intelligent life (probably not on Venus; the argument is the same for other planets). Of course, not everyone agrees to those. Other extendable arguments include those for the preservation of species on Earth [2]. Your last sentence refers to the anti-copying campaigns, right? Since their analogy is so flawed, I don't see what you mean by that.. (Most people wouldn't steal a car, but they would totally copy one (as soon as they can).) If we could copy planets without disturbing orbit mechanics, there wouldn't be a problem? [1] I'm talking about the ethics of using another species for one's own gain without dire need. [2] For it's own beauty, but more importantly as a collection of ideas and examples for what is possible, as an information ressource, so to say. Since our state of knowledge is low, we cannot collect all the information without preserving the found state. Of course [1] also applies.

stcredzero 12y ago

> Mining the surface is required Why not get other resources from near-Venus asteroids and Mercury? It would be easy to imagine a near-sun economy that mostly involves people, information, and raw materials making the trip up and down the Venusian gravity well -- with most raw materials and finished goods making the trip down. Most of the energy would be dissipated by aerobraking. In essence, Venus could participate in such a solar-system spanning economy by supplying relatively friendly radiation-shielded Real Estate and fluorine. Raw materials would largely go down, and people, culture, intellectual property, and fluorine would come up.

Terr_ 12y ago
> Why not get other resources from near-Venus asteroids and Mercury? The exact same reason we don't get our resources from near-Earth asteroids and Earth's neighboring planets: It's freaking expensive. One of the aspects that makes Venus attractive for colonization--similar surface gravity--also makes it expensive to launch anything. More-so, given that you'd be doing it with a frontier outpost's industrial base. > Raw materials would largely go down, and people, culture, intellectual property, and fluorine would come up. So why bother going to Venus at all, as opposed to creating such an economy around Earth? Barring catastrophe, Earth will certainly have a lot more people, culture, intellectual property, value-dense high-tech goods, etc., as well as significantly nicer/cheaper real-estate. All successful colonies require an economic driver, and Venus is no exception. "Like Earth but less-profitable" is unlikely to do much.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  > The exact same reason we don't get our resources from near-Earth asteroids and Earth's neighboring planets: It's freaking expensive. Remember that I referenced its relative price. We don't get Earth's resources from near earth asteroids because we can get them more cheaply from Earth. Obviously, this wouldn't apply to Venus. Likewise, lots of things on the west coast of Alaska come from Seattle, not because it's cheap in absolute terms, but because it's the cheapest. > So why bother going to Venus at all, as opposed to creating such an economy around Earth? For the express purpose of not living on Earth. For the express purpose of spreading our civilization beyond the confines of one planet. Such an Earth independent economy and culture might be more likely to exist around Venus than Earth, simply because the proximity of Earth is more likely to pull investment away. > All successful colonies require an economic driver, and Venus is no exception. Not all colonies on Earth were motivated primarily by economics. People have lived in a variety of places on Earth motivated by religious and military concerns. Successful colonies will need economies to keep themselves going, but economic concerns are merely the strongest motivator for settlement, not the only ones. Granted they are in the minority, but there are people who live in the middle of deserts, in pressure vessels at the bottom of the ocean, in all kinds of remote wilderness, in many cases for the sake of living in such places as private citizens. Granted, it will be a long time before such civilizations would begin to remotely rival the scale of Earth's, but I'm sure they will come to exist and that they will achieve near self-sufficiency. Summary: People will live in space because they want to be there. Once a spacefaring population reaches a certain threshold, it will become self sufficient.

Houshalter 12y ago

> any planetary colony has to be almost-entirely self-sufficient. Is this even remotely possible anywhere with current technology? Can we even make completely self-sufficient colonies on Earth (like the technologically advanced kind we want to make in space, not just people living in the woods.)

lmm 12y ago
In Biosphere 2 the human volunteers ended up IIRC needing a few millilitres of liquid oxygen injected every 6 months or so. Perfect? No, and we'll probably never get to 100% perfection. But it's pretty damn close; if that was all you needed you could ship a big supply from Earth every decade or so, and it starts to look relatively affordable. (Of course most parts of space are much more hostile than an Earth desert)
- onnoonno 12y ago
  > [...] the human volunteers ended up IIRC needing a few millilitres of liquid oxygen injected [...] Citation urgently needed.
  - lmm 12y ago
    I don't have one, hence the IIRC; I'm remembering a television documentary (I think BBC's Horizon) from years ago.
- dalke 12y ago
  http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/05/science/the-environment-oxygen-loss-causing-concern-in-biosphere-2.html http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/05/science/the-environment-ox... says "Project leaders, expecting the decline to continue, have made arrangements to pump tons of pure oxygen into the 3.15 acres of glass domes. ... "If we decided to raise the level by 2 percent, that would be 100,000 cubic feet of gaseous oxygen,"" A short ton (907.2 kg) of oxygen is 635 cubic meters or 24160 cubic feet as a gas and 794.5 liters as a liquid ( http://www.uigi.com/o2_conv.html http://www.uigi.com/o2_conv.html ) so they would have needed 5 tons to raise the O2 levels by 2%. For what it's worth, the concrete depleted the O2 levels from 21% to 15%, so about 30 tons would have been need to fully restore the O2 levels. 800,000 mL/ton means that it was not the case that it needed "a few millilitres of liquid oxygen injected every 6 months or so." More like a few thousand liters every 6 months.