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It would be a colony constantly depending on Earth supplies and you would be constantly rebuilding it. Just like every other planet, nothing can permanently survive in upper atmosphere. It would be easier to have a massive ISS-style station in orbit, with a tethered cable elevator for research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposing_Microorganisms_in_the...
At 50 km altitude above Venus (where pressure is about 1 bar) you are not really in the "upper atmosphere" as there is still about as much atmosphere above you as on ground level on Earth. So UV radiation is not a problem.
The atmosphere of Venus is just very thick. Also it contains many useful elements, C, O and H, which can be used to build basically anything if you have enough solar energy. The problem is the (comparatively small) amounts of other elements.
From the point of view of exploitable resources, Venus is the opposite of Mars.
On Mars, metals are very abundant and easy to extract, and also minerals suitable for making glass or ceramic materials are abundant, but the raw materials for making food and organic materials, like plastics, are very scarce and expensive to concentrate.
On Venus, there are abundant resources for making organic materials and food (except for a few metallic bioelements required in small quantities, i.e. Fe, Zn, Mn, Cu, Mo, Co), but there are no resources for making metallic, vitreous or ceramic materials.
However, the materials that are missing on Venus are easier to transport from elsewhere, because they are required in smaller quantities and they are dense solids that occupy little volume. If not enough water would be found underground on Mars, that would be really difficult to transport from elsewhere.
> would be a colony constantly depending on Earth supplies and you would be constantly rebuilding it
To be fair, this is true for all planets with known science and engineering. I'm not sure it's obvious that Venus (with its higher pressure and better radiation shielding) has fewer fundamental problems than Mars (with its surface that doesn't melt metal).
True fact, but not by much, as plans are already in-progress with Artemis V and a lunar colony.
Untrue. You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (the vast majority of the elements used by life) can be extracted from the atmosphere, as well as sulfur. So from an elemental standpoint, it actually could be self-sufficient. Not that you’d WANT to avoid trade with other planets, but it is possible.
It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
Yes, but! It's very hard. But you are a million percent right that the Venusian surface has lots of fantastic metals, largely tied up in basalt and volcanic ash. The bad news to my understanding is that they're kind of pulverized and evenly spread out and requires lots of refining/processing, and not necessarily so much in the way of veins/ore deposits ripe for harvesting (though I could be mistaken).
But back to how hard it is. There's mid-atmosphere winds that are effectively persistent hurricanes. It's hotter than a pizza oven, and the thick co2 air might as well be an ocean, because it has that much crushing force.
In my opinion, people should get excited about the thick atmosphere, because it's also the secret superpower that unlocks all the near term possibilities. Floating in the upper atmosphere is more like being a ship in an ocean, and if we ever got materials strong enough (graphite-carbon composites?) we could do some really cool passive dragnet + air balloon lift kinds of things to recover surface resources and lift them to a hypothetical settlement.
The one need-to-have resource that, as far as I know, there's none of on Venus whatsoever, is iodine. So even in the best case you'd have to import that. Oh, and water. You can get some out of the sulfuric acid rain but probably not as much as you want.
Granted, these are all assuming technology advances and big time scales, but trying to practice a golden rule here and be as charitable to the exercise as possible and not bean soup the discussion to death, which is a pet peeve of mine.
> It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
We are facing an existential crisis in the form of climate warming on Earth that we are unable to address properly. The thing is, terraforming Earth is the easiest thing to do: we already live on it, it's already liveable. Mars, Venus or any other body in the solar system is magnitudes harder to transform on almost every aspect.
So unless humanity demonstrates it can tackle the easiest terraforming endeavour that be, anything else is firmly in the science fiction realm.
> although much more difficult than
Terraforming is so conceptual at this point that I wouldn't take a hard stance on either being easier or harder. You never know what a few generations of studies will teach us; and what misconceptions we hold dearly that our descendants will laugh at us for.
Terraforming is possible but colonizing worlds hostile to humans has always meant genetic engineering to me. We need to drop the Star Trek idea that we can explore space in the sacks of water we call bodies.
> You can actually mine the Venusian surface for metals
By "surface" do you mean the ground of Venus? The odds of a mining operation happening on the ground of Venus seems like science fiction at best, impossible at worst. Between the high winds, corrosive atmosphere, outlandish heat and extreme pressure any vehicle on the surface would be torn to shreds likely within a few hours (which has so far been the case for all landers that actually survived the landing) - and that's not even getting into the idea of getting things off the ground. Extraction from the atmosphere would likely be the only method unless something significant changes with the entire planet. Refining those materials would require a lot of machinery being in Venus's orbit that we'd have to get there, as well. Speaking of the conditions though...
> It is also possible to terraform Venus
Everything is hypothetical at best regarding this and would require a level of time and resources no government nor company would want to invest for an outstanding "maybe".
> It is also possible to terraform Venus
We can't even properly terraform inhospitable places within Earth.
Hell, if anything we are very quickly un-terraforming Earth into a place inhospitable to human life.
>>>It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
I would argue that it is very much opposite. Venus has already 80% mass of Earth. Mars on other hand have not much different gravity than that of Moon and Moon is much closer to Earth if you plan to make something suitable for older folks that look for lighter gravity.
They are all impossible without supplies from Earth.
But wonder if a floating balloon contraption isn't more likely than a base on Mars. Which is more deadly?
Venus seems to have more potentially useful compounds in the atmosphere.
The issue with Venus and Mars is that there is no magnetosphere. Over geological time periods the hydrogen is slowly lost into space. All that CO2 in the atmosphere could become H20 given enough introduced hydrogen, and photosynthesis.
Yes, geologic times, so like 100 million years or more, not relevant to human life timescales. But even Venus has substantial atmosphere still, including substantial amounts of hydrogen still (with enhanced deuterium concentration due to the atmospheric loss… which could actually be worth mining for nuclear power export).
Making a magnetic field on those timescales is easy, tho, compared to the other challenges. If you cool Venus down, you can place superconducting wires around the equator to generate a magnetic field. This is much easier than the terraforming you had to do.
Venus has a lot of atmosphere but very little water, maybe 1/1,000,000 as much in the atmosphere as we have in the atmosphere + ocean.
If you are interested in hyperlarge structures you could maybe spread out a really big foil to catch hydrogen from the solar wind and react it with oxygen in one form or another to make a large ocean.
That induced hydrogen, which you're looking for, can very well be the material particles in the solar wind. They don't reach much the Earth because are mostly charged protons and thus collide with Earth's magnetosphere. However, the lack of a strong magnetosphere on Venus means that, once that carbon dioxide layer gets reduced to lower levels and the reactive (free) oxygen can stay below a certain altitude, that shower of hydrogen should naturally become water. Therefore, the key to water on Venus is the reduction of carbon dioxide levels and production of free oxygen.
I've touched this idea before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26575155
My understanding is, insofar as we're talking about protection from radiation, Venus compensates for its lack of a magnetosphere with incredibly thick atmospheric cover that does the same work, in fact does it better than here on Earth. That's not to say we would say no to a magnetosphere if such a thing could ever be achievable.
There's a degree of induced magnetosphere on Venus. Coupled with the atmosphere, you're far more shielded from radiation even floating high up in the Venusian atmosphere than on Mars.
One shudders to think of the difficulties of launching and landing space vehicles on these balloon-supported platforms.
At least two...
Does no one read Gerard K. O'Neill anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...
Blue Origin does. https://www.blueorigin.com/destinations And VAST https://www.vastspace.com/
Every time I read about colonizing another planet, I think about how we correctly don't want to colonize the bottom of the ocean or the Sahara desert because it would be completely uneconomical, and yet either would be much easier than this.
It would be akin to a city floating on Earth's open ocean. With all food, household items etc, and even construction materials produced via extraction from the surrounding ocean.
For Earthlings, the open ocean is harder to survive on long-term than deserts like the Sahara. Maybe on par with living off the land on Antarctic. Never mind all that corrosive stuff in Venus' atmosphere.
Doable in theory, yes. But HARD (and then some). That's ignoring the economics of such an enterprise.
On the upside: still easier than interstellar travel.
That and we'd soon do the same things to a new planet that we're doing to this planet. The more time humanity has to mature from a cooperation-over-conflict perspective (both with each other and other beings/the environment) before it starts spreading to other planets, the better.
We’d have a settlement in the Sahara desert if it took six months to get there and there were something interesting there. We have one in Antarctica.
I agree. And how all of our meager steps towards trying to learn the pre-requisites of sustainable colonies (eg. closed cycle ecology) have failed miserably. For example Biosphere program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 ).
And the only working ecological system we can study is being destroyed by humanity and capital on record pace.
Yeah, and the fact that no one is doing "practice runs" on them is telling how serious any colonization effort really is. Zero chance of a successful mars city if we can't even colonize the trivial in comparison ocean.
What it would be much cooler
There's no reason to colonize the ocean bottom. For one thing, it's completely dark and cold. For another, I don't see any way you could build a spacious structure that could resist the pressure.
Not this century. Just like Mars not this century.
Humans cannot survive long-term space travel, yet, the technology does not exist
The radiation alone will kill you and then there is the problem is you will go blind from changes in your body and brain fluids
Obligatory Isaac Arthur reference [1].
I still think humanity's far future is in orbitals in space, not on planets and certainly not on planets as hostile as Venus is. I'm not sure how well living at 50km above the surface would work. You still need a lot of buoyance to float large structures.
The atmosphere is also a solvable problem. One idea I've heard is using so-called "fusion candles". That is a fusion-powered device in the atmosphere that sends waste gas into space and waste matter to the ground in an equilibrium that keeps them airborne, all powered by fusion. You could extract carbon and/or oxygen this way from the plentiful atmospheric CO2.
Still, if you ever got the atmosphere down to a non-hellish level at surface, the surface would still be covered with all sorts of exotics and metals, many of them toxic. You'd probably be looking at geologic timescales to rehabilitate it.
But whenever these terraforming questions come up (often with respect to Mars), people really don't appreciate the scale and the energy budget required. The energy budget is many orders of magntidue what our civilization currently uses. If you have access to that much energy, there are far better options.
If only Venus had a moon like ours to encourage rotation.
Duplicate of my previous comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47887938)
If I remember correctly, the habitable-ish cloud layers have super-fast winds that circle the planet once every 4 days or so. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_super-rotationMoon actually slows down Earth's rotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration#Effects_of_...
If you could increase rotation somehow and place a moon sizes object in it's orbit, maybe you could improve the magnetosphere and reduce volcanism by inducing plate tectonics.
space colonization, even if there were habitable planets within our reach, is not possible anymore.
you could, for example, send a million settlers to Kepler-69420, and with the TFR of 1.5 - an unrealistically high number - the colony would be extinct in just a few centuries. 1m becomes 100k in 200 years and 10k in 400 years.
I bet the colonists would be highly (self-)selected for many traits not common in the majority of the population, likely including the willingness to have many children.
I suppose that colonists on other planets, like colonists on other Earth continents, would largely consist of people who are unhappy with the status quo at their origin, and would have some strongly-held ideas about a different way of living.
If anyone wants breadcrumbs, I just did a deep dive and there are a couple of promising technologies that could terraform Venus on roughly a human timescale of 100 years:
* Sun shade/sail near L1 tipped up to 35 degrees to remain still: 5 micron polymer film (1.5-3.5 billion tons or 10-25 million SpaceX Starship launches at 150 tons each) or 50 layer graphene (15 thousand tons or 100 launches). Liquid CO2 ocean forms at 31 C or 88 F, or dry ice glaciers at -78 C or -108 F result in nitrogen atmosphere dropped from 92 times pressure to close to Earth's pressure. Shade rotation can simulate a 24 hour day.
* Comets to increase water and spin rate: 50-100 100 km diameter comets from Kuiper Belt at 30 AU, nuclear rocket using 1% of water to gravitationally slingshot comets by planets over 20-100 years to impact at equator, resulting in 50 day retrograde or 64 day prograde rotation (down from 243 days). Decreases temperature and sulphuric acid enough for microbes to start fixing CO2 and acid.
The "hard" parts are getting bots into orbit to blow graphene bubbles to form a honeycomb, and inventing open-ended fusion rockets to avoid containment issues.
5 cm by 50 cm graphene sheet grown in 20 minutes:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21152.pdf (warning PDF)
Direct fusion drive:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652... (PDF available)
Magnetic mirror concept for open-ended fusion rocket:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_mirror
Magnetic reconnection thruster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caM94mem5K4
I think the sun shade is probably how we'll slow global climate change until we can plant the 1-10 trillion trees it will take to reverse it (mechanical carbon capture can't be scaled enough practically), but I digress.
Note that the blocker is actually getting to low Earth orbit (LEO) since delta V is straightforward with ion engines. That will arguably be a solved problem once big "dumb" rockets like Starship scale. I'm a big fan of JP Aerospace's airship to orbit concept and other magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) craft, but it's unclear if they will be able to achieve heavy lift. Aerospike engines and exotic rockets are being evolved by AI currently.
Mechanical carbon capture is a joke. There's no way it can scale enough to be measurable. It also requires energy - coming from where?
Trees, on the other hand, can scale, and they get their energy from the sun.
Forgotten: genetically modified algae-like organisms that would float at the habitable-ish altitude due to having a gas bubble. These organisms should consume sunlight and transform gaseous substances into something more solid/liquid to rain it down onto the surface, thus making the atmosphere less thick and more transparent. Bonus points for binding and removing chlorine and leaving oxygen intact.
clouds cannot be eaten yet to my knowledge.
The bulk of what you eat is harvested air.
colonizers gonna colonize