Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/11/annalee-newitz-explains-why-we-should-colonize-venus-instead-of-mars.html
…
10 Likes
I just read all three of her Hypothesis newsletter essays. They are short, succinct and thought-provoking. I’ve subscribed. Thanks, Thom.
13 Likes
While the idea is intriguing, Mars offers one thing that Venus does not that makes this idea totally impractical, at least for now: access to raw materials.
The article mentions this, but we absolutely cannot access the surface of Venus. It’s a literal hellscape.
So each and every piece of equipment, food, water, etc, must be initially shipped from Earth (or from asteroids). I’m not talking about the initial investment to get things started. I’m talking about supplies needed to expand and move forward.
Mars at least offers the possibility of being self-sustaining. We can get water and oxygen from on-site materials. And if you need more space, just dig another tunnel. You can’t do that on Venus.
16 Likes
I miss her doing the bookshelf injection posts on io9. It’s dreadful now.
4 Likes
I still check it for cultural nerd stuff, but yeah. A once great site gutted by vulture capital.
8 Likes
Would take some true grit and likely a lot of human error… but would result in some pretty agonizing living conditions!
3 Likes
Or from Mars. Let’s colonize!
4 Likes
I thought about this, too. But by the time we can move significant mass to Venus, we will probably be pretty adept at harvesting metals and manufacturing in extraplanetary environments and dropping supplies down the appropriate well. On Venus we would have plenty of accessible light elements from the atmosphere, so local access to metals would be the limiting factor.
The scary part about Venus is that missing the landing pad is certain death. Also, it would take one hell of a robust floating platform to launch rockets.
4 Likes
I”m not convinced. Even if you’re floating inside balloons, you’d still want to explore the planet. It’s environment is quite hostile;
4 Likes
I’m not interested in living somewhere for the rest of my life where you can’t go outdoors.
Sounds awful.
16 Likes
Prior to 2020 that would be a completely ridiculous proposition.
10 Likes
I’m rather suspicious of any article on colonising Venus that doesn’t mention the hurricane-force winds, the massive clouds of concentrated Sulphuric Acid, and the possibility of raging lightning storms.
Really, the article spends more time on “Colonising Mars is a bad idea” than it does on any of the practicalities of Venusian colonisation.
11 Likes
That’s what quintillion-dollar asteroids are for!
2 Likes
4 Likes
That would be a very slow leak of poison gas. But yes, it’s pretty much the most auspicious situation you could hope for in an imaginary space-colony scenario. A balloon full of Earth sea-level atmosphere could be lighter than air without needing to be pressurised or heated relative to the outside, so the structural requirements are extremely forgiving – it’s just century-old blimp technology, except that people could live inside the balloon, and it wouldn’t have to move under power, which potentially makes things even easier.
There might be problems with weather, which is violent in many places on Venus, and you’d need to be sure your balloon can drift indefinitely without being drawn into that. But according to Wikipedia the upper layers of the atmosphere just go round and round, circling the planet every 4 days, which is quite handy as it means you’d get alternating weekends of night and day, instead of the 34-week days you’d experience at the surface.
The carbon dioxide atmosphere is also great news, because it means you can grow wood and paper and food plants using native atoms. Even the abundance of sulfuric acid is kind of helpful, as it’s a source of hydrogen (and therefore water), and useful for all sorts of industrial chemistry. And you’re well positioned for solar and perhaps wind power.
I don’t think there will ever be a reason for long-term cities on Venus, but in terms of manned exploration, or even Antarctic-style permanent research missions, it seems less far-fetched than anywhere else, and there’s a whole lot more to research. We probably get too hung up on the part of exploration where someone steps onto solid ground and sticks a flag in it.
10 Likes
It would certainly be less fraught to land an asteroid on Venus than on Earth, since you don’t have to worry about gliding it in for a gentle touchdown. And once it’s down, it’s halfway to sitting in a blast furnace already. So long as you have a fleet of ovenproof robots with the ability to launch themselves 50km into the air, your balloon city would have all the metal it could ever need.
8 Likes
For all her stated reasons setting up a outpost on Venus is far more practical than Mars. Colonization is not going to happen for either anytime soon.
2 Likes
We barely even use lighter-than-air craft for transportation on EARTH anymore because it’s so fickle and dangerous compared to the alternatives.
4 Likes
The problem with these floating techno-cities is that even if the technology worked, the first human governance failure would doom it. There’s no Plan B.
Mars wouldn’t be much better, but if outlying settlements could make air and eat potatoes for a while, they might recover.
2 Likes
All I know is that the Venus Next expansion to Terraforming Mars is much worse than the base game
3 Likes
