Since she and Charlie Jane Anders left, io9 is basically all Star Wars all the time. Oh, and Lego Star Wars.
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Nobody is talking about Mercury.
The polar regions have comfortable temperatures. The escape velocity is relatively low. It probably has local stores of water and organic materials. Its night time zone is comfortably cool and safe from radiation.
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Just … No. LOLno
A) Venus is closer to Earth and easier to get to than Mars.
Well … Which is closer varies. A lot. So that’s not exactly true in the first place.
As to easier to get to? Straight up no. Due to physics, getting to planets closer to the sun is actually HARDER than going out. (higher Delta-V) Furthermore, there have been VERY few successful missions to Venus. Why? It’s so freakin HOSTILE!!
So yeah. These folks clearly have no idea what they’re talking about.
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On Mars, we could live in caves. Which we know are there. THOSE would be the ideal shielding against radiation. (ditto with the moon)
On Mars, we can use the local raw materials pretty easily. Not so much on Venus. We know now that Mars has water. Briny water, to be sure. But that can be processed and used. Venus? Not so much. Probably some water in its atmosphere, but not bloody much. And sure as hell no one would be venturing down to ground level in search of that or other raw materials. Not even robotically.
Others have already mentioned the weather on Venus and the composition of its atmosphere. So I won’t go there except to say “High concentrations of sulfuric acid.” So this floating colony would need to be made of materials able to withstand that. And that’s QUITE the strong acid.
Venus is arguably the most hostile planet or moon in the solar system. Hostile to life. Hostile to simply BEING there.
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This is like space elevators, terraforming Mars, or Dyson spheres. Fun to think about, but not even remotely practicable.
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Humans have been able to learn all sorts of wonderful (and not so wonderful) stuff from forays into our own arctic and antarctic regions… without attempting to colonize them. Those areas are far cheaper to get to than either Mars or Venus, so I think arguments for space colonies have to address that elephant in the room- why leapfrog a colony into space before we’ve colonized Antarctica?
With or without a colony, we are certainly going to want to explore mars and venus. A human can provide physical dexterity that a robot can’t, but that is foing to keep getting easier with better robotics.
Radio lag is another problem solved by boots on the ground, but with mars we could have a station on phobos for humans to shelter in, get low-latency links to ground equipment, and make it far easier to get back to earth from.
In fact, the delta vee requirements should really matter for phobos more than mars, because that’s the natural staging point for any sustained effort.
But delta vee is not the most expensive design factor, testing the hardware to be human rated, that’s the expensive bit. And something rated for the lunar surface, is most of the way to a martian rating.
I think it’s really the testing protocol that makes mars closer to earth than the orbital characteristics. To get something to the moon for testing is going to be vastly cheaper than sending it to mars… and there is no such venusian analog nearby.
So mars is still better… just not going to be a colony for a long while, not until there’s a single Earth government to pay for it.
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But someone has to explain to me why, if it “makes sense” to go to Mars (or Venus), we don’t just “colonize” the Sahara Desert or the South Pole? Many more raw materials. Safe atmosphere. No sulfuric acid or temperatures that can melt lead.
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You generally send missions when the planet is closest anyway, though. And getting close to the sun is indeed much harder than escaping the solar system because of how potential energy works, but it looks like Venus is still a bit smaller difference than Mars.
As to the rest…Venus is not actually so horrible if you can stay high enough up…after all, you had to be able to survive a long time in space to get there. But we don’t actually know how to make a self-sustaining environment on either planet, or even really our own, so I am not going to try to guess on that.
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I think there is a reason that in ‘The Expanse’ humanity colonzed Mars and handed over Venus to the aliens after efforts to colonze it had stalled.
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It’s not a balloon, it’s an airship!
Balloons is for kiddie-winkies!
If you want to play with balloon, step outside!
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cant remember which book i read where there’s a colony on a rail line on mercury. the metal of the rail expanding on the day side, shrinking on the night side, keeping the colony going round always in the dark
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2312, Kim Stanley Robinson.
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…Venus instead of Mars
Colonize both, tell them they’re going to have to fight a war with each other in 100 years, and see who does better.
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that is the true bottleneck, terraforming our own economy for this planet. And once we develop the attention span for sustainable economics on this planet, we’ll then have the attention span to do the other planets justice, and not get distracted after 50 years or so by something shinier.
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Mercury gets really interesting when(if) the time (ever) comes to launch interstellar probes. When you want laser cannons to fire constantly for tens of years at a time, the resources on murcury, alteady in a good solar orbit- that’s even yummier than astroidal metals.
But we’re gonna have to earn Mercury, the slow way.
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Cool post, but I have an even more audacious and exciting idea: colonize nothing.
Accept right now that it’s too goddamn much trouble. That it probably can’t be done at all in any technological epoch in which we’d actually need to. That it would be an absolute meat-grinder for the first n batches of “colonists,” where n is a number we cannot even begin to calculate in advance. And that any serious attempt would require resources that we as a planetary civilization can’t spare.
I don’t mean give up on science, or space. I’m saying, it’s one thing to work in a coal mine, and another thing to propose living in one. At best it’s an extremely idiosyncratic choice that would take a lot of effort for virtually no reward, and at worst it’s the world’s most brittle backup plan.
The solution to the radiation problem on Mars, and the low-gravity problem on Titan, and the water problem on the moon, and the material stress problem for Venusian cloud habitats, and the psychological and sociological and ecological problems in any non-Earth habitat, are all the same: don’t leave Earth. Not coincidentally, the solution to Earth’s problems (as far as humans are concerned) is also “don’t leave Earth.”
Theorize it, fantasize about it, war-game it, write compelling fiction about it. But agree now that it’s all just for fun. Don’t ever try it, and don’t ever pretend we’ll try it some day in the future. Make Earth the paradise that techbros want us to believe Mars can be. Or keep “colonizing” it as we have been.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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It depends on exactly how you do it, but because of Venus’ greater gravity getting back from venus is definitely harder.
is “newsletter” the new term for “blog”
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What a dismal view. Who runs around trying to stop other people from exploring? No one is asking you to go to Mars. If someone wants to spend their resources on spaceships rather than internet advertisement companies, I think that’s okay. The fact that such technology could completely solve resource shortages by mining an asteroid or two is just icing. If someone wants to risk their life pushing the boundaries of human exploration rather than grinding away their life in an office, let them. As long as everyone is a consenting adult, people should be able to push the edges of exploration even if lots of other people think it seems like a bad idea.
Just don’t watch. It doesn’t affect you.
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