As someone who already knew of the ‘features’ of Venus’ atmosphere all I heard during the start of the video was “blah blah blah blah”. He finally got to the problems with Venus near the end. But, erm. He kinda forgot to mention the hurricane winds.
Randal actually did a piece that includes a deal of information on trying to fly over Venus.
Also someone is going to have to tell me how we’re going to ‘land’ people in mid air without getting near the fatal surface when all our current landing techniques have enough trouble just landing on the ground.
I’m not saying we should never go to Venus. I’m just saying there are less technical hurdles to land on Mars. Many of them are ones that are also problematic for Venus. And it makes sense to aim for Mars since we can perfect the techniques of things like building nearly self-sustaining colonies on Mars before dealing with the other problems in getting to a place like Venus.
In the larger scheme of things, mars more closely resembles the rest of space than does venus. The problems we solve there, will also apply in some degree to all the other objects we’d want to explore. Much less so for venus.
Ever notice how native American housing styles differ from region to region? Almost as if their shelter design was a product of the environment. We would do well to figure that out in modern building practice, and apply it to space efforts as well. The only thing mars and venus have in common is that they’re different from here.
I don’t think Venus will likely be habitable before mars, because the scale of the projects necessary to change it would require a massive presence in space that couldn’t be there without having colonies all over the place, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t just start shooting packages of organisms tailored to live in its upper atmosphere at it, in the interests of changing it down the line.
Sounds like a quaint primate circle-jerk to me. The reason people supposedly need money here is to manage resources in scarcity. Once you are in an open system, paychecks sound even less compelling than they are now.
Well there are a few common points. When I talk about applying techniques we learn from Mars to going to Venus, I’m talking about the fundamentals we have to solve and perfect to ‘land’ on any planetary body and stay there, like:
Protecting astronauts from radiation in transit and in the station or colony where there is no natural protection like we have here on the earth.
And, perfecting an isolated ecosystem that can provide a reasonable percentage of the nutrition they need and recycle air into breathable oxygen.
Right now the processes we use for getting oxygen onto the ISS involve shipping water or powdered sodium chloride and iron to the space station.
As far as I know, so far our attempts to do things like this have ended in failures such as mould taking over the ecosystem.
And there should be some other fundamentals we can solve on Mars that would help on Venus, besides the stuff like shelter design that only applies to surface planets like Mars.
I’m just saying that these kinds of problems will probably be easier to solve on Mars than on Venus while fighting its hostile atmosphere. Then when we do try out Venus (or even attempts to mine gas giants) there will be less things we have to solve and perfect while trying to solve the issues unique to planets we cannot land on.
I think there were a number of tether experiments, starting in the 1960s, but they caused disorientation and vestibular trouble, although the trade-off could still have been better than the bone loss on long missions.
I notice how muddled the conversation gets when we talk of going to another planet. Does that mean sending robots? Sending humans to visit? Maintaining an outpost like we do in Antarctica? Raising children there the way we do here on ( level) , (dry), arable land on this planet?
By the rules of manifest destiny, it’s just naturally assumed that one will lead to the other, to the next phase, until earth is receiving tribute or taxes from every other planet in Sol’s well.
My thought about space is that humans will have to learn humility at a deeper level before we are granted a “hall pass” to visit other stars in the flesh. I have a hunch that before we’ll ever begin to terraform another planet, we’ll have to have a deep understanding of our own planet and its’s climate, and the ability to modulate our own impact in the the long run.
So if all you’re talking about is sending one way robots to these places, it makes perfect sense to treat each challenge as a stepping stone to the next challenge, regardless of where those orbital parameters be. But as soon as human footprints are included in the plan, there’s a political dimension to the mission that must not be short changed. Eventually we will reach (If we’re very,very lucky) a place like Clarke’s Europa, where we’ll need positive permission before attempting a landing. The practice for that eventuality began during apollo, on the unlikely assumption that the astronauts would bring back cosmic smallpox. It seems silly now, but it was absolutely the right thing to do at the time. I worry that the future will look more like Challenger and Columbia more than it will look like Eagle and Columbia.
Fine. You take the one with the boiling sulfuric acid, and I’ll take the rocky one with the too-thin atmosphere. Later we’ll compare notes on how long our landing equipment holds up.
Hey if we’re handing out planets I ain’t picky. I’ll just take a little one nobody else wants - it’s still my very own planet. I can play Le Petit Prince all day.
I feel like the only chance with Venus is if we could somehow vent a lot of the co2 in the atmosphere into space… That’d require some amazing and huge machines (and energy use) wouldn’t it?
Quite the opposite - I just refuse to indulge in “personal problems”. I can’t be superior/inferior to anybody else because I have my own goals instead of competing in the petty games of others.
This “evidence” wouldn’t, by any chance, be based upon anything more objective than collective wish-fulfillment, would it? Anything which is only true for humans and nobody else is made-up. Might as well be the Jupiter Catholic Church of Spaaaaace, for all the good it can do.
While we’re talking of impossible things, just hook it up with a tractor beam to a propulsion unit, and tow it to Earth’s L5 point. Then spin it up and drop a bunch of icy wet comets into it. Three or four oceans’ worth. Couple million years later, you’re good to go with Earth 2.0!
[edit] Oh, yeah, almost forgot. It’ll need a moon. Maybe drag Mars down, or go fetch Mercury…
Suppose we engineered some bacteria that could enjoy the atmosphere and fix the carbon. If they can survive here, they can survive anywhere. Maybe it will take a million years, but I’m pretty patient.
How long were the tethers? The smaller the radius of rotation, the greater the problem with the velocity-based Coriolis force whenever you try to move around (and maybe also with different centrifugal forces at different heights), but you can always make this effect smaller with a larger radius (although that requires increasing the velocity of rotation too so that v^2 / r will be equal to 1G).
Apparently Gemini XI used a 30m tether, while Soyuz experiments were cancelled. Later STS-46 used a 260m tether, although they had planned to use a longer one. Gemini XII and STS-75 also used tethers, but without rotation/artificial gravity xperiments.
Is it really that crazy? We are fucking up the atmosphere here on Earth with our global emissions already, aren’t we? Granted we have billions of people on the ground helping, but that sort of climate change, assisted by some giant machines, does not seem totally in the realm of science fiction…
Interesting, thanks. And do you remember for sure that the problems with equilibrium were reported in the case of the 260m tether along with the 30m tether? I figure that in this case, if the end of the tether is rotating at 50.5 m/s to produce a centrifugal acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2, then if someone moves sideways (perpendicular to the axis of rotation) at a speed of 5 miles per hour (2.235 m/s) in the rotating frame, the Coriolis acceleration should be 0.87 m/s^2, which seems pretty mild (plus I would think people’s heads normally move a fair bit slower than 5 miles per hour when they’re going abut their daily business).
