What To Do With Venus?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve kicked around the idea of terraforming Venus with people before and the consensus seems to be that while it might be technically feasible it’s not really cost-effective and there are a lot easier places to make habitable in the solar system.

Fine. Meanwhile, we have a very hot rock wrapped in sulfuric acid clouds. Can we do anything useful or nifty with this? So… the purpose of this thread is to come up with ideas for utilizing Venus as a resource. It doesn’t matter if the end result is human-habitable or not, the game is to “mine” the planet for either fun or profit.

Starting with the atmosphere - well, if you want sulfuric acid there it is. In addition, lots of carbon dioxide. Rig up some solar power and you can get pure sulfur, carbon, and oxygen through various processes. Even trace gasses will be present in significant amounts just because there is just so damn much atmosphere.

Other than that, though - what else can be done with Venus?

2

could launch prisoners there as a form of torture/execution

3

sulfuric acid clouds?
We make a giant space elevator, at the top there is a basket that can be lowered into the atmosphere. We put our dishes in the basket, and lower them into the atmosphere, the burning hot sulfuric acid eats away all the grease and grime, voila! squeaky clean plates

4

Daycare Center

5

I’m thinking that we find extremophile microbes that can survive the enormous heat and see what happens.

6

I don’t think there could be any kind of mineral resource there that would be worth the cost of collecting it. I remember reading a well-reasoned argument that if there were bars of pure gold on our own moon, stacked and ready for collection, it wouldn’t be economically feasible to go and get them.

7

Apparently the upper atmosphere of Venus may actually be the most Earth-like extraterrestrial environment in the Solar System; at something like 50 km up both the temperature and atmospheric pressure are close to Earth-normal. Of course, “most Eath-like” is still something of a relative term–the atmosphere’s not actually breathable or anything, since it contains no oxygen–but as I understand it, if you choose just the right altitude, you could find a spot where the temperature wouldn’t require cryogenic refrigeration systems or anything like that, and your pressurized habitat would basically float. I think you could even arrange it so that if you sprung a leak, your air would (slowly) leak out instead of poisonous Venusian atmosphere rushing in.

This has lead to apparently serious proposals to colonize the upper atmosphere of Venus.

Granted, I don’t really know what the hell the colonists would do up there–maybe they could open a tibanna gas mine.

8

We could restore her arms.
Oh, wait, you meant the planet?

9

/entertainment

10

How could you float in a container that’s under greater pressure than what you’re floating on?

11

Greater pressure does not necessarily mean greater density. At any given pressure and temperature, nitrogen and oxygen will both be lighter than the carbon dioxide that makes up most of Venus’ atmosphere.

12

In a craft that has a smallish living compartment attached to a largish flotation device. Think of a balloon with a sealed gondola.

Not that this would work all that well in the Venusian atmosphere, which apparently has violent windstorms.

13

Don’t sign me up for the floating Venusian colonization balloons please. But I’d love it if it became a prisoner’s colony like Australia.

14

Just make sure that none of the kids are locked in the closet on the one day that the clouds clear up.

15

Fly some lead there and make a huge car battery.

16

What is that? You triggered an old memory of a show I saw when I was a kid but I can’t remember much about it. I recall it being a school on Venus and it was always gray and cloudy. Only one day a year the clouds clear up and the kids can go out and play in the sun. So in the show of course they run up and down hills and have fun until returning to the rain for another year. I forgot about the one kid that couldn’t enjoy it but that seems right to me too. What show was that?

17

There was a thread about that show a while back. It’s All Summer in a Day, based on a Ray Bradbury story.

18

You land robotic digging equipment.

Using the robotic digging equipment, you dig a quarry.

Then, you go down to the quarry and throw stuff down there.

It’s extra cool because what you throw becomes molten acid-dissolved goo before landing in the quarry.

19

sulfuric acid is used in in electroplating and smelting processes, isn’t it? That means with a lot of engineering and careful planning, you could turn Venus into a huge smelter. Send ore-bearing asteroids skimming through the atmosphere with a harvest ship flying alongside. Arrange some sort of opposing charge between asteroid and ship-mounted collector and you’ve got semi-processed ore. It still requires further refinement, but you’ve reduced the amount of material to be refined by a significant portion.

20

If we’re talking terraforming levels of technology, then we’re also talking cheap access to space technology, and there we run into another problem, even with floating upper-atmosphere colonies. Most proposed CAtS technologies won’t work on Venus: It doesn’t rotate fast enough for a space elevator, and you can’t run a skyhook in atmosphere. Other launch megastructures like a space fountain or launching loop require very firm foundations, which are going to be hard to achieve from floating habitats, which brings you back to the surface problems.

So far as I know, Venus is the only solid body in the system for which this is an issue. Everything else rotates quickly, lacks an atmosphere, or both.