The Second Stone said: I’m thinking that we find extremophile microbes that can survive the enormous heat and see what happens.
I like that idea. Let’s take some volcanic-sea-vent microbes & stuff, breed them to be even more extreme, and drop several tons of them onto Venus.
With any luck, we’ll get critters with tentacles or bug-eyes or something in a few hundred thousand years.
If we were to attach a rocket motor to it, and increase its orbital speed to the point where it transferred to a new orbit, roughly on the same plane of the elliptic as Sol III, would the atmospheric environment travel with it?
And how might such shenanigans effect the orbital mechanics of Sol III as they are currently understood and worked with by our astrophysicists?
Earthly versions of these may need a rigorous training program before we send them to Venus. Surface temperature there is around 460C, whereas our extremophiles max out around 140C.
There are many of tons of sulfur lying around refineries with no economical use. Do a Google image search for sulfur stockpile.
Oh yeah, that makes sense in an obvious sort of way.
I would hope by the time we can reach the atmosphere of Venus…as opposed to just slamming a probe with a heat shield towards the surface…we might be able to genetically engineer “balloon plants”: water vapor billowing up from the acid rain clouds below would be captured by the floating gasbags which, using a modified photosynthesis/hydrolosis technique, splits the water into hydrogen to be stored and oxygen to be released.
Yeah, they would, but maybe they could be floating-in-the-air colonies or something. Upper to middle atmosphere is probably a better climate anyway, you might get some sunlight as well as cooler temps.
I tried using Venus as a coffee table but it was staining the rug.
I never considered floating cities in Venus’s atmosphere before reading this thread. I have always considered the concept in connection with the gas giant planets. In Venus’s case its hard to see a point. Sure, you could set up Venusian cloud cities, but why would you want to? Which is pretty much OP’s point, I suppose.
My thinking in this direction was originally sparked by Michael McCollum’s novel Clouds of Saturn. The premise was that solar flare activity had rendered Earth uninhabitable, and mankind fled to Saturn, protected by Saturn’s thick atmosphere and greater distance from the sun. At the appropriate altitude, there is a zone in Saturn’s atmosphere where temperature and gravity are Earthlike. I doubt Venusian cloud cities would get as much protection directly from Venus’s atmosphere as Saturn’s, and Venus is much closer to the sun. But if the cities had a little mobility they might simply stay permanently on Venus’s night side, or perhaps in a sweet spot near the day/night terminator, receiving some sunlight but not too much. Venus’s slow rotation makes this more feasible than it would be on other planets. So Venus could have even more potential than Saturn as a refuge from solar activity.
But I don’t really buy it. If solar radiation is a problem, wouldn’t it be simpler just to live underground right here on Earth?
The thing is, I can think of another reason one might want to float a city, or at least an industrial facility, in a gas giant’s atmosphere. The theoretical best fuel for fusion power is helium 3. But it doesn’t occur naturally on Earth. All the gas giants have a small percentage in their atmospheres. Set up a floating extraction plant, run a cubic mile or so of the natural atmosphere through a gas diffusion separator or something similar, and voila, helium 3. Use some to run a local power plant and ship the rest off to Earth, or to other space colonies. Uranus appears to have the highest percentage of He3, but is not necessarily the best planet for the purpose, one could simply pump more atmosphere through the separators at a different gas giant if there is a compelling reason to prefer it.
As far as I know, Venus, like Earth, has no Helium 3, so this doesn’t work as a reason to colonize Venus.
Venus has several useful resources; sunlight, for power, carbon, for construction, and nitrogen, for atmosphere buffering. You can’t go around building space habitats filled with atmospheres of pure oxygen, as Apollo 1 demonstrated. If you want to make a fleet of space habitats housing millions or billions of people, the atmosphere of Venus could supply carbon to make the wals and diamond windows, oxygen to breathe, and nitrogen to prevent fires.
There is even a little hydrogen on the planet which could water your crops; enough hydrogen to cover the planet in a layer of water a metre thick, apparently, although that isn’t really very much. Still, it would be enough to support a moderately large population. Some of these could live in balloon habitats as described by Geoff Landis - as mentioned above, the 50km layer in Venus’ atmosphere is the most Earth-like environment in the Solar System outside Earth.
The cheapest way to extract material from Venus relies on solar power to scoop material from the upper atmosphere; scoopships with electric propulsion that use sunlight to normalise their orbits. That doesn’t really help with access to the hypothetical balloon cities, however.
An orbital ring could be built using atmospheric carbon, but we’d need some magnetic material such as iron to keep it in ‘orbit’; looks like there would have to be some mining activity on the planet’s surface, unless we can import some meteoric iron from somewhere.
For some really wacky ideas about how to exploit Venus, see this JBIS paper by the late Paul Birch
As it is such an extreme environment, it’s kind of nice for stress testing landers or whatever we come up with over the next few centuries.
“Are you sure this planet cruiser is safe? Can it withstand high temperatures, and pressures? What about extreme weather and…”
“I’ll stop you there. This model of cruiser has landed and taken off from Venus”.
“No further questions”
… How many atmospheres can this ship withstand, Professor?
…Well it’s a spaceship, so anywhere from nought to one.
<Marvin the Martian> I’m going to blow it up, as it obstructs my view of Mercury <Marvin the Martian>
“nought”? Mercury? Is today change the quote day?
^ Sorry, I meant for the < > to read “Marvin the Martian voice.” I didn’t realize I got that much of the quote right ::happy dance::.
Plus, I had just gotten up.
Garbage dump? Take an old rocket, fill it full of garbage and shoot it at Venus. (I’m thinking mostly about all the atomic waste rather than plastic.
And while we’re at it, why not dump all of our useless gold there, too?
An image I have made of the type of floating colony described upthread, described by Birch in 1991 and by Landis in 2003
