The issue isn’t so much how much you would weigh on Mercury, but rather how much energy would be expended to move into and out of the deep gravity well the planet exists in.
The while planet would be between you and the sun, therefore not much radiation would get in to kill you. Cosmic ray yeah but you’d be safe from solar flares.
The pressure is roughly 90 atmospheres or what you would experience about 900 m under water. Some one check my math please.
For the inner moons (Io, Europa et. al) the dosage is 10s to hundreds of time the lethal dose for humans.
Stupid question: why is Venus, a planet with lighter gravity, possessed of an atmosphere so higher pressured than Earth’s? I always pictured that the heavier the gravity, the higher the atmospheric pressure. No?
They’d have to be some pretty heavily engineered bacteria. There are acidophilic bacteria that can survive a pH near zero, which is thought to exist in the Venusian atomosphere. The pressure isn’t so much of a problem, as there are loads of bugs that live in the deepest depths of the ocean…even coliform bacteria can survive significant squeezing and come out OK. But the temperature on the surface is high enough to melt lead, and there’s little variation in global temparature because the atomosphere conducts heat so well. If you could stand on Venus at night (which you can’t, but just for shits and giggles), the ground would literally glow beneath your feet. Even proteins from thermophilic bacteria denature at temperatures well below that. At typical Venusian temperatures, organic molecules are broken down at the level of molecular bonds. In that kind of heat, with that low pH, there isn’t a biogenic macromolecule that I can think of that wouldn’t be destructively altered at the chemical level in less than a few seconds or maybe a minute. Venus is a super-turbocharged-hyperbaric-acid-bath-autoclave of a nightmare, and its surface is likely completely and unchangeably sterile without global climactic adjustments.
I believe it’s because the planet is so hot that carbon which normally exists only in solid form on Earth exists as a gas on Venus (in the form of CO2).
I don’t know. Three-hundred degrees F is one thing, but surviving at 800[sup]o[/sup]F, about 200 degrees higher than the melting point of lead, is another matter entirely. Would it really be possible to genitically engineer something that could survive those temperatures? Wouldn’t they just melt, unless they were made of gold or something?
It’s actually not a stupid question at all. But it’d be better if reversed: given that Venus has such a dense atmosphere, why is Earth’s so thin?
This is actually a fairly complex topic and more than I wanted to type in here about. This page here: Goldilocks and the Three Planets covers it fairly well. Basically, though, the answer is that the vast bulk of carbon dioxide on Earth is tied up in carbonate rocks, while on Venus it’s in the atmosphere doing the Greenhouse Effect thing.
BTW, Mars could easily hold a much denser atmosphere than it currently has and that page also covers why its atmosphere is so thin.
We could just go there at night.
In all seriousness, I think the most potential for manned exploration is going to be those places where liquid water exists or once existed - to search for traces of life.
There’s also the fact that the total amount of water in the atmosphere would cover Venus to a depth of 2 inches. Photosynthesis requires water to “crack” the carbon dioxide, so the over all impact would be negligible.
Venus’s atmosphere is the easiest hurdle to over come. Far easier than CREATING AN ATMOSPHERE FROM NOTHING such as with Mars.
It’s 92 atms actually, not 90.
And it is 900+ degrees.
And I know what the clouds are formed of…it is that very formation that gives us a chance.
Bacteria on earth thrive on H2SO4 and therefore can not only eat the acid in the sky, but most of the atmosphere is sulfurous and therefore can be condensed into organisms relieving the pressure problem.
This process occurs on earth around thermal vents, stalagmites of bacterial deposits forming around sulfur vents at the bottom of the ocean.
Introducing such bacteria into the atmosphere of Venus would more or less theoretically result in the same product. Rain of bacterial product as “stone” to the surface that would lock Venus’s atmosphere into deposits.
To finish your quote, I just answered your “I can’t think of any way…”
The way has already been thought up, all we need to do is attempt it.
Loopydude answered another person asking if there were a possibility of genetically engineered bacteria to do the job.
You don’t even have to have genetically engineered bacteria, as there are bacteria today that can survive not only extreme pressures but heat as well.
Besides the Bacteria can work from the “top down”…that is floating in the atmosphere’s surface and as they eat up the atmosphere, float down towards the surface.
Removing the atmosphere from the top down so that all that remains are Nitrogen and Hydrogen and Oxygen.
With that gone we shouldn’t have much problem introducing carbon such that we can create enough limestone to remove excess amounts of Oxygen. With that the atmosphere would be far less than what it is today.
How long that will take who knows…and it’s an oversimplified explaination of a complex issue, but still, it is the most probable.
dtilque…I’m going to just go beyond your article from a physics department, and interject a more important issue that the article seems to not recognize…hold on let me scan it better…phew good that I scanned it, nope it explains the process…it’s trying to tie it into a “Green House” effect was at first a confusing bit of propoganda but then it got into tectonics which is the heart of the matter.
Like I said before, Venus has vulcanism, therefore is the ONLY planet that can be terraformed.
Mars’s atmosphere is locked in Limestone deposits in a 15+ mile thick crust. There is no way in hell short of a meteorite impact (I was thinking Eros or Ceres), that Mars will ever reignite into the vulcanism needed to produce an atmosphere.
That’s not entirely true…there’s a lot of CO2 and even water ice frozen up in Mars’ polar caps and permafrost. It’d be a tad easier to thaw out that, before you have to start melting Limestone.
The real problem with terraforming Venus was pointed out by Grey in the post just before yours. It’s the lack of water. Adding bacteria to Venus’ atmosphere won’t do much good until you add a few hundred teratons of water. Enough to give it some decent seas once it cools down. Where that much water can be found is a good question. Lots and lots of comets, I guess.
Plus, what’s the thermal mass of Venus? That whole planet is ungodly hot. Even if you could wave a magic wand and put a perfect Earth-type atmosphere on Venus, it’ll still be a long, long time before it’s cool enough to hang out. Thousands of years, I’d guess. Maybe much longer.
Surely you aren’t saying that there are bacteria on Earth today which can survive 900+ degree temperatures? As I said previously, that’s well past hot enough to melt lead, along with, I would assume, bacteria. I’m prepared to accept a reputable cite proving me wrong.
I can maybe buy this, but would the bacteria be able to survive the variation in temperature from day to night, which would be much greater in the upper atmosphere than on the surface? Also, ditto to Grey and dtilque about the lack of water. And even if it worked, how long would it take? Thousands of years? Longer? Would it be worth the expense of time and resources?
Yes, Venus’s day is equal to 243 Earth days; its year is about 226 Earth days. This is another serious concern in terraforming Venus. Even if we could overcome the problems with the atmosphere as The_Broken_Column suggests, how would we overcome the huge temperature variation that the extra-long days would cause?
