todofwar

Sulfuric acid is not as bad as you think, actually. It's one of the most produced chemicals on Earth, and not that we would take any from Venus to Earth but it's a good resource for a growing civilization to have access to. And at 50 km above the surface temps are Earth temps and pressure is Earth pressure, Mars is practically a vacuum. As for the comment on soil, it's not a big deal. Chemically speaking you have access to most of the elements you need in the atmosphere, and you would want to grow using lightweight hydroponics anyway. Sort of seperate from this but I am always curious why people were quick to speculate about life on Titan, a place so cold you have methane seas, and write off Venus. Whose to say there couldn't be exotic life forms using supercritical CO2 as a medium? From a kinetic perspective, any chemistry happening on Titan is painfully slow. Venus at least can have some things going at a decent pace.

So, which one gets built first/should be built first? Fountain Pros: Can be built with current materials Can be built to any height Fountain Cons: Active structure, need for constant power Elevator Pros: Passive structure Elevator Cons: Currently impossible Have to go to geostationary

But combustion gives us so much energy because it is the energetically favored reaction. You need to drive the reverse somehow, which gets back to the energy problem. You have plenty of silicon for some solar cells sure, but that's all you have available. And you will need allot of solar panels to run the life support systems without getting into fuel production. Mars is not impossible, but Venus just seems more in reach to me. I think people might be seriously underestimating the amount of material we need to land on Mars (or any other planet we try to settle) before it hits that self sustaining mark. And then even more material, probably more than double, before you get self perpetuating (by which I mean the colony can grow without any further supply runs from Earth). The Moon will never be self perpetuating but it's so close to Earth that it becomes less of an issue overall. Actually, I would argue we kind of know why Mars failed, it's too small. You got a thin atmosphere, the volcanism was short lived even if it did give us some epic volcanoes, and no magnetic field. Venus, being so much more similar to Earth in terms of where it formed, can tell us much more about why Earth developed to support life and other planets might not. I also think we might be arguing about different things, I'm talking about a colony that will grow itself with no further Earth support, not a base to conduct experiments from.

Yes, pretty much that. The way they showed it was this odd glowing ladder, which was then split by one other "enzyme" that looked nothing like an enzyme magically duplicating it. I mean, I expect that kind of thing in Marvel movies, but in a show that's trying to be educational it made me have serious doubts about the other parts they were showing that I knew less about.

Completely unrelated, but I stopped watching the new cosmos after they tried to talk about DNA. For some reason seeing it depicted like a twisting ladder really irks me, I know they're trying to make it look interesting but when they try to explain how it copies itself they just ignore how base pairs and other things affect it.

I'm sure Lockheed or Boeing or some other giant in the industry is starting to look at their business model and how to usurp it anyway, so I actually don't give SpaceX long. But maybe I'm too much of a pessimist, I didn't think Tesla would survive entry of the big auto manufacterers but they're outselling the competition right now. And I still don't understand NASA's own funding model. There seems to be this inherent jump in cost when you go public sector, and try as I might I can never find the reason why. Maybe if Congress just gave carte blanche and said do what you want NASA could bring in some consultants and trim away all of the fat and start making real progress. But that is probably never going to happen.

Still hold that Mars is just a more difficult version of the Moon, with no real benefits aside from being able to say we have a Mars colony. And the whole landing issue will severely limit the initial growth. Sure, you can hit the self sustaining mark, but the self perpetuating mark will require a critical mass of mining, refining, and manufacturing equipment that will all have to be delivered from Earth.

We have experience crashing balloons with lightweight toy trucks on Mars. We successfully soft landed once I believe, Curiosity, and that was about as big as we can get for now. The atmosphere being that thin is a huge problem. And for all the talk Mars gets, what is supposed to be the benefit? Gravity well just big enough to be a problem but possibly not big enough to counteract health effects of low gravity. Atmosphere too thin for radiation shielding or really anything of use. It might have plenty of hydrogen sources, but what about nitrogen? Last I checked (and I admittedly have not calculated this out too much) it doesn't have much and nitrogen is a macronutrient. It gets us slightly closer to the asteroid belt but if that's the argument it's really thin because you would have to land and relaunch from a planet rather than just straight shot back to Earth. Basically, Mars is a more difficult version of a Lunar colony, and why not just colonize the Moon at that point (side note: first step will obviously be a Lunar colony no matter what planet we're shooting for). Venus at least has the benefits of Earth gravity, unlimited energy, plenty of nitrogen gas (and plants are pretty darn good at the whole CO2 -> O2 process, so creating breathable air is easy), and we can easily "land" into the upper atmosphere. An airlaunch is tricky, but there is a reason Virgin is working on it, it would be a very effective launch system even from Earth if the problems can be worked out. And while I loved the Martian, in reality it stretched science just enough to work, but in real life you don't get to stretch science. Watney would have probably died a few weeks in (radiation). And of course there is no economic benefit to colonizing any planet, though there may be an ecological argument to strip mine asteroids and planets so as to preserve the environment on Earth (bringing fuel back from Titan would be a terrible terrible idea though). So Venus would have to be a charity mission, a concentrated effort to allow our species a second chance should this planet get wiped out. But the same can be said for just about everywhere.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but in terms of current tech Venus is far FAR more accessbile than Mars. That sky crane wasn't just to be fancy, you can't brake with parachutes or gliders on Mars, and using rockets to brake will be very costly. Landing enough equipment for a base, let alone a self sustaining colony is a far way away. venus has a nice thick atmosphere and you don't even have to land. A few shuttle sized gliders that can deploy a hydrogen filled envelope (no need to worry about it burning, no oxygen) and your good. The real advantage remains energy. If we are talking about easiest to establish a self sustaining colony, Venus ranks pretty highly mainly because of the readily accessible energy. Don't forget how much of our needs on earth stem from not having enough energy to go around. In a floating Venus colony you get access to so many different types of energy, from geothermal like pipes you can drop to harness the temperature gradient, to hanging wind turbines to harness the wind gradient. In fact, since any kind of pipe designed to harness the thermal gradient would need to be quite long (nothing compared to some things we've already built here on earth) you can slap a few turbines on it to do both. What does Mars have? Solar? Going to need allot of solar panels to get things running, which will probably be low efficiency because sophisticated refining is out. Sure, the surface is difficult, but honestly it's not that hot from a materials perspective (steal could even work). Just need to do quick runs for material and process them in the upper atmosphere. You would probably do a hand off to a different ship since getting something that can operate at both the surface and upper atmosphere is difficult of course. And you don't need much, plenty of CO2 to process into carbon based materials. And the pressure is child's play compared to deep sea submersibles. The one big problem with Venus, and this is admittedly a huge problem for long term colonization, is the lack of hydrogen in any form. In total, it could probably not sustain a colony above 20 million or so people and that is assuming you can harvest every last drop of water, sulfuric acid (those clouds are SO2 not H2SO4), HF and HCl. But with imports from Europa or maybe by trapping a convenient comet you can solve that in the super long term.

Even if it is rather old tech at this point I still think it might be useful to try and repurpose some of the parts for either an interplanetary ship or maybe even a moon base. We're talking tons of material already in orbit, and the most expensive part of space is getting things into orbit. Sure, they would take extensive retrofitting, but you could conceivably launch an inflatable workstation up there just big enough to accommodate one unit at a time, and retrofit/gut each piece individually. Even if only the structural shells can be saved it could easily be worth it.

As a spectroscopist I would say that it makes sense to look at raw photon flux if you want the highest possible resolution. You can then throw on some filters to find out how much of each color is coming through. Colors might be "pretty" but don't actually hold much info. As was pointed out, you can also use specific filters to get UV and IR data this way and get the most bang for your buck.

They actually pulled it off! Hard to believe. This has to be the most Kerbal thing I have ever read happen in real life.

Wow, that video raised all kinds of emotions. Say, could you say which mods you have installed? I have Small Solar System and EVE but I can't get the two to work which means no clouds on Venus. And that rotating habitat wheel is awesome