Andrew Zachary Foreman
-
Posts
18 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Developer Articles
KSP2 Release Notes
Bug Reports
Posts posted by Andrew Zachary Foreman
-
-
3 minutes ago, Scotius said:
Venus is rare in science-fiction literature, because it's hard to do something interesting and plausibe there, that doesn't include astronauts dying in a violent way
Take a look at Ben Bova's "Venus" novel. It's a part of his "Grand Tour" series about colonisation of Solar System. But what is the focus of this particular book? Efforts to retrieve bodies of the members of the first expedition to land on the surface, never to return. Venus is that hard to survive, not many authors dare to tackle this task.
The plot mostly follows the second and third generation fighting for survival as their home falls apart from wear and tear. It is a story of duct tape repair and last minute rescue. I want a good explanation for why they are there in the first place though.
-
5 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:
1) As mentioned before, the easiest way is just to condense it from the atmosphere. Luckily the water vapor is a lot easier to capture than the helium, even though both are in similar abundance (double digit parts per million)
Note that you don't "filter" gases like this. What you'd probably be doing is called "fractional distillation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation
Its how we produce Xe from our atmosphere now, and its how you'd take the N2 out of the atmosphere as well. I suppose some chemical methods may work too (chemical methods won't work for noble gasses like Helium though)
Essentially, the gas condenses or freezes out at different temperatures. The CO2 will freeze out at -78 C, leaving a mixture that is mostly just nitrogen. I don't know if further purification would be neccessary. The Sulpher dioxide would condense out at this temperature as well, leaving just N2, some harmless inert gasses (Argon, Helium, Neon), and then theres the
HCl and HF... which are quite bad, but those combined are less than 0.7 ppm, so maybe it wouldn't be too bad... plus they're quite reactive so chemical purification should work. HF should condense to a liquid by -78C, and be easy to remove. HCl would unfortunately still be a gas. You could cool it down to -85 C to get that to liquify if the small amount of HCl is a problem and can't be removed by other means... The N2 won't liquify until -196 C, so you'll separate the components quite well by just cooling below -78 or -85C
Long before you cool it down to -78, the water will have condensed out. Cooling a million liters of venusian atmosphere will leave you with the equivalent of 20 liters of water vapor... this is the vapor... thats about 1 mol of water, or a measly 18 grams of it. You'd need to cool about 50 million liters of venusian atmosphere to get a liter of liquid water. You would need excellent water recyling. It doesn't sound so bad if you use cubic meters, then its only 50,000 cubic meters... Thats actually just a cube of 36.8 meters... Just cool it down and scrape the condensation of the sides, and repeat, you'll get almost a liter each time.
Run the "AC" constantly on air you suck in, and water will start condensing, just minimize losses, and you should be fine.
My guess is that they'd mostly "run the AC" for the purposes of water extraction, cooling air more to get the N2 would require much smaller volumes (as its 35,000 ppm compared to H2O at 20 ppm). The same equipment can get you the N2 and the H2O. Keep in mind that you only need to cool the Venusian air a couple/few dozen degrees to get the water to condense, but you need to cool the air by about 100C to get the N2.
#2) I really have no idea.
That's fantastic! It sounds like a really workable model for getting enough to water to meed demands!
You guys are making good points. The primary reason I chose Venus is because modern science fiction hasn't done much with it, and I love the concept behind the setting. I want this to make sense though. What reason would they have for building a highly expensive colony above the atmosphere? What kind of economic trade off could there be, @DerekL1963, @Scotius
-
2 minutes ago, Scotius said:
Only viable way to make such setup economical is chemical industry. Extraction of carbon, sulphuric acid and nitrogen. Maybe mass production of carbon half-products (fibers, graphene, nanotubes etc). The problem is, all that stuff is pretty common elsewhere. Carbon is fourth most abundant element in Universe, sulphur, oxygen and nitrogen aren't rare and hard to get either. Interplanetary civilisation would find all that stuff in asteroids, and won't bother with lifting it from the bottom of venusian gravity well. Or in a pinch get it from Earth itself.
Maybe tourism? How many people would want to pay hefty sum of money to watch toxic clouds on another planet?
Since this is science fiction, what if we say that a rare element or something like else along those lines was discovered on Venus? This could make the planet seem a lot more welcoming. Also, our understanding of the planet is still premature enough that it wouldn't be unfair to rule this out as a possibility.
-
4 hours ago, Scotius said:
I have another question to OP: what is that colony even doing there? Obviously someone forked up money, materials and effort to build it there - what was the purpose?
Everyone has raised good points. I want to explain the proposed timeline more thoroughly than I have. Hopefully, this will enable you guys to see what I need a little clearer.
1. Around 2050-2060 A colony is formed in Venerian atmosphere mostly as a scientific experiment.
2. Between 2050 and 2080 the Colony is developed to the extent that it can now fully support 500 people with aid from Earth. Colony somehow must become economically viable. I am looking for explanations as to how this would be done. I heard CO2, but there might be better ways.
3. Around 2080 all communication is suddenly and dramatically cut off. At this time all spaceships would have been in transit. There is no way to escape Venus, Venerians must either learn how to survive or all die. (This is crucial to the plot so we really can't do too much with this.)
4. Eventually, contact with other humans will be restored. This will open up the opportunity to get resources that can enable them to repair their ship and anything else they need. This should happen around 2130-2140.
Highlights, Fully staffed and fully supported up until 2080. Everyone in the colony would have had advanced education and been in the age range of 20-40. Given several decades, successive generations would have been born. Once primary education is completed children would have been apprenticed to learn a specific science. Since this would require everyone to be a teacher of their trade this would negate some of bottleneck population problem. Furthermore, I imagine that the way in which people today are utilizing resources like YouTube and Khan Academy to learn could be used to a much higher degree aboard the airship in the event that the last person of a skilled trade met an untimely death.
2 hours ago, KerikBalm said:1&2) I think its been answered already
3) Assuming your ship orbits where the atmosphere is at about 1 Bar, and its a comfortable temperature... ie lets say its close enough to STP.
1 Mol of gas occupies 22.4 liters at STP. 1 mole of Hydrogen masses 2 grams, 1 mol of Helium masses 4 grams, one mole of "earth air" (mostly N2 with some O2 and a smidgen of Ar) masses about 29 grams.
1 mol of venuses atmosphere masses about 44 grams (its 96.5% CO2). The bouyancy is going to be the difference in mass. 22.4 liters of hydrogen will lift 44-2 = 42 grams. The same volume of helium would lift 40 grams. 22.4 liters of earth air will ift 44-29 = 15 grams
Helium is inert, but would still require the lifting envelope to be separate from the inhabited sections, and require an air supply for any crew servicing the lifting envelope. Alternatively one could do 80% helium (by volume) 20% O2 and have no division. The problem with Helium... where do you get it? its only 12 parts per million in the atmosphere of Venus, it would be very hard to resupply the stuff that leaks out.
Hydrogen: only lifts a little better than helium, but you'll have to keep it seperate from the inhabitated spaces. External leaks are not a fire hazard as CO2 is basically inert. It is also hard to come by with HCl and HF combined being much less than 1 ppm in the atmosphere of Venus, and water vapor only comes in at 20 ppm (0.002%). Venus' atmosphere in general is severely lacking in hydrogen due to its lack of a magnetic field and the strong sunlight -> When compounds such as water were split by UV light, no magnetic field would trap the H+ ions released. Much of the hydrogen escaped, as unlike on Earth, chemical bonds weren't really enough to contain it... at least for atmospheric constituents, I guess the surface still has a lot.
Nitrogren+O2 (Earth atmosphere): Pros: Oxygen is easily obtained from CO2, which is 96.5% of the atmosphere. Nitrogen is 3.5% of the atmosphere, which is a lot better than 0.002% for the hydrogen containing compounds, so it wouldn't be too hard to keep the lifting envelope filled. The lifting envelope would also be 100% breathable, with low fire hazard risks - low maintenece and easy to supply. You'd just need ~2.5x more enclosed volume for the same lifting power as He/H2. There's a reason most proposals go with this.
Aside from CO2 (no lifting power), and N2, the next 2 most common gasses in the atmosphere of venus are SO2 (negative lifting power) and Argon (bouyancy = 4 grams per 22.4 L ... much worse than the others)
Pure O2 as some have suggested would lift less than a mixture with N2, and would be an extreme hazard if there is anything flammable in contact. With jsut O2... you'd have to separate the lifting envelope from the inhabited part. Do O2 and N2, have equipment for concentrating the N2 present in the atmosphere of Venus.
4) Not very practical... At the surface its not an atmosphere per se... its neither gas nor liquid, but a super critical fluid. Its very dense. Some of the early probes had their parachutes fail, and survived impact because the "atmosphere" is just that dense. There is an extreme wind gradient between the surface and ~50km... so there would be *a lot* of tension on any connection between th airship and the surface. Any cable will need to not only withstand the high temperatures, but also have an extremely high tensile strenght as well. Even at the highest mountain, you need something that will operate at ~380C/~650K. I don't think it would be very practical. Winds decrease farther away from the equator, so it may be more practical at the poles (the surface temperature won't noticably change though)
A note on even the "slow" surface winds: "The winds near the surface of Venus are much slower than that on Earth. They actually move at only a few kilometres per hour (generally less than 2 m/s and with an average of 0.3 to 1.0 m/s), but due to the high density of the atmosphere at the surface, this is still enough to transport dust and small stones across the surface, much like a slow-moving current of water."
"The winds quickly decrease towards the higher latitudes, eventually reaching zero at the poles."
On the polar vortices: "The linear wind speeds are 35–50 m/s near their outer edges and zero at the poles"
Mining at the poles at least gets around the wind issue. Those wind speeds are stronger than similar speeds on earth because of the atmospheric density.
5) Don't bother, just get the water directly:
The H2SO4 basically forms by reacting with the SO2 with water vapor, just use the water vapor from the start.
Absolutely not, not unless you want perpetual motion machines. Burning Carbon and Oxygen produces energy... its basically the entire basis of coal power (and oil, but oil has more hydrogen, and energy also comes from H+O -> H2O).
It takes energy to break CO2 into C and O. No near future GMO is directly capable of this reaction, nor would it be feasible as that wouldn't help the bacteria grow at all.
A cyano bacteria can make use of the CO2 though, if you also give it water.
***NOTE*** Plants/Algae/Photosynthetic life does not take the carbon from CO2 and release oxygen. The oxygen that plants produce comes from WATER.
CO2 is combined with hydrogen to create hydrocarbons, like glucose. That hydrogen comes from water, which is split and H2O is released:
2 H2O + 2 NADP+ + 3 ADP + 3 Pi + light → 2 NADPH + 2 H+ + 3 ATP + O2
Now you may not the over all equation implies some O comes from CO2: 6CO2 + 6H2O ------> C6H12O6 + 6O2
Since 12 O are released, and water could only supply 6. Note that this is the *net reaction* You actually split more H2O than that, but you regenerate some H2O in the next step:
3 CO2 + 9 ATP + 6 NADPH + 6 H+ → C3H6O3-phosphate + 9 ADP + 8 Pi + 6 NADP+ + 3 H2O
So, From CO2, one O goes into the hydrocarbon, and 1 O combines with H2O to produce water, which can later be split to produce O2. There is nothing we know of in Biology that can directly release the O from CO2 to make Oxygen. Thus there will be no GMO in the near future capable of doing this.
Given the scarcity of water vapor how would you propose we harvest it in the first place? Developing incredibly heat and pressure resistant equipment for mining at the poles would still be essential. Could this be done?
In conclusion, is it absolutely necessary that they find a way to collect additional resources from the ground?
-
3 hours ago, radonek said:
No, OP wants sustainable colony whose inhabitants are content where they are. No outside contact, much less rescue.
It needs to be a colony that is 95% sustainable. I am fine if it is slowly wearing down over time as long as that "overtime" period is several decades. Does that make sense?
3 hours ago, todofwar said:Not sure. You just need a cold bucket basically, things should deposit into it. Google iodine deposition to get a visual of what to expect.
I checked it out and now I have a visual to work with. I don't know though, the idea is really cool but is it practical? I still think that if it were possible to use such tech you might as well start mining away the peaks.
3 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:The people I know who've thought deeply about this all think that the real bottleneck isn't genetics - it's occupational specialties. A colony of 500 might only need a neurosurgeon once every two years or so for example... where does he get his training and experience? Etc... etc... With sufficient and proper tech this can be hand waved away of course, but it's something to be aware of. (The numbers I've seen tossed about to avoid this bottleneck are in the five digit range.)
You raise a good point. Nearly all of the colonists are scientists. Blue collar work doesn't play much of a factor on the work force. I have imagined that once kids would get through their primary education they would study under the scientist in their field almost like an apprentice. They would also have a vast database of knowledge to draw on.
-
1 minute ago, todofwar said:
@Andrew Zachary Foreman the idea is that on Venus it snows lead because the temp is so high lead sulphate can sublimate (go from solid to gas). Presumably other metal salts do the same, I purify metal compounds by sublimation all the time. Even tungsten will sublimate when bound to the right things. The idea is instead of scooping tons of rocks that need to be refined, you can go in blind and condense out the metals and bring them back with you. No drills needed, no need to longer on the surface for too long.
That sounds great! How would the process work and how heavy would it need to be?
-
Thanks again guys! This is a great discussion. Some of you were wondering about the population that the airship will need to support. Originally, I planned for around 500. From my limited research this should be enough to avoid unwanted genetic defects from sprouting out in successive generations. I had thought about splitting this number up on a couple of smaller ships, but that seems impractical now. So, unless it would simply be impossible, what would it take for five hundred people to survive at least six or seven decades with no outside help? It seems like the biggest concern right now is how to gather resources to meet needs. I will talk about this below on all of your separate points, but I will quickly list the different proposals now. also, please realize that none of these have to be mutually exclusive.
1. Use a heat sink to gather and filter trace elements from the sky.
2. Mine from mountain peaks.
3. Make literally everything from organics.
4. Use some sort of scooping mechanism that extends a machine down near the surface that could collect metals and then be towed back up.
6 hours ago, radonek said:Well, its easy to imagine any number of technical difficulties to keep them down. But that would only make them work harder to restore orbital capability. I gather you want them content with their situation.
No, I have pessimistic view of living inside artificial ecosystem midst of nonsurvivable environment. That kind of situations tend to have ways to filter out idiots. If colonists education somehow degraded to the point of just pushing right buttons, the would be unable to repair their own equipment, much less produce new one. So yes, they need to know laws of buoyancy, or they wont be able to check and repair their flight control equipment. Not to mention constructing new balloons. They need very deep knowledge of biochemistry and ecology to maintain biosphere. They need to know a lot about engineering to repair equipment, and much, much more to be able to produce new one. I have some doubts that several hundred souls can absorb that much of know-how. Other option is that you live knowing that certain critical equipment is irreplaceable and when it breaks, colony will die out.
If you have cold and hot surface, you can produce electricity. Bigger the difference, more power you get. If earth provides you with hot or cold, its called geothermal, but it really works in any situation. This is how RTG power sources work - you have hunk of warm plutonium, a heatsink at ambient temperature, which is pretty low at space and thermocouples in between. On Venus, you'd probably lower down a heatpipe to pump heat from hot air below. but temperature difference is going to be much lower and heatpipe long and kinda heavy. Maybe lower a water tank, let it warm up, rope it back up… but that would be kinda complicated machinery. I'd stick with solar - you need large balloons anyway, which gives you a lot of surface area. And photovoltaics could be made from carbon, which is renewable resource there. You could probably harness wind by throwing turbine into height different winds, but that is a lot of stressed moving parts - equals maintenance and replacement parts. Thinking about it, kites or sails on cables would be great way to anchor or move around without raising/lowering whole colony.
So solar is still the way to go? How would using kites and sails work? Like a glider in our own atmosphere?
4 hours ago, Scotius said:This is the point i'm raising again and again - just read my earlier posts in this thread. A colony can't survive on Venus without an external source of materials. They'd have to bring it from other bodies, or from surface of Venus. If they don't do it, they will have very little to work with - carbon, sulphur, hydrogen and not much more. There is no way to keep machines going, computers working and people healthy, clothed and well fed. There is no way to get enough freakin' water! I rest my case
So if the atmosphere simply can't provide what is needed, what do we do? It seems like going down to the surface would be even harder.
4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:Easier to list what for couldn't.
And where and what would they use if mining the mountain?
Any equipment that would be used to mine resources from the mountain peaks would be extraordinarily heat and pressure resistant. The problem is that I don't know if this is plausible.
3 hours ago, todofwar said:There is hydrogen on Venus, low amounts but its there as sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and even some water. You can set up a cold trap and leave it running for a few weeks and you'll start collecting stuff that can be used. People freak out about acid, but you can store them in most plastics without too much trouble. Recycling would be the order of the day, and in this scenario new habitats aren't getting built so you only need to take in a few materials from the outside. You can use the water and CO2 to grow plants, and use the biomass as feedstocks for plastic production. Once the hydrogen is fixed as plastic, recycle until it has become too warn out, then burn it, trap the water, and keep it going.
People have been working for decades to use carbon based materials (organics) for pretty much everything. Organic transistors, organic solar panels, organic circuits. Unfortunately all the papers I might pull are behind pay walls, but really about 90% of things can likely be made purely of organic material in the next couple decades. Now, for earth based applications they are rarely as economical as the alternatives (silicon comes from sand, and the processing cost vs efficiency keeps pace with organic replacements). On Venus, such products can very easily become the order of the day.
Another way to mine Venus would be to not go all the way to the surface. Drop a line of something with a high melting point, maybe a steel chain or something, but you need a way to keep it cold. Lead sulphate and other things will sublimate and deposit themselves on the line, which can then be hauled up for processing once it gets to a certain weight. Not sure what all you will collect that way, I think the theory right now is its mostly lead, but there's probably other metal salts that will come along with it. Edit: lower the line to within a few Km of the surface, but you will need to keep the habitat well above this level. Will probably need a specialized unmanned airship for this purpose.
I'm interested by this idea of almost "scooping" resources from near the ground. Wouldn't you have to at least within 10 km of the surface by that point though? And if you could do that, it seems by that point you might as well just mine mountain peaks.
1 hour ago, todofwar said:I believe the scenario is a few hundred trying to survive Watney style, not full colony, but I'll let the OP reply. And to get things from the atmosphere is allot simpler on Venus. Because you just need to cool it down. For seawater, there's no good molecular scale filter right now, so you have to boil away the water and then sort through the tons of salt. For Venus, you just need a cold trap.
Gas goes in, water and acids condense out, gasses leave. It will take a while to accumulate things, but again you just have to make up losses not grow. Similar principle for collecting things like lead, they are in a gaseous state and you just need to condense them.
Right, growth isn't important, just maintaining the statue quo.
-
11 minutes ago, Scotius said:
I don't know - i'm not an engineer or materials scientist. But currently we do build car chassis, boat hulls, fishing rods and motorcycle helmets out of carbon components among many other things. Read a bit about it - it's fascinating.
I will. Thanks for the suggestion!
-
5 minutes ago, Scotius said:
Everything possible. You should get it by now - if you can't bring the materials from the space (asteroids, other planets and moons), and you can't mine it on Venus, carbon extracted from the atmosphere is the only building material you will have in relative abundance. Carbon fibers, fullerenes, graphene, nanotubes - your colonists will have to use them for everything. From hulls of the habitats to tableware, shoes and hair combs.
And this would actually be doable? Can you foresee any problems that would arise from trying to use carbon to meet most building needs for several decades?
-
9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
Not at 50 - at 55 km. 27°C and 0.5 atm.
Sulfuric acid concentration looks not that high.
But still without breathable air,, of course.
So, like a weather near a coke oven of a metallurgical plant in tropics.Carbon dioxide density is nearly twice greater than air's. Would be ~1 kg/m3 for ~0.5 atm pressure.
So, Volume of balloon, m3 = Mass of craft, kg / (1 kg/m3 - density of gas inside balloon, kg/m3 )On a 40 km long chain...
With such kite on a rope they should just put a generator instead of anchor.They would gather CO2 and convert it to carbon instead of mining.
Why do I need a chain? I want the airships to be able to travel across the planet. What could I use carbon for? could that really meet all of their material needs? Would you mind explaining the air/mass ratio in terms I can understand? I think you are saying that for every ton of mass I have I need three tons of air. And that would be at .5 atm? What if it were lower? I think that having the aircraft lower and investing more in a heat reduction system would better serve our purposes.
8 hours ago, Scotius said:Heh. 40 km of anything will weight A LOT! And because of the power of venusian winds it couldn't be flimsy. You will need baloons the size od small countries to bear that weight - which of course will create even more problems with wind.
Balloons the size of small countries are definitely not going to work.
5 hours ago, HebaruSan said:What about beaming power from orbit? How massive would the ground station need to be?
Not possible. They are "air locked" so to speak. Their tech makes long stays on the ground unfeasible, and they are terrified of returning to orbit. I have thought about the possibility that they could mine resources from the tops of mountains, but that still might require a stretch of imagination.
4 hours ago, todofwar said:Not necessarily. And you don't need 40 km, there's some good data on variable wind speeds at different altitudes, a couple km will do fine. And you would wrap the cable in a long balloon of its own. The size of the habitat helps in this case, it works like a big anchor preventing the kite from accelerating the habitat to the point that your wind energy is useless.
Solar can work, and we're not fat away from efficient organic solar cells, if this is near future they could conceivably use carbon from the atmosphere with hydrogen from the acid to make some voltaics.
Are you saying to ignore wind energy and go for solar? That sounds way better. Although I am concerned with weight that all of those solar cells will add.
-
First off, thanks to everyone who has contributed! Your feedback is fantastic, and is a major boon to my research. If any of you are curious, you can check out my blog here, azfstories.worpress.com. I am posting frequent updates on the book if anyone wants to see what ideas I am pulling off of here. The next post will be up tomorrow night.
4 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:
As is generally the case, the problem isn't tech - it's infrastructure and keeping that infrastructure functional for decades without support.Thanks. That is actually a really good point as it would be very tough. The major crisis in the first book will be overcoming a massive system malfunction.
4 hours ago, todofwar said:My two cents: forget mining. Not needed for your scenario. You won't be building new habitats unless that was your starting goal. But you can probably get by with as close to a closed loop as possible. The daily requirements for things like iron and calcium are incredibly low, a single block of iron will be good for your 100 people. So there's really nothing needed from the surface. For general repair they could use plastics, some conductive polymers have been developed that they could use for circuitry.
As for energy, that's Venus's number one strength. You got thermal gradients and strong vertical wind shear, so drop a pipe and pour some water in to get a geothermal style system, and attach wind turbines to simultaneously get wind energy.
I would say that you can't have a perfect closed loop, but that just adds to the tension as they watch their habitat slowly but inevitably crumble around them.
I know almost nothing about how a geothermal system would work. I understand that Venus gets about 40% more solar energy than Earth, and if you assume that efficiency rates will have improved over the course of several decades it seems like the best way to get energy would be to focus on solar. What are your thoughts on that?
4 hours ago, todofwar said:For the sulfuric acid, you can probably use some kind of bacterial vat. Sulfates are the bioavailable form of sulfur, which is a micronutrient. So some enzyme somewhere is breaking it down. Or you can extract H2, you'll have to provide some kind of cation, but then you can take co2 to o2 and c and react the o2 with h2 to get water.
H2so4 to 2h+ and so42-,
H+ to h2,
And so on.
Ok....A little over my head but ok. Could this bacterial vat hypothetically meet all of the water needs of a colony housing a couple hundred people? Also, should I consider using this as a means to create hydrogen to lift the colony, or is that not worth my time? This is just a thought. I still think it makes more sense to use a breathable mix of air.
1 hour ago, radonek said:This wont fly. I can't imagine how can highly trained astronauts turn into such superstitious simpletons in a first place, much less how would said idiots be able to run life support machinery without causing fatal catastrophe. Unless you posit some incredibly advanced technology that can take care of itself, any extraterrestrial colony is bound to consist of intelligent, educated and forward looking people. Either that, or dead people.
Years, centuries, anything. It obviously depends a lot on technology and size of ecosystem. If you grow food (hydropony?) crops are probably most susceptible. And it would probably be easy to have huge stock of _trace_ elements. My point is, even if it would take a long time, they would know that their ecology is not sustainable. They would even be able to track rate of degradation and project pretty accurate timeline of decaying life conditions. This is not exactly conductive to your idea of forgetting about space travel. Mining surface is certainly possible, but would be very complex and with quite an attrition rate. Its hard to image how you could pull that off yet remain unable to reach orbit.
They would be very intelligent, yes. It is assumed that initial colonists would have to be vetted. It is very important for the plot of the book that they cannot access outer space. Do you have a better suggestion for what would hold them back?
46 minutes ago, todofwar said:You have a very optimistic view of humans. Human nature doesn't change, I think superstitions and fear can creep in easily. Without necessarily compromising their ability to run the ship. Hell, at a certain point it will be more about knowing the intricacies of the ship, not the derivation of the laws of buoyancy.
I am starting to realize that I need to focus more on the life support systems on the ship. It is going to have to be absolutely massive. My starting idea was to make it big enough to fully support 500 people. Now that seems unrealistic.
37 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:Who said they were all well trained astronauts? Unless that is the case, then it is possible.
Most of the first generation would be highly skilled, although much of the education would have to deal with meteorology and surviving in the atmosphere. Successive generations would have a broader scope in purpose.
-
8 hours ago, radonek said:
You have carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur and loads of free solar energy to power chemistry to make it into something valuable. It's hard to frame it into something plausible, but I will try:
My bet would be good 'ol hydrocarbons aka oil. Of course, earths fossil resources are long depleted and these have to be produced artificially. While it is certainly not wasted in cars anymore, it remains useful chemistry precursor (not least because there is a lot of inherited infrastructure) and one of best packages of chemical energy. Bioengineering is a good bet, so let's have some nice catastrophe that would lead to
worldwideearthwide ban. Answer would be to move all bioindustry outside earth, because anything spaceborne is by definition contained and tightly controlled. Obviously, there would have to be already established infrastructure to build stuff in space - hauling everything up the Well is not going to work out. So lets assume asteroid mining is a thing already and this dangeours biostuff is actually a last thing to poison earth. Conglomerates of biotech corporations just need to order development and production of necessary technology in Geo or Phobian shipyards and move their business to Titan, Io, Venus or anywhere useful really (IMO that would be mostly just plain space).Note this changes OPs scenario a bit, human settlement is just cream on top of much larger industrial complex, working at various
heightsdepths. And I mean LARGE - moving stuff around solar system is not going to work out unless we are talking some serious economy of scale. Energy budget of chemistry involved is so big that moving in a bit of uranium to power machinery is just negligible. Venus would be about most difficult of such places anyway, since one need to spend lots of produce just to make fuel to get stuff up to orbit. But inhabitants are proud of it because hey, at least we don't have to spend lives in pressurized radiation hardened cans like stinky martians.
This wouldn't work with the plot I have set up in the book though, although you do have it right that Venusians would be a very proud people. Due to the nature in which they lost all contact with Earth Venusians became very fearful and superstitious about what was going on in greater space, and any spaceships traveling between planets would have disappeared at about the same time as well. This would mean that they reengineering their habitats for space travel would be impossible. So they are trapped. Are there any workarounds? This is set at the bare minimum, thirty or forty years down the road, so they would have some tech at their disposal that we do not.
8 hours ago, Scotius said:Without ability to contact Earth\interplanetary travel? Short answer: They didn't. Unless you follow radonek's idea and build a massive industrial complex before the catastrophe. To survive you need resources and energy. To get energy you need even more resources to build wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear reactors. If you can't get them from the surface of Venus, your colony is doomed. If you have means to get them from the bowels of
HellVenus surface, you most likely have the means to get your people somewhere less deadly and difficult to live (a.k.a. interplanetary travel).I big part of my book is that when Earth went off the radar all people currently living above Venus experienced radio silence. This caused superstition and fear as to why there was no contact and this would have pushed them to stay out of space at all costs. At some point I do plan to introduce other humans that have advanced, interplanetary travel tech, so let's say they only need to survive for fifty through a hundred years. What can you give me?
8 hours ago, radonek said:IMO this is not going to work out unless they learn how to mine resources from surface. If you want them to be long-term self-sufficient, they'd need metals for industrial production and chemicals for maintaining biosphere. They can probably get without metals to some degree by substituting carbon based materials (fullerens to the rescue again :-) but not everything. And no closed ecosystem is 100% effective, your colonists will be slowly losing trace elements and would eventually die out due to lack of phosphorus or something.
How long do you think they could get by, assuming they were running like a well oiled machine before before everything happened? Also, what would it take to mine minerals off the surface? As I understand we wouldn't have that ability with current tech.
-
10 hours ago, Bill Phil said:
1 & 2: I have no idea.
3: I can't help you there.
4: They likely do, after all, living in Venus' atmosphere implies a space faring species.
5: I don't know about the GMO bacterium creating energy from CO2, breaking it down usually takes energy.
Hydrogen can't explode when there is no Oxygen to oxidize it (like in Venus' atmo). It can catch fire in the habitat, though.
Awesome! Thanks! The concept for the book is that the colonists were put there and then lost all contact with Earth. They didn't have enough resources to get outside of Venus and back to Earth so they decided to stay. Eventually they learned how to survive and lost all desire to waste the resources to find out what happened.
Catching fire on the habitat would kind of suck...
6 hours ago, Scotius said:How do you intend to get power from the wind farms on free floating dirigibles? You would have to anchor them to the ground - and good luck with that. Solar arrays needed to power up your floating colony would have to be enormous. As in very heavy. As in requiring even bigger airships to lift. And they would need protection from the sulphuric acid in the air - which would make them even heavier.
On Mars you are not only closer to the asteroid belt, you also have entire surface of the planet at your disposal. You will have ready source of water. You can build mines, have industry and agiculture. Still, many people on the forum will raise very valid points against the economy and doability of building self-sufficient colony there. How do you intend to achieve the same with a colony that is essentially a bunch of baloons floating above the closest equivalent to Hell we found so far, and still break at least even money-wise?
All of this was discussed on this forum ad nauseam. I'm not saying you should drop your ideas - but you have either to think very carefully about what you want to put inside it - or handwave a lot of stuff.
I don't have an issue with massive balloons required to lift the colonies. Collecting resources still remains my chief problem. I only care about lifting ratio so i know how big the balloon needs to be.
3 hours ago, peadar1987 said:You could still harvest energy from wind shear. It would be a technical challenge, you'd probably have to drop a direction-insensitive turbine on a long cable, and it would have to be pretty robust, but it wouldn't be insurmountable. Just a question of transporting all the added mass associated with that to Venus, and the cost that implies
That is my big kicker right now. I don't need a thorough explanation for how they got there. Just how they managed to survive.
-
3 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:
1 and 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus has a table of temperatures and pressures at varying heights (it doesn't really have a citation, so take it with a grain of salt)
3: You want buoyancy calculations, right? I'm not a buoyancy guy, but the math should be online.
4: Not very practical. Asteroids, while far away, would be more useful (especially since it's "easy" to brake it into orbit...)
5: You need energy. Where are you going to get it?
1. & 2. I looked at the page. Do you have any idea why some people are saying it would be more like tropical weather at 50 km?
3. Yeah, I need to know how much air I am going to need to lift the required mass for several hundred people to live.
4. So the people that would be living above Venus most likely don't have the ability to reach asteroids. What is the second best option?
5. I read that Venus reflects 40% more solar energy than Earth, so that will account for some of it. Wind energy could also contribute as the wind speeds can reach 210 mph. I also plan to utilize a GMO bacterium that breaks down CO2 into energy and oxygen. Do you think that is feasible?
48 minutes ago, _Augustus_ said:- One atmosphere of pressure.
- 80 degrees fahrenheit.
- You could use oxygen, helium, or hydrogen. All are equally safe.
- No.
- Hard...
Thanks. When you say 80 Fahrenheit do mean a range of 80 Fahrenheit, or that it would be 80 Fahrenheit at 50 km? If you mean the latter, how did you determine that?
Wouldn't hydrogen pose a danger of exploding? It seems like some gases would be better suited than others.
-
Hey guys! I am new to the kerbal community and really hoping y'all can help me out! I am writing a novel about life among the clouds of Venus and I need help figuring out some basic science about how people would do it. I have done quite a bit of research online but there still remains a number of questions I can't seem to answer. They are as follows:
1. What is the range of atmospheric pressure above Venus in the range of 20-50 Km? I understand that near the top would be about 1 bar.
2. What would the temperature range be like in this 20-50 km area? I have heard wildly different estimates. Some say that towards the bottom of this 20 km the temperature would be near tropical climate and that higher up, close to the 50 km, the temp would be closer to sub-polar. Then again, others have said that even near the top of this range the temp would be well above 150 Fahrenheit. This would imply that it would be even warmer the lower you go.
3. My third question should be fairly easy to clear up. The habitat design in my book mimics airships. The things I need to know are how much mass can a given quantity of air lift, and what would be the pros and cons of helium, hydrogen, and earth air. Should there be any other gases I should consider?
4. The highest mountain on Venus is about 11 km as I understand. Would it be practical to mine resources from mountain tops to fuel an expanding economy? If it wouldn't, what other options would there be? My understanding is that asteroids would be too far away to be practical and that the atmosphere wouldn't have enough elements to meet all of the expected needs.
5. How hard would it be to get water from sulfuric acid?
Are there any other things I need to know? Remember, I am a noob at this and really want my book to be scientifically accurate. Thanks a ton for any help you can offer me!
Take a look at Ben Bova's "Venus" novel. It's a part of his "Grand Tour" series about colonisation of Solar System. But what is the focus of this particular book? Efforts to retrieve bodies of the members of the first expedition to land on the surface, never to return. Venus is that hard to survive, not many authors dare to tackle this task.
Writing Science Fiction Novel about living above Venus in the near Future! Need help with Science!
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
Haha. Went to Hell. I don't know if that was intentional but it sure was funny! Ok, then let's hand wave it, and go with your suggestion for now. If most of the facility was designed for processing the CO2 then that would mean that they would need to re-purpose the machinery for other functions, like growing food on a huge scale. Are we all in agreement now that they could survive on their own for at least five decades without outside help?