KerikBalm

On top of that, if the ballon is linked to the surface, you will be able to make use of the wind gradient to generate power. Just mount some wind turbines on the balloon. Since its not floating freely in the air, but tethered to the surface, it will experience relative wind. I just can't see exploring the surface of venus for any substantial length of time without using a balloon that gives access to the much more temperate upper atmosphere. -I still don't think there is any life there though :p

So the solution to a boring ball of rock not being worth visiting is to add smaller boring balls of rock around it?

Strictly speaking, there would be buoyancy. If the inside is 1 atm, and outside is 90+, then you will have a density difference (ignoring temp and gas composition). So I looked it up, the surface density is roughly 65 kg per cubic meter, or 6.5% the density of water. Its not huge, but its not nothing...displacing a cubic meter of venusian atmosphere gets you 65kg of buoyant force

There had been a rash of BS papers lately: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/amp34166354/black-hole-center-of-earth-fake-study/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31850126/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32996903/ Could this be one that has so far escaped notice?

That author name sounds familiar to me, I think he's some guy trying to show failures of peer review... but maybe I'm way off...

*cough* Beirut port explosion *cough* but yea, it is an uncommon event Umm, no... antigravity is just a terrible idea for lazy SF writers who don't want to think through things. What does the AG do? neutralize the effects of gravity? Great, you don't fall towards the Earth, but you also don't fall towards the sun. Your station flies off into interstellar space, and ceases to be a station about the planet. If you then say that somehow it neutralizes Earth's gravity but not the Sun's (or whatever planet/star combination you wish), then ask yourself, what happens when you need to shut it down for mainenence? what if there is a malfunction? or sabotage? A station holding place at 300km would take about 245 seconds to fall and hit the surface of the Earth if it was "stationary". That's just over 4 minutes. Even if you got it fixed in 4 minutes, then you'd need one heck of an acceleration to stop it from smashing into the Earth. A massive station that would be destroyed if a piece of equipment stops working for a few minutes is a terrible idea. If you have "antigravity", you can get your big station up, and push it into orbit, then shut your antigravity device off - much safer. Plus if you stipulate that the antigravity tech needs some expensive/exotic material/tech, then you don't need to have it on every vessel, just some sort of reusable cargo lifter.

Well my point is that there may be an energy limitation similar to the very slow growing microbes that I included a link about. If any life on Venus needs to do a lot of energy intensive reactions, despite the ample sunlight, it may end up with an energy limitation. Anyway, I consider this chemical finding to be less interesting than this other 10 year old chemical finding: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2010-190 Its interesting and deserves further investigation, but I would still bet against life.

Well, we are talking about a pressure around 1atm, so 3.5% there compared to 78% here... Dunno if that's low enough to be a problem, but yes, it would be an energy hog, lots of things for such life would be energy hogs, including producing phosphene. Its growth could be energy limited, despite the sunlight.

Yes, if there is life, it must reproduce relatively fast, which is one reason why I really doubt anything is there. To your other point, yes it was an energy starved environment, but it was to generally express the point that conditions in which life can live don't necessarily mean conditions where lufe can live fast. I mentioned xerophiles growing orders of magnitude slower. That could still be fast- but generally speaking, there is an a_w where they stop growing at all. As one gets arbitrarily close to this, the doubling time gets arbitrarily large. The clouds of venus would be very nutrient limited in some aspects... Nitrogen, water, (phophorus?), trace minerals, sodium, potassium, etc. Maybe they can pull water from the atmosphere in an energy intensive process to hydrate the cell... pulling scarce resources from the environment slows growth related to how fast the resources can be pulled, and may be energy limited. Bottom line, they compare specific and well defined abiotic processes to vague and undefined biological ones. The only conclusion is that we don't know how it is being produced. Lets not assume life. There is no positive evidence for that yet.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10905 Stable but extreme environment, biomass turnover on the order of hundreds or thousands of years. You can't assume that conditions that allow life automatically mean high reproduction rates.

Yes, they need to reproduce at a rate that is faster than the number falling down. They can float for a long time, but they are equally likely to float up as to float down. Strong winds can just mean better mixing. Some circulation cells can reduce the loss, but the loss rate would still be very high. But they won't... and keep in mind that xerophiles on Earth reproduce very slowly, orders of magnitude slower than non xerophiles. Some specialist archea/bacteria are thought to take decades or even centuries to reproduce. Reproducing like crazy in an a_w of about 0.15 is far from something that can be easily granted for the sake of argument... And they would need to

Not at all the same. Life on Earth can go dormant, and emerge just fine. Cloud life needs to reproduce fast to compensate for the mixing with the lower atmosphere/falling out of suspension. Dormancy for 10 years isn't an option if that means descending deep into the atmosphere where ver bad things happen due to the heat and pressure.

I am very pessimistic about Venus cloud life. Martian subsurface life, perhaps. Gas giant life? I doubt it, but maybe more likely than venusian life, I think it depends on the temperature gradient, and how hot it is when you get deep enough to have much more than hydrogen and helium. Below the surface of frozen moons, very interesting possibilities.

They'd have to be enclosed, but if there is a tiny leak, you don't neccessarily have to rush to contain it. On the other hand, if it contains a deadly pathogen, you could be in big trouble. A big glob of water for something not used to it can be deadly. A very simple example is dumping a sea-going fish into fresh water... https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1462-2920.12598 The organisms we know of that can tolerate low aw fare very poorly when put in an aw of close to 1. The even more extreme conditions of Venus would suggest that any Venusian organism would be killed by the salt, pH and water content of our bodies. I'm in favor of more exploration. I just think its #1 Nearly impossible that there is life resembling Earth-based life/that is contamination from Earth/that poses a threat to Earthly organisms #2 Unlikely that there is life on Venus, but if so it will be very different from ours and not even have DNA/RNA #3 Very likely that we will learn something new about Venus or chemistry.

but you said I would say definitely not. That would lower the known aw range of earth-life from 0.6 to about 0.15, among other issues. Define "similar", and define "survive". I would not define metabolically inactive spores that would still be viable if returned to milder conditions as capable of surviving in those conditions. If the life form cannot reproduce under those conditions, it cannot survive (in the long term) under those conditions. In particular on Venus, the reproduction rate needs to be fairly high to account for mixing of the upper atmosphere with the lower atmosphere where it will certainly be destroyed. We know of no life on Earth that can replicate itself at anywhere even close to the aw range of Venus. So we know of no life capable of surviving in similar conditions to the upper atmosphere of Venus. Define "unconstrained". In this case, the environment itself is a constraint. In my review of aw limits of life, it seems most life lives in an aw of 0.9-1.0, and although some life can still replicate at aws much lower, the division rate starts dropping by orders of magnitude. Growth is very very very slow around an aw of 0.6 for all known Earth-life. For the purposes of this discussion, if they cannot replicate in those conditions, they cannot survive long term in those conditions. There are some places where the atacama desert surface samples come back seemingly sterile. What is there is thought to have blown in. On the surface without active DNA repair (thus active metabolism), UV light renders many spores non-viable rapidly. Of course just a mm or two under the surface can prevent that. Some stuff is blown in, other stuff can wait it out for the very rare rain or at least elevated humidity. In the worst parts of the atacama desert, the humidity / aw is about 3x better than the best case for Venus. The atacama desert is an oasis in comparison. If we don't find metabolically active life in the worst part of the atacama, then we won't find any life with earth-similar biochemistry on Venus. Cryptobiosis isn't good enough, especially when relying on suspension in droplets/aerosols to stay above the kill conditions. Even favorable circulation cells have mixing, and survival will depend on reproducing faster than the average lifetime of a particle in suspension. They cannot wait very long for better conditions, they must be metabolically active a significant portion of the time. Earth-life won't do it if the best case situation for the worst of the atacama is a state of cryptobiosis most of the time. Which is one reason that aw is very important. DNA's structure depends on said H-bonds. It will start to lose its ordered structure at an aw of less than about 0.55. Such an aw is wildly optimistic under any scenario for venusian clouds. I'm not saying there can't be life in the clouds of Venus, I'm saying it can't have Earth-like biochemistry. If it is there, it can't be contamination from Earth. That is what the authors of this phosphine observation propose in a separate publication: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2020.2244 (note the author overlap with https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4#MOESM1 ) However, they pull a little switcheroo in their speculation, and switch from talking about water activity to water content. They start talking about the water content of droplets that are by their own admission, only 15% water - and thus have an aw of about 0.15, which is 1/4th what anything on Earth has been observed to reproduce in. So this reproduction in droplets is plausible for Earth-life in water droplets on Earth - but it does not seem to be plausible for Earthlife in droplets with a composition similar to what we see on Venus. Metabolically active microbes in Earth's atmosphere (for which its still unclear if there is significant sustained replication up there, or if the airborne biosphere is basically due to ground-based life being swept up but surviving in the short-term) Well, based on the literature research I've done in the past couple days, the earth-life that does survive at low aw does not survive at high aw. Anything surviving in a droplet that is 15% water, and 85% H2SO4 is going to find that human lungs are extremely basic, with very different hydrogen bonding properties, that is very very very likely going to gum up all the works and kill it. On top of that, as I mentioned, the biochemistries would have to be so different, it won't know what to do with the biomolecules it does find. I wouldn't worry about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_activity#Selected_aw_values On earth, we don't observe any life in areas with an aw less than about 0.6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438321/ https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1462-2920.12598 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693405/ Which has previously been brought up with regards to the suitability of the putatve salty brines on Mars: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7358355/ Life on earth simply does not appear to be able to function with an aw of less than 0.6. Given the very dry conditions in some places such as the atacama and Sahara deserts, and other hypersaline environments (some of which have extremophiles, others are even saltier and don't seem to have life), if life on Eart hcould have adapted to such low water activity, it should have already done so. Its extremely unlikely that it would be able to do so from small amounts of microbes on the surface of a probe that was not assembled in those extreme environments (favoring non-extremophile contamination), followed by a long period in space subject to ionizing radiation without conditions allowing active DNA repait, to be shed in small amounts on a very different environment, as opposed to the gradual transitions that we observe in earth environments. I think the possibility of contamination from Earth is overblown for Mars, and especially for Venus. Europa and Enceledus on the other hand... I'm not sure how briny the subsurface water is there, it may be quite mild for Earth life. The atmoshere of Venus is very very dry, with a very low water activity: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2020.2244#:~:text=2.3.&text=Venusian water activity is much lower than any analogous habitat on Earth.&text=The habitat inside liquid droplets,of liquid water (15%). Its not contamination from Earth probes, and I doubt its life. If it is life, it must have fundamentally different biochemistry, because Earth life's biochemistry does not appear capable of living in such low aw conditions, despite prolonged contact with such conditions, and all manner of intermediate environments to facilitate the evolutionary transition.

Or, "ore" is just sub-surface ice: H2O + energy > H2 + O If you want, you can throw in some carbon (its often in asteroids), and do: C + 2H2 > CH4 Then you've got methane and liquid oxygen. Of course, there is a bunch or ore often on equatorial places where ice shouldn't be just below the surface (like moho), so.... whatever

I wish it acted like that. It used to act somewhat like that (improving the transmission amount, so it seems labs back on Kerbin are more advanced). Instead I use it as a way of funding missions without bothering with contracts. Lab provides science... use the admin building to do science> fund conversion. Thus I can fund my missions using this, and ignoring contracts.

I would bet 10:1 odds against it, which is still fairly high. The combination of conditions makes it very unlikely, even if any one particular condition is not a deal breaker. Some abiotic source is still much more likely.

#1) bacteria are smaller than blood cells, without needing any discussion of viruses or mitochondria/chloroplasts. #2) the principle cells of blood (hemocytes, responsible for oxygen transportation) cannot replicate, but immune cells in the blood ca Where did you go to school anyway? Seems like they failed you. By sci fi, you mean fantasy, but in space?

Well, for specific things, its relatively easy, like golden rice. Improving the efficiency of a system that has already been evolving for billions of years towards optimal efficiency? Not easy, perhaps impossible unless something is stuck in a local optima.

I once had a guy try to sell me "organic" salt while my wife and I were on vacation in Croatia. I started asking him about how that can be possible and such. He wasn't so fluent in English, and my wife told me to just say no thanks and leave the "poor guy" alone. I think he was selling minimally processed sea salt. I think people equate "organic" with "natural", people used to say all natural back in the 90's, whatever happened to that (even though aresenic, and uranium, are also all natural)?

You really are obsessed with this aren't you? how many threads have you started in which contain the premise that one has access to such a thing? "Gut instinct" is worthless, and the presence of an ocean around Europa's core is well supported. Enceledus on the other hand, that may be pockets of water without a moon-wide ocean

I didn't think it worked that way either, and if the storage bays work like fairings, then the props that I make that are covered in fairings wouldn't work, like so: Also, if you use the backwards nose cone for LF, then you would be duplicatng volume, but.... Do you mean something like this? This is about the limit for me. As for duplicating volume, I could just offset them vertically. In other instances when wings are clipped, it gets you unreasonably short wingspans, which do matter when it comes to not knocking naything during landing, fitting in fairings, etc. However, that can almost always be avoided by vertical offset, with your wings ending up looking like a very thick box... so yes, I accept clipping for aesthetics, but not performance. I think I better example is just clipping everything into one tiny fairing/service bay, so your craft has ridiculously low drag. Other examples are stacking engines end to end, then clipping them so they don't obstruct each other's thrust, and thus giving you a ridiculously high thrust:cross section ratio (one of the things that makes the vector so good). Clipping all the tanks into on small area also makes it trivial to avoid shifting CoMs... etc But I agree with you, clipping for aesthetics is fine.

You mean sometimes closer than Jool... Eeloo isn't that far away, I want something like OPM. Pluto has some rock at its core, but is completely covered in ice. The water ice behaves more like rock, but its "ice" by normal definitions. The darker parts are just dirty ice. We have very little idea what Eris looks like. It may look very similar to Pluto. I doubt they will too, but to be an eris analogue, it needs to move farther out. Eeloo's cracked appearance makes me think it should have some source of tidal flexing. Pluto doesn't look like that for sure.