Terraforming Venus

[AngelLestat]

And what do you suppose we should do on Venus? It's on the inner edge of the habitable zone, and will much sooner than Earth be scorched by the sun, more so than now.

Mars in turn is close to the outter edge, and as such, will only get more habitable as the sun ages, up to a certain point of course.

Right now, is several times more habitable and safe to be at 50km in venus atmosphere than mars.

First we have 0,9g instead 0,3g from mars. Second we have the same atmosphere pressure, in mars would be have only a 0.6%; close to vaccum. And you know how danger and difficult is to deal with vacuum.

In venus the atmosphere protect us from sun and cosmic radiation, something that in mars we dont have.

To be close to the sun is a benefic from the energy point of view, at venus orbit we have 2660 w/m2 and in mars we have 593. So a solar panel is more than 5 times efficient. (energy is the only that kept us alives at earth)

And answering your question, when the times come, after several hundreds of years of live at venus, we can reflect most of energy that we dont want back to the space.

Warming a planet like Mars is easier than cooling a planet like Venus. Venus may in fact already be too close to the Sun to ever be Earth-like again. And there's the issue of the extremely slow rotation. Mars has a 25 hour day. Venus' days are longer than its years.

There is not need to deal with that problem right now living in its atmosphere. However like already comment, economics needs to be had it into account. Terraforming mars (also huge task) investment with not profits until hundreds of years later, is something not possible to do.

Also, what is there on Venus?

CO2 and Sulphuric acid, and hellish heat. So there is no economic benefit to colonising Venus at all. I'd not bother with more than some science-aerostats.

Venus has heavy elements than mars, like it is explaning in the original study paper, they can be mined from surface by telerobots commanded from the floating cities.

Like radonek said, hidrogen at venus is not enoght to large scale production, but you can capture an ice comet with a solar sail, and with time obtain an aerocapture to leave it in orbit.

Well if i understand you right, you wish to push venus' orbit farther out to make most of it's bad qualities condense into the ground, here's my input.

I dont know who you are answering, but at least that is not my thought. There is not need to change its orbits. In fact there is some benefics with venus orbit.

With your idea, it would probably make sense but i highly doubt that it's atmosphere would change except for the elements in it that are already close to solidification or sublimation. Even then we would have a massive amount of work to do. There is no oxygen on venus, if so, miniscule amounts, but the amount of carbon dioxide in venus would pretty much kill plants because there is so much. The sunlight on venus is very dangerous. And the atmospheric pressure is equivalent to that 3,000 feet beneath the ocean, so any structures built on it's surface would have to be incredibly strong. Although this is a great idea, it just ins't practical in science, unless you know I get frozen in cryonics and wake up 1,000 years from now to our superiority of space elements. But like I said this is an extremely expoundable subject and keep up the great thinking! Hope your day goes well!

I soo wish that it would be my idea! haha, I would be famous; but is not

Instead of Landis land I would called Angel land, and it would had more sense since is in the clouds XD

The problem, is that you need to think in small steps, first the plants would be inside these floating cities. Then you can grow some genetic moss and painted over the outside of the floating cities. And I am sure there is several and efficient ways to convert over time all the atmosphere removing the co2 and sulfure.

And not forget that we are close to any other planet from venus than from others.

[Klingon Admiral]

But why would one want to mine stuff on Venus if it takes like 20 km/sec to get it somewhere useful?

[Rakaydos]

But why would one want to mine stuff on Venus if it takes like 20 km/sec to get it somewhere useful?

Local manucacturing, at least. Spare parts for the balloon citys.

[AngelLestat]

can you explain those 20km/s?

[Albert VDS]

What do you suggest to use to mine the surface of Venus? There's not a lot of which could withstand the heat, let alone be reusable.

[Rakaydos]

can you explain those 20km/s?

Wait, I think I know what he means. That "Landis land" Delta V map had 20m/s listed just to get from the surface to Landis Land, with significantly less to get from landis land to orbit.

Rather than flying the cargo up to the city, the citys are going to need to drop a rope for the miners.

[SargeRho]

Thing is, machinery needs to be cooled. It's kind of hard to cool stuff on Venus. Basically, you can't really mine anything on the surface because everything will overheat immediately. In the end, there is nothing to be gained from colonising Venus, economically. Scientifically, it's an entirely different issue.

I suppose you could produce some sort of consumable cooland in the aerostat colonies, or deliver it from somewhere else, like liquid nitrogen or so, and use that as heatsink. You'd then have aerostat freighters use the coolant as ballast as they go down to the miners, refill them with coolant, and raise back up.

On Mars in turn, you can have nuclear powered mobile mining and refining bases, and cool them through radiation and convection. On the moon you can have that too, but radiatively cooled. You can't have any of that on Venus, because it's simply too hot.

Edited February 11, 2014 by SargeRho

[AngelLestat]

Wait, I think I know what he means. That "Landis land" Delta V map had 20m/s listed just to get from the surface to Landis Land, with significantly less to get from landis land to orbit.

Rather than flying the cargo up to the city, the citys are going to need to drop a rope for the miners.

If that is the case, he choose the less efficient way to do it.

About a rope.. That would work in places close to the pole where the constant winds are slow.

But searching in internet, at the edge of science top advances. I guess I have a solution.

We just need to change the burner by any small nuclear reactor. The envelope can be made of any carbon based material.

Thing is, machinery needs to be cooled. It's kind of hard to cool stuff on Venus. Basically, you can't really mine anything on the surface because everything will overheat immediately. In the end, there is nothing to be gained from colonising Venus, economically. Scientifically, it's an entirely different issue.

I suppose you could produce some sort of consumable cooland in the aerostat colonies, or deliver it from somewhere else, like liquid nitrogen or so, and use that as heatsink. You'd then have aerostat freighters use the coolant as ballast as they go down to the miners, refill them with coolant, and raise back up.

On Mars in turn, you can have nuclear powered mobile mining and refining bases, and cool them through radiation and convection. On the moon you can have that too, but radiatively cooled. You can't have any of that on Venus, because it's simply too hot.

What do you suggest to use to mine the surface of Venus? There's not a lot of which could withstand the heat, let alone be reusable.

Carbon can stand 3000 or 5000 K, And carbon is the most easy to get in venus.

There is already a link over electronics that can stand almost those temperatures. And Nasa (geofrey landis) is planning the next rover that will be sent to venus. It would survive many days, we just need to insolated and cool the electronics.

What we can find? In early days at earth. Diamonds, gold, platine was very easy to find even in the surface, and to day we already consume almost all heavy elements close to the surface.

Venus has more heavy elements than earth. And never was mined.

THe most valuate at first it will be the materials that would help us to made the cities. Basic contruction elements are mentioned in the paper.

But we can find diamonds, Californio, plutonium and who knows what else.

And rememeber that you dont need to leave the machinary down more than a week, you can rise it with the ballon to cool it.

Also, organism life is not discarded in venus, it could be life living there in the clouds. More taking into account that some day venus was similar to earth.

Edited February 11, 2014 by AngelLestat

[gm3bq]

The only real resource that is practical to try and mine from Venus is the CO2 from the atmosphere, and the only thing it would be good for is worming up Mars or maybe Ganymede.

[SargeRho]

Contrary to popular belief, diamonds are not actually rare. I think platinum isn't all that rare either, same goes for gold. It's still easier to get those from metallic near earth asteroids, and the moon, than to get them from Venus.

And electronics need to be cooled. There'll also be massive, massive attrition on the surface of Venus on any equipment you decide to send there. And you can't use anything that'll dissolve in liquid CO2. In the end, there is no economic value in Venus. A colony there could never be self-sufficient and would depend on constant supplies from the outside. If we start terraforming Mars, Venus might become of value as a source of CO2, but that would require us to develop enormous interplanetary tankers.

And we can't find Plutonium there, because as far as I know, it's not a naturally occuring element. Not that it'd be useful either, unless you want to build an Orion engine.

Mars is better than Venus in almost every way imaginable. Easy access to the surface, cooling isn't an issue, the surface is, like the moon, basically made of ressources, specially iron, it's possible to transform it into an earthlike planet, it has a 25 hour day, and getting to orbit from the surface of Mars is basically peanuts. Even from 50km up in Venus' atmosphere you need pretty big rockets for big payloads.

On Venus you could only live in the clouds, you can't make a self-sufficient colony, and it's not economically viable to extract ressources from the surface. It's also not a long-term habitable planet unlike Mars.

Edited February 12, 2014 by SargeRho

[peadar1987]

Solar-powered mass drivers putting CO2 into a transfer orbit from Venus to Mars? You'd need about 31km/s from the Venusian surface, although 27km/s of that is just to get from the surface to low orbit, if you had buoyant, automated stations doing it for you, it would be far less. Earth's atmosphere has a mass of 5E18kg,

I'm not sure how well a jet of gas would hold together in space, but I reckon with some clever maths you could get a significant proportion to end up captured by Mars.

[Winter Man]

For mining on Venus, you wouldn't need all that much cooling. Just dig down and insulate your tunnel with super duper space age aerogel which you totally have because you've got a freaking city on Venus, and you won't have a problem.

[SargeRho]

And then you'd still need a lot of cooling, since both the ground below and the atmosphere above is very hot. And in all likelyhood, the ground is even hotter. Additionally, Venus seems to go through cycles of resurfacing instead of having tectonic plates. So every few 100 million years, the surface is mostly replaced. And I don't think it's known how long those cycles actually are. The surface is estimated to be between 300 and 600 million years old.

[Idobox]

Once again, Venus cloud layer is almost habitable as is, which is infinitely precious.

Mining stuff anywhere to bring it anywhere else makes little sense with current technology.

Venus atmosphere is rich in a few elements, but not in the heavier ones. All of you seem to consider mining the surface of Venus to be super hard. It's less than 500°C there, steel, titanium and many polymers are perfectly usable at this temperature.

Electronics are a bit trickier, but pumping heat and dumping it into the super dense atmosphere is nothing revolutionary, it's just an over-sized fridge. Sure, it will consume energy to keep things cool enough to work, but it's not like a strip-miner requires a server farm to run.

The most difficult issue is producing energy. Heat engines could work, but you will need a source several hundred degree hotter than the atmosphere to get any significant power. Right now, people are working on nuclear reactors close to 900°C, so still possible. And I imagine super-critical CO2 is a decent working fluid, but I might be wrong. I can picture an open-cycle nuclear reactor using the atmosphere as a working fluid and a titanium turbine.

Another option would be to use a cable to carry electricity down, but that would be heavy, and the wind would pull strongly on it. I don't think it's very realistic.

Venus has lots of sun power, a nice nearly habitable layer in its atmosphere, plenty of resources, plenty of heavy metals that are not especially difficult to mine or move around.

The only thing it lacks is hydrogen and other light elements. Still, 20ppm of water times 4.8e20kg of atmosphere gives us 9.6e15 kg of water, enough to support industry and provide hydrogen for a reasonable time. It might make sense to have specific airships in lower layers to extract water from denser atmosphere.

To sum up, you could live there in an inflatable structure with barely any insulation or radiation protection, with access to massive solar energy and limitless organic materials. Aerobraking is super easy, mining the surface is harder than other places, but nothing crazy, and airships can move tons of stuff easily, and you can produce rocket fuel easily.

The main issue is going away, since you can't really build and launch a massive rocket from an airship. Spaceplanes might be a better solution, I don't know.

By comparison, the Moon gets massive temperature variations, is covered in dangerous dust, has a 28 days light cycle, and has some water near the pole, where it's the most difficult to land. Nuclear energy is limited by dissipation, and solar either by the long night, or by the shallow angle, rotation, and distance from the ice resources at the poles.

For Mars, the deltaV is slightly lower, but the transit time much longer, you would need pressurized habitat and suits, strong insulation, possibly to bury yourself for radiation protection. The atmosphere is just thin enough to be annoying without being useful for lift or resources. If you want access to volatiles, you'll need to be close to the poles, which means even less solar power. Moving stuff around (because you don't find every resource in the same spot for example) will require to build roads or rails. The most interesting point is low delta-V budgets to go to the asteroid belt.

[victory143]

Airships? This is different...

[AngelLestat]

gm3bq, sargeRho, peadar1987:

When you put all data over the table and start to look all pross and cons about what is the best place in the solar system to seat a base.

You will be agree.

Here there is a note about today electronics being made for venus missions:

And in a few years we can dispose of carbon base electronics using CNT or graphene "We already made graphene transistors"

Like winterman said, they can be isolated, also cooled expending extra energy, moving heat from circuits to outside.

The acid is not a problem, we know everything that we need to know about how to counter all different acids.

Teflon, ceramics, plastics (only for the floating city) are all perfect covers.

We not need to expend rocket energy to rise the components to the city. We do it with a hot air ballon.

All these question about why is better than mars and others are already answered in this previous post:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68857-Terraforming-Venus?p=963968&viewfull=1#post963968

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68857-Terraforming-Venus?p=964340&viewfull=1#post964340

Also if you read this post

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68857-Terraforming-Venus?p=960786&viewfull=1#post960786

there is the original geofrey landis paper, and you can see how the payloads can be transported.

There is just one issue, how you transport payload from venus floating city to earth, just using rocket is not a good way, becouse the atmosphere at that height has the same 50km, but it has concave shape from the density point of view (instead convex like earth). But you have 0,9g.

So you can rise again rockets with hot air ballons to a very high altitude over the city, and due to the lower gravity, you can use engines with more isp and lower thrust, so you would not need so much deltav to get orbit.

Mining in venus has a lot more profit that in any other place.

Venus has more heavy elements than earth becouse is closest to the sun. This is due becouse before sun was another start who die like supernova (plutonium comes from there) and all heavy elements remain at closest orbits.

After the impact against earth which form the moon, almost all heavy elements remains with earth, for that reason moon has very low amounts of heavy elements. Either light elements, becouse all gases or water is lost by sun wind pressure.

If you transport 5T in diamonds from venus to earth, that has a value of u$S 20000 millons. Diamonds are value, not just becouse they are nice, also becouse they are very usefull in many things, like super lens, etc.

You can find many other heavy elements that cost more or less than diamond.

After you read the links that I show you, try to find something negative about venus that would make mars a better place. I challenge you. If you are right, it would not be difficult to prove it.

EDIT: Like addiction to what idolox said, here is the design of the next venus rovers.

Edited February 12, 2014 by AngelLestat

[DaveofDefeat]

Considering how common diamonds are on earth, I doubt you'd ever make money transporting them from Venus.

[SargeRho]

Again, Diamonds are only valuable because of shady business, not because they are rare. They aren't rare at all. There is nothing on Venus that can't be mined much, much cheaper from the Moon and Near Earth Asteroids. You also can't build a fully self-sufficient colony on Venus, but you can on Mars, and even the Moon. Also having an atmosphere, producing semiconductors and superalloys more efficiently isn't an option either. And Plutonium is produced in Nuclear Reactors. Uranium is I think the heaviest element Supernovae produce. It's also not all that useful. RTGs and Nukes. Those are the applications of Plutonium. It isn't naturally occuring on either Earth or Venus.

Also, if I could choose between taking a walk in Vallis Marineris, sanding before or on top of Olympus Mons, etc. , and spending all my time on an airship with nothing but dull sand-colored clouds of acid below...I'd choose the former.

So my question to you: What can be done on Venus that can't be done easier or as easy on Mars, the Moon and Near Earth Asteroids?

Edited February 12, 2014 by SargeRho

[TheGatesofLogic]

it's not necessarily true to say that a supernova can not produce plutonium, rather that the amount produced by a supernova decays so quickly it does not last very long in a geological timeframe.

[SargeRho]

So by now there isn't any useful quantity left now, which ammounts to the same thing.

[AngelLestat]

Once you are there, with mining tools, the cost of mining and sent 5T of diamonds from venus to earth, is not even close to the 20000 millons of earnings you get.

You said that diamonds are not valuable, but if I have that amount I can sell them for that price you want it or not. So that make them valuable.

There is more valuable elements there? yes, there are.

Meanwhile at earth every time is less cost effective extract resources (we already extrated and consume in 50 years the half of all the petroleum on earth, that was made it in 2000 millons of year), we have limit reserve of heavy elements. And extract them means cause major pollution.

If we dont want to end like Venus, it will be a good advice stop doing what we do.

Besides, we need space, the human popullation keeps growing. The land price increase every day. There is an 70% of the populattion which still live in the same way that we did hundreds of years back.

So if we do all right and all this people get similar resources than everybody else; the question is... from where we would get all those resources?

About moon, when Moon Impact Probe crush into the surface, scientist noted that it was almost no trace of heavy elements. And this had sense with the current theory of moon formation. Besides, there is not volcano in the moon, so there is not way where heavy elements can arise to surface.

You also can't build a fully self-sufficient colony on Venus, but you can on Mars, and even the Moon

Why we cant?

In Venus we can get oxigen, hidrogen, water vapour, nitrogen (there is 4 times more nitrogen than at earth), co2, sulfure and other elements right from the atmosphere.

We can go out outside with just cloth to protect us from the acid rain and oxigen, we can extrat the nitrogen from the atmophere with some special filters and look at the sky with 0,9g and the same atmosphere pressure.

If you have a little hole in your base at moon or mars.. you die!

Also is not very know if the gravity of mars is enoght to escape to all health problems.

Some art pictures of floating cities.

http://i.imgur.com/bJVzn.jpg

http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/298/e/d/venus_sunset_by_invertedvantage-d31il2q.png

Being close to the sun, like your period time is shorted, you have launch windows more often to any place and higher deltaV to go to any place. Becouse venus orbit speed is faster.

Your light day last 48 hs, and 48hs of night. You can go and fly all the time you want with an electric airplane. Is a lot lot easier to fly at venus.

Venus has more energy than moon or mars. What do you do in mars close to the poles to extrat water? Like idolox said, you had less solar power in the poles, and you need to use all the energy to melt ice, but you also need energy to everything else.

In venus you have energy wherever you look, you can extract energy from the wind, or chemical energy from the elements, thermal energy, nuclear, etc.

If you seat at venus more than 500 years, and with so many cities the hidrogen start to scarce, it is very easy to aerocapture an ice comet to mining.

Also you can keep the comet at very low orbit, with sun energy we melt ice and we use it like proppelent to mantain orbit, all this proppelent (water) fall to the atmosphere, within years, you could remove all sulfure from upper atmosphere and had breathe air.

Edited February 12, 2014 by AngelLestat

[Kryten]

Once you are there, with mining tools, the cost of mining and sent 5T of diamonds from venus to earth, is not even close to the 20000 millons of earnings you get.

You said that diamonds are not valuable, but if I have that amount I can sell them for that price you want it or not. So that make them valuable.

Diamonds aren't some kind of element, they're just a form of carbon and can be manufactured. It's extremely doubtful that diamonds could be retrieved from Venus for less energy than it would to synthesise equivelant diamonds, and there's not even any real reason to believe diamonds would be more common or easier to access on Venus anyway.

[DaveofDefeat]

Not to mention bringing 5 tons of diamonds into the market would decrease their value significantly, then you would have to find somebody to purchase all of those diamonds which would have to be jewelers or something similar, because diamonds sold for industrial uses are worth far less. So at the end of the day it would take you 10 years to sell them all.

[Winter Man]

Let's be honest, by the time either bispheres on Mars or flying cloud cities on Venus are feasible, we're going to do both because they're both incredibly cool.

[SargeRho]

Mars has as much land mass as Earth's continents. Well, maybe not once it's terraformed, but that's beside the point right now.

Define heavy elements. The moon is rich in Iron, Aluminium, Silicon, etc. To an astronomer, those are heavy elements (everything heavier than Helium). As are NEOs. If you could mine Diamonds on Venus (And you can't, actually, there won't be any diamonds within reach, due to the nature of the crust), and ship them to Earth, they would be way more expensive than Terran diamonds, and nobody would even *want* to buy them.

As for Mars: Nuclear power is, like for so many things in space, the answer. And you don't want to settle near the poles initially anyway.

"We can go out outside with just cloth to protect us from the acid rain and oxigen, "

So, a fancier version of hazmat suits, in other words space suits. Same goes for Mars, just with a bit more cloth between you and the atmosphere. Returning from Mars to Earth is easier from Mars. Mining Mars is vastly more economic, and easier, than mining Venus, if that's even possible to an industrial extent.

Did you just say it's easy to brake a comet into orbit? Comets are typically in very "steep" orbits. They are very fast. There is nothing easy about bringing one into orbit. And they have a tail that far into the solar system.

Edited February 12, 2014 by SargeRho