Terraforming Venus

[peadar1987]

In 2012, global diamond production was $12.64 billion. Suddenly increasing production by 50%, which is what you're proposing, would cause prices to plummet. In the capitalist market, something is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. People are only willing to pay a lot for diamonds because the market was controlled by De Beers, and they were very clever with their power.

Dumping a load of extra diamonds on the market would do two things. Firstly, it would make diamonds more common, which would make the price drop anyway, because of basic supply and demand. Second, it would topple De Beers' dominant market position, meaning that the price of diamonds would drop still further.

The only reason to bring resources from space back to earth is if they don't exist in any appreciable quantity on earth (Helium 3, if it proves to be the best fuel for controlled nuclear fusion, etc.), or if they are something that cannot be manufactured effectively in earth's gravity (certain drugs and electronic components). Other than this it will always, almost without exception, be cheaper to dig deeper, invent new equipment, or even go to war to secure those resources. If De Beers and their competitors actually wanted more diamonds, it would be far easier for them to spend a couple of hundred million to throw more cheap labour and machinery at an existing mine to ramp up production than it would be to spend several tens or hundreds of billions sending the same sort of workforce to Venus. And diamonds are among the most expensive substances by mass in the world. Sulphuric acid? Forget it, we'll make it here.

[peadar1987]

I did have an idea once about the colonisation of Mercury, however. If we ever get to the stage where we need to produce large quantities of antimatter for spaceship fuel, using the high solar radiation on Mercury might prove more practical than making it here on earth, especially as you wouldn't need huge amounts of delta-V to leave the planet's surface. However, that is well in the future.

[AngelLestat]

Terraform Venus? Its the future. Earth is just catching up.

True

For that reason Venus is so important to science too.

De Beers.

Traditionally they controlled over 90% of the market, operating as a monopoly and strictly controlling the price by restricting supply and aggressively suppressing competition. They now claim they only control 50% and aren't quite so blatantly evil, but it's hard to tell how much of this is PR window dressing. They are certainly still overwhelmingly the dominant force in the market, and exert considerable control over the price.

Diamonds aren't expensive because they're rare or difficult to obtain and process, they're expensive because De Beers wants them to be.

You are right about the 50% (quite less). I dint found it when I search it. I retract.

In 2012, global diamond production was $12.64 billion. Suddenly increasing production by 50%, which is what you're proposing, would cause prices to plummet. In the capitalist market, something is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. People are only willing to pay a lot for diamonds because the market was controlled by De Beers, and they were very clever with their power.

Dumping a load of extra diamonds on the market would do two things. Firstly, it would make diamonds more common, which would make the price drop anyway, because of basic supply and demand. Second, it would topple De Beers' dominant market position, meaning that the price of diamonds would drop still further.

Good analisys. But that was my real example? That is the only way? How I said. ECONOMICS IS NOT SO SIMPLE.

Is like saying that hot air rises over the cold, and from there try to simulate the entire global climate.

First you will not bring 5T of diamonds, it will be 5T of each expensive element or product that you found or develope in venus.

In case diamonds are so easy to get. Then you will have that DeBeers would become in the main investment. You personally not need to do nothing, Nasa or other agencies are not the ones that would make money mining or wherever. You just build it, and they will come.

Now you may think that it would not be good for DeBeers get so much diamonds becouse that would get down the price. That would be stupid to think. In that case they should stop all mining in earth and weight to the price market rise.

First, Diamonds has a big margin of profits than even if they price gets down, the earnings are huge. But if the diamond price gets down a lot of companies would start to use it for their products to improve their quality. So the price rise again!

Lets change a little, now lets talk about platine or other elements. If you bring so much of one thing. You can sell it to very low prices.. This would eliminate any other competence, so when their share prices collapse, then you buy them and control the maket.

That is what China did with heavy elements.

And like those, there is many other different strategies to make a business sustainable.

The big true. All these resources are not renewable. Each time cost more to extract them. At the end of this century would be extracted almost all the resources close to the surfuce. For example, if you need resources that are just 30m below and you need open pit mining, then you need to remove first 30m depth multiply by many football fields in volume to start. That is not economic viable. So you reach a point when its more cheap deep 5m in venus than 30 at earth.

And when that time comes, You need to be prepared with machinary already extrating resources from there. If you dont, our global economy collapse.

It is like renewable energy vs Oil. It reach a point "to day" when any investment on renewable energy is more profit than Oil.

This means that we never had it before to become economically viable? Not.

We have it and use it since many years. But now we are ready to make the change.

If De Beers and their competitors actually wanted more diamonds, it would be far easier for them to spend a couple of hundred million to throw more cheap labour and machinery at an existing mine to ramp up production than it would be to spend several tens or hundreds of billions sending the same sort of workforce to Venus. And diamonds are among the most expensive substances by mass in the world. Sulphuric acid? Forget it, we'll make it here.

So debeers can get more diamonds but they dont want it? That is really silly.

Diamonds are not easy to find. There is a lot of study to see where is profit to mine or not.

About sulfuric acid, I never said bring that from venus!

Sulfuric Acid is the most value chemical element to the industry. This mean that all manufacture process to make habitats and all you need to live there become cheaper.

Also means that with extra energy, great temperatures and pressures at surfuce.. No oxigen at surface (here we expend a lot of money just to separate or remove oxide elements from metals) and acid sulfure. It becomes in a paradise for many industrial process. So you can develope products there for a tiny of their cost.

I did have an idea once about the colonisation of Mercury, however. If we ever get to the stage where we need to produce large quantities of antimatter for spaceship fuel, using the high solar radiation on Mercury might prove more practical than making it here on earth, especially as you wouldn't need huge amounts of delta-V to leave the planet's surface. However, that is well in the future.

Yes, you can live at craters shadows. But you also can sent a solar cell made of graphene with a brayton cycle to increase its efficiency much more close to the sun, and sent the power using a big laser aperture and a fresnel lens to focus the energy to earth. I dont know what is more efficient.

Edited February 14, 2014 by AngelLestat

[peadar1987]

So debeers can get more diamonds but they dont want it? That is really silly.

It's the truth. They can mine say double the diamonds this year, and sell them for half the price, or they can continue at current production, sell the diamonds at full price, then do the same next year. They'll have done very extensive studies to work out the exact right amount of diamonds to mine to make the maximum profit over a time period of decades.

[TheGatesofLogic]

Again, your economics is flawed, though in a slightly less foolish way. What companies will suddenly begin to afford diamonds for industrial use? Industrial grade diamonds are the largest fraction of all diamond use and 90% OF THESE ARE SYNTHETIC. The industrial diamond industry boasts annual products of over 114T of production annually, thus the your magic "prices fall, but now they rise because industrial use will be greater" is flawed, as it will hardly make a dent in that industry's product. While you might make a massive impact in the jewelry industry, it will not be profitable, and if you somehow believe people will enter into a falling market that's an issue of stupidity. Overall the issue is moot, diamonds are worthless as a purpose for Venal Terra-formation or colonization.

[Rondon]

Problematically AngelLestat, if a colony is to be reliant on trade in order to survive, the thing is that of all the rocky planets Venus has the second largest escape velocity, so you would have to travel between the two heaviest rocky planets, in order to trade. Venus has twice the escape velocity of Mars and four times the Moons, and while Venus has nearly twice as much energy per meter squared at the 1 atm of pressure compared to earth, mars and the moon don't have a quarter of it blocked by 1 atmosphere of pressure, so mars while in total mars has slightly more than a quarter as much energy, and the moon has only slightly less energy per meter squared compared to Venus, but due to the tyranny of the rocket equation, (and unless you can get it done in a single stage, which for a 10km/s acceleration plus capture velocity combined with severe air braking/additional 5km/s deceleration you probably wont) mars would be easier, and besides all that if all you want is to bring material to LEO, all you need for the moon is to achieve the 2.5km/s escape velocity and then do a manageable air brake, followed by a couple 100m/s delta V and you're in LEO.

[RuBisCO]

No matter what we would need titanic amounts of hydrogen, either as water or hydrogen it self. Enough to make oceans on venus, best by converting all of its existing supply of CO2 into water and carbon. Just a negligible fraction of Venus's CO2 converted into oxgyen would be enough to make an atmosphere with breathable oxgyen partial pressure (roughly 1/400th venus's CO2), so the rest would need to be converted into water. Venus's atmosphere weighes 4.8*10^20 kg and is 96.5% CO2, that would mean we would need to import at least 4.2*10^19 kg of hydrogen to turn all that into water (and coal). This would make 3.4*10^20 kg of water, or about 23% of the water in earth's oceans, and probably two to three order of magnitude less then all the water on earth and inside earth. So even if we converted almost all of venus's CO2 to water venus would still be a dry planet with at least 1/5 the surface water of earth and probably less as it is slowly absorbed into venus's extremely parched regolith. Mind you much of venus would then be covered in several hundred meters of carbon soot, which I would hope is compacted under the water and does not absorb much of it like a sponge.

How would we get all the hydrogen there? We would need to extract it from one of the gas giants, likely need something really crazy advanced like antigravity tractor beam atmosphere suckers or wormhole atmosphere pumps. Fun question, what happens to potential and kinetic energy when you have a wormhole on jupiter hosing out hydrogen gas on to Venus? I would assume to prevent violation of physics and making portal like proportional motion machines possible the wormhole would need to make up the energy difference, either that or the hydrogen comes spraying out at 22 km/s!

Perhaps it could be done by thousands of titanic ships that skim the atmosphere of say Uranus (the smallest gas giant) harvest cubic kilometers of hydrogen, cool and compressed it into a liquid, and then fly over to Venus where it is dumped into the atmosphere somehow and the cycle repeated. The propulsion system would at the very least need to be nuclear fusion. One thousand of these ships reaching venus a year, each moving a cubic kilometer of liquid hydrogen would take 20,441 years to move the required amount of hydrogen.

How would hydrogen make water? That part is simple thermochemistry: venus's own superheat atmosphere would do the job, converting CO2 to Methane and water via its own heat and pressure near the surface, bio-engineered microbes inoculated into venus's clouds could then back converted the methane into carbon (soot) and hydrogen. Eventually the clouds would become made of water (rather then sulfates and sulfuric acid). The clouds would start to rain down once the surface temperature got low enough. Depending on how thick venus's very thin crust is, and thus how well it convects heat, it could take decades to thousands of year to bring venus's surface temperature down even close to liviable, not assuming the time it takes the bring all that hydrogen of course.

As the surface termpature drops on venus more and more of the conversion of CO2 and hydrogen to water would need to be taken up by cloud microbes. At first this process would consist of organisms utilizing CO2 and hydrogen to make water and biomass, then eventually dying or getting too heavy and falling to the surface where the heat and pressure pyrolysis the biomass into coal and the hydrogen floats back up. But once the temperature drops, organisms would need to be designed to produce pure carbon, either that or the surface would be covered in hundreds of meters of biomass, taking a good percentage of hydrogen with it, I would say roughly doubling the hydrogen requirement. And making venue's surface truly alien covered by a gigantic living “thing†hundreds of meters thick and covering all the low lands of the planet! Mind you it can be dead biomass or it would rot, oxidize and suck up all the oxgen and covert it back into CO2.

All that assumes that eventually an orbital sunshade is made, For what will be left of venus's atmosphere consisting of 3 times the amount of nitrogen as on earth (three times the final air pressure of earth roughly) and with venus's closer proximity to the sun, bring down venus's surface temp will eventual require cutting down the sunlight reaching venus. A sunshade 4 times wider then venus at a point out at Venus's L1 would eclipse the sun completely, how to deal with solar pressure and the like I don't know, perhaps a stable point beyond L2 where solar pressure, the sun's gravity and venus's gravity cancel each other out can exist.

Assuming all that, the at least 4.2*10^19 kg of hydrogen, the at most 50,000 km wide sunshade with light controlling apature. holes or vairable diameter. All of that Life on venus would be very different from earth (besides the the planet size bioroid or coal producing microbes). Venus's gravity is 90.4% that of earth's so gravity would be nearly the same, unlike on mars, but that residual atmosphere would be roughly 3 times as thick as the earth. Scuba diver's experience that pressure at roughly 30 meters under water, that pressure is were nitrogen necrosis starts to become noticeable, via scuba's divers "Martini's law" that pressure is equal to one martini, so everyone on terraformed Venus would be the roughly physiologically equivalent of drunk (mildly high on Nitrous oxide would be a closer analogy)

Hopefully, probably human neural chemistry will adapt to the increase in nitrogen's partial pressure, so that they won't be 'inebriated' for the rest of their lives.

Once one adapts to the drunken phase of life settling on venus, and setting up settlement need the few places of open water (or drinking off the gigantic teets of the planet size superorganism) the next thing to get use-to will be the day, for venus's day is ¼ of a year long! Venus's has a solar day that is 116.75 earth days long, with daylight for 58 earth days or 2 earth months, and nighttime for another 2 earth months. Noon, dawn, dusk and midnight would replace summer, spring, fall and winter as seasons. Venus's atmosphere will hopefully, even at just 3-4% its present thickness, still superotate, and thus bring heat from the daylight side to the nighttime side, keeping the winter-night bearable and the summer-day from baking hot.

Animal and plant life on venus's would need to be heavily engineered to handle 2 months of daylight and 2 months of nightime. A very different kind of ecosystem would need to exist, for example migratory animals that stay in the daylight, all they have to do is keep moving east at an average speed of 6.5 km/h. Perhaps flying migratory plantimals that keep in the sun for photosynthesis, Hyper-evolved from the first cloud seeding organism used in the initial transformation. Besides that all the same strategies on earth for dealing with summer and winter might work on venus: hibernation, seasonal transformation, etc, except in just 4 earth month long cycles instead of 12. Growing cycles for plants would need to be short, at most 2 months, or they curl up for the winter-night to open up again for the daylight.

So add all that together and terraforming venus is a tall order, and after all that work the resulting world maybe livable by human standards but nothing like life on earth, it would be... well... Alien.

Terraforming Mars is frankly a much easier task, sure you would likely need orbital mirrors or sulfur hexfloride factories at maybe a few thousand kilometer wide comets made of alot of methane and ammonia, but that peanuts compared to the material needs of terraforming venus.

I would say if you really want to be cheap just use the asteriods as material source for building huge orbital colonies, gigantics space stations kilometers wide that produce "gravity" by rotating, have climate controlled enviorments, and use artifcal magnetosphere and asteriod minned slag for radiation protection. Screw mars and venus and the moon altogether.

Edited February 15, 2014 by RuBisCO

[Designer225]

If Venus and Mars were swapped orbit things would've been easier. But no. Now we have to do science on the planets with the slim possibility (little chance) of life...

[AngelLestat]

It's the truth. They can mine say double the diamonds this year, and sell them for half the price, or they can continue at current production, sell the diamonds at full price, then do the same next year. They'll have done very extensive studies to work out the exact right amount of diamonds to mine to make the maximum profit over a time period of decades.

And I imagine that you have a source of all this tale? Or is just what you imagine?

I can not find sense in this strategy, if they stop mining, other companies would kept doing it. So they get less diamonds, and other companies still produce them and gain more money with a plus, becouse debeers is not producing.

Again, your economics is flawed, though in a slightly less foolish way. What companies will suddenly begin to afford diamonds for industrial use? Industrial grade diamonds are the largest fraction of all diamond use and 90% OF THESE ARE SYNTHETIC. The industrial diamond industry boasts annual products of over 114T of production annually, thus the your magic "prices fall, but now they rise because industrial use will be greater" is flawed, as it will hardly make a dent in that industry's product. While you might make a massive impact in the jewelry industry, it will not be profitable, and if you somehow believe people will enter into a falling market that's an issue of stupidity. Overall the issue is moot, diamonds are worthless as a purpose for Venal Terra-formation or colonization.

I never said only in jewelry.

That is your problem, you did not read me from the begining. I coment 4 pages back, that there is a lot of products that are willing to use big diamonds if their price is reduced at least a little. But they also needs to be sure that always would be stock. They can not change their products and one day they realize that there is not stock (which means that the cost went up).

All about optics, is very expansive. Now go to science experimental optics, and the cost rise much more. Diamonds are so much incredible that the best optics. But their price is too much. They can be used to improve lasers, medicine, great lens, etc.

Their properties are great, for example:

You can made a micro diamond sail of 100cm2, get a powerfull laser (multiple bounce), and accelerate that microsail to almost lightspeed in 1 second and it would be fine.

They also can be very usefull in fusion. There is a lot of diamonds uses that we dont see, just becouse they are too expensive and rare.

Read about heavy elements in car production. You will see how some companies like toyota "prious" use them to get great efficiencies and some others companies avoid them completly (not becouse they are expensive) just becouse there are rare. So they will end up raising the cost of those items down to numbers out of control.

Problematically AngelLestat, if a colony is to be reliant on trade in order to survive, the thing is that of all the rocky planets Venus has the second largest escape velocity, so you would have to travel between the two heaviest rocky planets, in order to trade. Venus has twice the escape velocity of Mars and four times the Moons, and while Venus has nearly twice as much energy per meter squared at the 1 atm of pressure compared to earth, mars and the moon don't have a quarter of it blocked by 1 atmosphere of pressure, so mars while in total mars has slightly more than a quarter as much energy, and the moon has only slightly less energy per meter squared compared to Venus, but due to the tyranny of the rocket equation, (and unless you can get it done in a single stage, which for a 10km/s acceleration plus capture velocity combined with severe air braking/additional 5km/s deceleration you probably wont) mars would be easier, and besides all that if all you want is to bring material to LEO, all you need for the moon is to achieve the 2.5km/s escape velocity and then do a manageable air brake, followed by a couple 100m/s delta V and you're in LEO.

We already talk about this.

Get low orbit from cloud city would take 8,5km/s, although we have the same pressure and less gravity 0,9g, venus atmosphere has a concave density shape in contrary to earth that is convex. For that reason, even that we have less gravity and venus diameter is smaller, there is not much difference to get low orbit than in earth (9,5km/s)

But! I guess we can take advantage of that concave shape and low gravity using an hidrogen ballon to rise the rocket to a highest altitude, this with a low thrust high isp engine would be enoght to make an efficient launchs.

From LVO to LEO you can use a solar sail, venus rocket fall again to venus atmosphere and you recover.

But this expenditure in propellent is not enoght to make things not profits. About the aerocapture and different manuvers, you can find more data at page 5.

If Venus and Mars were swapped orbit things would've been easier. But no. Now we have to do science on the planets with the slim possibility (little chance) of life...

Venus is great just the way that it is.

Rubisco:You are late, we are agree that is not a good idea try to terraform venus. We are talking about the idea of live in their clouds.

PD: Some materials that maybe has potential for comerce.

Taaffeite, Tritium, Californium, Painite, Platinum, Rhodium, gold, Molybdenum, Osmium, Ruthenium, Palladium, Rhenium, Rhodium, Technetium, tantalum, niobium, Thorium, Uranium, Mercury.

[Seret]

And I imagine that you have a source of all this tale? Or is just what you imagine?

I can not find sense in this strategy, if they stop mining, other companies would kept doing it. So they get less diamonds, and other companies still produce them and gain more money with a plus, becouse debeers is not producing.

A quick Google would find for you numerous resources discussing De Beers' relationship to the global diamond trade. It's widely known. Even their wikipedia page details numerous court cases brought against them by governments to try and break up their monopoly and prevent their anticompetitive practises.

In the bad old days if another company tried to push lots of diamonds onto the market De Beers would simply buy them and stockpile them, keeping the retail price high. They still made money doing this because they could sell them for more than they bought them.

[RuBisCO]

Rubisco:You are late, we are agree that is not a good idea try to terraform venus. We are talking about the idea of live in their clouds.

PD: Some materials that maybe has potential for comerce.

Taaffeite, Tritium, Californium, Painite, Platinum, Rhodium, gold, Molybdenum, Osmium, Ruthenium, Palladium, Rhenium, Rhodium, Technetium, tantalum, niobium, Thorium, Uranium, Mercury.

Just build asteroid colonies then, you can find all the same elements often in concentrations several times higher then any terrestrial mine.

[Rakaydos]

Angel, I agree that the venus Cloud City is a good idea, but drop the idea of interplanetary commerce. Intelectual property is a much more exportable resource, as information can be transmitted through both gravity wells with hardly any cost.

Atmospheric mining is much more reasonable, but it's best used for local resources rather than exporting.

[peadar1987]

And I imagine that you have a source of all this tale? Or is just what you imagine?

I can not find sense in this strategy, if they stop mining, other companies would kept doing it. So they get less diamonds, and other companies still produce them and gain more money with a plus, becouse debeers is not producing.

It's basic business practice, but as Seret has said, a quick google will get you plenty of specific examples relating to De Beers. It's in nobody's interests to overproduce diamonds, because that would drop the price, and cut into everyone's profit margins. Anybody with the production capacity to affect prices is firmly on the side of keeping the price high for years to come. What would you do if you controlled 50% of the world's diamond supply?

OPEC do the same thing. They never produce oil at full capacity, they limit production to control prices.

[AngelLestat]

Just build asteroid colonies then, you can find all the same elements often in concentrations several times higher then any terrestrial mine.

Like I said already, 0g makes all mining process a nightmare. You can not detonate nothing, you can not select or separate with efficiency desired elements from unwanted. You need build something a lot bigger than the I.S.S. with artificial gravity. All habitat in space needs to be vacuum proof . This is not cheap, also is risky. Then you need resources. Water, many plants for food and oxigen, etc. "A LOT OF ENERGY REQUIREMENTS and you have only 350w/m2 or less" You need some kind of shielding against radiation.

And if you finish to mine 1 asteroid, you need to move your base to another. Asteroids are not close from each other. In fact in time fly, you are closer from venus than from the same asteroid belt.

About water if you are lucky, maybe you found a close ice asteroid very close to your target asteroid.

Solar sails so far from the sun are not very good to be used like transport. So maybe you need to use something with proppelent.

In the venus case, you can capture an asteroid and push it with a solar sail over the years (maybe you can use the same asteroid material like proppelent) until you get an encounter. You aerocapture the asteroid using the thick venusian atmosphere. Then you can work in the asteroid using telerobotics commanded from the cloud city.

Angel, I agree that the venus Cloud City is a good idea, but drop the idea of interplanetary commerce. Intelectual property is a much more exportable resource, as information can be transmitted through both gravity wells with hardly any cost.

Atmospheric mining is much more reasonable, but it's best used for local resources rather than exporting.

What do you mean? I know the intelectual property like comodity used at earth. But I dont know how you plan to use it between worlds.

It's basic business practice, but as Seret has said, a quick google will get you plenty of specific examples relating to De Beers. It's in nobody's interests to overproduce diamonds, because that would drop the price, and cut into everyone's profit margins. Anybody with the production capacity to affect prices is firmly on the side of keeping the price high for years to come. What would you do if you controlled 50% of the world's diamond supply?

OPEC do the same thing. They never produce oil at full capacity, they limit production to control prices.

I search, I dont find nothing, I guess you two are confused with the strategy of stretch gains over time when you have a limited resource. This is easy to see with Oil. We already spend it the half of earth Oil. Every time is more difficult to get it, find differents places where to extracted require a lot of studies and big plataforms, knowing already that you have a limited amount and you need to stretch it at least 50 years more. (becouse the cost would rise).

The same happen with diamonds, find another places to mine is not easy, they require a lot of investment, and each diamond that you extract and you sell right now, is a diamonds that you can not sell in the future. Each time you need to remove more ground to find less diamonds. So right now is not cost efficient make huge investments to increase the diamonds production becouse with the current diamond cost those investments produce loses. But all this happen becouse we know that is a limited resource.

If you dont have so limited resource and the cost of extraction is not so high, you can sell and mining almost all you want, depending of how many diamonds aplications emerge with the new diamond price and trust that the price would not grow so much in the future.

But your example has not sense for the same reason I give it to you.

If you dont produce, then other companies kept doing it, and they get the profit that you are not selling, so their price grow and they gain money. So if they gain more money that you, they get more power and star to buy your shares.

Again. Economics is not easy..

I can give you thodsend of examples about the colonial times where spain, france, england and portugal arrive to America, and a lot of things that seems that it can not be profits, they do it the same, And they gather a lot of power in those times.

For example in Buenos Aires, how there was not the right type of rocks to make cobbles roads, they bring them from europe. You know how much cobbles you need just to make 1 road?

Resources in earth rise each day, becouse we have limited resources. Space transportation cost are reduce every day. Demands rise at hand of population and development. Renewel energy was already here before it was cost efficient.

My estimations are, 50 years to have the first floating outpost manned at Venus, 20 years later we would start with mining and sent some things to earth.

The only problem of venus, that you need to have from the begining a way to get out of there once you send the first people to live in their clouds. Once you get past that point, a venus colony would grow many times faster than a moon or mars colony.

[SargeRho]

0g actually doesn't make mining a nightmare. Quite the opposite, it makes it really easy. And you can use centrifuges to separate stuff, which is normally done anyway. Hydrogen and oxygen aren't exactly rare on asteroids. And Near Earth Objects are easier to reach than Venus, or even the Moon.

And no, a venus colony wouldn't grow faster than a moon or mars colony, due to the critical lack of ressources. Extracting them from the surface is rather difficult, unlike the Moon and Mars, where you can basically just bake the regolith into concrete.

How many times do we have to tell you: Diamonds are _NOT_ rare at all. They are very common in fact. Mining diamonds on Venus is not, and cannot, be profitable compared to mining them on Earth, where they will not run out. And if they do run out, you produce them artificially, which is still cheaper than getting them from another planet. *IF* there are diamonds on Venus, they are likely underneath layers of granite and other pretty punishing rocks.

Moving across an ocean is absolutely not comparable with moving across interplanetary space. For one, you can get water and part of your food from the sea, and you don't have to worry about air, and the centimeters of aluminium that separate you from the vacuum of space. Not to mention many things imported from around the world weren't available at all in Europe. Which is not the case with Venus. There is nothing on Venus that we don't also have here, that is worth getting from there.

If you want to live in and exploit the clouds of another planet, go to Jupiter and mine Helium 3, also Ammonia which is often used as coolant from its Moons. But Venus? It's worthless. If you want to use it as a gravitational anchor for solar power, use Mercury and beam it via Microwaves to Earth.

The only thing an outpost on Venus would be worthwhile for is Science. For extreme material sciences and atmospheric science, and to study the planet itself of course. But there is no viable industry opportunity on Venus. While you *can* mine stuff, you can't sell the stuff you mine. Because stuff from damn near everywhere else is cheaper. Diamonds? Common on Earth. Platinum-group metals? Moon, and Near Earth Asteroids. Both easier to reach and mine than Venus. Habitation? The moon is infinitely more "useful" for that than Venus. In the case of an emergency, you can get back to Earth or recieve supplies from Earth within days. On Venus you're ****ed. With a cactus.

Extracting ressources on the Moon is far easier than on Venus. Dealing with the vacuum of space is easier than dealing with 90 atmospheres and 450+ °C. And you can build the return vehicle right there, relatively cheaply. Or you build a mass driver and just shoot the stuff back to Earth if that's where you want to use it. Or to orbit, and give it a small monopropellant engine or AlLOX engine. Getting to and back from a Near Earth Object is also easier than reaching Venus, and often even the Moon.

If anything, Venus is a target for fancy villas and billionaires. For the future middle class, Mars and the Moon will be more viable. Dealing with Mars' .1 atmosphere, and almost Earthlike temperatures is also easier than mining things on Venus. You can on both Mars and the Moon just take regolith and directly use it as construction material. Someone has actually demonstrated the capacity to produce bricks out of regolith, although they used artificial regolith for that.

Edited February 16, 2014 by SargeRho

[NASAFanboy]

Fifty years to having a manned base on Venus?

Thats 2063, and thats wholly optimistic.

Twenty years to extract resources?

Thats 2083. Still wholly optimistic.

I can assure you, we can land on Mars by 2030 and have a base by 2050, and we shall return to the Moon in the 2020's and have a base in the 2030's, but we will not, in any way, have a base that is in the atmosphere of Venus before 2090. Venus is an red herring, a poisoned apple. It may look convincing to you, but it will destroy everything. Everything.

Venus is living planetary embodiment of hell itself.

A typical Mars rover that is high-quality will last years.

A hypothetical Venus rover using future technology will last five hours.

There is no way a living inferno of hell like Venus will ever be an more desirable spot for colonization than the Moon or Mars, unless the world got high, drunk, and stupid at the same time. Firstly, you need much less dV to return from the Moon or Mars, and it is easier to construct to-orbit infrastructure there like space elevators (We already hypothetically have technology to construct a lunar space elevator, and probably a Mars space elevator very soon). These two bodies, the Moon and Mars, also have minerals, many of which could be valuable, such as gold and diamonds (Mars is rich in carbon like Venus), and even ice and water. There is also speculated abundance of platainum and gold on Mars, which can be extracted without the crushing temperatures of Venus and the atomsphere. Oh, and on the Moon, you have both a nice view of Earth (Except for nights) and an convinent spot to refuel/service ships headed out onto interplanetary missions, since the Moon is close to our homeworld (Earth). Venus does not offer that, and nethier does Mars.

The only advantage Venus has is the slightly less dV you need to get there. Only, except, this advantage is rendered moot by the fact it takes roughly ten times (And I'm probably underspeculating) the dV to return from the Venusian surface than it takes to return from Mars, and around thirty times the dV to return from the Moon. Oh, and radiation around Venus is more intense due to the fact it is much closer to the Sun than Mars.

The only thing I can see happening to manned spaceflight near Venus in the foreseeable future is this:

But by 2150, we might have this:

(Thats a manned landing on Venus, by the way)

Which will ultimately lead to your dream being realized around 2150-2200.

But having it become more popular than Mars and the Moon is a huge folly.

As for the gravity and atmospherical pressure, I would rather have weaker bones and be a little light-headed and dizzy on Earth for three months than to be crushed inside out on Venus.

[KASASpace]

What if we could place the harmful gases in the atmosphere of venus deep in the crust?

Bare with me here.

If all the gases in Earth's crust were released, it would be WORSE than Venus. For us, that is.

Of course any information pointing otherwise is welcome.

Solar sails need to enter a more large usage.

Edited February 16, 2014 by KASASpace

[RuBisCO]

Like I said already, 0g makes all mining process a nightmare. You can not detonate nothing

But you could do with shaft mining. A mechanical “wormâ€Â, could eat out an asteroid from the inside. Being able to grip the walls of the tunnel to move about, no need for gravity. Because of its extremely low gravity a good percentage of an asteroid should be able to be dug out in this way before the asteroid collapses. Likely even then the collapse would be very slow and would not damage the “worm†which under such low gravity could not be crushed and could just re-tunnel any collapsed tunnels.

you can not select or separate with efficiency desired elements from unwanted.

Same problem on the surface of venus. As is some types of asteroids have specific elements in concentrations not found on any mine on earth, so the difficulty in extracting and purify could not be much harder then those mines.

Lets assume a C-type asteroids because it has a bit of everything, and not a M-type asteroids that practically just solid stainless steal.

Material that is dug up by the aforementioned worm, can be place in a solar thermal oven, with quarts window to let in concentrated sunlight, magnetic or electrostatics or gas jets can be used to keep a ball of raw feedstock floating in the center of the chamber preventing thermal contact with the walls. First few hundred K would boil off all the water or any volatiles in it, even chemically bound water. Hydrogen gas would be added to chemically reduce the feedstock into metals and hydrides. Oxides would reduce to metals and water, the water would be electrolyzed back into hydrogen, with oxygen as the product. Carbon would convert into methane, excellent starting material for making any kind of organics. At different temperatures different elements would boil off and could be caught in cold trap collectors. If the floating molten glob of raw material can be heated to 4000 K every element would boil off eventually. Further refining could be done by “burning†semi-refined product from the cold traps in with chlorine or fluorine gas, the fluorides are then dissolved in molten salts and electrowinned back into Florine and specific metals.

This process could separate any element from any other element. Sure it would require a lot of power, for example boil a metric ton of Iron would take roughly 100 kw continuous for a whole day (8.53 GJ) (also assuming very little heat lose) to convert a metric ton of water to hydrogen and oxygen would take 155 KW continuous for a day, (assuming 100% efficiency, quadruple that 600 Kw for a reasonable 25% efficiency from sunlight to electricity to electrolysis, or 50% efficient, 310 KW for a thermal cracking process). So a safe over estimate would be 2 MW per ton of material processed in a day. A 1000 tons per day processing capacity would require 2 GW continuous.

but with sunlight available continuously and no structural restriction by gravity on solar array sizes, it would not be that hard to achieve that. Most of the energy would be needed as heat which could be provided by solar thermal, the waste heat could drive generators that would provide some of the power for electrolysis and electrowinning.

You need build something a lot bigger than the I.S.S. with artificial gravity.

Yes, that what the asteroid is for, providing all the materials to build that. A giant torus 500 m wide could produce earth “gravity†at it edge with less then 2 rpm, making Coriolis effect unnoticeable. If it internal space is is 30 meters wide and 30 meters tall (10 floors) it would have an internal volume of 1.4 million cubic meters and 450,000 m^2 of floor space, about the same volume as a very large cruise liner. If we assume equal weight to a cruise ship that would be 50-100 thousands tons, or 111-222 the mass of ISS. Occupancy would be enough for several thousand people to live in cruise ship style luxury. Some of that floor area would need to be given up for food production, assuming from the study below 50 m^2 per person of food space, and hydroponic stacks 5 racks high that would be 10 m^2 per person, lets give each person another 90 m^2 of living space and such a ship could hold 4500 people. Or 1000 m^2 per person for 450 people or 1/10 the density of a luxury cruise ship.

All habitat in space needs to be vacuum proof . This is not cheap, also is risky.

And building cloud cities that need to stay afloat and house an internal breathable atmosphere from a mildly toxic, highly corrosive atmosphere of CO2 and sulfuric acid droplets is way easier?

Then you need resources. Water, many plants for food and oxigen, etc. "A LOT OF ENERGY REQUIREMENTS and you have only 350w/m2 or less"

According to this study we should be able to feed and maintain a person on 50-100 kW continuous, easily. Lets assume 500 colonist, that would be 250 MW to 500 MW of power needed. Now unlike on venus power is continuously coming from the sun (no dark side, no night) and there is no gravity so there is very little in the way in structural constraints to building gigantic solar collectors, assuming only 25% efficiency, that would be a solar collector 1.2 km wide at the power levels you gave. Of course water and oxygen comes from the asteroid, as well as everything else.

Likewise you need resources, water, plants, food, oxygen for a Venus colony, and you need to keep all this afloat 60 km above venus surface.

You need some kind of shielding against radiation.

All the left over asteroid material would do just fine.

And if you finish to mine 1 asteroid, you need to move your base to another.

A 500 m wide C-type asteroid weighs 90 million metric tons (assuming 1.38 g/ml density) a M-Type asteroid of that size would weigh 348 million metric tons (assuming 5.32 g/ml density), most of that metal. It would take a long time to mine all that! For example that last one is one third to one half the earth's present annual metal production. An asteroid mine that can process 1000 tons a day would take 248 years to go through a single 500 m wide C-Type asteroid.

Asteroids are not close from each other. In fact in time fly, you are closer from venus than from the same asteroid belt.

What matters more is delta-v. Some asteroids require less energy to get to and back then getting to and back from the moon! An asteroid colony is not going to need to come back and yet are going to be able to build automated cargoships at the asteroid and have them bring cargo back to earth to help finance themselves, that not going to happen for a venus colony.

About water if you are lucky, maybe you found a close ice asteroid very close to your target asteroid.

Again the C-type have at least a few percentage points of water, either as ice under the surface or as hydrated minerals, both can be easily extracted. The C-type asteroids represent 75% of asteroids.

Solar sails so far from the sun are not very good to be used like transport. So maybe you need to use something with proppelent.

Well plenty of propellant can be produced at an asteroid as well as the delta-v needed to get it back to earth can be very small, with no gravity well to climb out of. Lets say your at an asteroid that is 3 AU away from the sun when you leave it, with a solar sail you could at best get only 1 N of thrust per km^2 of sail at that distance (because sunlight is 1/9th its intensity at earth), lets assume 1 km^2 of sail are exposed to the sun moving a 10 ton automated cargo ship (assuming it at a 45° that would be a sail loading of 5 g/m^2, or a 2 km^2 sail that weighs 3 g/m^2 would weigh 6 tons and could move 4 tons of cargo), even at that distance it would achieve 8 m/s of delta-v per day, and could achieve 3 km/s in a year, more then enough even for a non-Oberth effect transfer orbit to Earth.

Edited February 16, 2014 by RuBisCO

[AngelLestat]

you can use centrifuges to separate stuff, which is normally done anyway. Hydrogen and oxygen aren't exactly rare on asteroids. And Near Earth Objects are easier to reach than Venus, or even the Moon.

if you have a centrifuge device, each time that you drop material will slow down the centrifuge device. So you need to inject energy all the time. (something that comes free at earth with 9,8m/s2) Plus the cost of such device. And venus is closer than earth in time to reach the asteroid belt, using lower energy transfer orbits.

And no, a venus colony wouldn't grow faster than a moon or mars colony, due to the critical lack of ressources. Extracting them from the surface is rather difficult, unlike the Moon and Mars, where you can basically just bake the regolith into concrete.

There is a entire topic about this, in those papers show how that is easy to solve with today technology, no to mention in 20 years from now. When we can have electronics that stand without problems 500 celcius. (acid is not a problem either, is a benefic that you dont have in any other place) Temperature and pressure also can be a benefic for many process.

How many times do we have to tell you: Diamonds are _NOT_ rare at all.

How many times I need to explain that they are?? Is all about cost. Diamonds cost a lot more than platine. And if you kept thinking the opposite, I dont care.

Moving across an ocean is absolutely not comparable with moving across interplanetary space.

All your comparations are useless becouse all is reduced to one factor. The relative cost of that enterprice at those times and the cost of a venus trip to day. They was very similar.

If you want to live in and exploit the clouds of another planet, go to Jupiter and mine Helium 3, also Ammonia which is often used as coolant from its Moons. But Venus? It's worthless. If you want to use it as a gravitational anchor for solar power, use Mercury and beam it via Microwaves to Earth.

How is suppose we would mine that consider jupiter gravity, jupiter diameter and jupiter radioactive ambient?

you can't sell the stuff you mine. Because stuff from damn near everywhere else is cheaper.

I explain this several times. I am quite tired. I made calculates and everything, I explain all the process, all the evolution of costs and our needs. Just read.

Extracting ressources on the Moon is far easier than on Venus. Dealing with the vacuum of space is easier than dealing with 90 atmospheres and 450+ °C. And you can build the return vehicle right there, relatively cheaply. Or you build a mass driver and just shoot the stuff back to Earth if that's where you want to use it. Or to orbit, and give it a small monopropellant engine or AlLOX engine.

Why? what is the problem with pressure? And where you get the oxigen? Is like 10000 times more difficult get water from the moon than from venus.

And like already explain, materials in venus are a lot more valuable. Other thing, where is your shield against radiation?

Mars and the Moon will be more viable. Dealing with Mars' .1 atmosphere, and almost Earthlike temperatures is also easier than mining things on Venus.

What is your problem with venus pressure and temperature? you don't need to be there personally to mine!!! Is done using telerobotics! :S

Sargerho, anyway, I am quite done with this discussion, I guess we already said everything we could about the subject. Is fine if you like Mars or Moon more. In any case, if we dont do any. Is better that we start to make things right here on earth, stoping the population grow, recycling recources and getting clean energy sources.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Fifty years to having a manned base on Venus?

Thats 2063, and thats wholly optimistic.

Twenty years to extract resources?

Thats 2083. Still wholly optimistic.

The only advantage Venus has is the slightly less dV you need to get there. Only, except, this advantage is rendered moot by the fact it takes roughly ten times (And I'm probably underspeculating) the dV to return from the Venusian surface than it takes to return from Mars, and around thirty times the dV to return from the Moon. Oh, and radiation around Venus is more intense due to the fact it is much closer to the Sun than Mars.

But by 2150, we might have this:

http://i.imgur.com/oiMP8kF.png

(Thats a manned landing on Venus, by the way)

Which will ultimately lead to your dream being realized around 2150-2200.

But having it become more popular than Mars and the Moon is a huge folly.

As for the gravity and atmospherical pressure, I would rather have weaker bones and be a little light-headed and dizzy on Earth for three months than to be crushed inside out on Venus.

NASAFANboy, with all respect. You dont have a clue of what we are discussing here. I strongly recommend you to read my posts before reply. Becouse you seem very lost.

About the picture you post it, that is from the venus flag mission, that is a alternative to the next venus climate mission that would take place in the next 5 years in case is not remplaced by some of the geoffrey landis mission concepts.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

What if we could place the harmful gases in the atmosphere of venus deep in the crust?

Bare with me here.

If all the gases in Earth's crust were released, it would be WORSE than Venus. For us, that is.

Of course any information pointing otherwise is welcome.

Solar sails need to enter a more large usage.

We have the same CO2 than venus plus methane. I dont know if could be worst. becouse we are not so close to the sun.

At venus it would not be so difficult to convert all the CO2 to Carbon and Oxigen.

Here is better explained, the part 1 of this video is the floating cities.

http://youtu.be/iDz4K1EDbOk?t=4m52s

----------------------------------------------------------------

But you could do with shaft mining. A mechanical “wormâ€Â, could eat out an asteroid from the inside. Being able to grip the walls of the tunnel to move about, no need for gravity. Because of its extremely low gravity a good percentage of an asteroid should be able to be dug out in this way before the asteroid collapses. Likely even then the collapse would be very slow and would not damage the “worm†which under such low gravity could not be crushed and could just re-tunnel any collapsed tunnels.

You can.. but how that is more efficient than make an small hole, put a charge, and blow up everything? The fact that they are asteroids it does not mean that they are soft or easy to cut. Mostly all good target asteroid for mining are more harded than rocks. A lot of iron.

So you will need many diamonds jags.. At venus we can sell you some

Same problem on the surface of venus. As is some types of asteroids have specific elements in concentrations not found on any mine on earth, so the difficulty in extracting and purify could not be much harder then those mines.

Lets assume a C-type asteroids because it has a bit of everything, and not a M-type asteroids that practically just solid stainless steal.

Material that is dug up by the aforementioned worm, can be place in a solar thermal oven, with quarts ....... molten salts and electrowinned back into Florine and specific metals.

Sure it would require a lot of power, for example boil a metric ton of Iron would take roughly 100 kw .....

but with sunlight available continuously and no structural restriction by gravity on solar array sizes, it would not be that hard to achieve that. Most of the energy would be needed as heat which could be provided by solar thermal, the waste heat could drive generators that would provide some of the power for electrolysis and electrowinning.

You can mine like I said.. But not in an efficient way. That is a nice process. But in venus like at earth you can choose locations where to mine. Those locations would have extra concentrations of what you are looking for.

I can see your point, but you need a lot more energy than the one that you achieve with solar panels.. You need some kind of fusion or nuclear reactor (a big one!) and shield all the people from radiation.

Yes, that what the asteroid is for, providing all the materials to build that. A giant torus 500 m wide could produce earth “gravity†at it edge with less then 2 rpm, making Coriolis effect unnoticeable. If it internal space is is 30 meters wide and 30 meters tall (10 floors) it would have an internal volume of 1.4 million cubic meters and 450,000 m^2 of floor space, about the same volume as a very large cruise liner. If we assume equal weight to a cruise ship that would be 50-100 thousands tons, or 111-222 the mass of ISS. Occupancy would be enough for several thousand people to live in cruise ship style luxury. Some of that floor area would need to be given up for food production, assuming from the study below 50 m^2 per person of food space, and hydroponic stacks 5 racks high that would be 10 m^2 per person, lets give each person another 90 m^2 of living space and such a ship could hold 4500 people. Or 1000 m^2 per person for 450 people or 1/10 the density of a luxury cruise ship.

I like that you bother to do the math. But why you need 450 people??

You just need 5 or 10 top to start. The right amount to take desicions in real time. All the operations are via telerobotics.

And building cloud cities that need to stay afloat and house an internal breathable atmosphere from a mildly toxic, highly corrosive atmosphere of CO2 and sulfuric acid droplets is way easier?

The amount of sulfure acid is very low at those concentrations (something that I would prefer the contrary). And even if you are swimming in sulfure acid. You just need a little cover of teflon or hundreds of other sulfure resistent materials and that´s it. Corrotion is not a problem. Almost any Industry works with sulfure acid all days.

According to this study we should be able to feed and maintain a person on 50-100 kW continuous, easily. Lets assume 500 colonist, that would be 250 MW to 500 MW of power needed. Now unlike on venus power is continuously coming from the sun (no dark side, no night) and there is no gravity so there is very little in the way in structural constraints to building gigantic solar collectors, assuming only 25% efficiency, that would be a solar collector 1.2 km wide at the power levels you gave. Of course water and oxygen comes from the asteroid, as well as everything else.

Likewise you need resources, water, plants, food, oxygen for a Venus colony, and you need to keep all this afloat 60 km above venus surface.

Correction, 50km.

You just need breath air to float, If you have 1km sphere diameter envelope of breathe air (you can float 2 empire state buildings), you dont need nothing else.

We can have plenty of plats, food, oxigen (all you want) and water (venus has 15000 km3 of water, but even with these numbers the atmosphere is much more dry than earth becouse is thicker)

No problems with temperature and pressure.

If you are in the asteroid belt, you have more chance to be impacted for a tiny rock (product of other collition), if any rock makes a hole in your fabled structure. All would die.

So that is something that everyone needs to understand when they talk about vacuum proff habitats.

A 500 m wide C-type asteroid weighs 90 million metric tons (assuming 1.38 g/ml density) a M-Type asteroid of that size would weigh 348 million metric tons (assuming 5.32 g/ml density), most of that metal. It would take a long time to mine all that! For example that last one is one third to one half the earth's present annual metal production. An asteroid mine that can process 1000 tons a day would take 248 years to go through a single 500 m wide C-Type asteroid.

Nobody is negating this. Also another option is aerocapture with venus (you cant with earth for obvius reasons) and then mined from there via telerobotic. And you remove the risk of a orbital maned station (in case you want colonize venus too) Becouse after all, we need more space to people. And orbit colonies does not help in this problem.

Again the C-type have at least a few percentage points of water, either as ice under the surface or as hydrated minerals, both can be easily extracted. The C-type asteroids represent 75% of asteroids.

Well plenty of propellant can be produced at an asteroid as well as the delta-v needed to get it back to earth can be very small, with no gravity well to climb out of. Lets say your at an asteroid that is 3 AU away from the sun when you leave it, with a solar sail you could at best get only 1 N of thrust per km^2 of sail at that distance (because sunlight is 1/9th its intensity at earth), lets assume 1 km^2 of sail are exposed to the sun moving a 10 ton automated cargo ship (assuming it at a 45° that would be a sail loading of 5 g/m^2, or a 2 km^2 sail that weighs 3 g/m^2 would weigh 6 tons and could move 4 tons of cargo), even at that distance it would achieve 8 m/s of delta-v per day, and could achieve 3 km/s in a year, more then enough even for a non-Oberth effect transfer orbit to Earth.

I think in modest time frames and with modest technology, and you want to build a 2km2 sail? XD

When I did my sail transport calcultation for 5T, I use 400m X 400m. This is equal to 160000m2, your 2km2 sail has 25 times more area than mine

Is easy to get carried away when we use Km like unit in these cases.

[SargeRho]

1: Nobody is talking about going to the asteroid belt. I repeatedly said NEAR. EARTH. OBJECT. That means asteroids that cross Earth's Orbit or get very close to it. These are easier to reach than the Moon, and much more easily than Venus. More economical than both. Energy is not an issue in space near Earth.

2: No, we won't have 500°C electronics (that actually work). Those carbon based semiconductors will go up in smoke if they overheat just like silicon and gallium-arsenide semiconductors. And they aren't easily solved problems, from a physical aspect alone. The surface of Venus is the most punishing environment in the inner solar system.

3: You can say that they are rare as much as you want, that doesn't make it true. Diamonds are fairly common on Earth. They are expensive only because of a few people intentionally holding them back. They are also fairly worthless, because they are shiny aaaand...yeah, that's it. That's all you can use those diamonds for: Looking shiny. Industrial Diamonds put mined diamonds out of business in terms of industrial application.

4: No. Going from Europe to India is several orders of magnitude lower in terms of energy use and effort than going to Venus, and even more so if you want to retrieve anything from its surface.

5: Automated gas mines floating in the atmosphere, and nuclear powered cargo carriers going from the gas mines to an orbit outside of the radiation belt periodically. It might be possible to build hybrid nuclear thermal rocket/jet engines, using the reactor in NTR mode in space and for thermal jet engines in the atmosphere. Uranus and Neptune might be better targets for that, despite the significantly longer distance. Saturn might do as well.

6: Moon and NEOs are still easier to reach and mine than the surface of Venus ever will.

7: Oxygen isn't hard to get on the moon, since the regolith and crust is like 40% Oxygen. Same probably applies to many asteroids. And there's water on the poles. I don't know the ammount of Hydrogen on the moon, but robotic miners don't need Oxygen to run unless you are crazy enough to use ICEs in space.

8: Which also need to deal with the pressure. And that isn't an easy thing to do. They also need to deal with the heat, which isn't easy on Venus either. It makes the machines extremely maintenance-heavy. Overall mining Venus is not comercially viable because of how easy it is to mine Asteroids and NEOs.

Also asteroids are usually piles of rubble held together by gravity. They are very easy to pick appart.

In the end it comes to pros vs cons. And Venus has too many cons.

And as for the solar sail: Building a 2km solar sail isn't all that hard.

Edited February 16, 2014 by SargeRho

[RuBisCO]

Oh no we do have electronics that might work at 500°C, they are called "vaccum tubes".

[SargeRho]

They aren't very "micro" tho

[sal_vager]

Do they really need to be? And I'm sure smaller ones could be made but how complex a computer do you really need?

If it works then the size would just have to be accepted, look at the size of the Venera probes, they can hardly be called small

[SargeRho]

I guess for large, remotely controlled miners it'll work.

[RuBisCO]

You can.. but how that is more efficient than make an small hole, put a charge, and blow up everything?

Well in real life after we blow up a cliff side we have truck and scopes clean that all up and crushers break down the bigger pieces, its a rather complex system of machines.

The fact that they are asteroids it does not mean that they are soft or easy to cut.

At 1.38 kg/l they probably are very easy to cut through, that is desity far below rock (or metal) and just barely above ice. Most likely has the consistency of rubble with a little bit of snow mixed in.

Mostly all good target asteroid for mining are more harded than rocks. A lot of iron.

So you will need many diamonds jags.. At venus we can sell you some

Well again the C-type asteroids have a bit of everything, including metals, and precious metals, as well as water and volatiles, and are very "soft" So we don't need to go to the M-type asteroids, I would assume though for an M-type asteroid that is one solid piece of metal, melting chucks out would be the best option, in the vacuum of space electron cutters would be an option, or we could just use concentrated sunlight and collect the vapors with an ion trap, refining and mining all in one.

You can mine like I said.. But not in an efficient way. That is a nice process. But in venus like at earth you can choose locations where to mine. Those locations would have extra concentrations of what you are looking for.

The asteroids generally have "extra concentrations", like the M-type have some rare-earth metal concentrations higher then any place on earth (or venues I assume). I mean unless you have evidence Venus has particular deposits of purified ultrarare metal like nothing on earth, which may be possible, I mean what is with the snow cap effect there? Something got to be coming out the atmosphere and plating at that altitude and it sure is not snow! But barring some kind of geochemistry where platinum concentrates in pure metallic form on Venus here and there, mining Venus is simply not going to be economical again asteroid mining.

I can see your point, but you need a lot more energy than the one that you achieve with solar panels.. You need some kind of fusion or nuclear reactor (a big one!) and shield all the people from radiation.

No we don't. There no limit to how large we could make the solar panels or mirror arrays in space. On venus though we would need something like that, to make up for floating around the nightside, difficulty at facing panels at the sun, holding them up against gravity, etc

I like that you bother to do the math. But why you need 450 people??

You just need 5 or 10 top to start. The right amount to take desicions in real time. All the operations are via telerobotics.

Well I was assuming you wanted a colony, not just a mining crew. Need at least 150 people, to maintain genetic viability after several generations. But with the way AI is developing I would think by the end the century we could do Astrid mining completely autonomously with Von Neumann machines.

The amount of sulfure acid is very low at those concentrations (something that I would prefer the contrary). And even if you are swimming in sulfure acid. You just need a little cover of teflon or hundreds of other sulfure resistent materials and that´s it. Corrotion is not a problem. Almost any Industry works with sulfure acid all days.

Vacuum is not a problem either, what your point?

Correction, 50km.

From the chart I was looking at in the book "Venus Revealed" temps between 0-32 F are beyond 60 km. Also still some cloud cover/haze there as well.

You just need breath air to float, If you have 1km sphere diameter envelope of breathe air (you can float 2 empire state buildings), you dont need nothing else.

Except a 1 km wide balloon, that can hold the mass of 2 empire state buildings without breaking, covered with solar panels or windows to let in light.

We can have plenty of plants, food, oxigen (all you want) and water (venus has 15000 km3 of water, but even with these numbers the atmosphere is much more dry than earth becouse is thicker)

No problems with temperature and pressure.

If you are in the asteroid belt, you have more chance to be impacted for a tiny rock (product of other collition), if any rock makes a hole in your fabled structure. All would die.

Well considering the station is lined in several meters of glass fiber, carbon fiber and other overstock materials, it would need to be a big rock to penetrate. As well pressure barriers can be made inside it so a hole won't cause a leak for the whole station. The cloud city of yours would have the same problem, for any hole that forms for any reason would lead to a painful and hot death for all it occupants.

Nobody is negating this. Also another option is aerocapture with venus (you cant with earth for obvius reasons) and then mined from there via telerobotic. And you remove the risk of a orbital maned station (in case you want colonize venus too) Becouse after all, we need more space to people. And orbit colonies does not help in this problem.

Why would we want to put an asteroid down Venus's gravity well? We could just put one around the earth instead, use the moon for a gravity assisted capture, no need for risky aerocapture at all. Building an orbital city adds space for people.

I think in modest time frames and with modest technology, and you want to build a 2km2 sail? XD

When I did my sail transport calcultation for 5T, I use 400m X 400m. This is equal to 160000m2, your 2km2 sail has 25 times more area than mine

Yes, so? It would not be hard to make such a structure, again it weighs only 6 tons at 3 g/m^2, and that is the present limit with earth construction of fabric, in space we could make it even flimsier, a lithium sail just 20 nm thick would be only 0.011 g/m^2. Can you explain any show stopping technical problems in making as sail that is 1414 m x 1414 m verse 400 m x 400 m?

Edited February 17, 2014 by RuBisCO