NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise(science.nasa.gov) |
NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise(science.nasa.gov) |
DAVINCI is actually cancelled in the latest budget request. For obvious reasons, the NASA press office (the OP) won't talk about this. But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone.
https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-...
The proposed cuts to science are catastrophic, but there’s still time to call your Congressperson.
Ninth Space-X Starship/Super Heavy launch some time this month.
The justification? I don't think they are open about their reasoning.
Am I the only one shocked to see wordpress here.
I recall watching this NOVA episode in 1995 where scientists had no idea whether the lithosphere is thick or thin. Seek to 36 minutes: https://archive.org/details/VenusUnveiled/NOVA.S22E10.Venus....
> The paper used modeling to determine that its crust is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) thick on average and at most 40 miles (65 kilometers) thick.
So would that be considered “thick” or “thin”?
Crazy factoid two: Venus is 80% of the Earth's mass.
That is an extremely unlikely scenario because both intelligent life forms would have had to evolve before either of them developed space flight. It took homo sapiens 4 Gyr to evolve in the first place but only 100 kyr to develop space flight after that. So the odds are slim to none.
If Venus had a superintelligent species today, we would likely be pets or food.
If it had a superintelligent species 100,000 years ago, we will never know (or not know for quite a while).
And if it has life now that is evolving into something intelligent or superintelligent in 100,000 years, who knows if humanity will still be here to find.
Then throw in iron form the atseroid belt to react with it to form carbonates. Venus is dry so brining in hydrogen form the outer planets would be necessary anyway to form wate r and thta will account for a good bit. Garden the surface so subsurface rocks which might react with the atmosphere cna absorb some. (Assumign the subsurface rocks are thta reactive.) Scoop it off with smaller versions of the same scoops used to harvets hydrogen from the gas giants.
I thought the Venus theory was runaway greenhouse driven initially by water vapor. Going off memory, H2O is roughly 10 times as effective a greenhouse gas as CO2, with Venus being closer to the sun A larger percentage of water ended up in vapor form, leading to a feed back loop where the increased heat pushes more water to vapor leading to more heat, eventually liberating the co2 from the rock, making everything worse, ending up with the current situation where venus has way too much atmosphere.
Which is the long way to say, I think there is a lot of water on venus.
I'd rather try to keep the carbon around for organic molecules. Are we sure we can't get in enough H2O and N to balance it out and build a nice thick biosphere?
1. "Humidify" the atmosphere by crashing comets into Venus. This will also allow us to create a temporary "cloud" around Venus that can shield it from the Sun and lower down the temperature.
2. Once the temperature is low enough, Venus will get oceans on its surface.
3. At this point, CO2 can be split into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen will be immediately bound by the huge amount of under-oxidized iron on the surface, and carbon can be buried under the new ocean. Essentially, carboniferous age for Venus.
4. Once this is done, the atmosphere will be mostly nitrogen (at ~3 bar) and people could live there with just respirators. Eventually, once the surface iron is oxidized, the atmosphere can even be made breathable.
Apparently, this can be done within 2000-5000 years without any exotic-level engineering.
Which is to say, putting a ring around venus to block the sun may have merit, but adding more water sounds like pouring petrol on a fire.
See, the atmosphere at ~50 altitude... happens to be about 1 bar (which happens to be Earth's atmospheric pressure ASL)... and happens to have temperatures that can support human and plant life!
And better still, the atmosphere being mostly co2 with a little nitrogen actually means normal Earth air is a lifting gas! Starting to see where this is going?
It's not too hard to imagine the skies of Venus full of floating habitats that move to stay in the sunlight, or occasionally dock with tethers or balloons carrying cargo from extremely reinforced mining facilities deep underground (where they could be much more protected most of the time from the pressure/temperature/corrosion) -- a future where people (or machines!) might scoff at the idea of cooling off Venus and losing out on such an excellent habitation zone, one which could also fairly easily support elevated runways or launch platforms to more cheaply reach space from.
With Venus also having 91% of Earth's gravity, and those atmospheric conditions at high altitudes that add some radiation shielding and would probably let a human worker only need a very limited suit more akin to a hazmat or firefighting suit with SCBA to work outside habitats... Venus is actually easily the single best planet for humans to live on after Earth!
(Can you tell I'm writing a story set there? Hehehe)
Maybe if I were a bird I'd be comfortable with it, but it's just disturbing. No solid ground...
While the atmosphere is a big problem, even without this issue the rotation would be problematic.
And no thanks to autocorrect.
<The Sun, massing 1000x what Jupiter does.>
That said, we'd have to throw much bigger rocks to penetrate their atmosphere. And the likely (to me) actual plans would be:
Us: launch to the Moon, set up there, launch rocks from the Moon to Venus.
Venusians: launch and travel to the asteroid belt, launch an asteroid toward Earth.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that our plan would be the same as theirs: we'd both be heading for the asteroid belt, because nothing we could reasonably launch from the Moon would put a dent in Venus with that atmosphere.
And if we assume they actually can launch through that atmosphere, we're screwed: if they can do that, they're way ahead of us.
The situation I replied to assumed they were both inhabitable planets which I assume means Earth like atmosphere on Venus. The thick atmosphere complicates things, but I don't think you actually have to hit the ground. Tunguska didn't even get near the ground and it still leveled 1000 km^2. Also if Venus has the atmosphere there's no point of a war since there's no benefit to conquest in either direction.
But the question. Is do you spin it backward or slow it down to spin it the right way, creating a situation where one side of the planet always faces the sun for a while. Might be an opportunity to freeze and cart off the other side of the atmosphere…
Comets in the Oort cloud take very little energy to put on a collision orbit, the Sun barely holds them gravitationally, orbital speeds in the Oort cloud are measured in _meters_ per second. So they require (relatively) little energy to put them into a required orbit. It might be doable with just regular thermonuclear charges.
It will then take these comets more than a thousand years to "fall" from the Oort cloud.
Rather my meaning was that it's (a little shockingly) the best suited planet for humans in terms of most closely and reliably resembling conditions humans could survive in, which relates to the terraforming notions I was replying to.
It'd be overwhelmingly harder to make all of Venus Earthlike than to just use the existing relatively Earthlike regions of the upper atmosphere to our advantage along with their unique properties. Cool off Venus and you just get a big ocean of liquid or frozen co2 to have to deal with after a loooong time and a lot of construction. Keep it like it is and a fraction of the resources/effort will yield far more utility while we can still enjoy a segment of the atmosphere.
Scifi? Of course!
Cool? Without a doubt!
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=isaac+arthur+ve...
Oh wait, I remember the plan, ship it to Mars so they can have some decent atmospheric pressure.
What scale of 'device a way to signal back visually' could done with 1600's era manufacturing and technology?
I'll admit, it'd take a lot of effort/money to communicate and it'd be pretty slow, but it's not impossible to happen just decades (or perhaps even within a decade) of when its figured out that they had neighbors. Not hundreds of years.
At the same time, do consider how you already count on conventionally supported structures like bridges, buildings, tunnels, etc. not to have any defects or design flaws. Or once-in-100-years storms or earthquakes.
This magnifies further if you've ever flown on a plane or sailed on a ship. It only takes the right series of failures to be plummeting to the bottom. Now imagine people who spend months or years counting on technology and redundancy to keep them alive in space, and might expect to do so indefinitely.
Exposure therapy, baby!
Not on the ships I've been going on, anyway.
Where can I contribute to put all the senators in a spaceship and yeet them into outer space?
> Lighter gases, including water vapour, are continuously blown away by the solar wind through the induced magnetotail.
There used to be a lot of water on Venus.
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere#/media/File:Solar_s...
> Currently the main ion types being lost are O+, H+ and He+. The ratio of hydrogen to oxygen losses is around 2 (i.e. almost stoichiometric for water) indicating the ongoing loss of water.
Also Earth didn't have an oxygenated atmosphere until relatively late, a couple billion years in, so I didn't know if that could be the thing that saved it.
Venus's escape velocity is less than 1/3rd of its orbital velocity. According to google, Venus's orbit, despite being very circular, causes its velocity to vary by a KM/s from aphelion to perihelion.
So I believe you could send all of Venus's atmosphere off permanently into space at the cost of about 1/30,000th of Venus's orbital velocity, meaning you could very slightly circularize its orbit further.
