[Link] Colonisation of Venus
I was wondering what people thought of this paper by Geoffrey Landis on colonising Venus. In it he suggests that cloud-top Venus is one of the most benign environments in the Solar System. Temperature and gravity are similar to Earth, there’s some radiation shielding and useful resources, and aerostats filled only with breathable air would float at that height. I’m no expert so can’t speak to how accurate it is, but it’s certainly very thought-provoking for such a short paper.
The old tired counterargument: nobody colonized Earth’s cloud-tops yet, and they sure are easier to get to.
Also, if you have the means to colonize Venus, you don’t need to colonize Venus anymore. The ship that took you to Venus is a better place to live in that the colony.
And the obvious counter-counterarguments:
There are reasons to colonise Venusian cloud-tops that don’t exist for Earth ones (reducing xrisk, scientific discovery, etc)
Living in space long-term has lots of drawbacks, mainly to do with radiation and the lack of gravity.
Building a research base is not the same as colonizing.
Well, if we want to seriously travel in space, even in our own solar system, we will have to solve those problems anyway (in a form of radiation shielding and rotational gravity). And by solving them, we will end with a flying colony.
… Not sure.
Colonizing skies seems unrealistic because it seems to me like you would want to be able to land, rather than floating endlessly in an atmosphere rather than in a vacuum. THe main use for this seems like a fuel station as NTR rockets can use CO2 or things cracked from CO2.
Critically, Venus has no water.
Also, would a colony ship actually be long-term? Most locations in the inner solar system can be reached in under 5 years even under Hohmann orbit.
I’ve actually long wished for a long-term floating atmospheric probe around that altitude in Venus’s atmosphere; I think it could be one of the most favorable places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial (microbial) life, seeing as there’s lots of all the elements (except phosphate) we know are needed for life readily available, lots of solar energy flux, and a possible-but-unknown early geological history of the planet that could have had an earthly atmosphere and oceans right after the sun formed.
I’ve heard something about that. The obvious problem is mining, but you might be able to largely get around that by making everything you can out of plastic. It’s just hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, sulfer, and nitrogen, all of which exist in the atmosphere.
The sulfur dioxide could be problematic, but according to this website I found with google polyethylene is totally resistant to 60% pure sulfuric acid, and partially resistant to 98% pure. I don’t think a little sulfur dioxide in the air would be a problem.
You are going to need other elements for some stuff occasionally. Perhaps you can mine dust.
The impression I get from reading it is that he figures either teleoperated mining robots, or mining the asteroids; he spends more than a little time on discussing the great leaps in robotics, and then in claiming that a Venus colony is, from the point of view of orbital mechanics, almost as good as actual asteroid colonies for traveling to & exploiting asteroids.
Seems to me like Mars is probably the best colony world. Much fewer engineering problems, I think. And IIRC Martian soil consists primarily of iron ore. Plus way more water.
Teleop mining robots? That place kills our probes and I don’t think they even have many moving parts. What about some kind of bucket chain?
Well, I never said that they seemed like a good idea to me. (It’s personally hard to think of scenarios in which Venus-proof robots could be economical—unless the asteroids and other rocky planets/moons have all been tapped out, which is far-future enough that I don’t care.) That’s just what he seems to think.