New Mars Forums

I think that ultimately Venus could be more rewarding than Mars. I believe our gravity well to be biologically important beyond the mere impediment it presents to lifting ourselves off Earth. Microgravity (Moon, Mars, Ceres, ISS), ionising radiation and the dearth of magnetic fields are bigger issues than atmosphere and chemistry. I say this because issues of element abundance and chemistry are easier to deal with on the scale of human colonies than systemic issues like gravity and cosmic rays, which require planetary scale solutions.

Anyone spending a long time on Mars probably cannot withstand a return to Earth, biologically. And any children born on Mars will never see Earth -- our gravity will crush their bones. It is a one-way trip. The gravity of Venus and its proximity to Earth allow for two-way traffic.It's too bad Earth is the largest terrestrial planet in our system -- if we had a 2x or 3x Earth mass planet here, it would be the obvious destination.

We can get established on Mars rapidly, but only lightly. Venus will ultimately have a higher capacity for our presence.

Anywho, I doubt very much we could do anything to make conditions on Venus worse than they already are! Lobbing iron-nickel meteors at Venus is about more than just its tilt, rotation or fields. Adding mass to the planetary core should crack the stagnant lid crust into plates and release heat. A sufficiently massive impactor should blow off some atmosphere, which is all to the good.

Um, wouldnt their blood boil in their capillaries? I think human body temperature is incompatible with such an environment.

I am certain it has been worked out that a cooler Venus with less mass in its atmosphere would gain spin naturally, much like a ice skater drawing in her arms to her body.

Robert;

That's too bad about NASA and Lockheed, but it sounds so typical. Nice guys finish last. Too bad the world is like that, but twas ever thus.

I've been to Winnipeg and as far north as Gimli and Hecla. Amazing that grapes will grow there!

I am hearing that Venus lacks phosphates, which are essential for DNA. So that's one thing your plan would need to import. I dont know if RNA would give us a leg up on that problem or not. One way of looking at the challenge is to say: the seeds of life are everywhere, but successful life is not. I am sure we will find evidence of early life on Mars, for ex, but it got only so far there and then failed (barring the discovery of extremophiles in the water layer of the Martian crust). Ditto for Mercury and Venus, Ceres and Europa and every other little world in our solar system. In the cold worlds, the seeds shall be there still, dormant, resting, awaiting a day of warmth and light to awaken them and give Life a try. So the challenge on Venus is to turn back the clock of life on Earth to the place where what we got here could survive there, figure out where evolution took the wrong turn, then give it a push in a new direction. So, yes, if you cant do chlorophyll or haemoglobin (which are similar at the molecular level -- blood uses iron instead of magnesium), then do retinal. But is there a substitute for phosphates in DNA? Can we even imagine one? What might work? The alternative is to source phosphate and import it to Venus, then hope Life can recycle that supply into future generations. I dont know if that's practical. Or we maintain a station in the clouds of Venus to breed our little organisms and release them generation after generation.

It has been said that we here on Earth know more about outerspace than we know about the depths of our oceans or the interior of our own planet. The same shall be said someday about Venus if we can make colonies in the cloud decks. And I am okay with that. We do not need to know everything. We need know only enough.

It would be easier, with current tech, to mine an asteroid and lower its resources into the cloud decks of Venus than to go down to its surface to mine resources there and bring them back up.

I guess I am torn between terraforming Venus and leaving it as is. I would be in favour of terraforming if it could be done through natural biological processes such as you just described and within few enough decades to hold the attention of human brains (we have not evolved the kind of long-term planning that would permit us to focus on the centuries and millennia of our future -- some of us can, but most of us won't and I am willing to work with what we got in that dept as a species because the realm of politics is still at that evolutionary level). If it cannot be done simply, then leave it be. If it can be done simply (as you describe) but not quickly, then I would be in favour of launching the processes now and leaving it to future generations to handle the transition as Venus cools, as its rotation increases (with less atmosphere and less heat), as the cloud decks dissociate and mix, etc. If it cannot be done simply or quickly, then I say we can still live on the Venus we see today, if we change our thinking about what living ON the planet means. I do not propose anyone go to the surface. The surface equals Death, period. I propose floating single-family habitats manufactured on-site out of the simple compounds already present in the Venus atmosphere, including polymers etc. Some hard equipment would need to be imported, to be sure, plus some "potting soil". But plants growing in the floating greenhouses would make more soil and lock up carbon etc over time. Butterflies and quails and suchlike fauna could survive as well. Hopefully bees and then you have pollination. Maybe the colonists would be there to monitor the changes taking place in the atmosphere due to archaea activity. Maybe they would extract rocket fuels from the Venus atmosphere to lift up to an orbiting space station. Maybe lots of things. I like the idea of a society of free colonists, not trapped under a single dome, whose children could come and go from Earth (which the children of Mars could never do), etc etc. No private property or land ownership. No hoarding of resources. It loses all this potential of we terraform it.

Ok no one followed through on my idea for Venus. I talked about Venus here in these forums about 4yrs ago, with an idea similar to Void's. Imagine a double-walled greenhouse bubble on Venus. The polymer walls would admit light, but also filter light to reduce the harmful parts of the spectrum. The space between the two layers would be filled with water and let algae colonize the water. Inside the bubble, in the airspace part of the greenhouse, soil on the floor of the bubble with more complex plant growth. Equipment in the floor of the bubble to exchange gasses with the water and algae layer. The bubble would definitely not be spherical, but a flattened ovoid kind of bubble. Ok -- flying saucer shaped ... lol. Because of the winds on Venus, it might have a problem keeping This End Up. The algae wouldnt mind getting tossed about, but the soil layer and more complex plants inside might have a problem with that. If such a thing could be perfected, however, it would form the backbone of an agrarian economy on Venus for aerostat colonies of humans. The sky is free -- no such thing as territory or land ownership on Venus. A greenhouse able to sustain itself like a terrarium on Earth can be set free on Venus and just allowed to float. Humans who intercept them can check on them, service them, harvest them, set them free again, or hitch to them for a time. But they can be manufactured with carbon and other real simple elements and then just released.

Zubrin = "vested interest in keeping people away from Mars"?

I thought he was the Mars Direct guy ....?

With luck, the volatiles will contribute to the spacecraft's own propulsion. An asteroid mine can be as dirty an industry as it pleases. The propulsion system should have the constitution of a barnyard goat or pig. Think of human landfill site energy sources. Generators that work on pig manure. That's the kind of engine a mining barge should use! Something that can get fuel out of anything we care to toss into it.

It could also grow in airborne ponds on Venus.....

At the mass of Terra, hydrogen from decomposing gasses like ammonia and methane wouldnt stay on the planet but escape to space, over the long haul, which means by the time humans discover the planet, we wont see what it was like before it went rogue, if you know what I mean. In the abyss of Time that its origins lie, we will not be so lucky as to catch it early and see it in transition, but only in its new equilibrium. Without the tidal action of Luna or the community of planets and our Sol to act upon it, the centre of this little world should freeze out and tectonic geology cease with it.

I like the idea of planets by plutoid accretion however. By Bode's Law, the plutoids are where Neptune should be and Neptune should not be where it is at all. Which makes me think that Neptune has grown and is still growing by accretion and it is gouging out the near edge of the Kuiper Belt the way a river scoops land from one bank and deposits it on the other, to make a bend, a valley bluff and a floodplain. As Neptune picks up KBO's, it gains mass; as it gains mass, its orbit shifts outwards; as its orbit migrates out, it gouges out more and more of the KBO and so grows ..... Eventually, it will have a 250yr orbit at 1:3 resonance with Uranus.

Ok -- fair enough!

Then this has highlighted yet another issue over the long haul: If we are talking about setting up shop permanently on other planets, what needs to be done to prolong the serviceable life of our missions and colonies. Something that barely lasts from one mission to the next is obviously a non-starter. I am guessing its not that we dont know how to prevent this kind of degradation, but the cost and the politics. Are we ready, now, technologically, to overcome the problem of material degradation in space?

As some comedian once said: if the black boxes in planes are indestructible, why cant they make the whole plane out of that stuff????