New Mars Forums

StarDreamer,

Wish i could be more sure on a answer about the 1 bar Venus atmosphere to Mars question.

More of a guess than anything on my part that the gravity on Mars would just allow the gas to spread further than on Venus.

Hopefully someone will dive in and give a productive answer.

Kitchener is just a stones throw away.
Howdy Kitchener.

Spatula,

Before we think about moving anything from Venus to try and terra form it, we should probably think about where the additional heat on Venus is coming from.

If we take into account all the solar, C02 atmosphere and possible heat generated atmospheric conditions, Venus is still much hotter than the temperature can account for.

My guess is that Venus produces a lot of heat from the core directly to the surface.

Something like scraping away 20km of earths crust would on earth.

If that is true then nothing we do will ever terra form Venus.

Moving 1 bar of nitrogen from Venus to mars is possible but long term.
With a very sustained effort 1 bar of nitrogen will require about the same energy that all of earth has produced in the last 50 years and take around 36,000 years to complete.

In my opinion Mars could use just the native Venus atmosphere more than a nitrogen import.

We could move 1 bar of native Venus atmosphere with almost no output energy.
If we take advantage of the mainly co2 atmosphere to move the c02 atmosphere as separated C for storage and transport vehicles and 02 as the fuel to move, then we can probably move 1 bar of it to mars in as little as 1000 years.

Moving 1 bar of Venus atmosphere will make mars a 3% nitrogen atmosphere anyway.

My guess is that as little as 1/4 bar of Venus atmosphere sent to mars would set the melt going at mars.

StarDreamer,

Welcome to New Mars.

I agree Venus and Mars both have trade offs.
Like you say Mars is never going to be a good resource for fuel so the Venus abundance might prove to be a big bonus.

Even with the technology we have now using solar power and separation of co2 Venus looks like a much better place to fuel all space ventures.

Mars is sure to be the next real home of humans, Venus probably never a home.

We should probably think of Venus as just a store of Carbon and Oxygen in pretty much unlimited amounts, with plenty of free power to extract both.

Using the clouds on Venus as a home at best is a risky venture.
In the zone that human life could exist, it also rains concentrated sulfuric acid, a point most cloud city people probably haven't thought about much.

Sure we could overcome the sulfuric acid rain but it means staying inside a fortress 24/7.
Makes little sense to go if we are living in a can, we can do that anywhere.

Probably the best use for Venus i can think of is to terra form Mars.
1 bar of that 99% CO2 atmosphere would do the trick, maybe as little as 250mb sent to Mars from Venus would take the chill and low pressure off.

Venus has so much atmosphere we could probably terra form everything in the entire solar system, use free co2 separated fuel at Venus, build most of the transports from Carbon, and still have 40 or 50 bars left over LOL

Number04,

What is the bible passage?
Something like ... mankind has domain of all creatures on Earth...

A god of all the universe makes more sense to me than a god limited to just earth in all the universe.

If god exists in any religion he should be god of everything, not just Earth.

Pretty simple for any religion to embrace a grander god.
Science and religion need not clash.

Sure finding another Earth like place will be a tough pill to swallow for a regional species, but an easy one to swallow for a species of the universe.

When or if we find Earth2 the universe will still be the same, just our understanding of it will change.

When we find Earth99 we might have a start on understanding the universe as it really is.

Just my 2  1/4 cents cnd... = 2 cents USA.

Maybe time for NASA to stop sitting on it's hands and get the planet finder in space before some other country does.
NASA and the USA space program could find themselves playing catchup in very short time if they don't.
I guess NASA  and the USA could just pay for information from whatever country decides to be the first to take pictures of earth2.

Some things are more important than shuttling things to the space station, in fact almost all other things in space are

Austin Stanley

I agree that the drake equation is a little like trying to guess a persons age within 1 hour from the moon with no telescope.
Very difficult to get an accurate guess.

I think Mars will be a pretty good sign post for how adaptable life is in the universe.

If we get to Mars and discover it had microbial life at some point in its history, we can take a pretty good guess that form of life is pretty abundant everywhere it is possible in the universe.

Going from bacteria to animal life takes a long time to cook that recipe and i think it requires the moon a stable star and lots of other oddities.
Animal or similar life will be pretty scattered about the planets that can have life.
Probably a few freak accidents to make animal life so we can be pretty certain it isn't a straight forward process.
Then again earth might just be a slow learning curve planet and most others only take a few million years to obtain animal cells.

Intelligent life, in my opinion very very rare.
You need land and water in a good mix, steady volcanic activity but not to much, natural radiation shields that last for the life of a small planet, few impactors in billions of years etc etc etc.
Any other  large life form that dominates a planet like the dinosaurs will stop the creation of an intelligent life form.
Big brains on small creatures vs huge beasts isn't a contest.

My random guess would be one or two intelligent societies per galaxy.
And 1 or 2 on the way towards inteligence.
100 or 200 million planets with animal like life in the sea or sea and land.
1 billion bacteria/algae worlds.

Drake loved to do his calculation on just earth like planets so it was very limiting.

If we expect Saturn sized planets to be in the life zone of stars with say 20 moons orbiting it.
We might discover that instead of maybe 100 billion potential places for life in the universe, including those moons allows for a trillion places for life in each galaxy.

Maybe when we can really see planets orbiting other stars we can have an educated guess, but until they launch the space telescopes big enough to see them its all guess work.

John Creighton,

How about cover it in solar panels and separate C02 into 02.?

02 is lighter than C02 so you can float in the cloud tops, when you have stayed as long as you like, then go as high as the buoyancy will take you with some heat added to the 02 in your blimp.
At that point compress the 02 inside the air ship into liquid 02 and use it as rocket fuel.

It makes for a pretty simple vehicle and totally reusable, might even be able to carry extra 02 or C or sulphur or h20 to orbit.
Venus might not be such a bad place to fuel up.

If we use the waste C from the C02 seperation process we might even be able to make more Venus air ships from it, or at least most of a new ship.

noosfractal,

The pulverized metal asteroid as the coil sure make construction a pretty simple process.
It also makes charging it with any control a pretty difficult process.

I wonder if just having a metal dust ring spinning around the planet would make its own mag field?
Should be a differential energy between the ring and planet and solar activity.
Not much control of what kind of field it makes though without some pretty serious tech additions.

Without some sort of control it is sure to be an electronics nightmare near the planet.

Long term and low tech solution though.

Karov,

Or even a few smaller cable rings designed to combine fields with neighbor cables?
Lots of control that way.

No need to make a cable runs around an entire planet when short run cables can combine mag fields, or channel them to collect hydrogen and repel the rest.

Shorter 100km or 50 km cables are pretty common tech and involve very small power loss so good conversion to mag field.

That is real low tech

SpaceNut,

Good aero braking qualities in Venus atmosphere to slow down most of the way.

Then maybe just blow up the structure you are going to have as a city to use as the final brake.?

Seems the cheapest way to slow down, but pretty tough on the city structure.

dicktice,

I guess at some depth in the ground Venus temperatures would be something like earth surface temperatures.

Heat and pressure problems digging in for at least the first 12 or so hours, even with a very fast drilling machine.
Having a machine stay alive long enough to get to safe depth is the problem, and of course the pressure problems even on a fully made underground structure.
I wouldn't want to visit the manmade caves of Venus, a bad hatch opening day wouldn't be a good day.

I wonder if Venus had life at some point before it went greenhouse.
Maybe Venus still has microbial life underground at some safe depth, a pretty common place on Earth for life.

This is probably going to sound like a strange idea, but what about Venus underground?

Surface temperatures are unbearable on Venus but what about 100 meters below ground?