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I hope that one day, Venus becomes fully terraformed. But I don’t see that happening for a long time.
So how could humans survive on Venus today? Is it the atmospheric pressure that is a problem? By itself, no. Is it the heat? Most certainly yes.
Getting around the heat problem.
The best way would be to block the sunlight, or cut the amount reaching the surface. There are ways we could do this with our current technology, like spreading dust in the upper atmosphere, but that would be temporary.
When air expands, it cools. What if we had a habitable dome inside of a larger dome. The air inside the larger dome is as close to a vacuum as we can come and keep the dome stable. Imagine a small amount of Venus air being sucked in to fill the volume. By the laws of Physics, it should cool, but will it be enough? This trick of air is cycled through, as it warms up, it is pumped out.
I don’t know if this scheme could work (I have not crunched the number) but on the surface, anyway, it sound plausible.
Another law of physics is that Energy is not destroyed, it just changes form. If we could just find a way to change the heat energy to electrical energy we could take Venus hot air and get electricity and cool air. (This would also work great for producing energy here in the Southern US.)
In a related topic, I am sure there is a way to harness Venus vast heat energy. Who know, future generations might not want to terraform Venus, as it could be a valuable energy source.
"Run for it? Running's not a plan! Running's what you do, once a plan fails!" -Earl Bassett
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No need to land on the ground to create a place to live on venus. Create a balloon system and energy transfer exchanger from the heat of the atmosphere to create electricity to keep it flying non stop. Collect gasses from atmosphere for breathing and for water. Basically a floating atmospheric base. The same could work I think for an airplane like system as well.
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If ever there were a place that deserved robotic exploration rather than human, it is Venus! I doubt we will have the technology to keep robots functioning on the surface very long, let alone make it safe for people to function on the surface. We might as well figure out how to make it possible for people to function for months on the abyssal plains of the world's oceans first. The surface pressure of Venus is equal to the ocean's pressure at a depth of 3,000 feet, after all. Humans have never venture that deep for more than a few hours.
A floating or flying base would be much safer. There is an altitude, I think about 60 kilometers up, where the temperature and pressure are more or less Earth normal. One could imagine people sitting out on a plastic-enclosed balcony of their floating habitat, siping tea and looking out on the ever-changing patterns of clouds, with an occasional glimpse of the ground below.
But I doubt even that will happen. A small mistake and everyone will be roasted to death in a few minutes. There is also the vast problem of flying down to such a hab, docking, refueling, and flying back to orbit.
It would be far cheaper and easier to simply set up a base in Venus orbit. One could even use a Mars Direct Hab, attached to a burned out booster for artificial gee. The hab is designed to support people for three years; Earth and Venus are at opposition every 19 months. A crew could fly to Venus in a hab, live in it for almost 19 months, then fly back to Earth in the hab flown out the previous time. If the hab were in a highly elliptical orbit around Venus (I'd favor a 24-hour elliptical orbit, so that it generated a certain terrestrial rhythm to the sunlight and shadow on board) then the delta-vee to head back to Earth would be only a few kilometers per second (1-2). If an interplanetary transit vehicle were developed for Mars transport instead, it would be even better suited for a Venus orbit station. From Venus orbit, a crew of four to six would run rovers on the surface and solar-powered airplanes or balloons in the atmosphere. They could be present via telepresence and reasonably safe. Maybe some day an orbital station would pave the way to a human presence in the atmosphere, and I suppose some day maybe on the surface (though I have my doubts anyone will ever try it).
-- RobS
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Maybe some day an orbital station would pave the way to a human presence in the atmosphere, and I suppose some day maybe on the surface (though I have my doubts anyone will ever try it).
-- RobS
JP Aerospace had an idea for manned exploration of Venus using their airborne Dark Sky Stations as bases. I suspect that such a plan could work in tandem with their Airship to Orbit system, provided it could operate properly on Venus.
All it would have to do is work as advertised. There's a lot of disagreement on whether the systems proposed by JP Aerospace can do that, but I believe they can.
"We go big, or we don't go." - GCNRevenger
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Don't take this the wrong way, but WHY VENUS ? we have more moons , asteroids and planets that would be better to concentrate on then a planet closer to our Sun>>>
It will die faster than earth and not provide use with anything useable for exploration, expect what not to do, when terraforming.
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Venus seems impossible, but the jackpot is big.
You think of a way, then realize, not in our time.
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Don't take this the wrong way, but WHY VENUS ? we have more moons , asteroids and planets that would be better to concentrate on then a planet closer to our Sun>>>
It will die faster than earth and not provide use with anything useable for exploration, expect what not to do, when terraforming.
Because Venus "is there," should be all the reason one needs, since the Solar System provides so few rocky inner planets, etc. for us to realistically exploit. Further, its atmosphere (as earlier posts regarding Venus have already argued) seems just about ideal for 75-mile-high floating balloon platforms (eventually cities) to be situated and colonized, just as it is.
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One plus about venus is the huge suply of carbon in the atmoshpere. You can make allot of things out of carbon incuding diamonds and buckyballs. Just wait for the future of nano technology.
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Why Venus? Venus has the potential to become another Earth. Mars can come close, but only Venus could come even closer to being Earth’s twin.
Look at the Terraforming threads on ideas for terraforming Venus. We have thought of some good ones. I suspect our ideas are as close to the real thing as Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine is to a modern day jet. But like his work, or ideas are the foundation for future terraformist. Each generation builds upon the previous so that was once impossible become possible.
It wasn’t so long ago people laughed at the idea of man going to the Moon.
"Run for it? Running's not a plan! Running's what you do, once a plan fails!" -Earl Bassett
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Our biggest problem with teraforming is not for lack of ideas or for the places to actually make changes to. But is more of a down to earth funding issue. One enormous expense and one not easily justified to thoughs that do not believe that man should be in space.
We need that frontiering spirit again in the hearts and mind of all before we can get enough backing to correct the funding issues. Or we need to find ways to lower the cost of doing space. This may mean changing the way of doing business when it comes to Nasa and it's contractors. The big guy's need to start trying to lower cost for there products and that would allow for more to be purchased.
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