
A young Venus had water for 2B years, habitable for longer than Mars - uncertainquark
https://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/venus/venus.html
======
_Microft
_Wanted: redshirt volunteers for an away team to the surface of Venus_

Venus certainly seems scientifically neglected at the moment but hopefully
this is going to change in the coming years [0]. If SpaceX manages to get
somewhere with Starship though, we might see the most amazing things in space
exploration in the future. While they are focused on Mars, I wouldn't rule out
that with enough money, getting trips to Venus should be possible. Floating
research stations dozens of kilometers above the surface of Venus? Researchers
might even live _inside_ a blimp as filled with air, it would float at an
altitude of approximately 50km (the pressure is said to be about 1 bar up
there). Ah, I'm getting carried away again ...

[0]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2020/02/14/nasa-g...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2020/02/14/nasa-
greenlights-four-potential-missions-to-venus-io-and-triton/)

~~~
detritus
Oh my gosh - I'd never considered living _inside_ a Venutian blimp before. Of
course! Why not?

I still have fantasies about Venus being somehow a more likely [very] long-
term prospect for terraforming, despite the planet's rotational problems.
Seems like a thick atmosphere filled with (admittedly lethal) useful gases and
potentially-organic compounds offers a much better resource than Mars'
practical lack of a one.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _I 'd never considered living inside a Venutian blimp before. Of course! Why
> not?_

Are you aware of wind velocities at an altitude high enough to get you 1 bar
on Venus?

Think Goodyear blimp --

in hurricane Katrina.

OK, now that you've got a picture of that in mind --

double the wind speed.

~~~
omgwtfbyobbq
Isn't the dv/dt really the issue? If Venus has stable high altitude wind,
would the speed really matter?

~~~
klyrs
Call me pessimistic but I'd expect some pretty wicked turbulence... what'll
happen to that blimp when each side is taking on cat5 velocities in different
directions? "Artificial gravity" is not the right answer ;)

~~~
omgwtfbyobbq
That doesn't seem to be the case for the most part, although I'm sure
something would need to consistently monitor weather conditions to avoid
anything close to that.

 _This altitude is within the high-velocity "superrotation" region of the
Venus atmosphere, where a constant wind moves at a velocity on the order of a
hundred meters per second. This means that over the two days of the mission,
the balloons traversed about 11,000 km, from the night hemisphere into the day
hemisphere. About two days into the mission, the primary batteries were
depleted, and contact was lost._

[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201100...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110016033.pdf)

Edit - According to this the zonal winds are ~60mph at certain elevations.

[https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/44535/13-5079...](https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2014/44535/13-5079A1b.pdf?sequence=1)

------
boulos
For those interested in Venus, I'd recommend trying to keep up with Don
Mitchell's stream of stuff on Twitter.

This thread where he produces updated imagery from the Soviet Venus landing is
great [1]. He's also seemingly made a bunch of progress on his upcoming book
[2]. He used to post everything to his website at mentallandscape.com, and
it's still up for useful history / structure, but all his work for the past
decade seems to be solely on Twitter (until the book happens!).

[1]
[https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/12346581956682670...](https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1234658195668267010)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/12487923285143674...](https://twitter.com/DonaldM38768041/status/1248792328514367488)

------
scottlocklin
Can anyone point to some state of the art reference on Venusian planetary
science? I have some books from the 70s on the topic, but I assume more is
known now.

~~~
_Microft
I would start with looking at Wikipedia. Either the article on Venus or a
separate article on the history of exploration of Venus should have links to
sources.

~~~
karatestomp
My usual approach: find any recent academic book on the topic, read the
introduction/preface and maybe first chapter, and it’ll name-drop all the most
important books and papers on the subject.

Usually the Web, including Wikipedia, and outside of perhaps Library Genesis,
is shockingly shallow and out-of-date. It’s usually not even capable of
providing a basic list of major works like this, let alone the contents,
unless you stumble on some academic’s page that happens to provide it, which
is increasingly hard to do through search.

------
quezzle
I wonder if Venus had a large moon if it might not be earth like.

A moon would be constantly stirring the magma which might have given it
tectonics.

