
Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus - cryptoz
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-we-should-build-cloud-cities-on-venus
======
aetherson
In terms of human habitation, the big advantages of Venus' atmosphere are:

1\. It has essentially Earth-normal gravity. Zero-G long-term is a death
sentence for humans. The long term effects of Martian gravity are unknown. It
seems safe to assume that Venus gravity is fine.

2\. It is protected from impact and radiation by an atmosphere in a way that
Mars or asteroids never will be.

3\. It has an essentially limitless supply of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and
sulfur available to it.

4\. It is reasonably well-positioned for solar power.

5\. It is relatively temperate.

6\. Low pressure differential between inside a habitat and outside of one
means that leaks are less severe and containment breaches are easier to react
to.

But there is at least one huge disadvantage:

1\. Everything besides carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur needs to be
imported, either from a fantastically hostile surface, or down through reentry
into an atmosphere in a deep gravity well and rendezvousing with an aerostat.

That disadvantage is a pretty goddamn significant one for human habitation.

But it's not a disadvantage for long-term robot probes, and it's... less... of
a disadvantage for a minimal-population scientific base.

~~~
JulianMorrison
1g at 1 atmosphere has disadvantages. Namely: to get _off_ the planet, you
will need a fully fuelled multistage rocket with an almost identical profile
to rockets you'd launch from ground level on Earth. Something like a Falcon 9.
That's a bit heavy to lug all the way from Earth.

Bonus: you have to launch by dropping it into a hell-cauldron of poison gases
miles above a crushing, melting surface, better hope you don't have an engine
out, because there are no launch aborts or do-overs. Then you have to fly it
out through a hot corrosive acid atmosphere which I don't imagine would be
very friendly to machined aluminum.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Not quite an identical profile; it's not quite 1g, since Venus is less
massive, and you're already quite a ways off the surface.

It's still not _trivial_ , but it's not like there are a whole lot of do-overs
when launching valuable human cargo from Earth, either. (What happens if the
space shuttle's engines go awry? Everyone on board dies, and everyone on the
ground speculates as to whether they died within 30 seconds, or survived to
hit the ocean.)

~~~
JulianMorrison
The shuttle was an outlier, a rocket without an escape mechanism once the
crude, firework-like boosters were lit, which relied on ultra-advanced,
brittle and damageable heat shielding for re-entry because it had wings.

------
scarmig
Thought of the day, which is said mostly tongue-in-cheek:

If we really must think of a planet to terraform, it seems like the best body
in the solar system to work on might be... Earth. There are large swaths of it
that are more or less currently uninhabitable in its polar regions, and most
changes to the atmosphere we make have their greatest effects in those same
polar regions. A 5C increase in global average temperatures might be a 10C or
more increase in those polar regions, opening up millions of square miles for
human habitation and intensive agriculture. It's even self-sustaining: about a
quarter of known fossil fuel reserves are available in the Arctic, and those
will become much more accessible with warming temperatures.

Needless to say, there are costs elsewhere on the planet for that kind of
intervention, but those are very definitely far, far smaller costs than
building floating cities on Venus or reheating Mars' core. Many of those costs
could even be recouped by adding a terraforming tax on new residents of polar
regions and redistributing them to Bengali refugees fleeing their homes.

Economically, it makes a lot more sense than investing resources in
terraforming other bodies in our solar system, though it doesn't offer the
same risk mitigation.

Disclaimer: I think terraforming Earth, purposefully or not, is a bad idea. I
think it's just a better idea than investing real resources into terraforming
other planets.

~~~
isaacdl
Huh. That's a very interesting thought. The first thought that pops into my
head is the risk. The appeal of trying to terraform Venus (or Mars) is that
there isn't a huge existing population of humans. If we mess it up,
well...that's unfortunate and expensive, but we didn't just make the only
place we currently have uninhabitable.

The second though, pretty related to the first, is the ethical one. Do we have
the "right" to do what we want to our planet, including probably causing mass
extinction of existing animal life in order to terraform our planet? I'm not
sure if I'm even willing to argue that one either way.

Like I said, it's interesting to consider your idea. If we can be sure that
anything we do to "terraform" our planet isn't at all risky in terms of human
survival, you're probably right!

~~~
kaybe
Longterm, we will have to find some kind of climate control. The last ice age
was not too long ago, but mankind has almost entirely lived without. A return
of the glaciers would be even worse than global warming (in my estimates), and
extrapolating the curves shows that the next ice age is due (were it not for
the fact that we changed the atmospheric composition sufficiently to avert
that for sure).

Right now we already are playing around with the climate, but very
uncontrolled and destructive. I'm also not in favour of using methods designed
for climate control in our situation due to the risk (which is different for
the different methods, and the failure results are very different also, but
still) - the better solution is clearly to stop emitting CO2 - but longterm,
we will need the knowledge. Best to test it on another planet first..

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simon_
Could someone weigh in on the following quote? Sounds fishy / wrong to me:

To put this in perspective, a balloon that is one kilometer in diameter is
capable of lifting about 700,000 tons, or the weight of two Empire State
Buildings. Add a second balloon of the same size and the lift capacity of
these two balloons increases exponentially: it’s now capable of supporting
nearly 6 million tons of weight.

~~~
Tossrock
I assume they meant that if you were to double the diameter of the balloon, it
would be a superlinear increase in lifting capacity (since volume is cubic in
radius). However, it wouldn't actually be exponential, and two balloons added
together definitely does not equal more than the sum of their individual lift
capacity.

~~~
jackcarter
To be precise, it's 8x the lifting capacity (=2^3), which would be 5.6 million
tons, or "nearly 6 million".

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ChuckMcM
I've always been surprised that NASA hasn't gone for a blimp type 'probe' for
Venus. Something which floated above the clouds and allowed us to do long term
observation from that point.

We think in terms of "flying" through the atmosphere, but once it gets dense
enough you can make the equivalent of fish to "swim" through it. With internal
bouyancy compensation bladders, and a skin impervious to the atmosphere.
Smaller probes swimming down into the clouds to collect data about the surface
and other conditions.

If nothing else it would be completely different than exploring Mars :-)

~~~
tachyonbeam
My guess would be that NASA hasn't done this because they feel like they have
the traditional "lander" or "descent" type of probe worked out. They've done
the engineering, they know the difficulties involved. What you're suggesting
requires more expensive R&D, and means that the new probe has more chance of
failing.

The conservative thing to do is to stick with what works. I do think you're
right that the conditions are very different from Mars and this makes it
possible to explore alternative approaches that may be better suited to the
planet. I also believe that innovation entails some degree of risk taking.
Just gotta get SpaceX onboard.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm not sure that's the case; the latest Mars lander required some pretty
incredible engineering - I mean, they basically built a rocket-powered
hovercraft, something that's never been done before.

I'd wager that the real reason is that Mars is more interesting to explore
than Venus's atmosphere. Mars has the potential to have (or have had) life,
and it has interesting geological features that may be directly applied to
what we know about Earth.

Plus, the whole "we might go live on Mars!" mentality doesn't hurt, and Venus
is only recently getting this kind of attention.

~~~
userulluipeste
"they basically built a rocket-powered hovercraft, something that's never been
done before"

They basically built a retro-rocket¹. Rockets existed, the principle of retro-
rocket-like descent braking existed too (usually deployed on parachute drops
of heavy equipment like tanks).

"I'd wager that the real reason is that Mars is more interesting to explore
than Venus's atmosphere."

As you also noted, it's about public attention, which was fed with a lot of
Mars stories. Mars' surface was more observable and thus made it more easily
for Sci-Fiction writers to speculate about. It had less to do with practical
considerations like those related to its atmosphere.

¹
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrorocket](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrorocket)

------
nsxwolf
Do we know what it would look like to float in these safe regions? Would it be
all haze, or clear skies? What color would the sky be? What would you see if
you looked down?

~~~
smeyer
There are some interesting relevant plots in this presentation (found via a
google search):
[http://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/meetings/STIM/presentations/Cr...](http://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/meetings/STIM/presentations/Crisp_1_What_We_Know_Today_Venus_STIM_20130124.pdf)
.

------
j_baker
There's one gaping hole in the idea though: where are we going to get water?

One other interesting possibility is colonizing Mercury. It turns out to not
be as crazy an idea as it seems at first. Mercury does have water, there's
plenty of solar energy, and it's not too hot at the poles. The trickiest part
would really be getting there. As deep as it is in the sun's gravity well, it
would take 6 years to get there!

~~~
jlebar
Does Mercury offer any protection from the solar wind? I (naively) expect the
solar wind intensity to go as the inverse-square of distance, and I know that
surviving the solar wind on Mars is a big challenge, given the lack of a
magnetosphere there. I expect the difficulty would be worse by many orders of
magnitude on Mercury? Not to mention that you have to survive six years with
no protection just to get there; just surviving the trip to Mars is a
challenge.

~~~
j_baker
No, Mercury actually has a magnetosphere. I don't know about what kinds of
protection you would need to get there though.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mercury](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mercury)

~~~
monkeypizza
This site also has some nice info on Mercury colonization. [http://einstein-
schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html](http://einstein-
schrodinger.com/mercury_colony.html)

------
mmanfrin
Question to those with science backgrounds: Would it be possible to 'seed'
venus with co2 crunching algae, provided we figured some way of suspending
them in the atmosphere above the point where they'd cook to death? Some sort
of superlight-algae that could live in the clouds and crunch the CO2 in to O2?
It would grow and spread and begin reducing the pressure downwards, allowing
it to also eat downwards.

~~~
jkot
Not really, venus atmosphere is way too thick and heavy. It would takes
millions of years. Better would be ice ring on orbit to block sunlight, or
bombarding surface with comets.

~~~
ajuc
> It would takes millions of years.

Why? If it works it's exponential so it should be faster than other methods.

------
cdwhite
A related previous article: "NASA Study Proposes Airships, Cloud Cities for
Venus Exploration" ([http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-
study-p...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-study-
proposes-airships-cloud-cities-for-venus-exploration)). Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8760732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8760732)

------
jkot
Only argument for Venus atmosphere is that it sucks much less than its
surface. Any asteroid would be better place. Someone must really love Star
Wars.

~~~
geuis
I wish the article had expanded more on the idea of removing a lot of the
atmosphere. I wonder if an asteroid could be sent in such a way that it tears
through the atmosphere and rips a lot out into space. The rock would pass
through and back out into space.

~~~
kingmanaz
The ~50-megaton Tsar-Bomba reputedly "lifted" the atmosphere above its
mushroom cloud off the Earth and into space. The Russians allegedly had or
have a 100-megaton version which could presumably perform more "heavy
lifting". There are probably more scientifically-minded readers here who
possess a formula which will show the ridiculous number of Tsar-Bombas needed
to make Venus safe for Humanity.

I've read that comets could be slammed into Venus, modifying its rotation, and
somehow reducing or eliminating the runaway greenhouse effect. Of course, if
mankind is at the point of being comfortable terraforming with comets, it may
make more sense to point them toward the desert planet Mars.

~~~
userulluipeste
"There are probably more scientifically-minded readers here who possess a
formula which will show the ridiculous number of Tsar-Bombas needed to make
Venus safe for Humanity."

Not to mention the nuclear fallout that would drift for a long time all around
in the atmosphere - basically anything but "safe for Humanity".

------
joering2
"In more expansive visions, pumping Venus full of sulfur dioxide or
hydrogen—or surrounding it in Sun shields—could terraform its climate into
submission".

Couldn't bio-genetics create some sort of virus that inhabits on Mars' or
Venus' atmosphere and grows on it while converting it into friendly
environment? Or am I speaking pure sci-fi?

~~~
seanflyon
Even a sci-fi terraforming bacteria can't change one atom into another and
Venus is very low on Hydrogen.

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disputin
At what depth underground does the temperature become tolerable?

~~~
msandford
Probably none. The Earth's core is hotter than the surface and the surface
temperature of the crust basically reflects the average atmospheric
temperature.

Up north in the US the average ground temperature is maybe 40F at 10ft down
(which is why there are basements up north, to get below the frost line) but
here in Texas the average ground temperature is about 70F. At the equator it's
probably more like 90-100F.

Given that Venus' atmosphere is so hot it seems likely that the deeper you go
the hotter it gets.

------
stesch
"The Space Merchants" anyone? ;-)

~~~
mhurron
Miners. Cloud miners specifically. They should probably try to keep the
operation small.

------
vatotemking
Curious, how will they deal with the venusian storms?

~~~
userulluipeste
Even in a storm, you won't feel a thing on a big ship (over 300m) with
stabilizers. And you have to understand that there is a difference between a
storm which involves different mediums, like gas (atmosphere), liquid (sea)
and sometimes solid maybe (the shore or some sea cliffs) and a storm which
resides in one medium only. The Venusian equatorial winds which surround the
planet in a few days (at 300-400 km/h) and which are pretty permanent, can be
considered storm winds. Those plans with balloon deploying were designed
especially to take advantage of such winds, in order to get shorter days.

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imaginenore
Would you rather be surrounded by very thin CO2 of Mars or clouds of sulfuric
acid of Venus?

And no possibility to live on the surface?

At least we know how to transform CO2 into oxygen.

Mars just seems orders of magnitude more friendly.

~~~
aetherson
Venus has a LOT more CO2 than Mars does. And the band that people are
envisioning putting the aerosats in has, well, less sulfuric acid than does
the denser lower atmosphere.

Honestly, probably the realistic view is that it never makes sense to
colonize, or even send long-term human presence to, any planet besides Earth.
But to the extent that we want to dream of human presence on another planet, I
think that the big obstacle to Venus is not the hostility of the upper
atmosphere, it's the difficulty in getting any non-gaseous resources out of
it.

At the very least, it seems like sending a robotic balloon probe to Venus to
try to tool around in the upper atmosphere for an extended period of time is
at least as worthwhile as sending another lander to Mars.

~~~
_rpd
> it never makes sense to colonize, or even send long-term human presence to,
> any planet besides Earth

I don't know, establishing a second, independent biosphere is sound from a
risk management standpoint.

~~~
dalke
It would be much cheaper to establish a dozen independent biospheres here on
Earth than one off Earth. Put one in the Canadian Shield, another under the
Australian desert, etc. If scattered well, several should survive even a
Chicxulub-class event.

But I suspect you mean something different than independent biospheres. If so,
what risks are you thinking of?

~~~
_rpd
> several should survive even a Chicxulub-class event

That's an interesting proposal. I'd love to read a study on that.

> But I suspect you mean something different than independent biospheres. If
> so, what risks are you thinking of?

Well there are degrees of independence. Perhaps "isolation" in the systems
engineering sense is a better term. There are a lot of high-risk probabilities
that arise as technology advances - and the Fermi paradox isn't encouraging
about our chances. For some example risks, let's say grey goo, cybernetically
enforced self-destructive tyranny and unexpected stable artificial black hole.
In some case, the light-minutes of separation may make the difference.

It might make more sense to build an artificial orbital habitat at L5 or the
like, but these seem so fragile compared to biospheres that could be
constructed on Mars. Being out of the gravity well is a huge advantage, but
the gravity on Mars is low enough that space elevators become a real
possibility. Perhaps Ceres is a good compromise - lots of water, metal rich
asteroids all around.

~~~
dalke
The Chicxulub impact had global consequences, but far enough from the crater
would have been survivable in any bomb shelter.
[http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-
seti/climate.htm](http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/climate.htm) gives an
estimate of the damage radius, with 1 psi overpressure to 4000 km. While it
says there was a global firestorm, the most recent analysis believes that that
wasn't the case, see
[http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_430274_en.ht...](http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_430274_en.html)
. It does says that being on the other side of the planet would have been
worse than North America, in terms of heat flash, so the Canadian Shield would
be survivable, as would most nuclear bomb shelters in the world.

It's very hard to model those risks. A non-terrestrial habitat will certainly
be more fragile than one on Earth, and easier to fall prey to a malicious
computer attack by rogue AIs. A gamma ray burster would be more survivable in
a shelter 1,400 m underground[1] than anything we are likely to build soon on
another planet, or Ceres. A "Dark Star" scenario as in Fritz Leiber's "A Pail
of Air" feels more likely than an unexpected stable artificial black, and in
that story, access to nuclear fuels, along with a stockpile of liquid
atmosphere and frozen materials, helped keep civilization going. Or perhaps
the Free Peoples of Ceres will send an asteroid killer our way, to keep the
solar system from being infested by flatlanders.

So while there are scenarios where separation is important, there are also
scenarios where separation won't help, and might end up taking funding away
from something which would have helped. With probabilities that low, and with
such high error estimates, it's hard to tell which approach is best. The
cheapest is self-sufficient here on Earth. If that works, then there's the
base knowledge for how to set that up off-planet.

([1] I refer to the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, which is a neutrino
lab. While not the deepest lab, it's one with an access road instead of an
elevator. Very handy if you want to supply your colony.)

------
feralley
Humans are too cheap.

They'll just pass away during the next big extinction event, despite knowing
another will eventually come.

We are no better than the dinosaurs so far. Setup outposts on Mars, the moon,
Venus, learn to deal with radiation.

Cat lovers.

------
davesque
I'll take one.

~~~
davesque
Whoops. Sorry humor police!!

------
glxc
Elon Musk has got to step up god damnit

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agmcleod
I didn't read it through & through, but i think the benefits of going to mars
over venus is longevity. As the idea would be (provided we last long enough)
that when the earth starts to swell, earth will get too hot to live on, and
therefore so would venus. We'd still have time on mars before having to move
further away.

~~~
aetherson
You mean "when the sun starts to swell," not "when earth starts to swell."

And this is a laughable concern. The Sun's main sequence is predicted to last
another 4 billion years. That's more time than life has existed on Earth,
about 16,000x as long as homo sapiens has existed.

If we're concerned with the survival something vaguely descended from homo
sapiens in 4 billion years, there's little enough harm in taking another
million years for our tech to get a little better before starting the project.

~~~
ashark
To nitpick, The End Of Life We Care About on Earth is only ~800 million years
off[1], at the outside, barring some unforeseen catastrophe or some truly
astounding planetary engineering. Still a long time, but no 4 billion years.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Future_of_the_Earth)

