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I mean the soviets had a good go at landing big metal probes on there and they melted and failed pretty quickly. I'm not sure we have the technology to make a space suit or a quad bike that can function on the surface of venus. You'd also need to transport over 100 days of water and snacks so your dudebro doesn't starve on the way there

I remember reading a short story that featured settlements on Venus, and it mentioned the difficulty of running any sort of engine - rocket or combustion - on the surface. After all, your engine and its exhaust must be hotter than the atmosphere surrounding it, otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refridgerator.

I don't know if a rocket exhaust must absolutely be hotter than the environment, just at a higher pressure. If you open a gas bottle, the jet is going to be very cold, but it will produce thrust. With some quick googling, the surface pressure on venus is 90 bar, and a spacex falcon produces 350 bar in the chamber, so I think a falcon 9 could quite easily take off from the surface (ignoring the fact it would melt and the tanks might crush etc)

pV=NRT

Pressure and temperature are not independent.

"Hotter than the environment" is shorthand for "contains more energy than the output region does".


I don't doubt it's extremely challenging. But the initial engine temperature would still match the environment temperature, and it would not get somehow colder. That's not how any of this works.

Run your engine inside said refridgerator?

damn i thought venus was like the moon but red. still i feel like its hard to get excited about stuff without humans intimately involved. ultimately its all about the meatbag, he needs to be there somehow. maybe in orbit controlling the sat via FPV goggles?

Oh boy this is all mixed up. Mars is red, are you thinking of Mars. Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars

Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. It's still cold and you'd need a specialised quadbike (electric?), but seeing as martian travel is on the cards for some point in the future, you might see martian quadbike racing in your lifetime. However there are still the same food/water/oxygen issues, since it's a 9 month trip each way

>Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think.

Indeed. The very low pressure on Mars (0.006 Bar) would be much easier to deal with than the absolutely crushing pressure on Venus (92 Bar) - not to mention the 470C surface temperature.

Hanggliding or ballooning in the cloud tops of Venus would be more practical than going to the surface.


Humans have already survived simulated dives in hyperbaric chambers to around 70 bar with no long term effects, so in theory you may be able to have Venusian astronauts live in a habitat at ambient pressure if 90 bar is similarly tolerable (obviously would still need heroic measures for cooling, an approx. 200 K temperature differential is no joke). Getting enough gas there to pressurize the hab could be difficult, the deep dive experiments used a hydrogen/helium/oxygen mixture and I doubt you can recover helium through in situ resource extraction. And you would need some sort of acclimatization system to get the astronauts from their half-bar or so transit environment down to the surface - maybe a balloon that slowly descends over the period of a few days.

So yeah, pretty much science fiction for now!


>200 K temperature differential is no joke

It would be more like +450K/C difference (470C, not 470K).

Also it is one thing to get a person to 70 Bar in experimental conditions. It is another to actually stay at that pressure for prolonged periods and do anything useful.


Ah, whoops, you're right! Somehow my brain defaulted to Kelvin. So 740 K down to 290 K. Carnot COP alone is only around 65%, you'll be lucky to do half that, you need the stuff outside to survive heat and sulfuric acid, and you'll need to power it somehow. You could run it off a nuclear reactor, but your reactor will not be very efficient since it has to sink heat at over 700 K.

> Also it is one thing to get a person to 70 Bar in experimental conditions. It is another to actually stay at that pressure for prolonged periods and do anything useful.

Fully agreed - you'd have to test this long term in a hyperbaric habitat on Earth. You may end up needing some sort of medical or pharmaceutical intervention to make it possible. Very risky.

Even firmer in the realm of science fiction. It'd be a good hard sci-fi novel though.


>It'd be a good hard sci-fi novel though.

Must have been done already. Surely?

'Hail Mary' by Andy Weir has some interesting stuff about the (spoiler!) alien 'rocky' who is adapted to a high pressure/temperature environment.

I can't imagine anything would justify the cost and hellish conditions of living on Venus's surface. Except, perhaps, as an example what not to do to our own planet.


I really need to re-read Project Hail Mary, especially with the film in development. I really hope the film lives up to the book. I think they did a reasonably good job with The Martian, even though they cut out the entire dust storm section (and my favourite joke in the book!)

>I think they did a reasonably good job with The Martian

Within the time and marketing constraints of a Hollywood film, I thought they did a good job on 'The Martian'. Let's hope Hollywood doesn't ruin 'Hail Mary'.


It might be possible to make a hard suit where the inside is around 35 bar, which should be easier to work in (if maybe still uncomfortable), and reduce the stress on the suit of a 70 bar difference

Newtsuits have apparently been tested to 90 Bar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtsuit

I believe they maintain ~1 Bar inside. Not sure if something like that could be built to protect a fragile human from the temperature differential, though. Better to send a robot?


That's exactly what I was thinking of, I just didn't know the name. If they can do 90 bar, that's fine too, I didn't know what pressures they were rated to

The article says they are rated to 30 bar, but have been tested to 90 bar. Presumably with no human inside for 90 bar!

I mean yeah, what can we do about that surface temperature? That is extremely high.

Refrigeration is hard but I don't think impossible at high ambient temperatures. What immediately comes to mind is compressing gas (which will increase its temperature), letting it equalise with the ambient temperature, then decompressing it, which will lower the temperature (from Charles' Law). No doubt there are many other systems that could be used though.

I'm not an expert on refrigeration at all, but if you're interested, it might be worth checking out the youtube channel Hyperspace Pirate, who does a lot of diy refrigeration systems, and I believe has managed to make liquid nitrogen in his garage using a home made refrigeration system. He also goes very in-depth into the technical details


Interesting, thank you!

>Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars

Depends where they are in their orbits.


Couldn't someone just jam an active shortwave band?

The very first line of TFA: Note: We have recently posted (all the photos)[https://www.flickr.com/photos/nitroba/albums/721575944354804...] from the cube burning on Flickr.

At the top, it has what looks like part of an email, addressed to "Dan Ruby, Editor, NeXTWORLD Magazine". I'm guessing "you" is Dan, and the narrator is "Simson L. Garfinkel, Senior Editor, NeXTWORLD Magazine"

yes totally missed it thanks. o found it at the end , being a note to Dan. had me scroll back to top :') totally comment too soon!

Dear Dan,

I am so sorry I went to such great lengths to incinerate what was meant to be your computer.

LOL


> Read rf signal and emulate it or save it

I assume it checks that you actually have the licensing requirements to be transmitting on whatever frequency?


Why not assume people are responsible for following their local laws instead? They're not selling anything, so kind of feels it has to fall on the user, not the person who shares a thing.

Because people obviously cant be trusted to follow their local laws when using flipper zero-esque devices https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/wall-of-flipp...

People ignoring laws isn't a new thing, does that mean things that could potentially be used for illegal things should be outright outlawed?

That article you shared seems to say the problem is bigger than the used hardware even:

> Soon after, developer Simon Dankelmann ported the attack to an Android app, allowing people to launch Bluetooth spam attacks without needing a Flipper Zero.

How do you solve that without outlawing Android devices?

> People using Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids and heart rate monitoring tools also reported disruption, which could put their well-being at risk.

This is probably the most bananas part of that article, and it's great that they managed to find these issues in relatively trivial conditions, since the company's own testing apparently doesn't include very basic security checks. If those devices are failing when they aren't connected to the main device, what makes these companies even remotely suitable for building critical devices like that?

Who knows how long time it would take to discover these security issues with medical devices if people weren't able to prototype these sort of attacks at home?


The bluetooth-enabled devices are failing to connect to their devices because of deauth attacks. If you know how to prevent that, I'm sure they'd be happy to implement a fix

> The bluetooth-enabled devices are failing to connect to their devices

And that happens in lots of other cases too, when it's too far away, out of battery, damaged, does that mean their vital health devices stop working if that's happening? Sounds like they need to work on reliability if that was true.


press alt, tap tab, click the window you want

If you're going to go all the way to the mouse, you could just... click the window you want.

Data can only go about 500 miles in 3ms, and in the original story, that's how long the system took to time out, and would fail to send the email

I'm still waiting to see doom run on a pregnancy test

Honestly, I'm not too surprised. "Fictional" bands have existed for a while and gotten a lot of attention, for example Gorillaz, and they've gotten lots of awards. Feel Good Inc. has charted extremely well in the past (apparently it only got to number 14 in the us? though they are English so maybe it didn't translate perfectly). K-Pop is also becoming more widely popular outside of Asian countries (see BTS), so I think it was inevitable. Pop/Stars by K/DA is very similar, being a kpop song by a "fictional" group, and that has had similar success in the past

Fictional bands and artist are pretty common in Japan and also sweeped over to South-Korea at some point I think. But funny enough, the oldest are western bands. Remember "Alvin and the Chipmunks"? From 1958, with new series and movies even released today. Long before the first virtual Idol appeared in Japan in 198x. It seems in the 60s&70s there were a bunch of them in the USA, from Hanna-Barbera and others. Japan started with Macross in 1981 and continued for decades until today. I guess, now South-Korea and probably China are trying to take the crown of anime and virtual artists, they had some very disruptive successes in the last years.

Gorillaz had five top-ten albums in the US, of which two were number one in the UK.

Ah, there we go then =) I could only remember one song off the top of my head to check

> K-Pop is also becoming more widely popular outside of Asian countries (see BTS),

Its probably more accurate to say k pop has already peaked its been popular massively in the west for almost a decade since at least 2016

Blackpink, newjeans, and BTS are all mega acts that are on their nth albums, the trend for kpop is fully established not really emerging just now.

You do raise an extremely good ontopic point about gorillaz being a prior example of a fictional band. I always hated their mtv cribs episode because their fake animated house always scored no.1 on the best of cribs lists.


Wikipedia has a whole list of "Virtual bands", though I'm unfamiliar with most of them. I think they're seen differently because they are a standalone band, rather than being part of a movie or promotional item. Something more in line with Huntrix would be Alvin and the Chipmunks, being a group that are part of other things, rather than a group in their own right

The example that came to mind for me is The Monkees.

I mean, I think the dances used to promote the song are just part of the film, like any other music video that isn't just the band playing the song (my mind immediately fell to The White Stripes: Fell In Love With a Girl but there must be tonnes of examples).

I think that a song by a vtuber is unlikely to top the charts right now because they're still not quite mainstream enough for that. I think the current perception of them is similar to how anime was perceived in the past ("Look at all those weebs simping over their fictional girlfriends"), but it is heading towards mainstream. HoloEN did a lot to popularise it in the western world, and I don't think it's unlikely that a song by a vtuber could gain more widespread popularity in the near future. They have the talent for it, it's just not quite escaped the "streamer" bubble


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