I laughed at the guy who talked about colonizing Venus but I am now starting to think it's a better idea...

What about the corrosive chemicals in the atmosphere?

I think OP was talking atmospheric densities, not the planet itself. Notice that the Venus numbers are roughly proportional to pressure.

In that case a floating city could follow the sun to avoid the long nights. The lack of easily accessed suface resources is a major issue tho

Just put your goggles on and don't worry about it.

Even there, you are better off being on more than one planet.

Yes, but I'd still try Mars or Luna or orbital colonies (if sub-gravity turns out to be a problem) before Venus.

You're saying the point is a "backup" for the human race if something happens to Earth.
Venus is a terrible backup. You can't go down to the surface. A Venusian colony would last only as long as supplies can be imported from elsewhere in the Solar System. And that puts a stake through your reasoning.

Mars or the Moon can use native resources. Space colonies can't, but they're not parking themselves deep in a gravity well which makes re-supply expensive. Just about anywhere in the Solar System (barring the surfaces of the Gas Giants) is more hospitable.

you are aware you can do more than one single thing
we don't need to pick, since different groups can choose to colonize different places on their own

wouldn't a floating city inside earth's atmosphere need to fly through the atmosphere at incredibly high speeds to keep up with the sun?
wouldn't such a city in Venus' atmosphere also need to zoom through the corrosive atmosphere at speeds in excess of 1000 mph, sucking all the breathable air out of the pressure domes?

Luckily it's really windy there.

Venus rotates VERY slowly. Even on the Moon, with its month-long "day" you can stay in perpetual sunlight (or darkness) just by walking.
Compared to Luna, Venus crawls!
However, that's the speed at which the surface moves. The winds are extremely fast.
universetoday.com/36816/winds-on-venus/
So a city would need to "run like 60" to keep up with the Sun. Why would you try to keep up with the Sun through? Chart at the head of my link shows there'd be km after km still above your head. Sun would only be a brightish spot in the general murk. If you can't see the surface or descend to it, does it matter where on the planet you are? Go wherever the wind takes you.

>colonize the sahara
>african nations demand the UN kick you out because you're stealing their natural resources
>it's a desert again in 20 years
wow great idea genius

>radiation
Domed habitats you retard.

>Yes, but I'd still try Mars or Luna or orbital colonies (if sub-gravity turns out to be a problem) before Venus.

Oh absolutely, me too. Colonizing the atmosphere of Venus is just dumb. I am not the one who was arguing for it.

>Chart at the head of my link shows there'd be km after km still above your head. Sun would only be a brightish spot in the general murk. If you can't see the surface or descend to it, does it matter

It would matter in the scenario somebody mentioned where you want to use solar power.

Dumb satania poster

The wind would blow you around the planet about once every 30 hours. So you'd get a nice day night cycle. Too bad you're still floating in an utterly dry atmosphere with no useful minerals in sight. It's basically an orbital habitat with none of the advantages. It's beyond me why you would do this rather than build a proper orbital habitat near an asteroid. It's really because of the fun gimmick of a cloud city, isn't it.

The OP's figure noted the insolation is greater on Venus than on Earth.
He's the only one advocating that. Keeping the city "hot" and elevated is going to take more than sunlight. But if we're building cities on Venus, we have to import EVERYTHING, even the steel and glass. Not practical to dig mines on the surface. So we have to have already developed reasonably cheap space travel. Fusion rockets or something equally efficient. (Solar sails permit moving large masses inexpensively, but they can't lower them into atmosphere.)

I'd just like to post an image here.
This is May 1947. Atomic energy destroyed the Earth and all of remaining Humanity lives in domed cities on Venus. Even then, a "Venus" mostly covered by oceans was starting to look improbable, but it couldn't be ruled out and that's the scenario the author chose.

An oneil cylinder generating a large magnetic field at one tenth the strength of a fridge magnet, orbiting at the mars-sun L1 could protect mars from radiation. While also providing a habitat to start mars terraforming from. The magnetic field will allow co2 and water to subliminate and build up Martian atmosphere naturally. Resulting in a bare minimum acceptable atmospheric pressure on mars.

How important is gravity for the health of humans living on another planet?

We don't know.
That's one reason this thread has dragged on so long.

We don't know.
If it turns out that we need normal (or near-normal) gravity, we're screwed.
That leaves O'Neil colonies or the centrifuged Mars bases someone was promoting on Veeky Forums a few days ago.

Or, of course, finding the reason for inability to tolerate low-gee and "tweaking" DNA to get around the problem.

75c is still rather warm. What is the temperature in the day/night transition zone? With Vensus' high winds would there be any way to maintain position in the transition zone?

Temperature is the same all around Venus more or less. Just ride the wind round and round the planet for a roughly earthlike day night cycle.

But Venus atmosphere is full of sulfuric acid.
And very dry (With almost no water)

The acidic atmosphere is so corrosive that a floating spaceship/satellite/ballon/cloud city above the cloud would turn into rust in just few months.

how are we supposed to live at 462 degrees, or even 75?

Build it from something that isn't affected by sulfuric acid. This is a chemical engineering problem.

thats not what that means

Perhaps it was posted by Americans who don't understand celcius.

Space station colonies are where it is at, user. Radiation really doesn't matter since you can just make thicker shielding out of anything you want to use.

Or perhaps someone from Palau

>just colonise the earth
Unfortunately going to other planets is the only way to start a new country without violence. The powers that be will make sure you can't just compuete with them and make up some excuse, but they can't do that on mars without acting like retards.

>> using hot air balloons on venus
That's the dumbest thing I've ever read on Veeky Forums. Venus' atmosphere is CO2, meaning breathable air is a lifting gas. One can also use hydrogen as a lifting because the atmosphere won't react with it.

Solar is really awesome on venus You're closer to the sun so insolation is greater, but the other thing is the cloud layer is VERY reflective so you can get almost twice the power per unit area by point solar cells down. Pic related is what the venusian clouds could look like, notice how bright things are. You also get a reasonable day night cycle due to the fast rotation of the atmosphere
Plastics don't rust. You can make plastics from the atmosphere. The overall concentration of water in the atmosphere is very low, but there are local concentrations in the form of clouds

Why have we never sent more probes to Venus since the Venera program?

It's absolutely a better idea in the long run. Humans can't live on fucking Mars without becoming grotesque atrophied memes that can never return to Earth and will probably suffer an array of physical disease. Not to mention their fucking children. Humans are meant to live in 1G and their musculature and circulatory systems are "made" to work in that gravity. Venus and/or rotating space habitats, supplied by asteroid raw materials that don't have to enter/exit a gravity well, are the only feasable long-term colonization plans.

dumb animu poster

>I laughed at the guy who talked about colonizing Venus
Thats bc you are uninformed and retarded.

Could you fit the stereotype of a dumb anime poster any more?

rip earth it was nice knowing you

Planetes are so 21st century

Because the USSR collapsed and no one else is interested in spending $$$ for get five seconds of imagery of a footpad sitting on dirt.

The US has completely mapped the planet at high resolution with radar from orbiting spacecraft. YouTube offeres CGI "flights" over the Venusian terrain made from that data.

>First, colonize Antarctica, the Sahara, the Oceans (surface and continental shelves) before considering anything off-planet.
T H I S

This would be infinitely more cost effective and several orders of magnitude more realistic than any colonization or terraforming scheme.

We already know everything there is to know and wasting budgets on something that will not produce any meaningful scientific return is counterproductive.

>We already know everything there is to know

the temperature for mars is incorrect

When it comes to things useful to humanity, he's right.

The one for Earth is also incorrect. The range should be shown, not the median.

This, colonization is impossible with humans. Better to send robot miners and automatic foundries, then send the resources back. Even sending shit down a gravity well and brining material back to earth would be cheaper than trying to colonize a planet, and a colony would definitely fail. We can't even colonize a desert on Earth, how would you colonize a desert with no air and radiation everywhere?

>When it comes to things useful to humanity, he's right.
how can a smart board be so stupid

We should do Mars first. Literally drop some supplies, dig a hole and cover it with Martian dust and start some refineries.

Mars is cold and a near vacuum, but nice and stable. 25 hour days stop everyone from going mad and would let you live a somewhat normal existence. Also, room to expand with current known technology.

Venus would be an eternal Hindenberg until we could terraform it. That 1G gravity is thicc tho

sup oldspace

Venus has a steep gravity well, a corrosive atmosphere, a nightmare hell surface of ludicrous heat and pressure, and very little water. Ill pass.

since this is a Veeky Forums thread and it's about venus, well how plausible is actually building a surface colony on Venus? What sort of materials would the colony need to be composed of?

I assume you would need to build underground, where it's cooler, as the heat on the surface is from the greenhouse effect and greenhouse gasses, thus you would need to actually go deep underground where it would be somewhat cooler to build shelters and whatnot.

Wolfenstein II had a neat level on Venus, but the entire time I played it I couldn't help but think that it just seemed retarded. You could walk around the surface but constantly needed to use cooling stations for your suit. They were changing the atmosphere with some kind of massive machine too, it was honestly a pretty neat level.

No so fast, space man.
Before we do all this, we have to get access to space.

While SpaceX basically ridiculed the whole industry, the old farts are fighting hard to keep their money making machine going.

First off, SpaceX has to launch 7 final versions of Falcon 9 before astronauts are allowed on it.
Because that's obviously what they're gonna do with SLS and Atlas 5 with the 2 engine upper stage variant, that has basically never flown in the last decade.

Then, remember the whole Dragon 2 capsule landing on its own propulsion?
Cancelled, because it was 'too dangerous', even though it would still have carried a full set of parachutes, in case of anomaly.

Brushing over the whole USAF certification process that took way too much time to get done, for no reason.

Meanwhile, ULA gets authorization to still buy russian engines, when it was a National Security supersensitive subject before.
Imagine if they had to wait for Vulcan to launch crew to the ISS. Or worse, use Delta IV.

Expect a lot more shenanigans, as SpaceX keeps on crushing the whole space industry.
It's not even that those people care about space at all. They just want their money printing machine back.

Elon might get sniped at some point, that's what I really fear. But I'm sure he's enjoying fucking them in the ass, and that's totally worth it.

...

Maybe we could drop a bathysphere down there one day. How would we get back though

Why go to Venus, when we're basically Venusforming Earth?

Well, lead walls seem fine.
Then build your whole base as a fucking refrigerator to keep it cool.
I suppose you could use windmills, because, obviously, not much solar panels can do, when them melt.
You can make them windmill of lead too.
Atmospheric density will make them turn at 10km/h wind. Wind on Venus is pretty much like current on Earth's ocean.
But why would you want to live down there?
It's basically fucking Hell.

>start some refineries
>A few supplies is all we need to kick start heavy industry
I love how out of touch with reality you guys are.

I wasn't being 100% serious dumbass. In comparison to Venus it's still much more feasible though, especially delivering infrastructure from Earth.

I agree.
But you know what?
If SpaceX's BFR actually becomes a thing, there's no reason to not do both.

Subsurface Venus is not cooler.
Suppose it was.
Then there'd be a net heat flow towards the center of the planet until the interior warmed enough to eliminate the thermal gradient.
All planets have net gradients in the other direction because their internal heat comes from radioactivity (and leftover heat from when the planet assembled from planetesimals). The outflux can persist because energy can be radiated away into the emptiness between the stars.

Wolfenstein II isn't real.

Any base on Venus needs active cooling; to get rid of the heat which leaks in through the insulation, the heat which humans produce just by living, and the heat from the powerplant which runs everything. The radiators have to be hotter than their surroundings -- surroundings which can already melt lead.

I won't say it's impossible. I will say that, as an engineer, I'd hate to get stuck with the design job.

>surroundings which can already melt lead.
Fuck, then what the fuck would sustain that heat?
Or do you have to activelly cool your lead outer structure?

>I wasn't being 100% serious
It's really hard to tell in these threads. Anons unironically defend these kinds of ''just ......''-arguments.
>just put up an artificial magnetosphere
>just melt the ice cap to make an ocean
>just raise the temperature a bit to release the CO2
>just make an atmosphere
It's all so incredibly stupid

Oh, what do you imagine might be on Venus that will be useful to humanity that hasn't already been discovered?

People are saying Venus is useless because you can't mine it, what is deep sea drilling?

And it has precisely fuck all long term value. If space exploration can be kickstarted the earth can become a tiny part of a much greater civilization.

If your outer walls won't withstand the heat, then they have to be refrigerated. Heat must be extracted from them and pumped against the thermal gradient (by using power) until you have something hotter than the ambient conditions. Then you can dump it outside.
Simple thermodynamics.

You might get power from windmills. (I don't know how fast the surface winds are though. The thick atmosphere and slow rotation would make it nearly impossible to get appreciable convection going near the ground.)

>universetoday.com/36816/winds-on-venus/
Down at the surface, the winds only move at a few km/hour. That’s not much, but the thick atmosphere can still kick up dust and push around small rocks.

Any power plant which liberates energy as heat must operate at a temperature higher than any discussed so far.

There are materials which remain solid at Venusian temperatures, but they're expensive and may lack other desired characteristics. Don't you think the USSR build their probes as tough as they possibly could?

Back in the days before it was FULLY realized what a hellhole Venus is, Poul Anderson suggested
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube
as a means of cooling. That assumed high-speed winds and a surface not quite as hot as it turned out to be.

The two are almost nothing alike.

Not a sustainable colony. Requires constant resupply

all anime posters are retarded

>Any base on Venus needs active cooling
Or you float in the atmosphere up above the serious heat

And operations on the surface would be designed to operate fine at 400 c

Yeah, that is far-fetched.
Even colonizing Titan seems more likely.

Yea ofc because spending 99% of all the power generation you have on heating is the way to go

Sure, but we were actually discussing the idea of a ground base.

Well at least, your power generation devices wouldn't be melting.

>There are materials which remain solid at Venusian temperatures, but they're expensive and may lack other desired characteristics

It's 400 C not 4000
Any sort of stone or structural metal is fine

Callisto is the future

Dude, metals have a melting point, ok.
But they do things like expanding length way before they melt.
That kinda fucks up your engineering.

Thermal expansion is a familiar engineering problem, easily dealt with.

Furthermore, once you start mining and manufacturing on the Venusian surface, the temperature and pressure are stable, so this isn't a concern.

>>surroundings which can already melt lead.
>Fuck, then what the fuck would sustain that heat?
You can easily melt lead on your stovetop. Can you think of some materials that you can't easily melt on your stovetop? Those are fine for Venus.

Basically, you can live on Venus in a titanium-hulled nuclear submarine. This is convenient because a nuclear submarine would also be a good thing to live in in space, and to survive an atmospheric entry. This is inconvenient because one with living space for 60 men weighs about 5000 tons, and I doubt people would want to live in anything much smaller. With some development effort, I think mass can be reduced to around 1000 tons, and that this is feasible to launch if something like BFR is developed.

There need to be some design changes to the reactor, because the radiator will be at ~400 C, and plenty of power will be needed to air condition the habitable space. It may be easier to use wind and solar power (both highly available on Venus, and sunlight is constant on the day side: you only need to travel around the world once every 243 Earth days to have perpetual light, which would be quite easy near the poles).

It's doable but quite technically challenging. Probably better for colonists to stay in the upper atmosphere, on winged aircraft or lighter-than-air craft, until they've bootstrapped surface industry by tele-operation.

Oh, there's one reactor design that's remarkably well-suited to use on the surface of Venus: the molten lead fast reactor. It would need a different power-conversion system though, like a stirling engine.

New dating possibilities.

It would be interesting to give each significant cultutre their own planet to see how it works without other cultures interfering. Even with trade between planets, the huge distances should keep cultural contamination low. Other than perhaps asteroid mining, there would be little reason for there to be resource competition. Things like pollution would be confined to each culture's planet.

The radiators have to be hotter than their surroundings and the radiators have to be the COLDEST point in the system.

I said it wasn't impossible; only that it would be a heck of an engineering problem.
Nuclear reactors, for example, aren't constructed of the most heat-resistant materials we have. Nuclear rockets can't even reach temperatures hydrogen and oxygen can. There's more to material science and engineering than just softening point.

I'd like to see a nuclear sub atop a BFR.
Incidentally, a sub's PWRs aren't all that powerful. In fact, they're tiny when compared to commercial reactors. And I don't think you appreciate how much A/C is needed against a thermal gradient like you'd be facing!

There's a saying among engineers. "All problems are easy to the man who doesn't have to deal with them."
Again, not claiming problems are insolvable. But this thread (and many of the "solutions" I see on Veeky Forums) seriously underestimate the practical difficulties. "All you have to do..." is pipe-dreaming.

Good luck finding a material that won't:
- corrode,
- react,
- melt,
- get crushed

and will shield and insulate us from the: - blistering temperatures,
- acidic atmosphere,
- crushing pressures

To the user who said plastics, they can melt, aren't tough enough and are porous.
Even if you were to try and float in the atmosphere you'll have to have the following:
- A powerful energy system that won't fail or explode and can provide sustenance to the ship that will weigh several tonnes.

- A gps system to help you navigate around the atmosphere but that is assuming the signals will be received flawlessly. Also you'll be much closer to the sun so expect to get hit much harder by the solar storms. Does Venus even have a powerful magnetic shield?

- Means to escape Venus when things will inevitably go terribly wrong.

- Reliable means of dumping sewer waste.

- Means of producing and storing water.

>- A powerful energy system that won't fail or explode and can provide sustenance to the ship that will weigh several tonnes.

Solar panels & wind turbines would provide ample power

>- Means of producing and storing water.
Condense out of atmosphere

Elon will become the new JFK

an open borders communist who is more responsible for the death of the USA than anyone else?

>We can't even colonize a desert on Earth
I hope nobody tells California.

Solar panels will melt and get corroded.

Assuming they won't due to some amazing system, they will still perform poorly due to the high heat. Solar panels experience losses as the temperatures increase.

As for wind turbines, they would have to be made out of lead or some other heavy duty material. This will reduce efficiency due to weight and friction. Moreover the wind speeds are too high on Venus and that means the wind turbines would have to be shut down to prevent damage. They also have a limit that dictates the maximum theoretical power they can produced in ideal conditions - Betz limit. Conditions on Venus are far less than ideal.

>water can be condensed out of air
There's practically no water vapour on Venus. It's dry. You would also have to filter out ash, sulphuric acid, carbon dioxide etc. because they are continuously released into the atmosphere due to the volcanoes and as such dissolve information the air.

*dissolve in the air

why do you keep bringing up lead you clown

It's like trying to build out of dry ice on earth just to say building on earth is impossible

I'm just saying that the materials would be heavy. Just using as an example.