NASA Scientists Propose Airships and Cloud City for Human Exploration of Venus (VIDEO)

originally posted by: CJCrawley
Even if that were feasible, one wonders what could possibly be gained from such a venture - other than to prove we could do it.

We need to be directing our energies towards the terraforming and colonisation of Mars.

We only have around a billion years before Earth becomes uninhabitable...not really that long of an outlook for an ambitious species.

And the clock's ticking.

if it is possible terraforming mars would result in a world with .30 something percent earth gravity and an atmosphere that would eventually leak away again*. also with no magnetic field to speak of you would still have radiation problems for any biome you created outdoors. with no plate tectonics you would not have a deep hydrological cycle which has ramifications for any oceans. this also ties into maintaining aa proper o2 mix. with no dynamism or reduced dynamism maintaining a warm environment would be complicated and require constant planetary geo-engineering.

*but this would take 300K years; more time than mankind has existed on earth.

on the other hand Venus is earth mass and so has nearly 1 G gravity. heating aside this makes it harder for o2 to escape. also people who colonized venus could easily go back and forth to earth without suffering potentially fatal reaclimatization like would be the case with a martian to earth traveller.

i am not sure of the state of tectonics on venus nor the dynamism. it is possible those are earth-like too but i am dubious about it. but if i am misremembering and those are earth-like then that is 70 percent of the teraforming issue taken care of right there.

mars is worth it even with the deficiencies but venus is potentially even better. Venus's problems look insurmountable but probably aren't. the atmosphere is fixable. the heating is a problem but can be greatly reduced with the right atmospheric gas mix. at one time venus was far more earthlike but the sun was cooler then. you would need a orbital shade or mirror system ...or to somehow move venus further out from the sun. and if you did manage that trick somehow you would need a stable orbit that would not mess with earth or the moons orbit gravitationally. ideally somewhere between earth and the asteroid belt.

i once asked a astronomer if there were empty stable orbits like that and he told me according to modelling there are at least two such empty orbits available. so if we every develop the means to be moving planets around there are better orbitals available for what ever we decide to put there.

a reply to: JadeStar

Um... so you missed the engineering test flight of Orion earlier this month.....

pay attention:

Be as condescending as you like............now YOU pay attention.......

That test flight doesnt mean anything, they need to be able to engineer this tech for "sky cities" first before it can be launched........that means they need to start here on the ground......

We already know we can fire rockets, we already know we can get things into orbit and into space.......

a reply to: stormbringer1701

mars is worth it even with the deficiencies but venus is potentially even better.

Why would we want to terraform Venus? Or even visit?

It would be a hugely expensive waste of time.

The Sun will get hotter over time - we need to be moving AWAY from it, not heading towards it!

In about one billion years from now, the Sun will start to die.

It's a very long process lasting billions of years, but as it starts to die, the Sun will get smaller, brighter, and hotter than it is now.

It will boil away the oceans and make the Earth too hot to sustain life.

Mars may be cold now, but over time it will warm up as the Sun becomes hotter, and will be a far more promising habitat for humans than the Earth will be, one billion years hence.

If Mars will be difficult to terraform and colonise, then we have to begin addressing the problem now, because it's mankind's only hope of survival in the remote future.

originally posted by: CJCrawley
a reply to: stormbringer1701

mars is worth it even with the deficiencies but venus is potentially even better.

Why would we want to terraform Venus? Or even visit?

It would be a hugely expensive waste of time.

The Sun will get hotter over time - we need to be moving AWAY from it, not heading towards it!

In about one billion years from now, the Sun will start to die.

It's a very long process lasting billions of years, but as it starts to die, the Sun will get smaller, brighter, and hotter than it is now.

It will boil away the oceans and make the Earth too hot to sustain life.

Mars may be cold now, but over time it will warm up as the Sun becomes hotter, and will be a far more promising habitat for humans than the Earth will be, one billion years hence.

If Mars will be difficult to terraform and colonise, then we have to begin addressing the problem now, because it's mankind's only hope of survival in the remote future.

yeah a billion years from now Sol will be too hot for earth and venus. see; it's ridiculous. even Mars with the probable lifespan of 300K years of breathable O2 once an O2/Nitrogen atmosphere is achieved is worth doing. 300K is only 250K years longer than we have been fully human and over 30 times the entire history of civilization. now; how much better is a billion years? in that span there is plenty of time to teraform both. plus build a few spare planets out of solar system protoplanetary disk rubble. in a few thousand years who is to say we can't develop technology that able to move planets and migrate them to whatever the life zone of Sol happens to be at the time?