22 thoughts on “Inspiration Venus?”

    2. There’s about a lake Erie’s worth of water already in the atmosphere, trivially extractable from the air, not to mention what you get when you break down the sulfuric acid. Perhaps more importantly is abundant nitrogen, a definite requirement for plants, and easily accessible temperatures and pressures for economically making ammonia and ammonium nitrate, probably cheaper than we can do it on Earth. It also has about the same temperature and pressure as Earth (tropical sea level) at about 55 km altitude, and with the abundant CO2 , nitrogen, sulfur, and extractable water, growing plants would be a snap with the addition of some phosphorus and a few trace elements like copper and iron, and without requiring any type of insulated, pressurized, radiation-protected structures.

      Elon Musk started into the rocket business because he wanted to put a little terrarium on Mars so kids could see plants growing on another planet and become inspired. NASA is currently working on a lunar mission to sprout turnips on the moon (turnips? really? Doesn’t that sound awfully Soviet?). An small airship floating high in the Venus atmosphere and filled with growing plants would be equally inspirational, if not even more so.

      1. We seem to be disagreeing by a factor of 20 George.

        I get 20ppm of water in an atmosphere of 1,000,000 kg/m^2, so that’s 20kg/m^2 of water (ok correct for volume rather than mass), so more like 10kg/m^2 of water over the whole surface of 460 million km^2, so our lake gets to be 460 x 1cm deep if its area is a million km^2.

        So a million km^2 at 4.6 meters deep.

        1. Well, let me double check. The mass of Venus’ atmosphere is 4.8e20 kg and the average molecular weight is I think 43.7, so 20 ppm of H2O (by mole) should be 3.95e15 kg of water, or 3.95e12 cubic meters, which is 3,950 cubic kilometers, or a million square km lake (1000 km x 1000 km) 3.95 meters deep. Lake Huron is 3,540 cubic km and Lake Michigan is 4,920 cubic km, so the amount of water is somewhere between those two lakes.

          The atmosphere also has 5.17e15 kg of helium (at 12 ppm), which would be very useful for added lift and as a breathing gas during deeper dives into the atmosphere. I’m pretty sure a human could withstand the pressure (44 bar) on top of Maxwell Montes.

        2. As an aside, before we settle on trying to freeze the CO2 into dry ice and let it bury much of the surface, there’s a possibility that there’s enough Mg, Ca, Na, and K to lock it up in carbonates. I suggest this because we think the surface of Venus is only about 500 million years old, which begs the question as to what was there before. If it at some point had liquid oceans it could well have formed very thick layers of limestone and other carbonate and sulfate deposits. But calcium carbonate doesn’t like heat very much and can outgas CO2 (which is how we make cement) to leave CaO. When hydrated this forms calcium hydroxide Ca(OH)2, locking up a water molecule instead of a CO2 molecule. If there had been a prior sedimentary surface that had its CO2 baked out, it won’t reform at the present surface temperatures, but the elements to reform it might still be there as massive surface deposits, in the form of calcium, magnesium, and other hydrates. If so, there’s a better way to store all the CO2 as carbonates while freeing up an immense amount of liquid water.

          1. I can’t imagine how a thousand tonnes of CO2 over every square meter of the planets surface can be reacted with minerals in the surface to make it go away inside of 1,000,000 or so years.

            Maybe I’m just not imaginative enough.

          2. It’s chemistry. If you get the equilibrium chemistry right, under the right conditions, it happens in minutes!

            *claim does not extend to New Hampshire, Maine, or Nevada.
            *chemical reaction may require massive movement of surface deposits and radical changes to topography.
            *our knowledge of what’s on Venus and why is so sketchy that it’s premature to form a plan of action.

            The notion that maybe the CO2 can be absorbed by rocks on the surface as carbonates is based on the thought that there may have been carbonates prior to the Venusians’ socialist revolution that destroyed their atmosphere, much like every East Bloc left-wing environmental disaster, which on Venus released even more CO2 due to the temperature spikes, and that with an externally driven downward shift in temperatures, combined with a conservative economic philosophy, we could reverse the reaction and restore Venus to a thriving capitalist planet with a thriving economy where Venusian women once again flash their boobs.

  2. Yea, as long as you ignore the gas pressure, the temperature, and the gravity well….

    Oh yea, and lack of water…

    Splendid!

    2. The trick is to put a sunshade at the Venus – Sun L1 point, freeze out all the CO2 in one big heap, liquify 2/3rds of the N2, stick a mirror at L2 to give you 24 hour days, at which point you have an environment way better than that on Mars.

      2. The craziest way I can come up with to terraform Venus is to do nothing at all except encase the atmosphere below 55 km in a big balloon, which would start out like a giant layer of air mattresses. Once they’re all connected up, you pump any CO2 from up top to down below and liberate some oxygen to give an Earth normal atmosphere above the balloon and hellish current conditions below it. The balloon can support almost any amount of weight on top because it would be squeezing on the atmosphere of Venus at whatever pressure differential was required to support the weight.

        So on that surface you build a passive maglev system supporting a second sphere, then pump a vacuum between the two spheres so the pressure differential is opposed by the magnetic fields. Then you add enough solar cells to the second sphere to power its rotation magnetically, and spin it in whatever direction you want with a 24 hour period. Then you have a fake planetary surface that’s almost exactly Earth like, at an Earth-like pressure, temperature, and atmosphere mix with a 24 hour day/night cycle.

        Perhaps that would be a viable terraforming method if you traveled to a star and the only planet in the habitable range was a gas giant.

  3. Well, any attempt to colonize Venus should use transparent aluminum, so I suggest sialon 50 which doesn’t even react with 98% concentrated boiling sulfuric acid and can stop bullets. Stopping bullets may seem irrelevant, but airships built with composites and ceramics would be stealthy, and in the thick clouds of Venus it would be easy for Zeppelin-borne pirates to raid people’s cattle and crops, grab up the daughters, toss the parents over the side, and then disappear down into the depths.

  4. One of the problems with the castles in the air is that at 1 bar of pressure you’re in the middle of a smog the likes of which Beijing and LA have never seen.

    1. And yet LA and Beijing are two of the most economically successful cities on Earth, as was London when people were dying of smog. Smog is what spurs us on. Smog is who we are. One man’s smog is another man’s atmospheric ISRU. We look at Venus and see endless possibilities, where the Venusians threw in the towel because they dismissed the massive elemental and thermodynamic cornucopia they left as planet destroying waste.

      I could say much more about our sister planet, and what she did, if she wasn’t our sister. It’s unseemly to second-guess her disastrous choices, even though we knew where it would all end up. So sad.

      1. Yes, but look at the quality of people that smog attracts, would you really want our new planet overrun by people attracted to smog? People who would choose to live in airborne Caves Of Steel, surrounded in and blanketed by smog, who’re too dim to appreciate the glory of The Naked Sun?

        Have a look at the topography you get with a terraformed Venus topped up with a bit of imported water, shallow seas, lots of islands and bays, imagine all those Venusian Babes on all those golden beaches, beautiful people on a beautiful world. Now compare that with those miserable creatures in squatting in the fog.

        We’ll never get another world like a terraformed Venus, Mars will never compare, it’ll have one boring ocean around the north pole, and a boring continent around the south pole, the settlers on a new Mars will probably all shoot themselves out of boredom. Look boy, even the lakes on new Mars will be boring, they’ll all be round, deep and surrounded by cliffs, WTF, who wants to live in a lake district where all the lakes are round, deep and surrounded by cliffs??

  5. A vision comes to mind of a genetically engineered plant that grows an oxygen balloon to remain at a comfortable altitude. Add coloration to reflect more at short wavelengths and radiate at long wavelengths.

  6. Answer me quickly, the thermal thicket, the intense heating of an aerospace craft at supersonic and hypersonic speeds is the result of atmospheric friction?

    No, that “friction” explanation is wrong, wrong, something that Jim would quote, and wrong. OK, maybe friction is involved indirectly in the fluid viscosity needed to form a shock wave, but the reason meteors and unprotected spacecraft burn up on reentry is on account of compression heating.

    So, the hellish heat on the surface of Venus is the result of a “greenhouse effect.” Wrong, wrong, this really is something Jim (and others would and indeed do say), and it is still wrong. That heat is the result of — you guessed it — compression heating.

    There is this Harry Dale Huffman guy who explains all of this, and how at the 1 bar pressure altitude, and compensating for the increase sunlight, the temperature on Venus is not that much different than Earth. Venus, as we all know in the modern post Mariner spacecraft era, has a really, really thick atmosphere, and the high temps at the surface are explained by a atmosphere in thermal equilibrium and PV = nRT (or the adiabatic relation T =PV^{\gamma}).

    Now Huffman gets a little bit goofy when he tries to use this to prove that the CO2 warming hypothesis is dead wrong for Earth. I guess he assumes that the Earth is in thermal equilibrium, which may oddly enough be the case for Venus, but the Earth’s atmophere and oceans are far from being in thermal equilibrium.

    But I think you get a more reasoned explanation from Richard Lindzen, and yes Richard Lindzen is an atmospheric scientists, and yes, he is an “outlier from the consensus”, but no, he is not goofy and he understands the physics as well as anyone else who is serious.

    Again, the Earth is not in thermal equilibrium, and also unlike Venus, its albedo (reflection of light from the sun) varies with clouds. But if you read Crazy Harry Huffman and run his explanations through the filter of Lindzen’s more sober descriptions, you can kinda, sorta regard the Earth’s atmosphere as in thermal equilibrium, and apart from the worry about the differences between the “dry adiabatic lapse rate” and the “wet adiabatic lapse rate”, you can kinda, sorta do one of those “onion layer stellar atmosphere” physics models on the atmosphere.

    The narrative is that the lower atmosphere is more or less opaque to infrared radiation. That is why NASA has that jet (the Kuiper Observatory) with an open window like a WW-II waist-gun port to make telescope observations in the IR, to fly above most of this opacity. The warming of the surface above the chill we would have “in the absence of any greenhouse effect” is really the warming from compression heating, because radiative transfer is a minor effect (except when it it isn’t that minor, such as dry, still, cloudless nights — again, the Earth’s atmosphere-surface-ocean system is — say it with me — complicated). So for the next person who says meteors and unshielded spacecraft burn up from “friction”, wap them on the side of the head for me, will you?

    Just as the Sun has a “photosphere”, the “visible surface” of a body that doesn’t really have a surface, where the optical opacity has diminished to where the light comes out, and the altitude of this surface, the energy flux, and the Stefans-Boltzmann law determine what we call the “temperature at the surface of the sun”, the Earth has a thermosphere, a layer in the atmosphere where it emits IR, and this blackbody emission takes place at a lower temperature than the temperature at the surface. The altitude of that thermosphere, according to Lindzen, is dunno, somewhere around the bottom of the “flight levels.”

    What Lindzen goes on to explain is that the effect of CO2 is to raise (slightly) the altitude where the atmosphere becomes transparent to IR, warming the Earth surface by, you guessed it, a higher level of compression heating. But the Devil is in the details, and Lindzen earns the scorn of Jim and others by claiming that the amplification of this effect by a positive feddback into clouds and water vapor concentrations is not taking place.

    Now Venus could have had an atmospheric runaway event leading to this thick atmosphere. But the mechanism by which Venus is hot is compression heating, and its “thermosphere”, the layer it radiates as a black body in the IR, is well above the 1 bar level, just as on Earth, and the blackbody temperature of Venus, correcting for albedo and increase solar intensity, is a low value just like with Earth.

    1. Exactly. 🙂

      The radiative equilibrium of the upper atmosphere determines the temperature of the upper atmosphere, and then if there’s vertical mixing, the adiabatic lapse rate determines the temperatures lower down because an atmosphere is also like a refrigerator, heat pump, or diesel engine where the compression ratio and expansion determines the delta T. The link to the outside environment (the radiative altitude) determines the temperature at one point of the cycle, and all the other temperatures are determined from that based on where they are in the thermodynamic cycle. More simply, down deep Jupiter and Saturn are hotter than Venus because they have thicker atmospheres.

      Another invalid assumption climatologists made was assuming that higher temperatures create faster winds, under the theory that more heat means more energy. As we found out studying the outer planets, wind speed actually increases with cold because the gas builds kinetic energy instead of thermal energy, or that colder gas dissipates less energy into eddies because the molecules don’t slam into each other as energetically, or something like that. Thus the winds on Neptune actually go supersonic.

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