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Maybe Venus wouldn’t be as awful as Earth

Quick, after that last post, I desperately need a thorough brain cleanse. Maybe a quick vacation on the paradisial water world of Venus, or Amtor as Edgar Rice Burroughs called it.

OK, maybe 575°C and 90 atmospheres of pressure rule out visiting it for spring break (actually, I’m visiting Des Moines, Iowa at that time, which should be more pleasant), but this is a reminder that Soviet engineering and science actually accomplished great and admirable things. And they were so persistent and creative in their efforts to put a probe on the surface!

« Another evolutionary biologist exposed as a jerk

Comments

  3. Becca Stareyes says

    In terms of ‘places off Earth to live’, about 50 km up in the Venusian atmosphere isn’t half bad. At least, the temperature and pressure are fine and the atmosphere above you provides at least some shielding from cosmic rays even if Venus lacks a magnetosphere. Your air supply is even lighter than the local atmosphere, so adds buoyancy. Sure, it’s dry as a bone and the atmosphere will suffocate you, and it is a very long fall to the ground but you’re probably above the sulfuric acid clouds at least.

    (There is a reason why longer-duration exploration of Venus might be best done by putting the probes on balloons. Sure you can’t do the poke-the-rocks-with-your-instruments thing the Mars rovers can do, but it turns out heat and pressure kill robots faster than cold and sand.)

  4. Snarki, child of Loki says

    The Soviet probes worked much better on Venus than US probes, because they used vacuum tubes, which tolerate extreme heat much better than semiconductors.

  5. dennyk says

    As far as I can tell there isn’t a single billionaire there, so it’s not all bad.

    I suggest we send some immediately. Call it Project VenusGate or something.

  6. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: Becca Stareyes @3.

    From the Weinersmiths’ book A City on Mars

    We haven’t found too many proposals for a Venusian habitat, but there are a few ideas for a floating base in that thick atmosphere. It turns out that there’s a slim shell of the Venusian sky that has human-friendly temperatures and pressure, low radiation, 90 percent Earth gravity, and access to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Location, location, location!

    If you’re somehow not impressed by the idea of a life spent dangling above and below hell, you should talk to the nice people who proposed a project called Cloud Ten. Their plan is to use all that atmospheric carbon dioxide to grow bamboo and kombucha, out of which to build small cell-like habitats.

    […] if you dream of a home constructed of bamboo and kombucha, surely someone in Northern California is prepared to accommodate you at a lower price.

    * “Cloud Ten” a chapter in Inner Solar System: Prospective Energy and Material Resources (2015, p451–98) by Magnus Larsson and Alex Kaiser

  7. John Morales says

    dennyk, so send Beyoncé there? Rihanna?

    One should stick to < $999,999,999, lest one become evil is the moral.

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