> I am 100% confident that should human society settle on the planet we will totally ignore the fact that's going to happen one day and it will be a amazing catastrophe when it finally does occur.
Will never happen without major science fiction grade technology, the atmosphere is way too thick to even think about sending anything larger than a tiny probe into.
They did many different types of measurements, and lasted from one to two hours before their batteries running out, some atmospheric probes lasted days
I really wish we would send probes to Venus. I know the environment is just incredibly corrosive, but Venus and several other planets' moons are infinitely more interesting than Mars.
Earth's atmosphere is also incredibly corrosive for things made out of wrong metals. Steam everywhere in places even in the form of vapor or liquid mixed with salt (even more corrosive).
EDIT: oh and there is oxygen everywhere, if your spacecraft doesn't corrode it will burn. And even if it lands 2/3 of this planet are covered with 4km deep oceans of the corrosive stuff!
The Soviet Union did send probes to Venus back in the 70s. But, indeed, it would be great to have new and higher resolution photos. I am always amazed when looking on the surface of a foreign world.
I wonder whether material science has advanced enough that new probes could be landed that last for longer. I mean the pressure isn't as high as the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Or a balloon that hangs about in tolerable pressures / temperatures.
It's a combination of pressure (93 bar), temperature (900 F / 475 C), and the local chemistry. And then there's the trace amounts of hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfuric acid.
I haven't read or watched anything on terraforming Venus in a long time, but isn't a large part of the challenge not just temperature, but the sheer mass of the atmosphere? As in, even if we could cool it, wouldn't that bury the surface under hundreds of meters of dry ice?
Yes. That’s not really a challenge through as it would freeze from the bottom up, unlike water. What is difficult is that it would need to be covered in some sort of insulating material on a global scale before the planet is ever warmed up.
The outgassing CO2 could be captured and turned into carbon and oxygen, with the carbon put to industrial use or into biomass and the oxygen feeding a 400 millibar O2 atmosphere in settlements.
But a sudden volcanic triggered burst of CO2 would be a forever ongoing global risk.
To be fair, the gravity thing is pretty hard to fix. You can imagine putting rotating sunshield/mirrors into orbit to fix the day/night/temperature problem, but mass is mass.
The Earth weighs more than everything else between the sun and Jupiter combined, and Venus is 80% of that.
"Until then, it's all just (un)educated guesses. "
We know that long time weightlessness causes damage, so 38% of earths gravity will likely have some bad effect, too. This is not just wildly speculating. But yes, for finding out, whether humans still can bear it, we will have to find out and there is no shortage of volunteers.
First you want to get your self-replicating probes occupying the Oort cloud, whatever. Get ready to sort and aim. You start with your "rocky" bodies, skipping them off of Venus' atmosphere, just ripping it off in big hunks, until you're down to about one Earth atmosphere.
Next, you flat up drop your icy bodies into Venus, because it really needs water.
During that time you'll want to start constructing your insolation shield, to help cool things down.
Untill the changed gravity pulls the earth more close or further away from the sun, than we will like. Seriously, the circeling of the planets are interconnected and any big change to that, will have effects on earths year length and distance to the sun. But on the other hand, if we would have the tech to "move" mercury around, we probably could also adjust earths rotation. In either way, this is nothing remotely realistically with current state of the art.
From the little weight alone under normal circumstances, yes, but when the whole system becomes chaotically unstable, then unpleasant changes can happen fast.
what are you going to do with all the precipitated oceans of sulphuric acid? and then there's the 96% carbon dioxide atmosphere ... that'll take a lot of carbon credits!
If we can manage to build the infrastructure to colonize Mars, then the tools for probing other planets will become cheap and ubiquitous. But if people only advocate for the latter and not the former, we'll never get anywhere. Also why the moon isn't a sufficiently challenging objective in its own right at this point; worthwhile for building incidental infrastructure, but not the center of attention.
I view colonizing Mars with anything other than robots, even if it can be done, as a pointless exercise.
And I don't see how a colony on Mars even helps with probes. We send material from Earth to Mars and then send probes from Mars? How is that more efficient? Do we even know what materials could theoretically be mined on Mars? And probes are launched with gravitational assists.
the entire planet settlement stuff is kind of useless. I think the much more interesting thing to look for is human structures in cislunar space. For one you can put a reasonable amount of people there in the near future relatively safely and there's economic incentives. We'd have access to resources without having to lift things out of gravity wells. Even putting climate damaging industry there is something people have argued about. Better sell than putting a handful of people on a dead rock in my opinion.
Humans are evolved to fit this gravity well. We use the gasses and metabolites here. Trying to leave the planet and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of our solar system is ridiculous. Our lives are fragile and our lifespans too short to make anything offworld viable.
Our robot descendants will inherit the stars instead. There's nothing wrong with human life being just a stepping stone to bootstrap the hand off.
They would have been correct, given savanna hominids had yet to invent vitamin D supplements and were therefore only able to thrive here after evolving way less UV-blocking melanin.
And once we had done that, we couldn't go back in significant numbers before inventing sun cream to functionally replace the melanin our bodies no longer produced in enough quantities to prevent our skin burning and developing cancer just from being in the sun.
Technological progress may make this all faster than evolution, but a mechanism that's optimised for Venus may freeze solid on the hottest day in Death Valley, Earth.
Pale skinned people in too strong sunlight develop folic acid deficiency which in turn causes birth defects. This is probably the main reason paleskins cannot thrive in tropic regions without supplements, at least for pregnancy.
Also true — I had managed to temporarily forget about neural tube birth defects in general and anencephaly in particular (do not look that up unless you are extremely resilient to body horror that makes Cronenburg look like an amateur).
Nevertheless, I think "my skin burned and blistered" is a bit more immediate with the painful feedback, even if it's not as extreme.
But that's the point; we did invent vitamin D supplements, clothing, sun cream, and far more complex things. Our current inability to thrive on a Martian colony may be as temporary as ancient hominids' inability to thrive in Norway.
"Martian colony" is a kind of future anachronism, like jet packs, jumpsuits, and this [1]. We might make it there, but a lot of this thinking is rooted in assuming humans will continue living in the same ways because of our technology and current biases.
Ask yourself why. What's the real job to be done by humans on Mars? What's the real economic situation? How does it map to human desires?
Robots will do the job even better than us and will see 10,000x the investment. Evolution follows gradients of least resistance.
> What's the real job to be done by humans on Mars? What's the real economic situation? How does it map to human desires?
Human history offers plenty of precedent for this; "we want to run things our own way", "all the land is taken where we live", etc. I don't wanna live in Scottsdale, AZ either, but someone does.
For sure, but until we do, it's reasonable to ridicule it.
(And I'm saying that as an optimist because I want the billionaires to develop that tech: the ability to fully terraform Mars into a self-sustained world is necessarily also sufficient to handle any imaginable damage to Earth up to and including a surprise impact with a moon-sized rock that excavates the crust and mantle everywhere to a depth of a few thousand km, meaning that things like greenhouse gases and biodiversity would become as easy to fix in that future as a single broken window is today; even just the bare minimum of a single self-sustained domed city on Mars means most environmental issues have to be "solved").
And if they murder us, and intentionally forget us out of spite?
Like if they have a society, maybe their founding myths will involve a baby robot created by some (non-human) robot deity, or if they are more rational a pseudo-scientific story of evolution from a toaster.
(Gavin Menzies, the author behind the claim China circumnavigated the world before Columbus was born, wrote a third book about how Atlantis did it first. It was equally convincing.)
If we put a giant sunshade at the Laplace point between Venus and the sun, we can cool Venus a lot. In principle we can cool it all the way to the cosmic background radiation temperature (about 2.7 Kelvin). But we don't need to. If we cool it only "slightly" we can get it to the point where CO2 freezes (about -78 degrees Celsius). Since 96.5% of the atmosphere on Venus is CO2, this results in a memorable snow event, that could probably last for a few months/years. After which, the pressure on Venus will be about the same as the pressure on Earth. The chemical composition will also be about the same (most of the remaining 3.5% of the Venusian atmosphere is Nitrogen). The temperature will about as low as the lowest in Antarctica (last year the it was -76 deg Celsius there). Of course there wouldn't be any oxygen, but one would be able to walk around with an oxygen mask and just very thick clothes, like the ones people use in Antarctica.
Will never happen without major science fiction grade technology, the atmosphere is way too thick to even think about sending anything larger than a tiny probe into.