Venus is Harder

[Jaymann]

With all the interest in finding earth size exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone around distant stars, it is interesting to note there is actually one relatively nearby. It is a rocky planet with an atmosphere. Unfortunately the atmosphere is poisonous to humans and the temperature is beastly hot. But still, how did it get that way and could it be terraformed? No matter the difficulty, it pales by comparison to the difficulty of just getting to an extra stellar exoplanet.

Here is an excellent video on all things Venetian.

[Kraken]

That dude talks too fast to play at 1.25x. I'm going to have to watch this in chunks.

Reacting to the first 20 minutes about the history of Venus exploration, he doesn't mention what was always my understanding of the situation: during the Cold War, the US and the USSR each developed a different emphasis, with the US concentrating on Mars and leaving Venus to the Soviets. Yes there was some crossover, and no, neither country could lay claim to either world...but it felt like Mars was American and Venus was Soviet.

Just as an aside, during my childhood we knew so little about both worlds that we held some faint hope that either or both were habitable, if not inhabited. I remember the disappointment when Mariner...uh, 9 I think it was...revealed Mars to be cratered and dry, more like the moon than like Earth. And at more or less the same time we learned that Venus wasn't hiding lush jungles under those impenetrable clouds. We didn't definitively rule out the possibility of Martian or Venusian life until the mid-60s.

[raydude]

The above video is cool. I'm gonna skip to the part where he talks about the delay in the Psyche mission and the implications that it had for other missions in the pipe. Things that I don't feel like I can talk about because I'm part of the team that works with the GRNS instrument, built by APL. But I have no problem letting someone else speak about the problems with the project . I'm just gonna re-iterate some words he used like "shortfalls in management at JPL" - his words, not mine. I'll just say that I'm no longer interested in working there and am quite happy at APL.

What sucks about the delay to Veritas is that the Veritas team was on-track and on-budget. And at least one APL scientist was a co-investigator on the mission.

[Kraken]

Heh, the digression into management/budget/politics was a snooze for me, but it picked up again with the discussion of volcanism and surface resolution. I wonder if Venus has plate tectonics. I don't think we know yet (correct me if I'm wrong) and I hope the next section that I watch will address that. Because absence of plate tectonics could be one reason that CO2 took over Venus's atmosphere, and why that didn't happen on Earth.

[Daehawk]

Haven't watched it yet. I always figured Venus had dead cities scattered about on the surface We / they let global warming & carbon dioxide go crazy and created a greenhouse effect so we left and had to settle and terraform Earth. But the colony almost failed leaving only 2 humans to populate Earth..Adam and his scientist wife Eve. Together they carried on and saved mankind but lost all tech and info of their real past ...their human home world of Venus.

[gilraen]

Haven't watched it yet. I always figured Venus had dead cities scattered about on the surface We / they let global warming & carbon dioxide go crazy and created a greenhouse effect so we left and had to settle and terraform Earth. But the colony almost failed leaving only 2 humans to populate Earth..Adam and his scientist wife Eve. Together they carried on and saved mankind but lost all tech and info of their real past ...their human home world of Venus.

Heck, I'd watch that show

[Kraken]

Haven't watched it yet. I always figured Venus had dead cities scattered about on the surface We / they let global warming & carbon dioxide go crazy and created a greenhouse effect so we left and had to settle and terraform Earth. But the colony almost failed leaving only 2 humans to populate Earth..Adam and his scientist wife Eve. Together they carried on and saved mankind but lost all tech and info of their real past ...their human home world of Venus.

Heck, I'd watch that show

Count me in if the Venusians are women in skimpy clothes, as pulp sci-fi promised me in my youth.

[Daehawk]

Haven't watched it yet. I always figured Venus had dead cities scattered about on the surface We / they let global warming & carbon dioxide go crazy and created a greenhouse effect so we left and had to settle and terraform Earth. But the colony almost failed leaving only 2 humans to populate Earth..Adam and his scientist wife Eve. Together they carried on and saved mankind but lost all tech and info of their real past ...their human home world of Venus.

Heck, I'd watch that show

Count me in if the Venusians are women in skimpy clothes, as pulp sci-fi promised me in my youth.

Sorta the Syreen from Star Control?

[Holman]

I've seen speculation that colonization of Venus might not involve living on the surface at all. The dense atmosphere would allow floating dirigible-cities at the very top of the sky. Although at that point, one simply has to ask "why?"

I think the future of life in space involves building made-to-order space habitats, these having the benefit of perfect environmental conditions rather than settling for whatever a 5% or 10% terraformed Mars or Venus can offer us for the first three or four centuries.

I think Luna will be the test-lab for building our own space habitats, while also probably providing a lot of the structural material for the first of them.

[Holman]

I posted this in another thread about five years ago:

I think the model of "finding habitable planets" may be a relic of the previous age of discovery. ("What's on the other side of the ocean?")

Rather than sailing out to find new continents, we're probably going to wind up building them ourselves.