Venus News and Discussions

[Time_Traveller]

Cool idea, and he's right about that "sweet spot" in Venus' atmosphere.

But the timing for this announcement literally couldn't be worse. lol.

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OceanGate's cofounder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050, and says we shouldn't stop pushing the limits of innovation

Jul 28, 2023, 4:47 PM BST

Guillermo Söhnlein has been unexpectedly thrust into the limelight in the wake of the Titan submersible tragedy.

The cofounder of OceanGate Expeditions has been grappling with questions about the company's ill-fated trip to the Titanic shipwreck on June 18, which killed five people, including former colleague and friend Stockton Rush.

The sub is thought to have imploded within hours of its descent, raising concerns about OceanGate's approach to innovation and safety.

But OceanGate is not Söhnlein's only venture. The businessman's latest — and possibly grandest — endeavor is to send 1,000 humans to live in Venus' atmosphere by 2050.

[...]

Söhnlein doesn't see why humanity shouldn't attempt to live on the planet. He points to research that suggests there is a sliver of the Venusian atmosphere about 30 miles from the surface where humans could theoretically survive because temperatures are lower and pressure is less intense.

https://www.businessinsider.com/oceanga ... ?r=US&IR=T



Credit: BOLD Community/NASA

In my opinion, we should be fixing the problems on Earth at the moment and wouldn't trust OceanGate with anything too.

[wjfox]

When will the first human mission to Venus take place?

lower 25% … 2048
median … 2073
upper 75% … Not ≤ 2075

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/670 ... -to-venus/

[Vakanai]

In my opinion, we should be fixing the problems on Earth at the moment and wouldn't trust OceanGate with anything too.

We could and honestly should do both in my opinion - try to undo the damage we've caused to earth and try to become a multiplanetary species. Not so we have an out in case we can't or won't fix our mess, but because we should push space exploration and space colonization as a desirable thing anyways, while also pushing for saving our planet and combating climate change. But we definitely should not be trusting OceanGate with any of it, because that's a one way ticket to kill people (even if the people killed were only billionaires, what with the uber wealthy feeling more and more like some malign malevolent evil subspecies of humans more and more these days).
Then again maybe we should push for the wealthy to live in Venus via OceanGate tech...might be the best way to save earth!

[weatheriscool]

Does lightning strike on Venus? Maybe not, study suggests
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-lightning-venus.html
by Daniel Strain, University of Colorado at Boulder

Venus may be a (slightly) gentler place than some scientists give it credit for.

In new research, space physicists at CU Boulder have jumped into a surprisingly long-running debate in solar system science: Does lightning strike on the second planet from the sun?

The team's results add strong new evidence suggesting that, no, you probably wouldn't see bolts of lightning flashing from Venus' thick, acidic clouds—or, at least, not very often.

"There's been debate about lightning on Venus for close to 40 years," said Harriet George, lead author of the new study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). "Hopefully, with our newly available data, we can help to reconcile that debate."

[weatheriscool]

Venus had Earth-like plate tectonics billions of years ago, study suggests
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-venus-ear ... lions.html
by Brown University

Venus, a scorching wasteland of a planet according to scientists, may have once had tectonic plate movements similar to those believed to have occurred on early Earth, a new study found. The finding sets up tantalizing scenarios regarding the possibility of early life on Venus, its evolutionary past and the history of the solar system.

Writing in Nature Astronomy, a team of scientists led by Brown University researchers describes using atmospheric data from Venus and computer modeling to show that the composition of the planet's current atmosphere and surface pressure would only have been possible as a result of an early form of plate tectonics, a process critical to life that involves multiple continental plates pushing, pulling and sliding beneath one another.

On Earth, this process intensified over billions of years, forming new continents and mountains, and leading to chemical reactions that stabilized the planet's surface temperature, resulting in an environment more conducive to the development of life.

Venus, on the other hand, Earth's nearest neighbor and sister planet, went in the opposite direction and today has surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead. One explanation is that the planet has always been thought to have what's known as a "stagnant lid," meaning its surface has only a single plate with minimal amounts of give, movement and gases being released into the atmosphere.

The new paper posits that this wasn't always the case. To account for the abundance of nitrogen and carbon dioxide present in Venus' atmosphere, the researchers conclude that Venus must have had plate tectonics sometime after the planet formed, about 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. The paper suggests that this early tectonic movement, like on Earth, would have been limited in terms of the number of plates moving and in how much they shifted. It also would have been happening on Earth and Venus simultaneously.

"One of the big picture takeaways is that we very likely had two planets at the same time in the same solar system operating in a plate tectonic regime—the same mode of tectonics that allowed for the life that we see on Earth today," said Matt Weller, the study's lead author who completed the work while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brown and is now at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

This bolsters the possibility of microbial life on ancient Venus and shows that at one point the two planets—which are in the same solar neighborhood, are about the same size, and have the same mass, density and volume—were more alike than previously thought before diverging.

[weatheriscool]

Sample Return from the Surface of Venus
January 10, 2024 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/s ... venus.html
A NASA NIAC phase 1 grant has been given to Geoffrey Landis to develop innovative concepts for a sample return from the surface of Venus. The project description is vague.

At 450°C and 92 atmosphere pressure, the surface of Venus is the most hostile environment to explore in the solar system. This project will pioneer a new approach to return a sample from the surface of Venus. The approach will merge an innovative carbon monoxide rocket technology to make propellant from the Venus atmosphere with innovations in high-temperature surface systems and solar aircraft.

The pressure at the bottom of the Earth’s ocean is about 1070 atmospheres.

Landis had a NASA NIAC grant to investigate the use of laser- and particle-beam pushed sails for propulsion for interstellar flight. In 2002 Landis addressed the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the possibilities and challenges of interstellar travel in what was described as the first serious discussion of how mankind will one day set sail to the nearest star. He went on to describe a star ship with a diamond sail, a few nanometres thick, powered by solar energy, which could achieve “10 per cent of the speed of light”.

[weatheriscool]

Gravitational wave, Venus missions get European green light
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-gravitati ... e_vignette

The European Space Agency gave the green light to two missions on Thursday, one to detect ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves and another to probe the secrets of Earth's closest neighboring planet Venus.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will become the first mission to study gravitational waves from space, with a planned 2035 launch on an Ariane 6 rocket, the ESA said in a statement.

The mission will comprise three spacecraft that will trail Earth as it orbits the sun, forming an equilateral triangle in space.

Each side of the triangle will be 2.5 million kilometers, over which the three spacecraft will exchange laser beams.

[weatheriscool]

Life might survive the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus, new experiments find
By Michael Irving
March 24, 2024
https://newatlas.com/space/life-survive ... id-clouds/

Venus may be a hellscape by our standards, but there’s a chance that some forms of life could evolve there. A new MIT study has now found that the building blocks of life are surprisingly stable in highly concentrated sulfuric acid – which Venus’ clouds happen to be made of.

Thick cloud cover gave early science fiction writers free reign to imagine the surface of Venus as a paradise, but as technology improved science fact once again ruined the party. It’s a dry, hot, pressure-cooker of a planet, with surface temperatures of up to 464 °C (867 °F) – hot enough to melt lead – and air pressure equivalent to being 900 m (3,000 ft) beneath the sea. Throw in clouds of sulfuric acid and a suffocating atmosphere of 96% carbon dioxide, and Venusian real estate is starting to look pretty cheap.

While many alien hopefuls might cast their eye towards Mars, or moons like Europa, Enceladus and Titan, Venus has clawed its way back into the headlines in recent years. Conditions are thought to be more hospitable at altitudes between about 48 and 60 km (30 and 37 miles) above the surface, where the temperature and pressure drops and there’s more water around. Intriguingly, that’s about the altitude where strange dark patches have been spotted drifting through the Venusian clouds, with optical signatures suspiciously similar to a bacteria species here on Earth.

[weatheriscool]