ZeezbruhTV
Member
Terraform mars, floating city in the upper venus atmosphere.
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Venus vs Mars: which planet would you rather have terraformed?
- Thread starter The Artisan
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Dr. Buni
Member
Thanks for responding.
Wouldn't messing around with the moon be too risky considering its effect on Earth? What if we fuck it up entirely by "practicing on it"?
The Artisan
Member
the thing with that is wouldn't the pillars of the cities have to be standing on venusian soil? how would you keep them from getting destroyed?
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
Massive base? Dunno how we'd go about making a sky city feasible.
The Artisan
Member
the earth will survive, but we probably won't.
i didn't intend for it to be a choice.
neither do I. someone posted a link about it somewhere here
Hidden One
Member
Lmao
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
Not even sure what's more doable, an all out terraform effort of Mars or a sky city on Venus.
What kind of batshit engineering would we have to pull off to even get started on the soil level of Venus and not to mention how we'd raise the city from the ground?
Batshit science and materials, the costs would be mind boggling.
Actually, building a sky city on Venus doesn't involve any pillars or stilts or anything like that. The solution is much simpler: the city floats through the air like a balloon. Venus's atmosphere is incredibly dense; so much so that breathable air at comfortable pressures is more buoyant than helium is on Earth. Just as it makes more sense to build ships that float on the surface of the sea than it is to crawl along the seafloor, it makes more sense to float atop Venus's dense atmosphere than to try and build up from its depths.
It's not "easy", but I guess the fundamentals are pretty basic.
Venus is hot. It's hot because it's close to the sun and its atmosphere is full of greenhouse gases which retain that heat. Solution? Reduce insolation by placing sun blockers in orbit and wait. Seed the atmosphere with bacteria to fix carbon from the atmosphere. Wait.
You're still left with the orbital spin problem though which would cause extreme weather as the atmosphere thins and cools. You could build a bunch of mass drivers at the equator for some century-long programme of firing shit into space to increase the spin of the planet. Alternatively you could slam a tonne of comets into the planet at angles to convey spin and hopefully blast chunks of the atmosphere off.
The Artisan
Member
so you can build a massive city in the sky, like, the size and mass of manhattan, and it'll just float?
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
As long as the buoyancy of your structure is greater than it's weight plus whatever is inside, then anything will float.
Warm Machine
Member
How are Europa and Ganymede for colonization?
Well, it depends on how the structure is built. A certain volume of air generates so much buoyancy, and that buoyancy can support a certain amount of mass. You would probably need to engineer the structure to have as little excess weight as possible.
When I was researching the topic earlier, I discovered that Buckminster Fuller apparently once proposed a design for a type of floating habitat that he believed could even work on Earth, which he named "Cloud Nine". It is essentially a giant balloon in the form of a geodesic sphere more than a mile wide. Since geodesic spheres increase in structural strength the larger they get, they can be built very large, and thus lift quite a bit relative to the mass of the balloon itself. If you adapt the idea for Venus, then you could theoretically live inside that geodesic sphere itself, perhaps.
Well, that depends. The Jovian system isn't the most hospitable place in the Solar System, in large part due to Jupiter's magnetosphere. Radiation around Jupiter can be extreme, and many of Jupiter's moons are directly in its radiation belts. Io has it really bad, but Europa is still hit with a lethal amount of radiation on a daily basis.
For example, something on the surface of Mars gets about .022 rads of radiation every day. By NASA's estimates, that means that a three-year stay there would be at about the limit of what would be safe for someone to be exposed to in their lifetime. In comparison, Europa gets more than enough radiation to cause you to drop dead in a single day there. It is thousands of times stronger than the radiation you would expect on Mars.
Ganymede is a bit more encouraging. It is after all the largest moon in the Solar System, and larger than Mercury. It also has its own magnetosphere, which offers some protection from Jupiter's nightmarish radiation belts, but not quite enough protection. You're looking at 8 rems a day on Ganymede's surface without shielding, which is enough to cause you to become seriously ill in a matter of days, I believe. I wish I could make more exact comparisons, but unfortunately, Wikipedia gives some values in terms of Absorbed dosage of radiation, and other values in terms of equivalent dosage of radiation, and I don't have enough expertise on the subject to directly compare those two types of numbers.
The other problem with living in the outer planets is that is cold. You can't rely on sun light and solar power, so you might need to use some other energy source.
The Artisan
Member
then we would have to consider the mass of the facility itself since they're supposed to be cities, plus the mass of (each million?) people living inside of it.
We only need the moon for its gravitational pull. The only way to fuck it up would be by blowing it up.
MilkyJoe
Member
Then wait several million years for the fall out and dust cloud to disperse? Mars is dead, nothing can be done.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
The Artisan
Member
life would've evolved much weirder & differently if not for the moon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-YZAIECTrA
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