Talk:Colonization of Venus

message: ... because it's based on many dozens of papers I've read during a review of the literature and I don't have half a year to work onto the article.
1) Venus's day length and temperature are not constant with altitude.  The day length decreases the closer you get to the poles.  For example, at about 70° degeres a Venus day is equivalent to about 2 Earth days, while near the equator it's closer to a week.  The zonal winds decrease in velocity with latitude but not as quickly as the path around the planet decreases.  Temperature, too, varies significantly by latitude, particularly in the day.  The closer you are to the poles, again, the closer you get to Earth norms.  The main concern of heading too far toward the poles is the polar vortices.  The level of danger they (or any of Venus's storm systems) would propose is, at this point in time, highly speculative.  We just have so little data.
Note that concerning agriculture, some plants are "long day" plants and others are "short day" plants; unusual day lengths can effect their blooming.  That said, the relationship isn't so simple - bidiurnal and triurnal cycles often yield better results on sensitive plants than 1,5x, 2,5x, etc length days.
2) Venus was indeed once wet.  Venus's deuterium percentage is commonly said to be on the order of 150 times that of Earth, though some studies have put it as high as 240 times (it's enough that you have to start wondering about health concerns - although there are solutions if it does prove to be a problem, eg. doing nighttime power storage through reversible fuel cells and plumbing them as an enrichment cascade, making use of the enrichment factor that occurs in electrolysis).  The high deuterium levels are highly indicative of a tremendous amount of water mass escape to space - far more than Mars, where the ratio is 5-7 times that of Earth.  Some of the other "missing" chemicals on Venus aren't as obvious as to why they occurred, however - for example, models suggest there should be on the order of at least three orders of magnitude more mercury in the atmosphere than there is.
3) It's not true that access to metals requires access to the surface.  For example, iron (ferric and ferrous chloride) has been directly detected in Venus's atmosphere, for example, where according it probably makes up on the order of 1% of the mass of every sulfuric acid droplet (the exact quantity depending on which paper you read  ;)  ).  Process ~100 tonnes of sulfuric acid, get on the order of ~1 tonne of iron chloride... that's not a small amount of iron, considering that your primary structural components are nonmetallic. There's a whole range of compounds that have been studied for their vaporization potential, chemical equilibriums, and mass transport properties, from the common like iron chloride down to the super rare like silicon tetrafluoride.  Some are considered likely by some authors but very doubtful by others (such as aluminum chloride).  Others, while not having been detected, are generally considered quite likely, such as iodine, bromine, and antimony compounds.  The general forms are fluorides, chlorides, and oxychlorides.  Other examples of potential cloud-level trace species include arsenic oxide, selenium chloride, tellurium chloride, mercury chloride, lead chloride, zinc chloride, indium chloride, and bismuth chloride.  Right now, we really don't know what minor constituents might be there; we only have a good sense of the major ones.
4) It's not true that water access is extremely difficult.  While we haven't identified all of the droplet types (mode 3 is a big debate subject), there's no question that sulfuric acid is abundant - about 75-85%, several mg/m³.  Heating it not only liberates the 15-25% water, but the H2SO4 breaks down to H2O + SO3.  Further heating, preferentially aided by catalysts, breaks down 2 SO3 to 2 SO2 + O2.  So right there that's H2O and O2.  Sulfuric acid is highly hygroscopic and will readily adsorb onto absorption beds, which can be placed inside naceles on the craft's engines for collection (you have to have engines to resist the meridional drift regardless, might as well take advantage of the airstream that they move past - increasing blade diameters = greater mass flow / lower flow speed = good).  Also, collection via condensation is an open question. While the initial VEGA data was interpreted as involving no condensation/liquid buildup, subsequent reanalysis has suggested that there was actually significant condensation on the craft, ultimately peaking as condensation levels matched runoff levels.  Obviously, if it does occur, that would be a (significant) additional collection source.  Indeed, VEGA posed almost a worst case for condensation, being comprised of highly hydrophobic PTFE.
5) Landis's concept doesn't actually work with Earth air unless you air condition the entire envelope; the temperatures are too high even assuming no daytime greenhouse effect (which is a serious concern on its own).  The claim that the atmosphere is " 0 to −50 °C" at 50km is absolutely not true; see VEGA, which directly measured middle cloud temperatures.  Without air conditioning, the pressure needs to be reduced (aka, one needs to float a higher, and thus cooler, altitude), to the ballpark of 35-50kPa, which means a significantly reduced nitrogen content.  But people appear to be able to tolerate that largely fine, and plants often actually seem to like it (they get more water stress but it makes their metabolism more efficient and removes ethylene).  Another issue is that you have to deal with is gas permeation - both losing your air and having outside gases filter in.  It's not a closed cycle.  With a modern low-permeation teflon like FEP (not actually pure PTFE, but close enough  ;)  ) some of the more major gases may exchange at a dozen or two kilograms per day in a moderate sized habitat.  However, much more impermeable options are available, such as ETCFE, PCTFE, PVDC, EVOH, BoPET,  etc, generally in a layered approach with fiber reinforcement to gain the best properties of each layer (chemical resistance, tensile strength, gas permeability, etc).  However, in a way it's kind of good that you have to keep producing fresh air and filtering what you have; totally sealed environments involving extensive exchange of a limited volume of gas between people and plants tend to be unstable (see Biosphere 2).  Keeping CO2 down to comfort levels may be a challenge, however; I'm still working on that in the models.
6) It's quite true that not only would leaks be slow (overpressure on large balloons is usually only a couple hundred pascals), but there's some less obvious side effects.  For example, airlocks.  There's no need for traditional rigid airlocks; the most reasonable design is basically a big "ziplock bag" that you step into, vacuum seal around you, then open to the outside (and vice versa for return).  Also, the acidity of the environment is often overplayed.  A few mg per cubic meter isn't like a bath of sulfuric acid; OSHA's limit for breathing H2SO4 mists is 1mg/m³ across an 8-hour work shift  ;)  Now, Venus's H2SO4 mists are stronger than Earth's, due to the lack of atmospheric moisture; but the shouldn't be thought of like sticking your hand in a vat of sulfuric acid.  I'm still searching for more research in this regard to determine how quick dermatitis would occur on unprotected skin; OSHA informs me that they don't have any.  Also note that H2SO4 isn't the only acid.  For example, the lower cloud likely contains a large amount (if not predominantly) phosphoric acid.  There's also acidic gases like HCl and HF; they'd quite readily condense in Earthlike conditions, but in Venus's middle cloud H2SO4 is too good of a dessicating agent over long periods (although they could form droplets over shorter timeperiods).  
7) This article doesn't even begin to cover the wide range of terraforming options for Venus that have been proposed in the literature.  I even have my own, but having not yet build a CFD model (let alone passed peer review) I'm not going to speculate on its effectiveness here at this point.  :)  -- Rei (talk) 13:53, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some general information which I'm too lazy to work into the article 

message: Could we do anything to shorten the day to 24 hours and/or move Venus further out from the Sun?
Would it be possible to somehow move Venus so that Earth and Venus are a double planet?
:This is really OR, but for the curious the short answer is "no".  In Entering Space, Robert Zubrin discusses the possibility of changing Venus' rotation using asteroid impacts -- the most violent planetary events currently known, and determined that it would take thousands of them, and would likely wobble its orbit before significantly affecting the spin.  Moving Venus is an even more difficult proposition energy-wise, and one that would not really be desirable anyway as being the same distance from the sun as the Earth (i.e., having two planets in one orbit) is an inherently unstable situation, even in perfect opposition (i.e. in each other's L3 Lagrangian points). siafu 05:01, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd really like to see some sources on your instability arguments. My idea is for a satellite swarm around Venus that would have a net gravitational vector pulling Venus out of it's orbit. By slowing down on the near side of Venus relative to the Earth and speeding them up on the far side, a given satellite would spend more time on the near side than the far side. The swarm could gradually pull Venus away towards Earth orbit. Maintenance of satellite orbits could be powered by solar energy.--75.81.174.114 01:15, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A floating colony would be carried around the planet by wind, see Atmosphere of Venus. If the right altitude is chosen this could be used to approximate a day-night cycle for the colonists. See the posts below.Noclevername 15:31, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Lengh of day and distance from Sun

message: I'm suprised that several similar pages exist, but there has not yet been a colonization of Venus page yet. Roman Soldier 07:19, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for starting this one. I'm not sure I buy the argument that "the Venerian day is longer than its year, making feeding the colony via inexpensive plant growth in greenhouses impractical without some form of hitherto-unknown genetic engineering permitting plants to survive a lengthy night." What is the difference between a hypothetical greenhouse on a terraformed Venus and growing annual crops on Earth? One could plant seeds at the beginning of the Venus day and harvest in the Venus evening, saving seeds for the next day.  According to the Venus article, the high altitude winds circle the planet about every four Earth days, so that would be the effective day for the more likely balloon colony, I don't think it would take much to get plants to thrive on a cycle of 48 hours of light and 48 hours of darkness. Sounds like a nice science fair project. --agr 04:02, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You may be right about greenhouses in a floating colony, which I had not considered when originally writing that section of the article.  However, if on the surface (ignoring the issues of heat, pressure, sunlight, water, and atmospheric composition), we face the a much longer day: 116.75 Earth days long, meaning (if I'm correct) a night 58 Earth days long.  No Earth crop I know of could survive that; nor would genetically engineering a plant to adapt to a 116.75 day-long day-night cycle be an easy task.  This is dramatic contrast to Mars, whose "day" is 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds, almost exactly ours in an amazing coincidence that all but invites us to grow crops there. LeoO3 01:48, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Given how terrible surface conditions on Venus are and how difficult any terraforming would be, this is a somewhat academic discussion; however I think some possibilities do exist.  There are places on Earth where the growing season is less than 100 days. See, for example http://www.geo.msu.edu/geo333/growseason&frost.html Plants that can endure such a short season could be cultivated by starting seeds in artificial light during the Venusian night and then placing them in sunlight during the day. A colony would need some source of night-time energy anyway and plants take much less energy as seedlings. Other crops, such as evergreen trees might do just fine on the Venusian cycle. And, of course, there are always photosynthetic single cell organisms. Since these lighting conditions are easy to simulate on Earth, experimenting with various possibilities could be done now. Might make a good science-fair project, even.--agr 22:29, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Crops on Venus

message: Would the floating cities be domed or open aired structres?--Rhydd Meddwl 20:54, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Domed, unless you want to dodge sulfuric acid raindrops on your morning commute. :-) At least until things are at an advanced stage. Although, laboratory farms where you try to develop species for terraforming could be open-air. - Reaverdrop (talk/nl/w:s) 21:33, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, the atmosphere is almost all carbon dioxide, so a dome (or other isolated structure) would be needed if humans where to be in it. Polonium 20:14, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

text: The radius of Venus is 6052 km at the surface, so climbing to 50 km increases the radius by a little less than 0.1%.  The reduction in gravity is twice that (inverse square law), about -0.2%, i.e. not enough to be noticeable except with sensitive instruments.--agr 12:52, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Why isn't NASA doing this? Why not make Venus the next major goal instead of Mars? We could build the structures out of carbon nanotubes.173.60.95.232 (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 05:19, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

text: I dunno, people seem to function on boats as they pitch and roll. —Tamfang (talk) 08:03, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Floating Cities

message: Cute, but unencylopedic, in my opinion.  Thoughts? --LeoO3 19:36, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed - the remark that Venus is Earth's "evil twin" is better suited to an article in a dumbed-down science popularization magazine. - Reaverdrop (talk/nl/w:s) 21:27, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

text: This comment is particularly entertaining, when current thinking is that actually Venus is a good example of what Earth is eventually going to become as the Sun gets brighter. :D Double sharp (talk) 07:34, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Evil twin" 

message: Let's make this article into an FA! Much more interesting and appliccable to people in the here and now compared to the one on terraforming. I'm in Korea so I'll only be able to use the internet when it comes to sourcing. Maybe we should collect resources / ideas here on the talk page to start. Here's one, a thread on a discussion board and a site with more papers by the same person:
*http://www.extrasolar.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=7145&sid=9cd9702a9b2092f090253119c5a31f24
*http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/papers.html
I'm not an astrophysicist myself so I'll have to defer to others on that area, but I've gotten an article on the front page before and have been looking for another one that deserves to be on the front since then (December 25, 2005). I think this is the one. Anybody else up for turning this into an FA? Mithridates 16:23, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  FA! 

message: Overall this is an excellent article and it appears to cover the subject well.  However, the low level of referencing expecially in key sections like Advantages and Obstacles mean that it is not GA quality at this time.  Also the opening should be reworked per WP:LEAD and sentences like Given the seemingly insurmountable difficulties outlined above, a surface colony on Venus in its present form would appear to be out of the question. should be rewritten in a more encyclopedic tone.  Please resubmit the article to WP:GAN or WP:PR when these concerns have been addressed.  Eluchil404 20:34, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: GA nomination failed

message: I removed the following text:
:Other smaller obstacles include: Though Venus is still quite close to Earth relative to other bodies in the Solar System, having to wait for a launch window every 500+ days at present technology would leave missions isolated from possible aid from Earth should problems occur. Having Earth appear as a small blue dot in the sky would not be as comforting to early explorers as the view from the moon, where Earth is always visible from one side.
The long time for resupply and the small apparent size of Earth apply to any locale in the solar system other than the Moon, so there is no particular reason to mention them here. Also, it is not obvious to me that the Earth and stars would be visible from a colony at 50 km altitude. Some reference is needed if they are.  Finally the 500+ day launch window intervals apply to orbits with minimum delta-V at each end. These are the ones one would pick for building the colony and for regular supply runs since the payload would be maximized for a given rocket. However there are less efficient orbits available at other times and with techniques like gravity assist (using the Moon and Earth), ion engines and aerobreaking already available with present technology, the question of emergency resupply becomes a complex tradeoff of payload vs time. For a shipment of medicine or small spare parts, I suspect times on the order of months are practical today for most configurations of the two planets. --agr 13:09, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Other smaller obstacles

message: While lengthy discussion has been made to the use of solar, nuclear and unproven fusion power on potential space colonies, the use of wind power has never been discussed, perhaps because there is no wind on the moon, and no usable wind power on Mars. This is not the case for Venus, Titan and the gas giants however, which have atmospheric densities greater than Earth's. Wind power is economically viable on Earth and its usage is growing rapidly. This resource would be readily available to floating colonists on Venus or to surface colonists (or robots) on Titan. Wind turbines are also much cheaper, lighter and simpler to construct than nuclear reactors. Jasonkglore 17:05, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wind Power Resources 

message: The section on Obstacles draws attention to the dire survival rate of the Soviet Venera program landers, but neglects to mention that Venera 13 managed to survive 127 minutes on the surface of Venus -- the, as far as surface survival goes, most successful lander to date. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 161.184.11.236 (talk) 09:04, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No one knows how long the Venera landers functioned.  Loss of signal was due to the radio relay spacecraft moving out of range.  DonPMitchell (talk) 05:07, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Obstacles 

message: The article said that in the future, in October 2006, a Mercury mission will have a flyby of Venus. I went ahead and changed that to be past tense (I'm just assuming that it actually happened as planned). It says the same mission will do another flyby next month, so in the near future someone will need to move that mission's mention entirely out of the future missions paragraph, and maybe put something about the results/findings. --67.110.213.253 06:01, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minor Messenger Edit 

message: I don't know how to do it, but could 'Colonisation of Venus' please redirect to 'Colonization of Venus' even if only for British English speakers  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.77.205.92 (talk) 18:59, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. haz (talk) 19:03, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  redirect 

message: The "Colonization of Venus" article has been put into a new category, the "Nanotech Age" category which was created only about a month ago.  It seems to me there should be some indication in the text of the article that Nanotechnology would be used in Colonizing Venus before the article is put into this category.  Since there is a lack of any verifiable indication that the article belongs in the category "Nanotech Age," I intend to remove this category.--Fartherred (talk) 00:55, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proper categorization 

message: right|thumb|A VERY quick and innacurate sketch, but that's what roughly what KIND of picture I suggest.
Other pages on Colonization have pictures of it as an illustration in the beginning of the article, yet Venus lacks one.
I suggest drawing a picture to depict a possible half-transparent aerostat with a meadow on its bottom, floating in the Venusian atmosphere with people inside the aerostat wearing short-sleeves, and people outside the aerostat wearing the same clothes, only covered with light transparent plastic suits and masks, to illustrate the most likely approach to Venus.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.239.86.199 (talk) 11:56, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: On 2010-07-15, a picture was added showing a aerostat with a torus balloon full of helium above. Although a nice way of stabilizing the main hull and to synthesize drinking water, it conveys the wrong impression that the habitat is not securely floating by itself.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by AlainD (talk • contribs) 11:25, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  A picture 

message: Advantages and Difficulties are just the same as Pros and Cons. They may be more of a pro and con prose, but still that constitutes pro and con. See WP:PROCON. --Turkeybutt (talk) 11:17, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: There are no pro and con lists in the article. There is prose. No lists. Yes, do see and read WP:PROCON, which by the way, is just yet another wp:essay. - DVdm (talk) 11:36, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Message for DVdm 

message: Why isn't this favored more instead of mars? 188.210.27.247 (talk) 15:33, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: This is WP:OR, but I suspect mostly surface chauvinism. Double sharp (talk) 07:49, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Human coloniziaton 

message: An attempt to further approach an exhaustion of potential remaining problems for Venus habitat concepts (by pointing out solar flares, hurricanes, lightnings, and tiny space rocks landing on Venus):
===Remaining problems===
Structural and industrial materials would be hard to retrieve from the surface and expensive to bring from Earth/asteroids. The sulfuric acid itself poses a further challenge in that the colony would need to be constructed of or coated in materials resistant to corrosion by the acid, such as PTFE (a compound consisting wholly of carbon and fluorine). Also, maybe most importantly, since Venus is closer to the sun, the chance of solar storms from solar flares hitting Venus - and that then with higher intensity both due to the shorter distance and the lack of a magnetosphere - is higher, risking the malfunctioning and breakdown of electronic infrastructure. Besides this, atmospheric lightnings as well as strong atmospheric storms, such as possibly hurricanes, could damage and violently push on atmospheric habitats alike a rough sea on a ship. And it was confirmed by a team of researchers at the University of Lisbon, who found that the upper part of Venus' atmosphere suffers from hurricane-force winds of up to 360 kilometers per hour. Tiny rocks from space of various sizes with associated frequency distributions depending on size that also hail down on Venus likely constitute a problem to the structural integrity of the hull of any atmospheric habitat, long-term.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.192.195.234 (talk) 03:59, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The foregoing (beginning with Also) was added and swiftly reverted (WP:NOR).  The sentence above the subhead was the edit summary of the addition.  Evidently this was put here to save the work for posterity.  (I moved it down from the top of the page.) —Tamfang (talk) 00:46, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: rejected addition

message: Structural and industrial materials would be hard to retrieve from the surface and expensive to bring from Earth/asteroids. The sulfuric acid itself poses a further challenge in that the colony would need to be constructed of or coated in materials resistant to corrosion by the acid, such as PTFE (a compound consisting wholly of carbon and fluorine). Also, maybe most importantly, since Venus is closer to the sun, the chance of solar storms from solar flares hitting Venus - and that then with higher intensity both due to the shorter distance and the lack of a magnetosphere - is higher, risking the malfunctioning and breakdown of electronic infrastructure. Besides this, atmospheric lightnings as well as strong atmospheric storms, such as possibly hurricanes, could damage and violently push on atmospheric habitats alike a rough sea on a ship. And it was confirmed by a team of researchers at the University of Lisbon, who found that the upper part of Venus' atmosphere suffers from hurricane-force winds of up to 360 kilometers per hour. Tiny rocks from space of various sizes with associated frequency distributions depending on size that also hail down on Venus likely constitute a problem to the structural integrity of the hull of any atmospheric habitat, long-term.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.192.195.234 (talk) 03:59, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The foregoing (beginning with Also) was added and swiftly reverted (WP:NOR).  The sentence above the subhead was the edit summary of the addition.  Evidently this was put here to save the work for posterity.  (I moved it down from the top of the page.) —Tamfang (talk) 00:46, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Remaining problems