Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system
From another perspective, its atmosphere is "one of the most Earth-like in the solar system", and scientists long ago postulated the idea of establishing floating cloud cities.
Big balloons filled with nitrogen and oxygen would naturally settle at the right altitude, 30 miles above the surface, where gravity, ambient pressure, and radiation aren't far off that of Earth, and temperature hovers around a balmy 86°F.
Since the pressure inside and outside is matched, punctures wouldn't cause explosive decompression, providing time to repair damage or leaks. You wouldn't need a bulky pressure suit to venture outside, just some comparatively simple breathing apparatus, and of course protection from the nasty sulfuric acid in the atmosphere (akin to acid rain). The habs would be coated in Teflon to resist it.
The Venusian atmosphere at that altitude is super dry, only a few score ppm of water making it much drier as Earth's Atacama desert. So while that water vapor is extremely acidic in terms of raw ppm its not too far outside the limit of what OSHA allows and is probably fine since you aren't breathing it.
How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? How do visitors or pioneers deorbit and land at the floating city? If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely.
> For a time, the mantle would get hotter, since the shell around it would trap heat generated by radioactively decaying compounds inside it. As heat accumulates in the interior, the Earth in Kane’s simulations would experience an uptick in volcanism lasting for about 15 million years.
That totally surprised to me. I had no idea radioactive decay played such a role for earth. It turns out I must have fallen sleep in one of the classes when that was explained.
> The radioactive decay of elements in the Earth's mantle and crust results in production of daughter isotopes and release of geoneutrinos and heat energy, or radiogenic heat. About 50% of the Earth's internal heat originates from radioactive decay
The only context in which I heard it mentioned is the idea of trying to date the earth by its temperature. Assume it was a hot molten mess in the past and has been cooling down ever since. Factor in the rate at which it would radiate heat and all of the energy coming from the sun and... you conclude that the planet is very young. Because you didn't account for radioactive material within the planet, keeping it warm.
If i remember right, according to one of Asimov's Foundation sequels, the Earth was unique due to its high level natural radioactivity, which allowed it to develop an ecosystem more vibrant than any other planet in the galaxy.
> It turns out I must have fallen sleep in one of the classes when that was explained.
Unless you've studied this at a post-secondary level, I'm afraid that it's quite likely that you've never had it explained to you. My highschool discussed at length the role that the sun, the greenhouse effect, oceans, forests, agriculture, mountain ranges, etc, play on weather and climate, but never actually went through the exercise of energy accounting to determine what keeps the Earth warm.
Which is understandable, because that exercise is non-trivial, and will not actually be convincing to anyone who doesn't have a calculus education.
I've always wondered about the feasibility of adding a reflective solar shield between Venus and Sol to cut the feedback loop that keeps surface temps so high, eventually reducing cloud cover and revealing what lies beneath. In addition, such a project might be good practice in case we ever needed a modified version for Earth, and may even be useful to add energy to celestial bodies (e.g. heat up the dark side of an asteroid by placing it at the focus of a large parabolic mirror). Venus having an atmosphere and having almost the same mass as Earth has always made it, not Mars, my favorite target for terraforming and colonization.
The funny thing is that an oxygen-rich environment is a hell-hole! Oxygen is insanely reactive and will corrode anything. Even early life on earth found oxygen toxic. It was released as a waste product by early life and they were so successful that all that oxygen accumulated resulting in the Great Oxidation Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event).
That likely resulted in many species going extinct!
I often like to quip that the [21%] corrosive gas is pretty nice today, and I think I'll go consume a big container of industrial solvent to help counteract the radiation from the uncontrolled nuclear [fusion] explosion in the sky.
I once heard a similar point and it has fascinated me ever since: an alien observing human culture would be appalled at how dangerous our lives are.
Everything around us is bathed in warm oxygen, just waiting to catch fire! Our homes, our clothes, our fields, our possessions, …our hair. Ready oxidation brings vitality to Earth but it’s also ridiculously dangerous.
An oxygen-rich environment is so thermodynamically unstable (it would lead to oxidation and rusting of virtually every other prevalent element) that it would be exceedingly short-lived without the presence of oxygen-liberating biological metabolism. To that extent, a high-oxygen atmosphere is one of the very clear and detectable indicators of probable life which we are capable of detecting even on extra-solar planets (via spectroscopic analysis of reflected or filtered light).
Mars, interestingly, was just determined to have a core almost identical to Earth’s as I understand it. This is not the sole determinant of course - you still need enough volatiles, enough gravity to maintain a hold on the lightest elements across billions of years, and tectonics to keep refreshing the atmosphere. Unfortunately for us all, Mars has none of those. There may be other significant factors as well.
Given Venus's atmospheric pressure, I'm not sure that "no magnetic field protecting the atmosphere" is a big part of the story. It's got plenty of atmosphere left.
I can't believe people haven't read James Lovelock's works re the Gaia hypothesis. The feedback loop is that plants produce an oxygen rich atmosphere right up to the point where lightning strikes would start fires that kill off enough plant life, reducing the oxygen in the atmosphere. Send plants to Venus now and in 500 billion years we can move there.
At these time scales, major terraforming projects become viable, from building large sunshades in orbit to one near Earth-Sun L1 (balancing light pressure and gravity, it would be closer to the Sun than L1), to even raising Earth’s orbit through a fleet of gravity tugs. Venus would be an excellent case for a planet-sized sunshade, btw, as well as a solar wind magnetic lens to replace lost hydrogen and make liquid water as the planet cools. The latter could be useful for Mars.
Earth's internal heat regulation is such an underrated hero in the climate story. Half of Earth’s heat comes from internal sources, constantly driving plate tectonics and helping regulate CO₂. Venus lacks that it’s like a pressure cooker with no release valve.
And once the water was in Venus' atmosphere, it could reach high altitude, where it would be dissociated by solar radiation. The hydrogen could then escape to space. The signature of this remains in the isotope ratio of deuterium to ordinary hydrogen in the atmosphere there: deuterium enriched by two orders of magnitude above the level seen on Earth.
Ok, so this is all leading to one very specific place: An anarchic society of steampunk airships harvesting Deuterium from the shirtsleeve zone in Venus’ upper atmosphere.
Venus's albedo is so high that the insolation at the surface is even less than Earth's. Yet it's hotter than Mercury, which is closer to the sun than Venus.
The article says that volcanism is the reason, and that solar heating would not cause this result on its own, even though it's everyone's first guess.
Isn't the answer just: we grew up (evolved) on Earth, so from our perspective it's an Eden? Everyone's home planet must seem like an Eden to them, right?
One odd theory i heard is that Earth is actually one giant superorganism. (When you look at how well all the ecosystems internact with each other it kind of makes sense). Like any organism, when invaded by a virus it heats up in a fever in order to kill it...
Whether or not Theia was the cause - having a fast-spinning Earth and huge satellite in a low orbit* make Earth's situation profoundly different from that of Venus.
> They’ve been pushing their model Earth to its extremes
Is your model anywhere good enough to be able to get useful outcomes from this process? I would suspect not. I mean, we know this planet's state is partially owed to the many unique comet impacts that have occurred during it's life, are you modelling those?
There are real limits to what life can be supported due to basic chemistry/laws of physics. e.g. "Venus is so hot — hot enough to melt lead — that the acid rain evaporates as it’s falling." That life evolved on Earth and not Venus is not an accident.
Merely "because humans evolved on Earth and not on Venus" is just a dismissive contrarian take that says absolutely nothing of any value what-so-ever.
Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system
From another perspective, its atmosphere is "one of the most Earth-like in the solar system", and scientists long ago postulated the idea of establishing floating cloud cities.
Big balloons filled with nitrogen and oxygen would naturally settle at the right altitude, 30 miles above the surface, where gravity, ambient pressure, and radiation aren't far off that of Earth, and temperature hovers around a balmy 86°F.
Since the pressure inside and outside is matched, punctures wouldn't cause explosive decompression, providing time to repair damage or leaks. You wouldn't need a bulky pressure suit to venture outside, just some comparatively simple breathing apparatus, and of course protection from the nasty sulfuric acid in the atmosphere (akin to acid rain). The habs would be coated in Teflon to resist it.
More about this crazy idea here:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161019-the-amazing-clou...
Venus is room temperature with low radiation, if you dig in.
Living on Venus was floating around as an easier alternative to living on the Mars surface.
Room temperature is 21°C, I have no idea how many freedom fries units that is.
The Venusian atmosphere at that altitude is super dry, only a few score ppm of water making it much drier as Earth's Atacama desert. So while that water vapor is extremely acidic in terms of raw ppm its not too far outside the limit of what OSHA allows and is probably fine since you aren't breathing it.
Nice link, shifts the perspective a bit.
Guess it would be like living on a floating oil/gas platform.
Just don't fall off the side of those platforms.
It'd be interesting to see what additional "personal atmospheric floatation" devices would be needed.
Living like little organelles inside a giant cell membrane
How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? How do visitors or pioneers deorbit and land at the floating city? If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely.
> For a time, the mantle would get hotter, since the shell around it would trap heat generated by radioactively decaying compounds inside it. As heat accumulates in the interior, the Earth in Kane’s simulations would experience an uptick in volcanism lasting for about 15 million years.
That totally surprised to me. I had no idea radioactive decay played such a role for earth. It turns out I must have fallen sleep in one of the classes when that was explained.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget
> The radioactive decay of elements in the Earth's mantle and crust results in production of daughter isotopes and release of geoneutrinos and heat energy, or radiogenic heat. About 50% of the Earth's internal heat originates from radioactive decay
Dually: geothermal energy installations (& volcanism) release much more than simply energy into the biosphere
https://www.ntanet.net/hot-rocks-radioactive-waste-radon-fro...
You are welcome to consider that as a matter of hormesis and resources, of course
The only context in which I heard it mentioned is the idea of trying to date the earth by its temperature. Assume it was a hot molten mess in the past and has been cooling down ever since. Factor in the rate at which it would radiate heat and all of the energy coming from the sun and... you conclude that the planet is very young. Because you didn't account for radioactive material within the planet, keeping it warm.
If i remember right, according to one of Asimov's Foundation sequels, the Earth was unique due to its high level natural radioactivity, which allowed it to develop an ecosystem more vibrant than any other planet in the galaxy.
> It turns out I must have fallen sleep in one of the classes when that was explained.
Unless you've studied this at a post-secondary level, I'm afraid that it's quite likely that you've never had it explained to you. My highschool discussed at length the role that the sun, the greenhouse effect, oceans, forests, agriculture, mountain ranges, etc, play on weather and climate, but never actually went through the exercise of energy accounting to determine what keeps the Earth warm.
Which is understandable, because that exercise is non-trivial, and will not actually be convincing to anyone who doesn't have a calculus education.
I've always wondered about the feasibility of adding a reflective solar shield between Venus and Sol to cut the feedback loop that keeps surface temps so high, eventually reducing cloud cover and revealing what lies beneath. In addition, such a project might be good practice in case we ever needed a modified version for Earth, and may even be useful to add energy to celestial bodies (e.g. heat up the dark side of an asteroid by placing it at the focus of a large parabolic mirror). Venus having an atmosphere and having almost the same mass as Earth has always made it, not Mars, my favorite target for terraforming and colonization.
The funny thing is that an oxygen-rich environment is a hell-hole! Oxygen is insanely reactive and will corrode anything. Even early life on earth found oxygen toxic. It was released as a waste product by early life and they were so successful that all that oxygen accumulated resulting in the Great Oxidation Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event).
That likely resulted in many species going extinct!
Yes, first everything rusted, and then the excess oxygen collected in the atmosphere.
Many of our iron ore deposits we still mine today are from that rusting. (That iron used to be mostly dissolved in the oceans.)
I often like to quip that the [21%] corrosive gas is pretty nice today, and I think I'll go consume a big container of industrial solvent to help counteract the radiation from the uncontrolled nuclear [fusion] explosion in the sky.
I once heard a similar point and it has fascinated me ever since: an alien observing human culture would be appalled at how dangerous our lives are.
Everything around us is bathed in warm oxygen, just waiting to catch fire! Our homes, our clothes, our fields, our possessions, …our hair. Ready oxidation brings vitality to Earth but it’s also ridiculously dangerous.
An oxygen-rich environment is so thermodynamically unstable (it would lead to oxidation and rusting of virtually every other prevalent element) that it would be exceedingly short-lived without the presence of oxygen-liberating biological metabolism. To that extent, a high-oxygen atmosphere is one of the very clear and detectable indicators of probable life which we are capable of detecting even on extra-solar planets (via spectroscopic analysis of reflected or filtered light).
Far more an Eden, then.
I hope humans are like Cyanobacteria in that in destroying the environment we create the substrate for something grander.
It's interesting that this article places the boiling of Earth's oceans much further in the future than Wikipedia's Timeline of Earth's Future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
Venus does not have a molten core, and there is no magnetic field protecting the atmosphere from the solar winds.
This is not likely the sole reason, but it must be a factor.
Mercury does have a magnetic field, Mars does not.
Mars, interestingly, was just determined to have a core almost identical to Earth’s as I understand it. This is not the sole determinant of course - you still need enough volatiles, enough gravity to maintain a hold on the lightest elements across billions of years, and tectonics to keep refreshing the atmosphere. Unfortunately for us all, Mars has none of those. There may be other significant factors as well.
First order the explanation is simply, Venus is a hellhole because of atmospheric greenhouse effect exacerbated by proximity to the sun.
Given Venus's atmospheric pressure, I'm not sure that "no magnetic field protecting the atmosphere" is a big part of the story. It's got plenty of atmosphere left.
> no magnetic field protecting the atmosphere
Venus has too much atmosphere. That's the problem.
Venus is thought to have a (at least partially) molten core.
It doesn't have a magnetic field, but that could be due to the slow rotation.
Watch this magnificent documentary about the mystery of the surface of Venus.
Still a favorite after 30 years.
https://archive.org/details/NOVA_VenusUnveiled
Russian missions to Venus IMO are some of the coolest missions.
That's some brave stuff to try to pull off.
can you apply 'brave' to unmanned missions? challenging, yes.
The Moon, gently stirring and moving the inner core like oatmeal.
Yummy. Mind the heat!
And keeping the axis of rotation consistent - and keeping the day length short and consistent.
Because we are built for Earth. Next question.
I can't believe people haven't read James Lovelock's works re the Gaia hypothesis. The feedback loop is that plants produce an oxygen rich atmosphere right up to the point where lightning strikes would start fires that kill off enough plant life, reducing the oxygen in the atmosphere. Send plants to Venus now and in 500 billion years we can move there.
I struggle to find plants that can survive and do photosynthesis in temperatures of molten tin and sulphuric acid rain though
I've heard of if but am put off by the flaws as suggested in the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#Criticism_in_t...
I liked the nyt microbes in the crust article https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobi... along those lines.
At these time scales, major terraforming projects become viable, from building large sunshades in orbit to one near Earth-Sun L1 (balancing light pressure and gravity, it would be closer to the Sun than L1), to even raising Earth’s orbit through a fleet of gravity tugs. Venus would be an excellent case for a planet-sized sunshade, btw, as well as a solar wind magnetic lens to replace lost hydrogen and make liquid water as the planet cools. The latter could be useful for Mars.
Earth's internal heat regulation is such an underrated hero in the climate story. Half of Earth’s heat comes from internal sources, constantly driving plate tectonics and helping regulate CO₂. Venus lacks that it’s like a pressure cooker with no release valve.
How does Earth's internal heat regulate CO2?
This is a good time to point people to one of the best PBS TV series about "Our Planet Earth" (unrelated to BBC series of the same name) aired in 1986 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(1986_TV_series)
Episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=planet+earth+pb...
Everybody needs to watch this to understand how exquisitely balanced our planet is.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
And once the water was in Venus' atmosphere, it could reach high altitude, where it would be dissociated by solar radiation. The hydrogen could then escape to space. The signature of this remains in the isotope ratio of deuterium to ordinary hydrogen in the atmosphere there: deuterium enriched by two orders of magnitude above the level seen on Earth.
Ok, so this is all leading to one very specific place: An anarchic society of steampunk airships harvesting Deuterium from the shirtsleeve zone in Venus’ upper atmosphere.
I guess we need to start colonizing other worlds then.
We need to yes. Maybe the tech can help us with the required geohacks here.
Because of the distance from the sun
Venus's albedo is so high that the insolation at the surface is even less than Earth's. Yet it's hotter than Mercury, which is closer to the sun than Venus.
The article says that volcanism is the reason, and that solar heating would not cause this result on its own, even though it's everyone's first guess.
From TFA: "The sun alone cannot be responsible for making Venus the awful place it is today."
That’s part of it but the dense CO2 atmosphere is the major issue. Don’t worry, we are trying to get there as fast as we can to Hell as well.
Quite. Its just so.
Even in the Goldilocks zone a planet still need so many specific things going for it to be the paradise Earth is. Anthropic principle strikes again!
Earth is hell also...
Isn't the answer just: we grew up (evolved) on Earth, so from our perspective it's an Eden? Everyone's home planet must seem like an Eden to them, right?
Trisolarans notwithstanding.
It’s because there’s no Arby’s on Venus. If we put an Arby’s up there it would start looking a lot better
good point
One odd theory i heard is that Earth is actually one giant superorganism. (When you look at how well all the ecosystems internact with each other it kind of makes sense). Like any organism, when invaded by a virus it heats up in a fever in order to kill it...
Doing things in a chaotic way will increase entropy. Increased entropy is heat.
I don't see any mention of the Theia Impact theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis - of the Earth/Moon system's formation.
Whether or not Theia was the cause - having a fast-spinning Earth and huge satellite in a low orbit* make Earth's situation profoundly different from that of Venus.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#System_evolution for starters
Still disappointed it's not a swamp as promised by 20th century science fiction.
> Why Is Venus Hell and Earth an Eden?
Because humans evolved on Earth and not on Venus.
If we evolved on Venus then it would be our Eden.
> They’ve been pushing their model Earth to its extremes
Is your model anywhere good enough to be able to get useful outcomes from this process? I would suspect not. I mean, we know this planet's state is partially owed to the many unique comet impacts that have occurred during it's life, are you modelling those?
> If we evolved on Venus then it would be our Eden
I don't think we can just anthropic principle this one away. We couldn't have evolved on Venus. It's valid to ask whether any complex life could.
> Is your model anywhere good enough to be able to get useful outcomes from this process? I would suspect not
Got it, reflexive blanket dismissal comment.
There are real limits to what life can be supported due to basic chemistry/laws of physics. e.g. "Venus is so hot — hot enough to melt lead — that the acid rain evaporates as it’s falling." That life evolved on Earth and not Venus is not an accident.
Merely "because humans evolved on Earth and not on Venus" is just a dismissive contrarian take that says absolutely nothing of any value what-so-ever.
> Because humans evolved on Earth and not on Venus.
> If we evolved on Venus then it would be our Eden
That's about the connotations of the words "Hell" and "Eden", not about the facts being discussed.
And why did humans evolve on Earth but not Venus? In fact no life evolved on Venus that we know of.