WHY COLONIZE A HOT BALL OF ACID?
Until the 1960s, Venus was thought to be a potential location for human colonies and space exploration because it was known that there were clouds on Venus, so there was some speculation that it could have an environment that was similar to Earth. Indeed early pulp science fiction (particularly between the 1930s-1950s) depicted Venus as a lush paradise full of jungles, oceans, swampland, Amazonian warrior women, and even dinosaurs.
It was only in the 1960s, when scientists got a better look, that it was discovered that Venus was super hot and that the clouds are made out of sulfuric acid.
Another problem is that Venus has more volcanoes than any planet in the solar system.
Currently now, much of the discussion of finding another planet for humans to live on focuses on Mars, not Venus. Yet surprisingly, there are many aspects of Venus that could make it a better candidate than Mars, despite Venus being a boiling hot oven of sulfuric acid. So some people are now saying that the original assumption popular before the 1960s was correct. One of the people who has argued that Venus is a better candidate for human colonization than Mars is Geoffrey A. Landis, a NASA researcher who has written much on this topic.
The benefits of Venus are its mass is 82% of Earth’s, and its surface gravity is 90% of Earth’s.
Because of the thick atmosphere, people wouldn’t need a heavy pressure suit, just a simple acid-resistant suit.
Mars, by contrast, has low atmospheric pressure, low temperatures, low gravity, and high exposure to cosmic radiation.
(Image source for picture above.)
BLIMP CITIES IN THE CLOUDS
People would not be able to live on the surface of Venus (at least not in its current form). The surface is 900 degrees Fahrenheit (475 degrees Celsius), which means it is hot enough to boil lead.
However, the higher up you get from the surface, the thinner and cooler the atmosphere gets. There’s a sweet spot about 50-55 kilometers up where the atmosphere is down to about normal Earth pressure, and temperatures are similar to the Mediterranean.
As Geoffrey A. Landis says, the surface is hell, but at cloud level, it’s paradise.
So a possibility is to build floating cities 50-55 kilometers above the ground. But how would one do this?
Venus’s atmosphere may be a vital asset in this endeavor. Venus has an incredibly thick atmosphere, about 100 times that of Earth. Most of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, with just over 3% being nitrogen, and only trace amounts of other gases. And yet Venus has more nitrogen than Earth, simply because it has so much atmosphere.
There is also a sea of carbon dioxide down on the surface, having characteristics of both a liquid and a gas, which will be important for terraforming the planet, but we’ll get to that later.
Now with regards to the carbon dioxide atmosphere, we must keep in mind that carbon dioxide has a molecular weight of 44, which means that any gas with a lower molecular weight than carbon dioxide can act as a lifting gas, much like helium in balloons on Earth. That means that hydrogen and helium work even better as a lifting gas on Venus than on Earth, but it also means that our normal oxygen-nitrogen air mix could actually make a balloon float on Venus. And you can get hydrogen, oxygen and water out of the sulfuric acid that makes up the clouds.
A near-term option for humanity would be to have automated aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere.
But for longer-term habitation, Venus’s colonists could make large, sturdy blimps with the mass manufacture of graphene. What is graphene you may ask? Graphene is the building block of graphite (which is currently used in pencils). This wonder material graphene is the thinnest material known to man, at one atom thick. And yet it is incredibly strong, 200 times stronger than steel. Graphene is also an excellent conductor of heat, electricity and has interesting light absorption properties. Graphene is an exciting material that is getting a lot of attention—especially since the 2010 Nobel prize in physics went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who first isolated Graphene in 2004.
And there is plenty of carbon for making graphene in Venus’s atmosphere. Venus’s colonists could use the carbon to make diamond hard tethers anchoring their blimp cities to the ground. These hard tethers could be possibly strong enough to survive the super-hot, acidic hurricane below. Or the colonists could use them like harpoons with a winch to drag their settlements around like a giant octopus.
Another benefit of Venus, Geoffrey A. Landis points out, is that the super thick atmosphere could provide shielding from cosmic radiation.
FLOATING SOLAR PUNK CITIES
Up higher in Venus’s atmosphere, the lighting is a lot like Earth, except that if one stays in the same spot, they’ll have a day-night cycle not of 24 hours but of 243 days. Since the day-night terminator creeps along at a fast walking pace, even at the equator, a colonist could opt to stay in perpetual sunlight, making it handy for solar power or growing plants to help recycle air and water, and to extend food supplies.
In fact, solar arrays can produce just as much energy pointing downward toward the reflective clouds as they can produce by pointing toward the sun.
There is also a superabundance of solar energy to power engines. And all the wind allows colonists to use wings to provide lift for a plane or a kite, not just balloons and buoyancy. So, there are a lot of options for transportation and moving around in the clouds.
The abundance of atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrogen will also be a useful resource for greenhouses.
The creation of mining robots could allow people in these sky cities to have autonomous sources of production that could give them a good deal of free time for recreation, education, family life, and spiritual reflection.
Venus also has a surface area 3.1 times the land area of Earth. With all this room, a billion habitats, each one with a population of hundreds of humans, could be placed in Venus’s atmosphere.
OBSTACLES WITH FLOATING CITIES
Floating cities would have their obstacles. Floating cities on Venus would have to be very thin and very lightweight to float. The colonists could also just orbit the planet in conventional rotating habitats. Yet being lower in the atmosphere would protect from meteors and radiation. Geoffrey A. Landis says the thick atmosphere would protect from radiation. But if this is not enough, the colonists could also put their blimps in water shielding to add some protection.
ROBOTIC MINING OF THE SURFACE
Venus’s surface is way too hot for humans to mine on their own. But they could control mining robots from up in their floating habitats and deliver the goods by going up a tether in the form of a high-temperature fullerine tether. Or the robots could pop compressed gas cartridges to fill balloons and float back up.
A settlement could float over a spot they are mining.
TERRAFORMING VENUS
Terraforming Venus is another option. And given Venus’s mass and gravity, it may be the best candidate for terraforming in the solar system.
Terraforming could be accomplished by constructing a dome or an enclosure on the planet, which would grow to encompass most of the planet’s usable area. This could be part of the process of cooling down Venus.
Changing the Atmosphere:
Part of the reason Venus is so hot is its thick atmosphere. But a major reason for the heat is Venus’s proximity to the sun. If one blocks out the light between Venus and the sun, they could reduce that heat. Colonists could use massive shades that are about as big as a football field but don’t weigh too much. Ideally, they would want to use something very light and strong, like graphene made of carbon. The colonists could manufacture these graphene shades on the cloud cities of Venus and deploy them to the Lagrange point between the sun and Venus by the millions until they shade Venus’s atmosphere. The atmosphere would then begin to cool. The thick atmosphere would start to liquefy and turn into seas of carbon dioxide.
The floating cities would probably not survive the process of liquefying the atmosphere, so the colonists would have to abandon them and retreat to orbital colonies. Or they could modify the floating cities to safely survive the process (like some Johnny Quest car blimp?) and be able to land on the seas of carbon dioxide and survive the changeover of early terraforming. During cooling, there would be a ton of earthquakes and maybe volcanic activity while it snows dry ice. And then, the colonists would have to find a way to export or permanently sequester all that carbon dioxide so they could warm the planet to an Earth-like temperature and an atmospheric composition.
Another possibility for clearing the atmosphere of Venus would be to use solar mirrors instead of shades. This would heat the planet even more and evaporate the atmosphere away.
But if the colonists went with the strategy of cooling the planet, they could keep cooling it until the seas of carbon dioxide froze and turned into surfaces of dry ice. Then they could pave over that and introduce dirt and water.
The trouble is, how to get enough water for oceans?
There is a large amount of water available in Venus’s atmosphere. But it isn’t enough for real oceans. It’s enough for people to drink and to farm food inside greenhouses. But it’s not enough to make a classic biosphere. For that, the colonists would need to come up with somewhere between 10-100 billion megatons of hydrogen.
One possibility is to boil hydrogen off the sun since the sun is a massive source of hydrogen.
Another possibility is to import the hydrogen from Jupiter or Saturn.
However, when it comes to making Venus more Earth-like, there is also the problem with Venus’s day length. Venus’s day is longer than its year. The sun would rise in the sky and stay there for months before setting for more months.
There are three approaches to this:
First, ignore it and adapt to life on a planet like this.
Second, place mirrors in orbit around Venus to bounce light down on the night side and block incoming sunlight on the day side to simulate a 24-hour day cycle.
Thirdly, the colonists could also make a fake sun with lots of mirrors to bounce light to something about the same angular size in the sky as the sun in Earth’s sky. All the mirrors and shades could also protect Venus from radiation. Though colonists would still want to consider an artificial magnetosphere to hold the atmosphere in. They can’t expect the atmosphere to stick around on its own once they make Venus earth-like.
The other alternative is to go all in and adjust Venus’s rotational speed to a 24-hour day, or maybe save some energy and let people sleep in longer with a 26-hour day. Yet the colonists would need massive amounts of energy to change the rotation of a planet. They would need 10^29 joules of rotational energy to do this. To put that in perspective, it’s more than a billion times the amount of electricity 21st century Earth uses each year. It’s also only a few years of energy output from the sun. (Though it would take roughly the same amount of energy to ship in enough hydrogen to create an ocean.)
Accomplishing this task could come in the form of sending a large beam of hydrogen from the sun like a water jet, hitting one side of the planet Venus, injecting hydrogen and spin. If we were getting the hydrogen from gas giants instead, each of those ships and pods would be moving quite fast, carrying a large amount of kinetic energy. The amount of kinetic energy needed for massive transports of hydrogen would be in the same ballpark as rotational energy. So the colonists would need to figure out how much hydrogen they want and how much rotational energy they need and make sure each pod of hydrogen is moving at a speed to deliver that energy. If that were moving too fast, they might ship in comets or massive balls of ice and let the extra mass carry the extra kinetic energy. It would still be very tricky to get this process to work. But a benefit of this is that if the planet is spinning fast enough, it could generate a magnetosphere, so the colonists wouldn’t have to generate an artificial one.
Another possibility is to give Venus a moon and use it as a gravity tractor to impart spin. And the outer planets of our solar system have an abundance of moons, along with excess hydrogen. The colonists could also take the excess carbon from Venus and build a fake moon.
While these are all interesting ideas, the reality is that terraforming Venus would most likely take thousands of years. So this would involve a long-term commitment that would outlast the length of many civilizations. The kind of society willing to do this would either have to be very dedicated, or they might be some form of artificial intelligence with a lengthy lifespan.
The residents of Venus have a few options: The orbital colony route, the floating city route, the para-terraforming route where they use shades to cool the planet down and use orbital mirrors to create a 24-hour day, or go big and start spinning the planet up to a 24-hour day by importing shipments of hydrogen or water to impart that spin momentum.
The colonists also don’t only have to do one option. They could have several phases or multiple options pursued simultaneously.
WHAT WOULD THE VENUSIAN ECONOMY LOOK LIKE?
Carbon in the form of graphene will likely be the preferred building material of the future, so Venus could export gigatons of that.
For export, Venus has lots of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and solar or wind energy for industrial processes. They could also build solar-powered satellites for export, along with shades and mirrors for terraforming.
Mining the surface (which is primarily a basaltic silicate), will provide silicon, iron, aluminum, magnesium, calcium, potassium, and sodium.
Venus could give Mars pods of nitrogen for their terraforming process, which could get shipped to their atmosphere and shot down. Metal for the pods would come from mining the surface of Venus.
Venus is closer to Earth than Mars. With current propulsion systems, launch windows to Venus occur every 584 days, compared to the 780 days for Mars. Flight time is also somewhat shorter; the Venus Express probe that arrived at Venus in April 2006 spent slightly over five months en route, compared to nearly six months for Mars Express. This is because at closest approach, Venus is 40 million km (25 million mi) from Earth (approximated by perihelion of Earth minus aphelion of Venus) compared to 55 million km (34 million mi) for Mars (approximated by perihelion of Mars minus aphelion of Earth) making Venus the closest planet to Earth.
Then there is the accessibility of asteroids from Venus. In terms of flight time, Venus is closer to the Asteroid Belt than either Earth or Mars. Geoffrey A. Landis argues that the higher orbital velocity of Venus makes transfer orbits somewhat faster and increases the number of transfer opportunities to various asteroids in the Asteroid Belt.
There is also the possibility of tourism on Venus. The appeal is that people can walk around beautiful sky cities without a heavy pressure suit. And with the thick atmosphere, there is the possibility of hang gliding with just a mask and a thin acid proof suit.
EXAMPLES OF VENUS IN EARLY SCIENCE FICTION
As mentioned at the top of this article, Venus was a popular planet in early science fiction before it was known that the surface was hot enough to melt lead. Therefore, there are quite a few examples of humans colonizing Venus, especially in the age of early pulp Science Fiction. But be aware that these examples do not offer accuracy given what we know about Venus today. I mean…especially not with the dinosaurs and Amazonian warriors and so on.
In the early pulp science fiction of the mid twentieth century, there was a lack of agreed upon canon about what Venus was like, given that the stories about life on the planet included everything from thick jungles, to a water world covered in oceans, to widespread deserts. In comparison, the writing about Mars was much more uniform.
Science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl attributes the disparity largely to the image of Mars made popular by Percival Lowell around the beginning of the 20th century. By contrast, very little was known of Venus aside from the fact it had clouds.
Disclaimer: I produced a list below of examples of Venus in science fiction. This list below doesn’t represent all instances of Venus in science fiction, as there are multiple instances. The list simply represents a few examples I have chosen to highlight.
Venus in Fiction (Wikipedia)
A True Story by Lucian of Samosata – 2nd Century A.D. (One of the earliest known examples of interplanetary travel in fiction. Lucian refers to Venus as the ‘morning star.’)
Voyage à Vénus by Achille Eyraud 1865 (One of the earliest known uses of Venus as the primary setting in fiction)
Last And First Men by Olaf Stapledon -1930 (A book that discusses genetic engineering for interplanetary colonization.)
“The Big Rain” by Poul Anderson – 1954 (Anderson writes about terraforming Venus’s atmosphere.)
In the Walls of Eryx by H. P. Lovecraft – 1936
Perelandra by C. S. Lewis – 1943 (This is a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden on floating islands in a vast Venusian ocean.)
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus by Isaac Asimov – 1954 (Asimov depicts human colonists living in underwater cities on Venus.)
“Before Eden” by Arthur C. Clarke – 1961 (Clarke portrays Venus as mostly hot and dry, but with a habitable climate at the poles.)
VENUS IN MODERN SCIENCE FICTION
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson – 2012 (A very well written novel showing human colonization on multiple worlds in our solar system.)
“The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis in Asimov Magazine – 2011 (I highly recommend this story for anyone who wants a more scientifically sound depiction of what life on Venus could look like. This is written by a NASA researcher.)
The Snows of Venus by G. David Nordley in Analog magazine – 1991 (In this story, G. David Nordley suggests that Venus might be spun-up to a day-length of 30 Earth days by exporting its atmosphere of Venus via mass drivers.
ART
Venus Science Fiction Art on Pinterest
LEARN MORE ABOUT COLONIZING VENUS
Colonizing Venus Video by Isaac Arthur (YouTube)
Colonization of Venus by Geoffrey A. Landis (NASA, February 2003)
How to colonize Venus, and why it’s a better plan than Mars (Big Think, 11-28-18)
How Could We Create Settlements on Venus? (Universe Today, 9-4-16)
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