Colonizing Venus

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The atmosphere of Venus is nothing at all like the atmosphere of Earth.

Earth's atmosphere contains clouds of water-vapor.
Venus is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid.

Earth's atmosphere is roughly 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, and 1% Carbon Dioxide and other trace elements.
Venus' atmosphere is roughly 96.5% Carbon dioxide, 3.5% Nitrogen, and traces of other gases (mostly Sulfer Dioxide).

The mean atmospheric pressure at the Earth's surface is 101.3 kilo-Pascals.
The mean atmospheric pressure at Venus' surface is 9.3 Mega-Pascals (~92x Earth).

The mean surface temperature of Earth is 14°C.
The mean surface temperature of Venus is 462°C.

:: The atmosphere of Venus does not mimic that of Earth.

Your colonization hypothesis is rejected due to false assumptions from available data.

I think that venus would be a bad place to go becuase of the sulphuric acid, I am not sure if the planet has water. It might even have oleum, I think that the corrosion issues would be very horrible if you were to send a mission to venus.

I recall that conc H2SO4 can be more corrosive to many grades of stainless steel than nitric acid, I recall reading once that nitric acid is the mineral acid which is most compatable with stainless steels such as SS316.

I know more about chloride and SS316 than sulphate media, but I would be nervous about hot H2SO4 and SS316. Titanium might not be a good choice either, I am not sure how strong the H2SO4 in the venus clouds is but the combination of heat and H2SO4 might be bad.

http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=1240

Colonising Venus? *scratches head* Wouldn't be my first choice... probably wouldn't be my fifth or sixth either, for all the reasons previously stated.

There are "easier" targets for an off-world base or for terraforming. Floating cities in the clouds sounds alluring (very Lando), but unless there is something on or in Venus that would make that kind of epic investment worth while, I don't think it's a goer. You could increase the rotation of the planet by slamming in asteroids (and/or comets, thereby increasing the water content too), but again, with Mars not requiring that sort of mucking about, I'm not sure why you would. We could probably crack the other issues too, given the time, political will, the socio-economic necessity...

She's a tough, tough cookie and with easier lays around, I think her virtue might be safe.

Venus would never EVER happen. Probes don't even survive there.. why would anyone bother with a planet that dangerous when they have mars as an option?

Venus has enough gravity to hold an atmosphere. Unfortunately the atmosphere is dreadful. Mars can't hold its atmosphere and it has no magnetic field which means if people lived there they would have to live mostly underground or use +3000 sunblock.

ruveyn

You really need to provide specifics for your opinion in case you haven't guessed that by now. WP is the 'real' world, almost like being in college but less fun.

Venus is actually preferable to Mars. Mars has a weak gravity compared to ours, while the gravity of Venus is more Earth-like. Also, the Martian atmosphere is too thin. It would be more practical to build structures in the Venusian atmosphere.
Yes, I know, I know, the acid and whatnot. But those of you who have flat-out rejected the idea don't seem to have read the first posts. The ideal colony on Venus would be a floating structure about 50 kilometers above the surface. At that altitude, the temperature and pressure equal those on the surface of Earth. Earth air is a floating gas on Venus's CO2 environment, so the city should buoy by itself. You just need to cover the structure with a material that will resist the acid, like some inert ceramic. Once inside, you won't need to worry about the daylight cycle outdoors.

Venus has no tectonic plates - when a volcano forms it just keeps on going and going. This means a constant stream of geologically sourced CO2, and a runaway greenhouse effect. plus the lack of a magnetosphere means the solar wind is stripping the atmosphere away.

You would need to be constantly adding nitrogen and oxygen faster than the planet is releasing CO2 - that's a humongous amount - otherwise the Nitrogen and Oxygen is stripped off by the solar wind and replaced by greenhouse gases released from the planet.

Even in a sealed habitat you'd have serious maintenance issues with the constant corrosion and heat weathering.

A low pressure/low gravity environment lends itself to construction that requires less building material. Its greatly cheaper. For instance, on Mars, domes could be erected solely through internal air pressure. Low gravity and external pressure facilitates that.

On the other hand, Venus, at heights, would require just as much building mass as on earth. Construction is more time consuming, requires more material, and there is a question of how to suspend such mass in the air.

Lower gravity has benefits in that there is less work for the heart to do, so we could expect longer lives(at least pertaining to heart problems). There is very little drawback to low gravity if colonists are not going to go back to earth.

The structure just needs to be filled with Earth air. Our atmosphere is a lifting gas in a Venusian environment.



I hope this gives you a chance to change your mind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_medicine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness

How do we get a significant amount of our atmosphere to Venus? Space ships have a rather small carrying volume.

ruveyn

SPLAH! Thats why you terraform it

At the elevation you want to place a colony on mars, the atmosphere is exactly equal to earths. An earth normal atmosphere would not be a lifting body.

I'll have a look at your links, thanks.

[edit]

Regarding gravity/links: Mars has gravity. It would not exhibit the same effects as zero gravity, ie: weightlessness. It is not even considered microgravity, which is what orbital astronauts experience. Mars has 1/3 the gravity of earth. The detrimental effects in your link pertain to microgravity and zero gravity. Whatever happens on mars would be far less.

I'm unable to find any references claiming that there's a "layer" of nitrogen/oxygen in the upper reaches of Venus' atmosphere. Rather, as listed here, it's largely carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, with clouds of sulfuric acid (and tropospheric winds upwards of 300 kph!).

Nope, overall Venus looks like a pretty sucky place to attempt to colonize. I think I'd prefer to carve out (or maybe find?) caves beneath the Lunar regolith, or build shelters on Mars - they're both downright homelike compared to Venus!

so what they thought was H2O
was H2SO4...

If you're going to have a floating city, you could do that on Earth....

On the other thought, you know it'd make a great garbage dump...no ecology, and everything gets compacted and dissolved...

It's been years since I learned my Archimedes, but wouldn't that be the point precisely? Wouldn't the structure tend to settle at an altitude where the inner and outer pressures are the same?