6 ms·
NASA study reveals Venus crust surprise
- WalterBright 1y agoI wonder if Venus could be terraformed via a sun shield placed in orbit around it. How big would it have to be to reverse the runaway greenhouse effect?
- vardump 1y agoVenus probably doesn't have enough hydrogen to be of any use.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gamescr 1y agoPart of the problem is having too much atmosphere. In the original Cosmos Carl Sagan talked about a hypothetical solution where we capture asteroids, and throw them at Venus in such a way that they just nick the atmosphere and knock large quantities of atmosphere out into space. One you reduce atmospheric pressure to a certain level, things could become habitable. Then throw in iron form the atseroid belt to react with it to form carbonates. Venus is dry so brining in hydrogen form the outer planets would be necessary anyway to form wate r and thta will account for a good bit. Garden the surface so subsurface rocks which might react with the atmosphere cna absorb some. (Assumign the subsurface rocks are thta reactive.) Scoop it off with smaller versions of the same scoops used to harvets hydrogen from the gas giants.
- dylan604 1y agoCouldn't we just build a MegaMaid and suck the atmosphere out? If we're going to go sci-fi, it seem easier to hoover it out than capture an asteroid and nick the atmosphere just right.
- shepardrtc 1y agoSomething like a solar powered space elevator that just blows atmosphere into the sun
- bdamm 1y agoThat would require a lot of energy to ensure the gasses escape Venus' gravitational pull, which would in turn effectively be a rocket. So then we'd be adjusting to ensure we don't mess with Venus' orbit too much.
- p1mrx 1y agoWe can avoid orbital drift through the magic of building two of them.
- gcanyon 1y agoVenus outweighs its atmosphere by about 10,000 times. This is actually less than I thought -- for comparison Earth outweighs its atmosphere by over 1,000,000 times, which is still far less than I would have guessed. Venus's escape velocity is less than 1/3rd of its orbital velocity. According to google, Venus's orbit, despite being very circular, causes its velocity to vary by a KM/s from aphelion to perihelion. So I believe you could send all of Venus's atmosphere off permanently into space at the cost of about 1/30,000th of Venus's orbital velocity, meaning you could very slightly circularize its orbit further.
- hinkley 1y agoSpinning it up would be handy.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoThen, move the MegaMaid into an orbit around Mars and go from suck to blow. Venus has too much atmosphere, Mars has too little. Win Win.
- 1y ago
- andrewflnr 1y agoI recall one of the plans being to use the sun shield to entirely freeze out the atmosphere, then use a mass driver to chuck most of the CO2 into space. I don't recall exactly where that was supposed to be on the feasible to scifi spectrum. I'd rather try to keep the carbon around for organic molecules. Are we sure we can't get in enough H2O and N to balance it out and build a nice thick biosphere?
- pfdietz 1y agoYou'd have to shoot it out of the solar system, otherwise much of it would reaccrete onto Venus... or onto Earth!
- andrewflnr 1y agoI guess I'll count that as another reason to prefer managing it in situ. But it might be fine, actually? Slow re-accretion can probably be managed by whatever terraforming process we've kickstarted while most of it was gone. Oh wait, I remember the plan, ship it to Mars so they can have some decent atmospheric pressure.
- pfdietz 1y agoMars could use only a small fraction of it. If the entire atmosphere of Venus were moved to Mars, the surface pressure there would be 120 bars (more at the lowest point).
- hinkley 1y agoThere’s a book where they freeze the atmosphere then cover the ice with a thick layer of dirt. But I cannot recall which.
- somat 1y ago"Venus is dry" I thought the Venus theory was runaway greenhouse driven initially by water vapor. Going off memory, H2O is roughly 10 times as effective a greenhouse gas as CO2, with Venus being closer to the sun A larger percentage of water ended up in vapor form, leading to a feed back loop where the increased heat pushes more water to vapor leading to more heat, eventually liberating the co2 from the rock, making everything worse, ending up with the current situation where venus has way too much atmosphere. Which is the long way to say, I think there is a lot of water on venus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
- andrewflnr 1y agoFrom your link: > Lighter gases, including water vapour, are continuously blown away by the solar wind through the induced magnetotail. There used to be a lot of water on Venus.
- wahern 1y agoMoreover, I think Venus has lost most of its hydrogen to space, so you can't even make water anymore. Hydrogen escapes the atmosphere relatively easily for Earth- and Venus-sized planets[1], and the vaporization of all the water and subsequent disassociation[2] of H2O allowed the hydrogen to escape into space. [1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere#/media/File:Solar_system_escape_velocity_vs_surface_temperature.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere#/media/File:Solar_s... [2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
- saalweachter 1y agoEarth's oxygen rich atmosphere is really important here-- any free hydrogen can readily combine with the free hydrogen, decreasing the chance of any being loss.
- andrewflnr 1y agoAccording to that wiki article, the hydrogen was mostly lost in the form of water vapor. The hydrogen and oxygen in the magnetotail are in almost a perfect 2:1 ratio. At least, > Currently the main ion types being lost are O+, H+ and He+. The ratio of hydrogen to oxygen losses is around 2 (i.e. almost stoichiometric for water) indicating the ongoing loss of water. Also Earth didn't have an oxygenated atmosphere until relatively late, a couple billion years in, so I didn't know if that could be the thing that saved it.
- jovas 1y agoVenus has a retrograde day that is longer than it's year. While the atmosphere is a big problem, even without this issue the rotation would be problematic.
- mousethatroared 1y agoIf the commenters are discussing diverting enough meteors to terraform Venus, there's enough fantasy to consider using nukes to apply the necessary torque to speed the orbit up
- stevenwoo 1y agoIf we're spitballing, one could simply angle the impacts of asteroids to add momentum in the desired direction.
- hinkley 1y agoWith that much atmosphere that’s a lot of tidal forces too, if you just get some I to orbit. But the question. Is do you spin it backward or slow it down to spin it the right way, creating a situation where one side of the planet always faces the sun for a while. Might be an opportunity to freeze and cart off the other side of the atmosphere…
- AStonesThrow 1y agoWhy don't we simply vaporize Venus entirely and construct our own bespoke planet in its place, if it's so damn problematic https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Technobabble https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Technobabble
- cyberax 1y agoI've read a crazy proposal: 1. "Humidify" the atmosphere by crashing comets into Venus. This will also allow us to create a temporary "cloud" around Venus that can shield it from the Sun and lower down the temperature. 2. Once the temperature is low enough, Venus will get oceans on its surface. 3. At this point, CO2 can be split into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen will be immediately bound by the huge amount of under-oxidized iron on the surface, and carbon can be buried under the new ocean. Essentially, carboniferous age for Venus. 4. Once this is done, the atmosphere will be mostly nitrogen (at ~3 bar) and people could live there with just respirators. Eventually, once the surface iron is oxidized, the atmosphere can even be made breathable. Apparently, this can be done within 2000-5000 years without any exotic-level engineering.
- dataflow 1y agoHow many comets would you have to crash and how would one redirect and crash them that wouldn't make this exotic-level?
- cyberax 1y agoDepending on a size, probably on the order of tens of thousand. Comets in the Oort cloud take very little energy to put on a collision orbit, the Sun barely holds them gravitationally, orbital speeds in the Oort cloud are measured in _meters_ per second. So they require (relatively) little energy to put them into a required orbit. It might be doable with just regular thermonuclear charges. It will then take these comets more than a thousand years to "fall" from the Oort cloud.
- Loughla 1y agoWe'll be dead by then I'm afraid.
- somat 1y agoMy understanding is that it was water that started the whole thing. water vapor is about ten times as effective a greenhouse gas as co2. and the runaway heat started with too much water vapor(closer to to the sun I think), leading to more heat, leading to more water vapor. eventually it got hot enough to start liberating co2 out of the rocks. leading to the current situation today where venus has way too much atmosphere. Which is to say, putting a ring around venus to block the sun may have merit, but adding more water sounds like pouring petrol on a fire.
- monkeyfun 1y agoIf you're interested in human habitation of Venus overall, you may find it interesting to learn Venus is probably preferable kept at about its current temperature or only made a little colder. See, the atmosphere at ~50 altitude... happens to be about 1 bar (which happens to be Earth's atmospheric pressure ASL)... and happens to have temperatures that can support human and plant life! And better still, the atmosphere being mostly co2 with a little nitrogen actually means normal Earth air is a lifting gas! Starting to see where this is going? It's not too hard to imagine the skies of Venus full of floating habitats that move to stay in the sunlight, or occasionally dock with tethers or balloons carrying cargo from extremely reinforced mining facilities deep underground (where they could be much more protected most of the time from the pressure/temperature/corrosion) -- a future where people (or machines!) might scoff at the idea of cooling off Venus and losing out on such an excellent habitation zone, one which could also fairly easily support elevated runways or launch platforms to more cheaply reach space from. With Venus also having 91% of Earth's gravity, and those atmospheric conditions at high altitudes that add some radiation shielding and would probably let a human worker only need a very limited suit more akin to a hazmat or firefighting suit with SCBA to work outside habitats... Venus is actually easily the single best planet for humans to live on after Earth! (Can you tell I'm writing a story set there? Hehehe)
- babyent 1y agoWow and then we get Lando
- pastage 1y agoYou need to give us more. I feel that just the heat is a tricky problem, even at 50km altitude. Anything todo with Venus is very much scifi at the moment. It might be easier than a moon base but we can not know.
- monkeyfun 1y agoOh it wouldn't be easier than a moon base or simple orbital habitats. And as for Venus being scifi, anything to do with space colonization period is scifi right now; humans haven't even stepped foot on another celestial body of any kind in over half a century. Rather my meaning was that it's (a little shockingly) the best suited planet for humans in terms of most closely and reliably resembling conditions humans could survive in, which relates to the terraforming notions I was replying to. It'd be overwhelmingly harder to make all of Venus Earthlike than to just use the existing relatively Earthlike regions of the upper atmosphere to our advantage along with their unique properties. Cool off Venus and you just get a big ocean of liquid or frozen co2 to have to deal with after a loooong time and a lot of construction. Keep it like it is and a fraction of the resources/effort will yield far more utility while we can still enjoy a segment of the atmosphere. Scifi? Of course! Cool? Without a doubt!
- minitoar 1y agoI would absolutely demolish a Venus Crust Surprise
- minitoar 1y agoSurprised at all the dead humor comments. Is humor against the guidelines?
- ossopite 1y agoFrom the headline I can't decide if it was a study in astronomy or gastronomy
- perihelions 1y ago- "Several upcoming missions, including NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging)" DAVINCI is actually cancelled in the latest budget request. For obvious reasons, the NASA press office (the OP) won't talk about this. But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone. https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-science-budget-and-cancel-major-missions/ https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-...
- gammarator 1y ago> But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone. The proposed cuts to science are catastrophic, but there’s still time to call your Congressperson. https://aas.org/posts/news/2025/05/week-of-action https://aas.org/posts/news/2025/05/week-of-action
- zo1 1y ago[flagged]
- casenmgreen 1y ago> No. Let's first feed the homeless and struggling, and fix the crisis that are affecting ordinary people. I may be wrong, but it's not money that's the problem; there's plenty of money. (I would also point out the NASA budget is a miniscule spec of dust compared to the total budget.) It seems to me the problem is organization and politics - actually doing the right things to address these problems. It's like, say, Microsoft. They can't run a successful project to save their lives. This is an organizational and cultural problem. Large organization, lots of politics, enough money that success or failure is not critical to survival. > Governments should have been able to do that up until now. Instead the government has been shipping money overseas and spending it on foreigners for far too long. In what ways?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- geuis 1y agoI'm blown away at the number of huge volcanos and relative lack of craters. If that's right, Venus must recycle its surface relatively often.
- floxy 1y agoAre you just looking at the photo to determine volcanoes and craters? Wouldn't we expect that with so much atmosphere on Venus, that meteors would have a much harder time reaching the surface? That is, much larger ones would burn up or get deflected than on Earth.
- quotemstr 1y agoVenus is a damned shame. Had planetary evolution gone just slightly differently, the solar system could have had two habitable water planets. Mars, owing to its size, was never going to cut it, but Venus might have.
- netsharc 1y agoI wonder how a system with 2 planets with intelligent lifeforms would've developed culturally and politically... if both civilizations grew at the same rate, 2 Galileos would've looked at the other planet and figured out "we have neighbors!", but it'd be several hundred more years before communication could be done. Even know we don't have manned missions to Mars or Venus...
- lisper 1y ago> a system with 2 planets with intelligent lifeforms That is an extremely unlikely scenario because both intelligent life forms would have had to evolve before either of them developed space flight. It took homo sapiens 4 Gyr to evolve in the first place but only 100 kyr to develop space flight after that. So the odds are slim to none.
- criddell 1y agoDoes intelligent life mean only human-level intelligence? If we found a bunch of chimp-like animals running around, would that count as intelligent life?
- lisper 1y agoSure, but our interactions with chimp-like intelligence on another planet are unlikely to be substantially different from our interactions with chimp-like intelligence on this planet. It only gets interesting when both are more or less evenly matched, and that is extremely unlikely.
- 1y ago
- kgwxd 1y agoSounds delicious.
- p1mrx 1y ago> Scientists expected the outermost layer of Venus’ crust would grow thicker and thicker over time I recall watching this NOVA episode in 1995 where scientists had no idea whether the lithosphere is thick or thin. Seek to 36 minutes: https://archive.org/details/VenusUnveiled/NOVA.S22E10.Venus.Unveiled.1995.DVDRip.DD2.0.x264-astro.mp4 https://archive.org/details/VenusUnveiled/NOVA.S22E10.Venus....
- bryan0 1y agoI remember that episode being excellent! Scientists could tell that Venus’s crust was somehow reforming because of the crater pattern but the didn’t know whether it was gradual change or something catastrophic, and the thickness of the crust would point to one way or the other but they didn’t have that data. > The paper used modeling to determine that its crust is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) thick on average and at most 40 miles (65 kilometers) thick. So would that be considered “thick” or “thin”?
- dexwiz 1y agoThick compared to Earth, but I think it has an especially thin crust.
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- Spackonewz 1y ago[dead]
- kristel100 1y ago[dead]