8 ms·

forget the cubesat nonsense. the aim should be to get a dudebro to quadbike on the surface. redbull & gopro will be the sponsors, plus polymarket for people to

forget the cubesat nonsense. the aim should be to get a dudebro to quadbike on the surface. redbull & gopro will be the sponsors, plus polymarket for people to bet on the outcome of the mission. actually i dont understand why this hasn't already happened! what is more extreme sports, that doing it on other planets? its hard to get people to care about the sciencey stuff. I've even got the tagline "Yeah, we found life on mars." and its a picture of the dude looking like a pirate in a spacesuit. people would (could?) love that i think.

voidUpdate 1y ago
I mean the soviets had a good go at landing big metal probes on there and they melted and failed pretty quickly. I'm not sure we have the technology to make a space suit or a quad bike that can function on the surface of venus. You'd also need to transport over 100 days of water and snacks so your dudebro doesn't starve on the way there
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  I remember reading a short story that featured settlements on Venus, and it mentioned the difficulty of running any sort of engine - rocket or combustion - on the surface. After all, your engine and its exhaust must be hotter than the atmosphere surrounding it, otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refridgerator.
  - the_gipsy 1y ago
    I don't doubt it's extremely challenging. But the initial engine temperature would still match the environment temperature, and it would not get somehow colder. That's not how any of this works.
  - voidUpdate 1y ago
    I don't know if a rocket exhaust must absolutely be hotter than the environment, just at a higher pressure. If you open a gas bottle, the jet is going to be very cold, but it will produce thrust. With some quick googling, the surface pressure on venus is 90 bar, and a spacex falcon produces 350 bar in the chamber, so I think a falcon 9 could quite easily take off from the surface (ignoring the fact it would melt and the tanks might crush etc)
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      pV=NRT Pressure and temperature are not independent. "Hotter than the environment" is shorthand for "contains more energy than the output region does".
  - kleiba 1y ago
    Run your engine inside said refridgerator?
- webdevver 1y ago
  damn i thought venus was like the moon but red. still i feel like its hard to get excited about stuff without humans intimately involved. ultimately its all about the meatbag, he needs to be there somehow. maybe in orbit controlling the sat via FPV goggles?
  - theoreticalmal 1y ago
    Oh boy this is all mixed up. Mars is red, are you thinking of Mars. Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars
    - voidUpdate 1y ago
      Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. It's still cold and you'd need a specialised quadbike (electric?), but seeing as martian travel is on the cards for some point in the future, you might see martian quadbike racing in your lifetime. However there are still the same food/water/oxygen issues, since it's a 9 month trip each way
      - hermitcrab 1y ago
        >Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. Indeed. The very low pressure on Mars (0.006 Bar) would be much easier to deal with than the absolutely crushing pressure on Venus (92 Bar) - not to mention the 470C surface temperature. Hanggliding or ballooning in the cloud tops of Venus would be more practical than going to the surface.
        Sanzig 1y ago
        Humans have already survived simulated dives in hyperbaric chambers to around 70 bar with no long term effects, so in theory you may be able to have Venusian astronauts live in a habitat at ambient pressure if 90 bar is similarly tolerable (obviously would still need heroic measures for cooling, an approx. 200 K temperature differential is no joke). Getting enough gas there to pressurize the hab could be difficult, the deep dive experiments used a hydrogen/helium/oxygen mixture and I doubt you can recover helium through in situ resource extraction. And you would need some sort of acclimatization system to get the astronauts from their half-bar or so transit environment down to the surface - maybe a balloon that slowly descends over the period of a few days. So yeah, pretty much science fiction for now!
Zigurd 1y ago
Thank you for capturing the zeitgeist way too accurately. Now I'm once again in a mood to watch it all burn.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  As kids, my friend and I had an idea of getting Microsoft to fund us buying used Buran and building a launchpad for it in Poland, in exchange for painting the shuttle all blue and slapping big Microsoft Windows logos on it. I still think this wasn't that bad of an idea. Maybe if we followed through with it, Poland would've had a proper space program now.
slightwinder 1y ago
That's not economical. A human mission to another planet is far too expensive and risky for the little advertising it would deliver. They could do that already on earth, send people to the north/south-poles, or even send them to the moon.. This would all be cheaper and still have similar effects. But the mindset is probably not wrong. Maybe Jeff Bezos can rent his dick-rocket to Red Bull, so people can spacediving the atmosphere. The necessary security-tech they have to build, will probably very beneficial for actual astronauts later.
- upghost 1y ago
  I can guarantee you that if someone were to discover that the "Ark of the Covenant" dataset that would unlock AGI was on Venus and it could only be accessed by a meatbag, we'd be sending fleets. Given the current hype it probably doesn't even matter if the claim is true as long as it keeps the capital flowing.
  - slightwinder 1y ago
    The difference is, that the prospective win from AGI is far bigger than any investment. But an advertisement more expensive than a whole decade's revenue from the company, has hardly any chance to reach the profitable zone.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    There are many worse ways of spending capital. Even if a false claim of this nature successfully bullshitted some companies or countries into a manned mission to Venus, that would be a net win to humanity compared to what that capital will be allocated otherwise.
i_love_retros 1y ago
A picture of dudebro's quad wheel squashing that actual life that we found on mars, with a redbull logo on the tire

voidUpdate 1y ago

I mean the soviets had a good go at landing big metal probes on there and they melted and failed pretty quickly. I'm not sure we have the technology to make a space suit or a quad bike that can function on the surface of venus. You'd also need to transport over 100 days of water and snacks so your dudebro doesn't starve on the way there

pavel_lishin 1y ago
I remember reading a short story that featured settlements on Venus, and it mentioned the difficulty of running any sort of engine - rocket or combustion - on the surface. After all, your engine and its exhaust must be hotter than the atmosphere surrounding it, otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refridgerator.
- the_gipsy 1y ago
  I don't doubt it's extremely challenging. But the initial engine temperature would still match the environment temperature, and it would not get somehow colder. That's not how any of this works.
- voidUpdate 1y ago
  I don't know if a rocket exhaust must absolutely be hotter than the environment, just at a higher pressure. If you open a gas bottle, the jet is going to be very cold, but it will produce thrust. With some quick googling, the surface pressure on venus is 90 bar, and a spacex falcon produces 350 bar in the chamber, so I think a falcon 9 could quite easily take off from the surface (ignoring the fact it would melt and the tanks might crush etc)
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    pV=NRT Pressure and temperature are not independent. "Hotter than the environment" is shorthand for "contains more energy than the output region does".
- kleiba 1y ago
  Run your engine inside said refridgerator?
webdevver 1y ago
damn i thought venus was like the moon but red. still i feel like its hard to get excited about stuff without humans intimately involved. ultimately its all about the meatbag, he needs to be there somehow. maybe in orbit controlling the sat via FPV goggles?
- theoreticalmal 1y ago
  Oh boy this is all mixed up. Mars is red, are you thinking of Mars. Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars
  - voidUpdate 1y ago
    Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. It's still cold and you'd need a specialised quadbike (electric?), but seeing as martian travel is on the cards for some point in the future, you might see martian quadbike racing in your lifetime. However there are still the same food/water/oxygen issues, since it's a 9 month trip each way
    - hermitcrab 1y ago
      >Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. Indeed. The very low pressure on Mars (0.006 Bar) would be much easier to deal with than the absolutely crushing pressure on Venus (92 Bar) - not to mention the 470C surface temperature. Hanggliding or ballooning in the cloud tops of Venus would be more practical than going to the surface.
      - Sanzig 1y ago
        Humans have already survived simulated dives in hyperbaric chambers to around 70 bar with no long term effects, so in theory you may be able to have Venusian astronauts live in a habitat at ambient pressure if 90 bar is similarly tolerable (obviously would still need heroic measures for cooling, an approx. 200 K temperature differential is no joke). Getting enough gas there to pressurize the hab could be difficult, the deep dive experiments used a hydrogen/helium/oxygen mixture and I doubt you can recover helium through in situ resource extraction. And you would need some sort of acclimatization system to get the astronauts from their half-bar or so transit environment down to the surface - maybe a balloon that slowly descends over the period of a few days. So yeah, pretty much science fiction for now!

Zigurd 1y ago

Thank you for capturing the zeitgeist way too accurately. Now I'm once again in a mood to watch it all burn.

TeMPOraL 1y ago
As kids, my friend and I had an idea of getting Microsoft to fund us buying used Buran and building a launchpad for it in Poland, in exchange for painting the shuttle all blue and slapping big Microsoft Windows logos on it. I still think this wasn't that bad of an idea. Maybe if we followed through with it, Poland would've had a proper space program now.

slightwinder 1y ago

That's not economical. A human mission to another planet is far too expensive and risky for the little advertising it would deliver. They could do that already on earth, send people to the north/south-poles, or even send them to the moon.. This would all be cheaper and still have similar effects. But the mindset is probably not wrong. Maybe Jeff Bezos can rent his dick-rocket to Red Bull, so people can spacediving the atmosphere. The necessary security-tech they have to build, will probably very beneficial for actual astronauts later.

upghost 1y ago
I can guarantee you that if someone were to discover that the "Ark of the Covenant" dataset that would unlock AGI was on Venus and it could only be accessed by a meatbag, we'd be sending fleets. Given the current hype it probably doesn't even matter if the claim is true as long as it keeps the capital flowing.
- slightwinder 1y ago
  The difference is, that the prospective win from AGI is far bigger than any investment. But an advertisement more expensive than a whole decade's revenue from the company, has hardly any chance to reach the profitable zone.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  There are many worse ways of spending capital. Even if a false claim of this nature successfully bullshitted some companies or countries into a manned mission to Venus, that would be a net win to humanity compared to what that capital will be allocated otherwise.

i_love_retros 1y ago

A picture of dudebro's quad wheel squashing that actual life that we found on mars, with a redbull logo on the tire