Isaac Arthur
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2017–2026
29:02 · 731K views · Sep 7, 2017
Isaac Arthur examines options for colonizing Venus, from vast floating habitats in the temperate upper atmosphere to full terraforming of the planet. It is a long-form speculative futurism episode in his solar system colonization series.
HN commenters cite it as the go-to reference for the idea of living in Venus's atmosphere rather than on the surface.
6 comments from Hacker News
I enjoy Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel where he explores topics like colonizing Venus. Here's the video: this video
Outward Bound: Colonizing Venus: this video Caution: don't click unless you have nothing else to do today.
Obligatory Isaac Arthur reference [1]. I still think humanity's far future is in orbitals in space, not on planets and certainly not on planets as hostile as Venus is. I'm not sure how well living at 50km above the surface would work. You still need a lot of buoyance to float large structures. The atmosphere is also a solvable problem. One idea I've heard is using so-called "fusion candles". That is a fusion-powered device in the atmosphere that sends waste gas into space and waste matter to the ground in an equilibrium that keeps them airborne, all powered by fusion. You could extract carbon and/or oxygen this way from the plentiful atmospheric CO2. Still, if you ever got the atmosphere down to a non-hellish level at surface, the surface would still be covered with all sorts of exotics and metals, many of them toxic. You'd probably be looking at geologic timescales to rehabilitate it. But whenever these terraforming questions come up (often with respect to Mars), people really don't appreciate the scale and the energy budget required. The energy budget is many orders of magntidue what our civilization currently uses. If you have access to that much energy, there are far better options. [1]: this video
So there a few comments scattered around about this so I'll address those concerns here. Quite a few people are scoffing at the idea of colonizing Venus ("you'll get crushed, dude!") but the idea has had a lot of people put thought into it and it's not as impractical as you may think. Consider: 1. Venus is easier to reach than Mars. The Delta-V is 0.4km/s and 0.7km/s respectively [1]; 2. Mars has practically no atmosphere and really low gravity. It's really not that much better than colonizing the Moon but a whole lot further away [2]. 3. You wouldn't live on surface of Venus, at least not initially. You'd live in the atmosphere [3]. 4. Energy will be plentiful on Venus, far more than on Mars or even the Earth, just from solar energy. [4] 5. Venus has nearly Earthlike gravity. So it's actually not as crazy as you might think and shouldn't be immediately dismissed. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: this video [4]: [LINK]
It's wild we have any images of the surface of Venus at all given how hostile Venus is. Given how hostile it is, it seems unlikely we'll go back anytime soon. These images were really a product of the Cold War where the US focused on Mars. It's worth noting that Venus is still probably a better terraforming target than Mars [1]. This romantic notion of Mars has rooted itself deeply at this point (eg with Elon Musk) but Mars is basically a more distant and inconvenient Moon. Almost no atmosphere (in fact, just enough because dust storms will occasionally just coat all your equipment), the Sun is weaker and gravity is still very low. Venus's atmosphere is about 3% nitrogen and 97% CO2. It has about 100x the atmosphere of Earth, which means there's actually more atmospheric nitrogen than on Earth. And abundant CO2 means oxygen is abundant. [1]: this video