[NicknamedBob]

Heavy Thinking (2)


(Continued ...) Venus.

I know what you’re thinking and saying to yourselves; Bob’s pulling our legs again. I know it sounds like that.

This may take some explanation.

I’ve probably mentioned this, but I don’t want to research when or where, and you’re not likely to, so I’ll just go over the basics again, with your permission.

You all know that Venus is inhospitable to life, with hellish temperatures and crushing pressures on its surface.

True.

You also know that Mount Kilimanjaro is snow-capped, even though it nestles in the heart of equatorial Africa. At more than nineteen thousand feet, its rarified air remains very cool.

Hmm.

This principle of decreasing temperature with increasing altitude applies to the planet Venus as well.

In fact, quite fortuitously, at a height of fifty kilometers, the atmosphere of Venus has not only the same pressure as Earth, but also a similar range of temperatures.

So if you found yourself in a balloon at that altitude, you would be relatively comfortable, except for not being able to breath the air, that minor issue of droplets of sulfuric acid, and by the way, just what is holding up the balloon?

Venus’ atmosphere is predominantly carbon dioxide, more than 96 percent. You couldn’t breathe it, but there is oxygen bound up in it, and plants know how to get it out.

In fact, in such a thick atmosphere, not only will a hot-air balloon keep you up, but even a balloon full of ordinary air would keep you up. Regular oxygen and nitrogen will support a balloon with half the lifting force of helium on Earth!

Now, admittedly, there may be a few technical problems to overcome; like what do we go into Venus’ atmosphere with; how do we slow down from interplanetary speed; and that sort of thing.

But don’t worry. I’m working on it.

[Monkey Face]

<>i>...But don’t worry. I’m working on it.

Famous last words.

I think I'll wait until you have perfected, if you don't mind...;o]

[Tax-chick]

Sounds interesting! I’ll come back and read it after I put the byos to bed.

[Dead Corpse]

and by the way, just what is holding up the balloon?

Skyhook it. Run a nano-tube cable out to geosynchronus orbit and hang a decent size asteroid off it. Spider-bot "spinneret" assemblies are essentially a combo of ink jet printers heads and large scale Scanning-tunneling-microscope (STM) arrays. They can deconstruct materials at a near atomic level and reconstruct them the same way.

Hang a super-tough carbon cable down-gravity from orbit and hang a counter-weight up-gravity in orbit.

Let physics do the heavy work...

Also, Venus probably smells like a bad day after a Texas chili and tequila contest.

We'd be better off trying to smack the planet with a good sized comet. Blow off some of the sulfur atmo and give it a massive dose of good old di-hydrogen monoxide. Of course, we'd need to wait a couple years for things to cool off a bit too... Multi-Megaton kinetic impact events tend to shake things up a bit.