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Comment by webdevver | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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)

pV=NRT

Pressure and temperature are not independent.

"Hotter than the environment" is shorthand for "contains more energy than the output region does".

Run your engine inside said refridgerator?

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?

Oh boy this is all mixed up. Mars is red, are you thinking of Mars. Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars

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

>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.

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!

>200 K temperature differential is no joke

It would be more like +450K/C difference (470C, not 470K).

Also it is one thing to get a person to 70 Bar in experimental conditions. It is another to actually stay at that pressure for prolonged periods and do anything useful.

Ah, whoops, you're right! Somehow my brain defaulted to Kelvin. So 740 K down to 290 K. Carnot COP alone is only around 65%, you'll be lucky to do half that, you need the stuff outside to survive heat and sulfuric acid, and you'll need to power it somehow. You could run it off a nuclear reactor, but your reactor will not be very efficient since it has to sink heat at over 700 K.

> Also it is one thing to get a person to 70 Bar in experimental conditions. It is another to actually stay at that pressure for prolonged periods and do anything useful.

Fully agreed - you'd have to test this long term in a hyperbaric habitat on Earth. You may end up needing some sort of medical or pharmaceutical intervention to make it possible. Very risky.

Even firmer in the realm of science fiction. It'd be a good hard sci-fi novel though.

It might be possible to make a hard suit where the inside is around 35 bar, which should be easier to work in (if maybe still uncomfortable), and reduce the stress on the suit of a 70 bar difference

Newtsuits have apparently been tested to 90 Bar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtsuit

I believe they maintain ~1 Bar inside. Not sure if something like that could be built to protect a fragile human from the temperature differential, though. Better to send a robot?

That's exactly what I was thinking of, I just didn't know the name. If they can do 90 bar, that's fine too, I didn't know what pressures they were rated to

The article says they are rated to 30 bar, but have been tested to 90 bar. Presumably with no human inside for 90 bar!

>It'd be a good hard sci-fi novel though.

Must have been done already. Surely?

'Hail Mary' by Andy Weir has some interesting stuff about the (spoiler!) alien 'rocky' who is adapted to a high pressure/temperature environment.

I can't imagine anything would justify the cost and hellish conditions of living on Venus's surface. Except, perhaps, as an example what not to do to our own planet.

I really need to re-read Project Hail Mary, especially with the film in development. I really hope the film lives up to the book. I think they did a reasonably good job with The Martian, even though they cut out the entire dust storm section (and my favourite joke in the book!)

>I think they did a reasonably good job with The Martian

Within the time and marketing constraints of a Hollywood film, I thought they did a good job on 'The Martian'. Let's hope Hollywood doesn't ruin 'Hail Mary'.

I mean yeah, what can we do about that surface temperature? That is extremely high.

Refrigeration is hard but I don't think impossible at high ambient temperatures. What immediately comes to mind is compressing gas (which will increase its temperature), letting it equalise with the ambient temperature, then decompressing it, which will lower the temperature (from Charles' Law). No doubt there are many other systems that could be used though.

I'm not an expert on refrigeration at all, but if you're interested, it might be worth checking out the youtube channel Hyperspace Pirate, who does a lot of diy refrigeration systems, and I believe has managed to make liquid nitrogen in his garage using a home made refrigeration system. He also goes very in-depth into the technical details

Interesting, thank you!

>Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars

Depends where they are in their orbits.

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