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Comment by Sanzig | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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'.

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!

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