DAVINCI is actually cancelled in the latest budget request. For obvious reasons, the NASA press office (the OP) won't talk about this. But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone.
https://spacenews.com/white-house-proposal-would-slash-nasa-...
The proposed cuts to science are catastrophic, but there’s still time to call your Congressperson.
The justification? I don't think they are open about their reasoning.
And no thanks to autocorrect.
That is an extremely unlikely scenario because both intelligent life forms would have had to evolve before either of them developed space flight. It took homo sapiens 4 Gyr to evolve in the first place but only 100 kyr to develop space flight after that. So the odds are slim to none.
That said, we'd have to throw much bigger rocks to penetrate their atmosphere. And the likely (to me) actual plans would be:
Us: launch to the Moon, set up there, launch rocks from the Moon to Venus.
Venusians: launch and travel to the asteroid belt, launch an asteroid toward Earth.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that our plan would be the same as theirs: we'd both be heading for the asteroid belt, because nothing we could reasonably launch from the Moon would put a dent in Venus with that atmosphere.
And if we assume they actually can launch through that atmosphere, we're screwed: if they can do that, they're way ahead of us.
I recall watching this NOVA episode in 1995 where scientists had no idea whether the lithosphere is thick or thin. Seek to 36 minutes: https://archive.org/details/VenusUnveiled/NOVA.S22E10.Venus....
> The paper used modeling to determine that its crust is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) thick on average and at most 40 miles (65 kilometers) thick.
So would that be considered “thick” or “thin”?
WalterBright•4h ago
vardump•4h ago
gamescr•4h ago
Then throw in iron form the atseroid belt to react with it to form carbonates. Venus is dry so brining in hydrogen form the outer planets would be necessary anyway to form wate r and thta will account for a good bit. Garden the surface so subsurface rocks which might react with the atmosphere cna absorb some. (Assumign the subsurface rocks are thta reactive.) Scoop it off with smaller versions of the same scoops used to harvets hydrogen from the gas giants.
dylan604•4h ago
shepardrtc•3h ago
bdamm•3h ago
p1mrx•3h ago
gcanyon•40m ago
Venus's escape velocity is less than 1/3rd of its orbital velocity. According to google, Venus's orbit, despite being very circular, causes its velocity to vary by a KM/s from aphelion to perihelion.
So I believe you could send all of Venus's atmosphere off permanently into space at the cost of about 1/30,000th of Venus's orbital velocity, meaning you could very slightly circularize its orbit further.
BuyMyBitcoins•3h ago
jovas•3h ago
While the atmosphere is a big problem, even without this issue the rotation would be problematic.
mousethatroared•2h ago
cyberax•2h ago
1. "Humidify" the atmosphere by crashing comets into Venus. This will also allow us to create a temporary "cloud" around Venus that can shield it from the Sun and lower down the temperature.
2. Once the temperature is low enough, Venus will get oceans on its surface.
3. At this point, CO2 can be split into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen will be immediately bound by the huge amount of under-oxidized iron on the surface, and carbon can be buried under the new ocean. Essentially, carboniferous age for Venus.
4. Once this is done, the atmosphere will be mostly nitrogen (at ~3 bar) and people could live there with just respirators. Eventually, once the surface iron is oxidized, the atmosphere can even be made breathable.
Apparently, this can be done within 2000-5000 years without any exotic-level engineering.
dataflow•1h ago
Loughla•1h ago