Sarevok wrote:
Why would you pick Venus in the first place ? What unobtainium deposits does it contain that cant be found anywhere else ? Any resource found on Venus is effectively LOCKED on Venus because of the planets high gravity.
Land you dunce. As many times as you've harked on about the dangers of low gravity as a living environment for humans I thought you'd be thrilled with a scenario of doubling humanities’ living space and settling them on a world IDENTICAL to our own. There's just no pleasing you, is there?
Why dont you provide an estimate for transporting a self sustaining country to Venus instead ?
There is no such thing as “a self-sustaining country” in the modern world. And even if there were, I would never send an entire country to Venus because that is not how you colonize something. You always assume a downgrade in industrial ability that will re-develop over time by taking advantage of cheap land and local resources. If I were doing it though, I might do it this way...
Colonizing a Green-Venus
Assumptions
-Venus is in an orbit between Earth & Mars (It can’t co-orbit with Earth stably, and it probably won’t be habitable at its current distance)
-Venus has a biosphere capable of supporting human life with NO environment separation (No space-suits, no hazmat suits, no oxygen masks)
-Colonists are able to either consume local foodstuffs or grow their own
-Initial colony will remain on Venus indefinitely
Equipment (Source: The Case for Mars, Robert Zubrin 1996)
-NTR augmented shuttle-derived launch vehicle (similar to Ares V). Launch to orbit capacity of 145-tonnes, NTR with ISP of 900 seconds, colony lander is 70-tonnes capable of transporting 24 colonists to Mars one-way (and so should be able to make a trip to Green-Venus as easily). Cost per launch: $1 Billion. This entire craft is buildable with current technology (or at any time after 1981, the first Space Shuttle launch, if we lock the timeline to the same development speed as ours)
-I am not adding extra colonists or cargo for three reasons, 1) It’s easier this way, and 2) It will provide an adequate high-ball estimate given the many variables involved in this scenario, and 3) There may be a need for additional retro-rocket fuel following aerocapture, so any savings incurred by leaving behind oxygen and food will probably be balanced out by additional methane/oxygen retro-rocket needs.
Launch Schedule
-4 Launches per year
-Yearly program cost of $4 Billion
Initial Colony Statistics
-96 persons (breeding strongly encouraged!)
-Cost per colonist: $40 million
Cycler Longterm Colonization
-Using a SSTO Methane/Oxygen rocket, and assuming a 1:7 ratio of fuel costs vs. total program cost (which is about double what a commercial airliner has) and $14 cost of methane/oxygen bipropellant per kg lifted to orbit we arrive at a cost of $100/kg to orbit.
-Using free-orbiting Aldrin Cyclers with 95-percent efficient oxygen/water recycling systems in a 2.2 year round trip between Earth & Green-Venus (time for an Aldrin Cycler Earth-to-Mars-to-Earth is 2.2 years)
-Assume each passenger is 100kg with personal effects and carries 400kg in food and supplies for use on the way.
-Assume 500kg per passenger of capsule mass(methane/oxygen rocket with ISP of 380 seconds) used to move from LEO to the cycler and from the cycler to Green-Venus surface.
-Total payload to deliver to LEO is 3,200kg.
-Using a deliver price of $100/kg to LEO and assuming cycler cost is spread out over a large number of missions gives us a per passenger cost Earth to Green-Venus of $320,000, entirely acceptable for a lifetime colonist
System Upgrades
-Over time, the cycler and the SSTO could be upgraded to reduce the cost of transport significantly.
**Switching from a chemical rocket to scramjet for the SSTO would reduce costs by a factor of .3
**Improving cycler efficiency form 95% to 99% reduces cost by .7
**using NEP for the trip from LEO to the cycler reduces cost by .6
**And using a magsail to speed up the cycler’s trip reduces costs by .7 again
-Applying all those upgrades gives you a per-ticket price of $28,000.
Now those calculations are based on a trip to Mars, which has 1/3 the gravity of our Green-Venus, but a much less-dense atmosphere. Using the thicker atmosphere of Green-Venus to aerobrake should set aside some of the concerns over the higher-gravity capture, but I realize the scenario is fungible at best with my limited astronautics ability. Even assuming the numbers for an actual Green-Venus-colonization are double a similar Mars mission, we still only get a total initial cost of 96 passengers Earth-to-Green-Venus of $8 Billion dollars and an end-point cost per passenger of $56,000. Hardly the “$100 Trillion” number you are tossing around without care or consideration.
Even if no advancements could be made to reduce the cost, and the population didn’t increase at all, and assuming the numbers are only half as much as needed, you still end up with 960 colonists in 10 years at a cost of $80 Billion or 1,250 times cheaper than your number.
Not to mention the fact that you could only grow crops in Antarctica without artificial lights for less than half the year, but could grow year round on Venus in certain areas.
And it wouldn't be near freezing outside either, and there's actually ore deposits and useful local resources on Venus.
And the point flies above the blackhole in space time continuum known as your head. The point is no matter how much money you need to make something absurd as cities on Antartica it is still far cheaper than settling an Earthlike Venus.
Prove it. You've provided no expansion of your $100 Trillion figure. You honestly don't even WANT to know how much it would cost because any number would interfere with your isolationist and selfish outlook on space-travel.
Space is not an ocean and planets are not islands. Stop pretending or shut the fuck up. The analogies completely broken because of the sheer size and scale of space travel and its relative costs.
You've used that pithy phrase many times, but you've never actually justified it. I've only ever heard "Space is not an ocean" used by people discussing combat in space, and there they are right. But for travel purposes the analogy works quite nicely. Trans-oceanic voyages were costly, both in terms of money and lives, they initially produced little return besides propaganda purposes, but eventually and with great effort and improvements in technology those far islands and continents were developed into independent nations. The distances were vast, the costs astounding, but tell a man 400 years ago that you'd be able to make the same trip that took him months in 8 hours, and he wouldn't believe you at all.
You vastly underestimate the appeal of Terra Nullius
How does that help pay all the money you borrowed to pay for sending people to Venus ? Plant samples and captured Venusian wildlife alone will not fund the staggering amount of rocket launches you will be doing for colonization.
80 launches in 10 years is staggering? $80 Billion spent over 10 years is staggering?
Assuming Green-Venus has an Earthlike moon as well (to provide tides and such) then you might well target some of the launches there to build up a launch infrastructure in the lower gravity. This might allow you to develop Earth-return capability sooner than expected.
The other big assumption we're making about Green-Venus is that there won't be intelligent life there. If it has a habitable environment similar to Earth's there is no reason to believe it won't develop life, if it has as much time to do so as Earth there is no reason to believe it will not develop intelligent life, and if the life is intelligent there is no reason to believe they won't want to visit us too.
One less collapse of a major empire could mean they reach the Space Age a hundred years before us, so by the time we manage to escape our little mudball they may have already set up shop on our Moon, watching us.
whale people).
