| Subject: Re: SETI and The Fermi Paradox |
| From: Puck Greenman |
| Date: 02/09/2009, 09:15 |
| Newsgroups: alt.atheism,sci.astro.amateur,alt.sci.seti,alt.astronomy |
On Tue, 1 Sep 2009 21:04:36 -0700 (PDT), BradGuth <bradguth@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sep 1, 1:16 pm, Puck Greenman <dubh.gh...@hotmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2009 06:32:13 -0700 (PDT), BradGuth <bradg...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sep 1, 5:40 am, Puck Greenman <dubh.gh...@hotmail.com> wrote:
snip
There's even plans on hold by an obscure group within NASA (meaning
public funded) that already has most everything figured out. With
their likely employment demise, of being asked to leave because of
insufficient funding, there's a good chance these same folks could be
obtained as consultants and engineers for either accomplishing their
original mission ideas or those of mine.
That assumes that cost, is not an issue.
The raw elements of Venus are worth trillions upon trillions.
Perhaps, but for what it would cost, to get just one working mine on Venus, and ignoring
the cost of first finding your ore, you could mine the whole asteroid belt.
But let us go with that for now.
Moving about safely in hostile environments, requires two things, protection from the
environment, and a bolt hole.
On the surface of Venus, your diving suit, if I can use the analogy, would probably be
some sort of vehicle, and your bolt hole, would be a biosphere, of some sort; yes?.
No. Human DNA doesn't care about pressure. Your physiology can
adjust to pressure a whole lot better than it can adjust to vacuum.
The DNA, may not, but the rest of the body does.
Six hundred feet is about the deepest that a free, saturation diver can reach, you are
talking a pressure of about five times that.
Both have several requirements in common, but the two that first spring to mind, are
1: Hermetic seals, capable of withstanding the heat, the corrosive atmosphere, and the
atmospheric pressure (about 1260 > 1300 psi) .
To give you an idea, 300 ft of water is about 10 bar, 140 > 150 psi
For your bolt hole, you may be able to find something that, with the aid of extensive
insulation, and minimal exposure, will suffice for a while.
Your vehicle, OTOH, will be somewhat more difficult, as all of it's external moving parts,
will need flexible protection.
Then there is your landing craft.
It will need seals which will function, both in the intense cold of outer space and in the
lead melting heat of Venus surface.
It will also need to be able to withstand ninety several atmospheres, which will make it
one very heavy baby, but it will need to be able to reach escape velocity in a very dense
atmosphere.
2: Thermal insulation.
For your bolt hole, I would suggest a tunnel, a hundred feet down in the bed rock, but
for your diving suit, I know of no technology that would give protection, and allow
reasonable mobility.
You're making more trouble and grief out of this than necessary. For
the moment, forget about waking around on that toasty surface, because
we'll obviously get to that later.
Walking was the last thing that I had in mind.
However, if you cannot move about on the surface, how are you to retrieve these trillions
of dollars worth of treasures?
What is your expertise?
I'm an engineer.
Then we engineer, rather than procrastinate, exaggerate the negatives
and otherwise whine a lot. Start thinking like an Einstein, and just
make things happen in spite of what others are thinking.
What expertise have you of alloy and composite rigid airships? (we got
<82 kg/m3 buoyancy and only 90.5% gravity to work with)
What exactly do you mean by "composite"?
Which alloys, and which composites, did you have in mind?
Farther: Assuming that you could build it, what would you do with it?