Airships Over Venus

for for a few different reasons. First of all, even though we have covered Venus in the past, there's just so much weird and wonderful stuff to discuss about the planet that we had to return. Also, in the past year, we've had some developments concerning Venus, and also there's a particular plan of a project in the in the works

that I'd like to discuss in more detail. Really, just like Venus is just such a wild and wonderful plan it and our attempts to understand how we might might be able to further explore it, and also our history of exploring it is just fascinating. So we just had to return. Well, you know what we always say here with reference to Venus, I am the doorway. We are both the doorway. So let's open ourselves and and walk through into some thoughts about the second planet. Yeah, nice

Stephen King reference there. All right. So, I guess one of the things with with Venus, you know, that I've been thinking about recently is like the idea of of terra firma, you know, of the solid ground beneath our feet.

And when I think about this, i'ten find it a bit weird because, on one hand, the idea of firm earth beneath us is truly reassuring, and knowing that the Earth is round only makes it more so, at least to my mind, because in some respects it means that it's Earth all the way down underneath this, you know, like the Earth might not be the center of the universe or even the Solar System, but the center of the Earth is still a center, you know what I mean. Yeah,

it can't. The Earth can't like collapse and fall throw into a space beneath itself, because being a sphere, there is no space beneath it. You just you go down until you hit the center. Yeah. Now the sky, of course, and if you're in the sky, that that's not terra firma. And the same goes for the surface of the ocean. Despite the fact that the ocean reminds us that terra

firma isn't all it's cracked up to be. Much of of of Earth is crushed beneath an ocean, hidden in darkness, and other proportions are covered in ice or propelled so far up into the atmosphere by mountain peaks that it pushes beyond what is a reasonable environment for humans. Sure, and then when we think of other worlds, it gets even weirder. Right that gas giants uh boast no terra

firma at all. And then there's Venus on Venus Terra firma or Venus firma more accurately would be a high pressure, high temperature hellscape, but higher up in its atmosphere or you know, in or above the clouds of Venus. This is the region, ironically, that we might find metaphorical terra firma on the planet that is Terra's strange sibling. Mm hmm, interesting thought. Okay, so we're gonna be talking about the atmosphere of Venus today. Uh. Now, this is this is

a subject that's not entirely new to us. We've visited this in uh some explorations before we did one episode a couple of years ago about the possibility of life on Venus, where we discussed the pros and cons and various scientific speculation about what form that could take if it were to exist. And one of the things that kept coming up there was about the difference between the surface of Venus and the atmosphere of Venus um and so, well, maybe we should just do a brief refresher on on

Venus itself. Tell me about the planet, like, I'm going on a blind date with Venus? What what? What have you got to sell me on this? Alright, So, Venus is the second planet from the Sun, and it's just slightly smaller than Earth size and surface area is quite similar to our own world, and in any ways it can be seen as an alternative Earth. The two planets may have had very similar origins, but they parted ways

on ago. Venus may have once had oceans, and may have once or even still we'll get into this supported life forms. But today it's this dully lit, high pressure world with volcanic mountains and ashen planes are runaway. Greenhouse effect boiled away the oceans long ago and they were lost to space. There are no plate tectonics that we know of on Venus, and it's volcanoes to spring up wherever instead of emerging along plate borders as they do

on Earth. The high pressure, high temperature atmosphere is more than nine carbon dioxide and three point five percent molecular nitrogen, with trace amounts of other gases. If you're standing on the surface of Venus, it would be roughly ninety times the pressure of sea level on Earth. Um. Of course, it's going to vary depending on altitude, but that's sort of the ballpark. The clouds are often described as being concentrated sulfuric acid, or more specifically sulfur dioxide with drops

of sulfuric acid within it. Yes, that that is what the mist is, so it's a carbon dioxide atmosphere, but the droplets that are suspended to make the clouds sulfuric acid have fun Batman. So when we we think about Venus, one of the cool things that we've touched on this before is that when we think about life on Venus, either life that could still reside there now, native life, or the possibility, which we'll get into later in the episode of of its sustaining our life in one way

or another. We end up not looking to that hell hellish surface to the actual Venus firma. No, Instead we look to the clouds above, or even the space a little above the clouds. Yes, And this brings us to one of the main things that we wanted to talk about today, which was that there was what looks like some really major news on the subject of possible life on Venus just a couple of months ago. So the story turned out to be one of those cases of

possible scientific whiplash. But we'll get into the complications as we move on. But but let's just take a look. If you're ready, let's do it. Okay, So, for obvious reasons, the reasons we've just been talking about, the surface of Venus is just clearly sterile. There is no way you would expect to find any kind of organized life form living at I was gonna say sea level, not sea level.

The surface level of Venus. You know, again, temperatures over nine degrees fahrenheits somewhere between like four hundred and five hundred degrees celsius. Extreme pressure like you just had something like ninety or hundred times the atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth. It's sort of equivalent to going like, you know, hundreds of meters down under the water, very

very high pressure um. It is difficult to imagine under these conditions that any sort of organized, self replicating structures would be able to survive, and there are a few reasons for that. One thing is that you know, like, uh, information containing molecules tend to be pretty fragile and they

would be probably disrupted by heat of that kind. Also, you can't have water there, and it's hard for us to imagine what a life form that did not incorporate water would look like, because water is a very Water is the necessary solvent that makes the existence of cells possible, allows it allows the transportation of different types of nutrients and molecules across membranes and stuff like that. Like, you can't have life as we know it without water, and

you can't have water on the surface of Venus. But as we've discussed on the show before, it is not impossible to imagine that life could exist higher up in the atmosphere of Venus. So this would be micro organisms floating in the clouds where at higher altitudes the climate is relatively temperate, and this would not even be without

precedent and known biology. We're not talking about some kind of organism that is unimaginable from from the perspective of Earth life, because here on Earth there are bacteria such as a Pseudomonas syringy that are thought to be present at higher altitudes floating within cloud I've even read about interesting speculation that these bacteria floating in the clouds could affect weather patterns by serving as ice nucleation points that

lead to precipitation. To think about that, like, what if the weather is being affected by germs up in the sky, and the idea of microbes floating in the clouds of Venus would even explain if it were true some observed features of Venus that that we don't fully know how to explain otherwise. Uh. David Grinspoon has written about this,

and he's a former show guest. We we've talked to him a little bit about the signs of life on Venus that that pre date the paper that was published this year, things like recurring patterns of darkening observed in the clouds. Do you remember any of the other specifics he gets into about that. I mean that that's one of the big one that's one of the ones we

ended up focusing on. Yeah, this is this idea that it it almost thinks makes you think about all some sort of u you know, plankton type life form thriving in the in the atmosp here. They're like atmospheric algal blooms or something. Yeah. Um. But the other thing is that there is evidence that Venus was quite possibly once more hospitable than it is now. You mentioned this earlier,

the possibility of surface water. Now there is definitely not surface water on Venus right now would instantly boil, But the evidence makes it look highly plausible that Venus once had liquid water at its surface, even oceans, maybe as recently as a billion years ago or so. That's not ah, I believe that's not a known fact, but it seems

highly plausible. So if there once was a full biosphere on Venus that was eventually wiped out at the surface level by the runaway greenhouse effect, it's possible that the last remnant of that archaic biological world is microorganisms that can live their whole lives floating in the clouds. Though it's worth noting that these clouds again consist primarily of suspended droplets of sulfuric acid. So these would need to

be special kinds of extremophile type organisms. Now, while these possibilities are very cool, this has always been totally speculative right there. There has never been any actual, direct, strong evidence for the presence of life on Venus. There has. It's just been that we've observed things that could be consistent with the presence of life in interesting and surprising ways. That is their space for life as we know it, within what we know of Venus. Yeah, and the answer is, well,

maybe more space than you might think. That we didn't have direct evidence that would say it looks like there is life. That picture got a little bit more complicated in September of this year. Uh Now, there's going to be a very big caveat coming with this paper. But first I just want to present the evidence that we

that emerged back in September. And so there is a paper published in Nature Astronomy in September by Jane Grieves, Anita Ms Richards, William Baines, Paul by Rimmer, Hideosagawa, David L. Clemens, and Sarah Seeger at All called Phosphine Gas in the Cloud Decks of Venus. Now, this paper deals with UH analysis of spectral data collected through a couple of telescopes.

So the lead author, Jane Grieves of Cardiff University and colleagues collected data through two major telescopes, the James Clark Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. And what the study reported was that they had used spectral analysis of venus to find something really intriguing about the gas is present in the atmosphere. And what they found was at an altitude of roughly fifty

kilometers above the surface. I think it was like fifty five kilometers in a concentration of about twenty parts per billion a gas called phosphene or pH three. That's one phosphorus them with three hydrogen atoms. Now the chemistry nerds out there, or the breaking bad nerds out there will alike, no,

that phosphine is just nasty, highly flammable, extremely toxic gas. UH. It's often found in conjunction with traces of die phosphine or P to H four, which makes it pyrophoric, so fond of automatically catching fire upon exposure to air at room temperature. Lovely UM. It is sometimes a product of human industry, for example, in the manufacture of semiconductors, or

also in the manufacture of methamphetamine. Now no one is alleging that there are meth labs on Venus, but whatever the cause, this was a much higher level of phosphine gas than you would expect to find. At about twenty parts per billion, this is something like three orders of magnitude more phosphine than you would find in Earth's atmosphere. Now, why is it interesting to find phosphine at that concentration. You know, different planets have gases in their atmosphere at

different levels. You know, Venus has much more carbon dioxide and its atmosphere than Earth does. So so what what's the deal with phosphine? Why would that catch our attention? Well, in short, the presence of high levels of phosphine gas represent a dis equilibrium. Phosphine gas is something that's kind of inherently unstable and digestible by physical processes, you know, exposure to ultra violet light and chemical reactions with other things.

Phosphine gas should just naturally sort of get eliminated from atmospheres. And this ties in with something we talked about in one of our recent anthology of Horror episodes, when we were talking about looking for signatures of a shadow biosphere on Earth. Some of the researchers there, for example, I think the planetary scientist or I can't remember she's a planetary scientist or an astronomer, but the scientist Caroline Porko.

I was talking about how if you were looking for signs of a shadow biosphere, you would want to find and environments that are at a disequilibrium, things that are out of whack with like quantities of chemicals that don't seem like they would just naturally settle at that level. And I was trying to come up with a good analogy to explain why it's weird to find phosphene like this on on Venus. And so here's what I came

up with. I hope this is somewhat appropriate. Imagine you live in Florida and you go out for a walk on a hot summer day in July. It's degrees out, a hundred percent humidity, and you're walking your dog along the sidewalk, and you notice that every twenty feet or so down the sidewalk there's just a big old hunk of ice sitting on the pavement. All right, Well, that that would be suspect. I think, Yeah, something weird exactly Florida weird but weird. Right, Yeah, the ice could be

the result of a Florida man. That that would explain it. It would not make a lot of sense, even though not ice does form naturally in the environment on Earth, it would not makes sense, given the conditions outside in this Florida neighborhood to assume, oh, this is a chunk of polar ice that happens to be left over from the last glacial maximum period, right, because like the the environmental conditions would have already like digested and recycled that ice.

The ice is unstable enough given the surrounding conditions that you wouldn't expect it to just be there from a previous freeze over right. It Also, it wouldn't even make sense to say, well, it hailed one time last winter, so the ice is just sitting here left over from that. No, it would mean somebody he's going around spilling ice all over the place, or or leaving ice on purpose on

the sidewalk. Yeah, there's something that there's got to be some kind of anomalous process that's putting the ice there, and so back to Venus. If phosphine gas were truly present at something like twenty parts per billion, you would have to assume that something was continuously putting that phosphine there.

And while it's possible the explanation was some geochemical or photochemical process that we don't understand yet, a very interesting candidate explanation was microbial life, because here on Earth, phosphene is when it's not made by humans, it is almost always the byproduct of microbial life, especially anaerobic microbial life. In fact, if you go way back to you know, I don't remember how many years ago, this is now like five or six years ago, we did some Halloween

episodes on the Will of the Whisp. Remember that there would be you know, the legend of there's a light in the bog that leads a traveler off the path, and it's often attributed to a spirit or a devil. It's kind of a visual leshy. It's fairy fire, it's the the elf fire, the Hinky Puck or Hinky Punk. Is it Punker Puck. I don't remember. I can't remember if it's Punker Puck. Yeah, I remember the Will of the whisp. Basically, the idea of the will of the

wisp has so many strange and curious names. It's that it's been given over the years in different caled That episode was a lot of fun, by the way, and you have to go back and revisit that sometime. But so people have tried to offer plausible physical explanations for

sightings of the willow the whisp. Why is it that so many people reports seeing a you know, a blue or green light in the swamp that's dancing around as if it's a lantern carried by a ghost, And a lot of these physical explanations for that phenomena involve phosphine gas.

Often the explanation is some variation on well, there's the bog or a bunch of mud, and there's rotting vegetation, and and maybe bones from animals down there that are being consumed and metabolized by anaerobic bacteria, which produced phosphine gas is a byproduct, and then this phosphine gas, in the presence of die phosphine or p to H four is sort of burping up out of the earth and is sometimes spontaneously ignited on contact with the air, or maybe it's just producing a sort of cool blue or

green glow without necessarily catching on fire. But it's in the presence of some of some of the pyrophoric gas, and whatever is going on here, this glowing or chemoluminescent luminescent cloud or this flame becomes the will of the wisp. But whether or not that is the the actual explanation for will of the whisp sightings, It is absolutely true that anaerobic bacteria decomposing organic matter down in the bog will produce phosphine gas. That's just something that's known that

they're known to do. Another interesting coincidence, the authors proposed that the phosphine gas detected in Venus's atmosphere was that altitudes of around fifty kilometers or like fifty kilometers. This also happens to be an altitude where environmental conditions are much more tolerable on Venus, around thirty degrees celsius or something like eighty something degrees fahrenheit and a pressure similar

to Earth's atmosphere. Yeah, this is one of the key layers on Venus that we're often looking at when we're actually sending some sort of a probe there or planning for possible missions to Venus in the future, right, and so if this phosphine gas was a byproduct of the metabolism of some type of microbe, one possibility that was discussed, and this was quoted in an m I. T. Tech Review article I was reading. This is from Jane Grieves,

the lead author on the study. She said, quote that suggests it's part of the global circulation pattern of the atmosphere, where gas sinks before it travels as far as the polls. So I guess a question would be, well, could something else be putting the phosphine gas there? Like with the Florida example, Uh, is there something else that could account for chunks of ice being found along the sidewalk? And

you could come up with explanations. You could say, yeah, maybe I don't know, maybe there was some kind of upper atmosphere phenomena, some kind of weird anomalous hail storm, and these things fell even though it's hot outside. It

just happened recently. You could come up with things. Uh, for example, we know that some amount of phosphine gas is generated by a biotic you know, non organic processes deep in the atmosphere of Jupiter, but Jupiter is a gas giant, and the phosphine there is produced under conditions that do not seem to be possible on Venus, at least as far as we know. So. Could it be produced by lightning or space impacts or volcanoes or some

other high energy phenomena like that. Well, again, this was analyzed by the authors of the paper, and it looks like no, not as far as we know nothing. No, a biotic process we're aware of seems capable of explaining

the amounts of phosphine found. So, basically, if if the findings in this original study from September are correct, there is anomalous gas present in the atmosphere of Venus, and we don't know of any photochemical or geochemical process that could have put it there in the amount that we find it. And on Earth the same gas is often the byproduct of microbial life. If so, this is not by any means proof of alien life, but it is

extremely tantalizing from an astrobiological point of view. Again, kind of widens the space possible for life to exist. We would say more than that, I mean it says, here's something we observe and we know it could be explained by life and nothing else that we know of would seem to explain it very well. Yeah, but to be very clear, this is not proof. And I was reading an article in Chemical and Engineering News by Arianna Remmel who quotes an astro chemist who who had some good

thoughts here. So I just want to read a quote from this article. Anthony Remission, and astro chemist to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory who is not involved in the study, says the team did a fantastic job presenting their findings, but he remains skeptical. Scientists need more spectral data to verify that the signal comes from pH three. Remission says quote,

but it's a first good step in that direction. As for what could produce phosphine on venus, he says, we need a better understanding of the fundamental chemistry forming these types of molecules before calling it a biosignature. So, uh, you know, so praise for the study, but you know, caution tempering the optimism. It's not like we know there are aliens there now. And when this study was first

published in September, people got really excited. A lot of listeners asked us directly to cover this on the show, especially since we've done episodes on the possibility of life

on venus before and it was really cool. But I figured we should wait for the experts to chew on this a little more before we did an episode about it, and I'm glad we did wait, because while this finding remains very interesting and is by no means totally overturned, subsequent research is making the picture look more complicated and

less clear. So there are reports of at least three studies, at least one of which involves one of the same authors as the original study, and this they tried to confirm the presence of phosphine, and of these three, all three failed to confirm it. Now, I don't know if all of them are published yet. I think at least

one of them is. But these are media reports I was reading in for example, the M I. T. Tech Review and in National Geographic that we're based off of reports from preprint versions of these studies, So, you know, maybe not fully confirmed yet, but there are at least

some questions that are arising. And the basic issue is they're looking to confirm the signs of phosphine in the atmosphere and they're not necessarily finding it so one tried to look for signs of phosphine and older archival observations of Venus and didn't find it. A couple of others processed the same raw data from the September study, just using a different mathematical analysis method, different method for crunching the numbers, and they didn't find the same strong indications

for the presence of phosphine. Now, these differences could be as the initial study was mistaken, or there could be other reasons. For example, in the one where they look at the archival data and don't find the same thing. Well, it could be that maybe there are cycles in which the presence of phosphine gas spikes at certain times in certain places in history on Venus. So from what I've been reading now, it's not as simple as yes there

is phosphine or no there is not. It looks like at this point it remains a complicated, unsettled question, and we need more research. So what would be really great would just be, like, you know, go to Venus and settle this whole thing. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, and of course they're there are two ways of considering that. One of course, is send more missions to Venus uh, and of course, there are a number of those either planned or in sort of aplete pre planning pre approval phase.

And then, of course there's the the ultimate dream, right, the idea of sending human explorers to Venus. Uh, perhaps even as a first human venture to another world. Uh. And it's just impossible not to be excited by these these ideas. So for the rest of the episode, I thought we might talk about some of the more exciting concepts out there involving humans visiting or even staying for an extended amount of time in the atmosphere of Venus. And to kick this off, I want to read a

quote from David Grinspoon in his book Venus Revealed. This is from chapter six, and you can actually read this entire chapter, I believe, at his website Funky Science dot net um because he's dr what was his his his r H. Come on, David, I love your work, but that's oh, I think Funky Funky Spoon works. You're done with that branding? Okay, yeah, yeah, I hope it works.

So so anyway, Grinspoon writes the following quote, I have a fantasy of cloud cities on Venus, huge and closed habitats suspended from giant balloons at a certain altitude where the temperature and pressure would be comfortable for us. We would mostly just have to keep the air fresh, maybe by collecting solar energy to make oxygen from C O two, or better yet, growing plants to do the job for us. Why should we bother to do such a thing. I

don't know. These could be research stations, or maybe there will be some economic incentive, something rare or beautiful found only on Venus, or maybe in the very long run, after we have solved all our major problems here on Earth, we will go just for the hell of it, because it is there. I'm hoping the reason that we set up colonies on Venus does not become a phosphene harvesting enterprise where we're that's trying to get as much poisoned gas as we can. Yeah, I mean maybe the secret

math reserves, so the reason we go there, I know. Um, but I think this is a wonderful quote from from Grimsman because he's you know, he's he's he's very much a scientist, but he also has this this this just raw you know, wonder and sound of science fictional curiosity too, you know, just like like imagine what it would be like if we were there, and and we've we've had various versions of this in our science fiction over the years.

And you see other spins on this too, right, I mean even Star Wars you have the best spin, which I believe is a gas giant in the Star Wars universe. But you have a cloud city there. You have a city floating in the sky. I mean, there's a few things more amazing. It seems hard to imagine that you could actually have a city floating over a gas giant, because I would think a gas giant would tend to admit levels of radiation that would kill everybody in the

cloud city. Blando has it cleaned up rather nicely though it looks looks pretty swank. Well. Um, all this made me wonder. I was thinking to myself, what is the earliest example of science fiction pondering, um, habitats within the clouds of Venus or something like that, And I was looking around. I didn't I didn't find anybody doing the work for me on this, like conclusively, Um, trying to answer this question. Maybe I just missed it. Uh, in

all things, isn't all things? I'm happy to be corrected. On this if I'm wrong, but it seems like a possible answer comes from astronomer and sci fi author Garrett P. Service, who wrote a book in nineteen o nine titled A Columbus of Space, Uh, which I think you know in n nine would have had nicer connotations for the before

the historical reassessment of Columbus. Yeah. So basically, this is about a human explorer who travels to Venus in an atomic spaceship to explore the planet, and there he encounters two different psychic species, a sort of morlock species that lives on the planet's surface and another species that lives in the clouds that are are basically humans or englishmen. Uh. You can find this This full book is available on Project Gutenberg if you look it up. But I just

want to read it. Just a quick exchange here between two characters. This is after they have arrived in their atomic rocket ship on into the atmosphere of Venus, and one says to the other, those are airships. Airships, Yes, surely an exploring expedition. I shouldn't wonder I anticipated something of that kind. You know already how dense the atmosphere of Venus is. It follows that balloons and all sorts of machines for aerial navigation can float much more easily

here than over on Earth. I was prepared to find the inhabitants of Venus skilled in such things, and I'm not surprised by what do we see. So I also just love the spirit of that. It's like, yeah, just as I imagined, they are flying ships on Venus full of englishmen. Um, this is exactly as I thought I it would it would This is exactly how I thought it would pan out. I like your Venus voice too. Now, why is he saying that they can float much more

easily on Venus than over the Earth. Is that because it was understood at the time that the atmosphere of Venus was denser than Earth's atmosphere. Yeah, yeah, I guess that's the case here. Like I said, it doesn't. It certainly doesn't hold up too much, um, modern scrutiny. It's very you know, it's it's very much old timey science fiction. And I think the thing is, you see a lot

of that. The the Golden Age of science fiction is a time where, yes, we were gazing at at Mars and and Venus and wondering what was their dreaming of canals on Mars and so forth. Um. But at the same time it was a period in which we were enraptured by the technology of flight, of powered human flight, and so even in is it was even as we see modern retreatments of of this idea, we see that Golden Age enthusiasm, uh kind of creep in. For instance,

there's a short story that I ran across. I haven't read, but it was published in two thousand ten in Asimovs. It's fiction by Jeffrey A. Landis, who's not only a hard science fiction author but a NASA aerospace engineer, and he wrote of what is apparently a kind of like Golden Age um flavored sci fi tail about there being habitats and ships, uh in the atmosphere of Venus, Like I think it has princesses and all. So it's you know, a very kind of Edgar Rice Burrows and its presentation.

Oh okay, cool swashbuckling. Maybe I would hope for swashbuckling. Buckling. You know, that's gotta be a sword fights on a platform over the atmosphere of Venus. That's bad news. Yeah, I mean, it's all part of the Golden age zeal the atmosphere is piranhas. Now the cool thing about balloons on Venus is you don't have to go to science fiction to to think about them and to read about them. All you have to do is look into space exploration history,

because we have sent balloons to Venus. So back in the Soviet Union sent its Vega mission uh to uh to Earth's hot uh neighbor here. So in addition to a lander, Vega featured two instrumental balloons that traveled roughly thirty percent of the way around the planet had an

altitude of around fifty four kilometers. Sensors in a gondola attached to these balloons recorded such stats as pressure, temperature, vertical wind velocity like that was apparently one of the the interesting findings from that they got within these vertical uh you know, wind columns, and then you had clown particle back scatter, ambient light level, and lightning frequency. These

were essentially aerobots uh. Now, they only made it thirty percent of the way around because they ran out of batteries, but they provided battery power, but they provided some interesting data before they went offline. Now, there were other atmospheric probes from the U S and the U S S are prior to this. But for instance, the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe, it didn't even use a parachute. It was just like, you know, cutting down through the atmosphere and collecting data

on the way down. And we've talked about on the show before. One of my favorite collections of images from from space exploration is the surfaces of Venus that were sent back by the Soviet Venera Lander. Did the Venera Lander use a balloon to descend? I was trying. I don't believe. So I believe that the Vega was the was the first use of balloons on on Venus. Now, in looking now, of course, parachutes are kind of an

additional um category, uh to consider. So I was looking around for what are some of the proposed Venus missions Venus missions that may be undertaken in the near or eventual future that will feature balloons or parachutes. So I thought I might mention a few before getting to the one that really excites me. So, first of all, there's not to say that these are these are these are not all exciting because they are exciting any kind of uh,

you know, future exploration of Venus. Is it just inherently um, they is thing, But you have NASA's DA Vinci. This is the Deep Atmosphere of Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging UM. And this one is currently shortlisted, So it's it seems like it it may well come to pass. And and if it does, it will entail a parachute probe that descends through the atmosphere and collects a data on the way down. Okay, so that that one should be a big one. There's also the Venus

Inset to Explore or Vice. This is a proposed lander that would then release a meteor a loot meteorology balloon I believe from the surface. So the meteorology balloon would be released once the lander has made it down. I might be wrong on that, but that's the the basic idea that I'm getting from what I was reading about it. UH. This has been proposed since two thousand three by the Planetary Science UH Decadel Survey. It hasn't made the cut yet,

but in the future it may. There's also Chuck gray In one, a proposed Indian Space Research Organization i s r OH mission to Venus that would likely feature a Vega esque probe. Shookra, by the way, is the name for Venus in Sanskrit, so that's where they get it. I think the name like literally means uh Venus craft or something to that effect. Interesting. Another really cool one is and I think this one may have come up

on the show before is uh. Northrop Grumman and l guards proposed mission and it is the Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform or VAMP. It looks like a futuristic well I would say, actually kind of best spin cloud city type airplane with with big wings going out on the sides. Yeah, it's it's basically. The cool thing is it's kind of a an update of an idea that Northrop Grumman has been putting out for decades, and that is the flying Wing.

It is an inflatable The concept is an inflatable flying wing aerobot that would also boast solar arrays on the top and it would UH and it would use those for its power, along with some combination of batteries and a generator that I think have maybe not quite been developed yet. It would be propeller driven and it would be fully controllable, though not in real time uh. And this would be during the day. So during the day when the sunlight is able to power it up to

full power. Uh, it would be soaring up to altitudes of seventy kilometers above the surface, taking advantage of the solar intensity above the clouds. And then at night it would power down and dip down to a cruising floating altitude of around fifty six kilometers. Oh, that's funny. So it's nighttime floating altitude might be right around where the phosphene was allegedly found if it wasn't found. Yeah, and at that point it would just be cruising or just floating.

Now also interesting, the vamp would actually uh. The idea is that the vamp would probably inflate in space and enter the atmosphere without an aero shell, so without this kind of sarcophagus to hold it to protect it. Uh. Quote large surface area is benign heating loads during entry and this would of course, I'll be supported by an accompanying satellite and the vamp would last four months to possibly a year, eventually losing out to the gradual loss

of the buoyant gas inside it. Than but wait, I think we're about to get to your to your real baby here, right. Yeah, this is the one that I read a little bit about and then I got excited and I was like, oh man, this we had to go back to Venus and that is Havoc h A V O C. This is what's got you sending your your harassing letters to NASA, Like do that do Havoc now? Havoc is this? This is one of those proposed missions where you read about it and it's is, it's is.

It's as exciting as any movie or or television show or sci fi short story you might come across, because it's it's unique and thrilling, and it's hard to imagine the type of person who would do it, but you know they exist. I mean, this is the type of of of of human being that goes on on a space mission. But yeah, this is the HAVOC high altitude venous operational concept. And there are essentially two different versions

of it. One is the robotic version that would be the the necessary precursor to the second variety, which would be a crude NASA venous mission. So to be clear, this is a this is a mission concept. It's not something that's like on track to to actually launch or be produced right now, but it's sort of like it's on the menu of things that could be selected for future missions. Right we would the Havoc project itself, if it were to come to pass, there would be like

two or three. There would be multiple missions which I'll get into leading up to humans actually going. But also it would not be our next venous mission. Uh. You know, under any circumstances like this, this is something we might be able to do in the future. You know, I'm embarrassed to say. I while I was reading about this, I couldn't help but keep thinking about There was this terrible video game. Do you remember the Command and Conquer first person shooter? Oh? I don't know that I do.

What what what system era was this? I think it was. I think I played it on PC many many years ago. So Commanding Conquered games are like real time strategy games. You move all these like little troops around and stuff. But they made one game in the series that's set in the same universe. But you played this like marine guy who it's the first person shooter and the guy you play is named Havoc. Very cool, and everybody's like Havoc. You you don't go off mission. You do as you're told.

It's like shoot thing. General. Oh man, were you Were you good at the real time strategy games? No? No, because I was horrible at him. Like I wanted to love them. They put out these these really well put together Donald war games based on Fort K stuff, and I really wanted to love them, but I was just terrible at them. It was just like chaos and loss time I tried to play it at any level, just weeping and just watching the destruction of your forces and

your empires. Yeah. I've never been an elite gamer of any kind whatsoever, So no, I'm not good at that or any other type of game. It just felt like too much multitasking. Like I, I like games where I can be specific and strategic, where I can pause and think. I guess that's why I'm more of a turn based strategy versus real time strategy. It's just I'll take the turn based anytime. You're a magic the gathering morlock. Yeah yeah, yeah, not not any whatever real time magic is. That's just

too too much pressure, all right, So so back to Havoca. Sorry, if that was a terrible digression, we can come down. No, no, it stays in um so basically, in essence, HAVOC entails the use of human exploration in the upper of the Nusian atmosphere aboard a helium airship. So this airship would be about a hundred or four three ft long thirty

four meters or a hundred and eleven feet tall. So as the as it's as it's presented in one of the the PDFs that I came across, uh from, from the people putting it together, it would be about half the size of the Hindenburg, but twice as long as sort of your average goodyear blimp. I love that they're

just reminding people of the Hindenburg in the proposal. Yeah, I didn't say a zeppelin, so so very much like whatever you're picturing in mind for like a blimp or a zeppelin or airship like that's basically the initial look of what they've proposed, but they're gonna be some key differences as well. So I propel propeller driven gondola on

the bottom. You know, this is the habited habitable portion of it would contain both an atmospheric habitat for two crew members over twenty eight days, along with an ascent vehicle. Essentially a rocket within a habitat on the front of it that would, at the end of its time in the atmosphere, allow the two crew members to rock it back to the transit vehicle in low of the Venusian

orbit for the return trip. Oh that's interesting because so one of the big questions about crude missions to other planetary bodies like Mars or something like that is, you know, how are you going to leave the planet? How do you get back up off? So you would probably need to take some kind of rocket with you that would need to be able to attain escape velocity. I wonder is it easier to leave a planet if you're in

the atmosphere as opposed on the surface. Of course it would be easier, right, You need less force, less thrust to escape from there than you would from the surface. Yeah, but it's a different just a different scenario than you encounter thinking about these other planets or like Mars, or thinking about traveling to Earth's moon for example. Because again this is one of the crazy things. A trip like this to Venus would not entail actually setting foot on

the planet. You would never go down to the true of Venus firma. Uh, you know, you would you would only be going into the upper atmosphere, hanging out there for like, you know, against something like twenty eight days, and then returning to low orbit from there. Yeah. It's something that's not usually considered. Are we think of visiting other planets in a binary? You've got orbit and then you've got surface activity, and this would be in between.

It's like if you were planning a visit to New York City but you're but you are, You aren't gonna actually travel to Times Square. You can only limit yourself to the very outer boroughs, right and then return home. Yeah, I just went on vacation to Queens. No, no disparaging Queens by the way, No, No, If anything, we should be disparaging Times Square like that. You shouldn't. Land Landing in Times Square is light landing on the surface of Venus? What were you thinking going in that deep? You need

a rocket to escape the bubba gum shrimp. So I recommend that, you know, everyone look up pictures of the concept, the models they've put together for this, because it is great. It's like this, the gondola with the propellers. The ascent vehicle again looks very much like a cool rocket um harnessed behind it. It's very neat we In essence, we'd be talking about sending three habitats on the Havoc mission.

So there'd be the transit habits habitat that the crew members would be in on the way to and from the planet Venus. This would be the space habitat. There would be the and then there would be the atmospheric habitat on the gondola. That would be where they'd spend in their twenty eight days and then or less depending on how it goes. And then the ascent habitat is the one on the front of that rocket, just to get them back up into orbit so they can get

back into the transit habitat and return home. Well, I gotta say that does sound complicated. I think that you have a lot of moving pieces like that you introduce increasing difficulty into the mission, right, Yeah, because in all the mission would see the ship arrived at Venus, then drop an airship from low Venusian orbit on a parachute, okay, parachutes in towards the upper atmosphere. It's gonna drop its aeroshell, it's protective sarcophagus. It's gonna then unferral and inflate the

helium blimp. It's going to drop the parachute altogether and uh, and it's going to carry out atmospheric activities for up to twenty eight days. Then when the time comes to leave, the two crew members hopping the ascent vehicle return to low Venusian orbit, leaving the airship to continue on for the duration of its life. Uh in the Venusian atmosphere. They get back in the transit vehicle and they return

back to Earth. I hope the airship would get to send pictures back as it sinks down into the atmosphere gradually over time. I assume that would be part of it, you know, sort of using every part of the buffalo on the mission, you know, like planning out exactly what it's gonna do for the rest of its life. Now they see this being ultimately they're being five phases to

this branch of of Venus x ration. So Phase one would be a robotic version of the same concept, just obviously do it without people and see how feasible it is. Phase two would be a thirty day mission to bring the crew to orbit around Venus, but then not deal with the atmosphere at all. Phase three would be a thirty day mission to bring the crew to the atmosphere,

and this would be the model we just discussed. Phase four, they touch on, would be a version that entails a one year voyage in the atmosphere, So like the next this is like the stretch goal for this particular project. And then ultimately Phase five would be the Grinspoon Special, a permanent human presence in Gondola habitats Um up there in the upper atmosphere of Venus, hopefully small enough that you don't fall under the jurisdiction of the Empire at all.

So so advocates of this mission, and just Venus missions in general. They point out that the Venus has an induced magnetosphere from the interaction of its thick atmosphere with solar wind, and it's nearer proximity to the Sun brings it further within the Sun's magnetic field, so there's arguably less of a cosmic radiation risk compared to Mars. It's also easier to get to, making it, by some estimates, an ideal first step in reaching Mars Um. Now this

I don't know. You may be getting into a little like team Venus versus Team Marsh competition here, something that Grinsman was talking about, you know, the legitimate rivalries there. Yeah, but you know, but the shortest possible distance from Earth to Venus is something like thirty eight million kilometers versus fifty six million kilometers for Mars, and a year on

Venus is much shorter, so you know, Christmas comes earlier there. Yeah. Again, we have to do have to stress though havoc as well as stuff like VAMP very much just mission concepts at this point. It's nothing on the books. Da Vinci I think is gonna probably be the project that gets the NOD next. We'll see how it goes. But either way,

Venus missions are only an option every nineteen months. Because I mentioned that the closest distance we've touched on this before, Like, if you're talking about going to head to another planet, it depends on where Earth is in relation to that planet, how long of a journey you're talking and you won't, of course, uh calculated so that you're making the shortest voyage possible to reach that other planet. Yeah. Yeah, So as somebody who feels a lot of sympathy for the

Venus partisans and the rivalries between the planetary scientists. I uh, I hope that the study from September of this year and and all the subsequent research, whether it turns out that there's good evidence for the presence of the phosphine gas or not, I hope this at least spurs more attention to Venus, Like it gets more unscrewed emissions there at least um to awaken the hunger for Venus knowledge

among the people generally. Yeah, yeah, just to build public interest in Venus, like it's a strange and an exciting planet and and missions like I feel like avoc alone should be one of these programs that everyone should look at, because it makes me more excited about about Venus to just even think about people. Can you can you imagine?

Can you imagine the footage much less being there, Like that's that's a step too far from me to be imagine being aboard this vessel in the within the skies or kind of over the clouds of an alien world. But just see the footage of that that journey, that would be amazing. Totally agree. I can't wait to see where we where we go from here? Yeah? Is that the end? If we're if we're the doorways. Is it time to close ourselves on the way out? I guess

it is. Yeah, obviously we could talk more about Venus and and I hope we do talk more about Venus. Uh, you know, maybe maybe we can we can get get Grinspin back on the program to talk about it. I know he discussed potentially writing more about Venus. That book that he wrote about Venus came out many years ago, so he's probably overdue for re exploration totally. In the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Um, what are your thoughts about Venus, Venus exploration or some of

the missions we've talked about here. What are your thoughts about the possibility of life in Venus? Do you have other examples of of early science fictional visions of balloons in the atmosphere of Venus? Uh? Let us know. We'd love to hear from you. Likewise, just space science in general and other planets. Uh. Would you like us to do more episodes like this in the future. Is there a particular planet that we have not journeyed to that you would like us to visit? Reach out to us

and let us know. Uh. In the meantime, just rate, review, and subscribe the show wherever you get the ability to do so. And if, oh if you go to stuff to bow your mind dot com, that will take you over to our I Heart listing for the show. And there's a button there or listing there somewhere you can click on store and that will take you over to

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