Comment by __MatrixMan__
7 hours ago
The general shape of geothermal, where you're up here where it's cool, and you push a fluid down there where it's hot, and you bring the heat back up here to do work... Would a good enough insulator make it thermodynamically feasible to do it from an airship in the Venusian atmosphere?
Like, clearly Earth's crust supports temperature gradients which are steep enough to make the juice worth the squeeze. Presumably you're not going to find gradients so steep in the case of a runaway greenhouse effect, but whatever gradients you do find, are there fundamental limits preventing them from being steep enough?
The "airships riding on clouds of Venus" is a scifi genre that we need way more of.
To be at 1 atm you need to be way up near 50km, but you'd probably want to be up closer to 55km to get temperatures down, filling it with higher concentration O2 to make it breathable. Making the envelope durable would be pretty crazy in H2SO4, but maybe Ti would self passivate?
Arguably, more dangerous and harder to navigate than vacuum.
You guys are imaginative, I'll give you that.
But there are so many more fundamental problems with the high altitude Venusian colony idea that you would never get to the "temperature gradients > power" pipeline implementation in any case.
I mean right off the bat, imagine building or navigating anything in hurricane Katrina. Then, since we're talking 50km, imagine winds that would make the forces you're dealing with an order of magnitude more problematic.
Yeah, in terms of knowledge and technology, mankind is just not there yet to be perfectly frank.
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