What could be found in Venus's atmosphere to trigger a gold rush?
March 23, 2022 1:01 PM Subscribe
I'm writing a short story set 500 years in the future, where humans have created a small colony floating in Venus's atmosphere. I'm brainstorming a material that would cause people to want to go to Venus, in a sort of gold rush, to get it.
While this is not truly hard-sci-fi, I want the story to be somewhat plausible for 500 years in the future. I could just handwave an unobtanium, but I'd like to get a little more specific and grounded.
My first thoughts are a chemical that is a much better catalyst for electric batteries than anything on Earth, or hydrogen (or a hydrogen isotope?) that could be used for fusion reactors.
Bonus points: if this material is something that that an individual colonist could credibly acquire through operating a machine/drone in the atmosphere, subject to paying exploitative fees to a Weyland-Yutani-style enterprise that gatekeeps Venus.
While this is not truly hard-sci-fi, I want the story to be somewhat plausible for 500 years in the future. I could just handwave an unobtanium, but I'd like to get a little more specific and grounded.
My first thoughts are a chemical that is a much better catalyst for electric batteries than anything on Earth, or hydrogen (or a hydrogen isotope?) that could be used for fusion reactors.
Bonus points: if this material is something that that an individual colonist could credibly acquire through operating a machine/drone in the atmosphere, subject to paying exploitative fees to a Weyland-Yutani-style enterprise that gatekeeps Venus.
Helium? It's a non-renewable resource that's currently critical for semiconductor manufacturing. I don't know if there's enough in Venus's atmosphere to support a gold rush, though, or what we might use it for in 500 years.
posted by ruddlehead at 1:20 PM on March 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by ruddlehead at 1:20 PM on March 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
Low density high intelligence life forms floating in the atmosphere that have a unique and often lucrative perspective, and that have developed a liking for conversations with humans.
posted by the Real Dan at 1:25 PM on March 23, 2022
posted by the Real Dan at 1:25 PM on March 23, 2022
...subject to paying exploitative fees...
This is a hook for a different approach entirely to things: where it doesn't actually need to make sense on looking deeper. A surface-level folderol about how the Venusian atmospheric proto-organic compounds are very special and very valuable, and Exploit Co is of course collecting its cut to maintain operations for the rising wealth of all...but which doesn't stand up to scrutiny past the surface.
Basically: think cryptocurrency. Think speculation bubbles. Venus doesn't have to actually be the rare valuable source--the society and society-influencing-and-inventivizing powers-that-be of the story just have to pretend that it is. The system newsfeed is all about self-reinforcing stories about the new gold rush. The systems parasocial webz are full of I Turned My Whole Life Around By One Contract Season accounts.
posted by Drastic at 1:36 PM on March 23, 2022 [5 favorites]
This is a hook for a different approach entirely to things: where it doesn't actually need to make sense on looking deeper. A surface-level folderol about how the Venusian atmospheric proto-organic compounds are very special and very valuable, and Exploit Co is of course collecting its cut to maintain operations for the rising wealth of all...but which doesn't stand up to scrutiny past the surface.
Basically: think cryptocurrency. Think speculation bubbles. Venus doesn't have to actually be the rare valuable source--the society and society-influencing-and-inventivizing powers-that-be of the story just have to pretend that it is. The system newsfeed is all about self-reinforcing stories about the new gold rush. The systems parasocial webz are full of I Turned My Whole Life Around By One Contract Season accounts.
posted by Drastic at 1:36 PM on March 23, 2022 [5 favorites]
Helium? It's a non-renewable resource that's currently critical for semiconductor manufacturing. I don't know if there's enough in Venus's atmosphere to support a gold rush, though, or what we might use it for in 500 years.
Helium-3 is a possibility. Its advantage over hydrogen and other helium isotopes is that, at least theoretically, it's possible use it in fusion reactions that don't produce radioactive byproducts. It's thought to be more abundant on the Moon than on Earth, and thus it is sometimes held out as a semi-plausible reason for industry on the Moon.
With a bit of handwaving you could claim that it's later discovered that there's a lot of helium-3 in Venus's upper atmosphere. Maybe there's a profitable monopoly on the the lunar supply, and the gold rush is driven by an interest in breaking that monopoly.
Helium is about 5ppm of Earth's atmosphere, but it's 3-15ppm of Venus's. If it turned out that it was more like 15ppm and the helium-3 ratio was higher than that on Earth (which would not be difficult, helium-4 is much more common on Earth than helium-3), then Venusian helium harvesting could vaguely make sense in a setting where there was high demand for helium-3 for fusion power.
If you need a plausible-sounding reason for it you could wave your hands and say it has something to do with Venus's lack of a meaningful magnetosphere. In the case of the Moon it's thought that the lack of a magnetic field leads to the solar wind depositing helium-3 in the regolith over the eons.
posted by jedicus at 1:51 PM on March 23, 2022 [6 favorites]
Helium-3 is a possibility. Its advantage over hydrogen and other helium isotopes is that, at least theoretically, it's possible use it in fusion reactions that don't produce radioactive byproducts. It's thought to be more abundant on the Moon than on Earth, and thus it is sometimes held out as a semi-plausible reason for industry on the Moon.
With a bit of handwaving you could claim that it's later discovered that there's a lot of helium-3 in Venus's upper atmosphere. Maybe there's a profitable monopoly on the the lunar supply, and the gold rush is driven by an interest in breaking that monopoly.
Helium is about 5ppm of Earth's atmosphere, but it's 3-15ppm of Venus's. If it turned out that it was more like 15ppm and the helium-3 ratio was higher than that on Earth (which would not be difficult, helium-4 is much more common on Earth than helium-3), then Venusian helium harvesting could vaguely make sense in a setting where there was high demand for helium-3 for fusion power.
If you need a plausible-sounding reason for it you could wave your hands and say it has something to do with Venus's lack of a meaningful magnetosphere. In the case of the Moon it's thought that the lack of a magnetic field leads to the solar wind depositing helium-3 in the regolith over the eons.
posted by jedicus at 1:51 PM on March 23, 2022 [6 favorites]
Interesting thought. Tried to put my mind around it by looking at valuable commodities from 500 years ago. Scarcity drives demand. Quick search found sugar to be incredibly valuable. Flash to today, not so much.
Thinking through an equivalent. If we stayed on human experience as the driver, maybe some unknown organic element that has pharmacological benefit. An amplifier of human health of some sort. An unexpected elemental amplifier of the human/AI conduit.
posted by zerobyproxy at 1:51 PM on March 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
Thinking through an equivalent. If we stayed on human experience as the driver, maybe some unknown organic element that has pharmacological benefit. An amplifier of human health of some sort. An unexpected elemental amplifier of the human/AI conduit.
posted by zerobyproxy at 1:51 PM on March 23, 2022 [3 favorites]
Put life in one of the cloud layers that makes your chemical, whether you want it to be your catalyst or a boosterspice equivalent or whatever. You have to go there to get it because the life form they're farming and the reactions are only possible at the boundary between one layer of atmosphere and another that's impractical to recreate elsewhere.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:05 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:05 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
It could be fun to work in a reference to Velikovsky's claim that Venus' atmosphere was the source of the manna that fed the Israelites in Exodus.
posted by xris at 2:36 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by xris at 2:36 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
Helium was my first thought, too. You could even say the are pockets of it underground or something.
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 2:52 PM on March 23, 2022
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 2:52 PM on March 23, 2022
Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, sulfuric acid and nitrogen.
What if decarbonization on earth had become so lucrative as a result of climate change mitigation that Earth's atmosphere was too low on carbon dioxide and getting too cold? So people were going to get carbon dioxide from Venus?
posted by medusa at 5:49 PM on March 23, 2022
What if decarbonization on earth had become so lucrative as a result of climate change mitigation that Earth's atmosphere was too low on carbon dioxide and getting too cold? So people were going to get carbon dioxide from Venus?
posted by medusa at 5:49 PM on March 23, 2022
If we stayed on human experience as the driver, maybe some unknown organic element that has pharmacological benefit.
Yeah, I was going to say something like this with a magical realism bent. Explorers on Venus have discovered an organic molecule in the atmosphere they call Venusium which inspires feelings of being loved when inhaled or ingested. And on Earth in 2522, there’s no rarer feeling than being loved.
posted by ejs at 7:20 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I was going to say something like this with a magical realism bent. Explorers on Venus have discovered an organic molecule in the atmosphere they call Venusium which inspires feelings of being loved when inhaled or ingested. And on Earth in 2522, there’s no rarer feeling than being loved.
posted by ejs at 7:20 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
Well I don't know what kind of space travel system you have set up 500 yrs in the future and all that, but as a practical matter anything you find in the Venusian atmosphere is going to be at the bottom of the Venusian energy well and also (assuming you want to take to back to earth) way down in the sun's energy well, addition.
Point is, you're going to need something that is pretty wildly valuable per ounce and also, ideally quite dense. That is to say, something you could put into like a space capsule or like the space shuttle to transport an extremely large/valuable amount of it, vs something you might have to transport el-gigantico tanks of. How are you going to get el-gigantico tanks out of the Venusian atmosphere etc etc etc.
Also, I was slightly flabbergasted to discover that transporting gold on an interplanetary basis is just about a break-even proposition even now. Or perhaps even break-even if there were somewhere say you could just pick up pounds of gold for free.
Calculation: $150 million for an Atlas V-541 that can transport around 8000kg payload to a transfer orbit. 8000kg in gold is worth about $500 million. If this were the only cost of the gold production, it actually compares quite favorably with current gold production costs - which run $500-$800 per ounce. And ounce of gold sells for about $1800.
Point is - you need something as valuable as gold, on an ounce-per-ounce basis, or ideally, maybe 10X or 100X or even 1000X more valuable per ounce.
So with that in mind, a gander at a few pages that list the most expensive substances on earth, ounce per ounce, is quite enlightening.
That suggests a few categories to consider:
- Rare metals and similar substances - gold, tantallum, tritium, plutonium, etc. Usually they are valuable because even just a small amount of them is quite useful for some particular use or industrial process, and they have to be produced synthetically somehow.
As I mentioned above, gold is almost marginally profitable to transport today. Say in 500 years the cost of rocket transport has dropped by 90% and you can somehow pick up gold on Venus for 50% the cost of what it costs to mine on earth today, then there you go. That is a profitable enterprise - maybe not WILDLY astonishingly profitable, but somewhat more profitable than gold mining today, which make it well worth doing.
Also lets say in the next 500 years industries have mined all the really easily mineable gold on earth, yet it is still as practically valuable and generally desirable as it is now, so the price of gold might go up 5-10X or even 100X compared to now.
This type of dynamic might make procuring even a little bit of gold on Venus a profitable enterprise, especially if you can do it inexpensively and regularly.
- Rare gems. Diamond, painite, taaffeite, etc. Some of these are valuable industrially - for instance if you could cheaply mine micro-diamonds somehow they are industrially useful and so that might pay off handsomely. You'd probably need small stone size not just "dust" size to be profitable, though. Other gems seem to be valuable primarily because they are #1 rare and #2 sought after by collectors and such primarily because they are rare.
This could potentially set up an interesting dynamic where only a few of these $X items are found, meaning that they will continue to be rare, but the 1/1000 who actually does find one is going to end up wealthy beyond their wildest imagination.
- Medically useful drugs. A lot of the cost here is in research, development, testing, getting through the regulatory system 200 times with duds to get one commercially useful and tested/safe drug. The main cost driver here is not so much the cost per ounce to produce, but the whole other structure needed to get that substance to the point you can produce AND use it. So I don't know if this translates well into a substance you would find, but maybe if there is some extremely life-saving/life-extending drug that has just been discovered and released and then it is discovered you can mine it easily by the ounce on Venus.
- Illegal drugs like meth. These are often wildly expensive, but the expense is typically driven by the illegal-ness of the drug, not the difficulty in manufacturing it per se. Meth is pretty easy to cook and is worth $2000-$3000 per ounce supposedly. But is that production cost or street cost as exaggerated by law enforcement? The fact that you can produce it on Venus & transport to Earth for $500/ounce does not necessarily translate into profit if most of the expense is in the illegal smuggling of it to earth and then onto earth and then distributing it (illegally) on earth.
But still, an extremely desirable illegal/mind-altering type drug that is easily available on Venus and then somehow easy to smuggle back to wherever it is valuable - perhaps.
- Things that have extremely high cultural cachet, are available only to the super-wealthy, and such. Caviar fits in here, rhinoceros horn, diamonds and other precious stones, things like saffron. Interesting point is it does not need to be actually efficacious (ie, rhino horn) or good at whatever category it fits into (is caviar actually the most delicious food of any type available? maybe . . . .). But if it has the reputation of being efficacious or ultra-good at whatever while also being rare - and ideally, requiring only micro-amounts of the substance to work it magic - maybe that would work.
Maybe the reputation this has for been the ultra-whatever is really only held by the ultra-wealthy but has a strong cultural hold there for some reason.
In this way it could be a bit like the current art market, where certain artists are declared by consensus of the ultra-rich collectors and those who cater to them, to be the best X. Thus it is a good thing for the super-rich to invest their money in, because all the super-rich have decided this X has a lot of value. So this in Venus terms could be special somewhat rare crystals, formations, gems, or similar.
Also the idea that something is "natural" has huge cachet, if it is "natural" and only found on Venus somehow then that makes it rare by definition, if it is supposedly curative of some condition or disease so much the better - now it is a "natural" cure that cannot be obtained any other way. Someone works to duplicate the chemical formula back on earth but now that is fake industrial product made with chemicals, not in its natural form straight from Venus, so it is worth only 1/10000 the price of the original natural and pure stuff straight from the atmosphere of Venus.
The cool thing about this is it could be just about anything, even rather commonplace. The "snow" that precipitates out of the Venusian atmosphere at some certain altitude and under certain particular conditions. But in its natural environment on Venus it picks up an unusual combination of trace elements, minerals, and such that people come to believe is extremely healthful and so on.
And only the original, natural, healthful stuff straight from Venus will do the job.
It's so rare and expensive that only billionaires and such can afford it, but it has somehow developed such a good reputation that those people will in fact pay for it. It has supposed health benefits but also is a huge status marker if you are able to take it. It's the sort of thing all the rich folk at Davos are taking. Also maybe it turns your skin a certain shade of green or yellow, or puts a certain tint into you pupils, or turns the base of your fingernails an unusual but beautiful shade of blue, or has some other tell of that kind that people start to accept as an extremely high-value status symbol, and that also fades with time if you don't keep taking the Venus Miracle Powder Super Secret Health Cure stuff.
Something like that, anyway.
posted by flug at 7:25 PM on March 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
Point is, you're going to need something that is pretty wildly valuable per ounce and also, ideally quite dense. That is to say, something you could put into like a space capsule or like the space shuttle to transport an extremely large/valuable amount of it, vs something you might have to transport el-gigantico tanks of. How are you going to get el-gigantico tanks out of the Venusian atmosphere etc etc etc.
Also, I was slightly flabbergasted to discover that transporting gold on an interplanetary basis is just about a break-even proposition even now. Or perhaps even break-even if there were somewhere say you could just pick up pounds of gold for free.
Calculation: $150 million for an Atlas V-541 that can transport around 8000kg payload to a transfer orbit. 8000kg in gold is worth about $500 million. If this were the only cost of the gold production, it actually compares quite favorably with current gold production costs - which run $500-$800 per ounce. And ounce of gold sells for about $1800.
Point is - you need something as valuable as gold, on an ounce-per-ounce basis, or ideally, maybe 10X or 100X or even 1000X more valuable per ounce.
So with that in mind, a gander at a few pages that list the most expensive substances on earth, ounce per ounce, is quite enlightening.
That suggests a few categories to consider:
- Rare metals and similar substances - gold, tantallum, tritium, plutonium, etc. Usually they are valuable because even just a small amount of them is quite useful for some particular use or industrial process, and they have to be produced synthetically somehow.
As I mentioned above, gold is almost marginally profitable to transport today. Say in 500 years the cost of rocket transport has dropped by 90% and you can somehow pick up gold on Venus for 50% the cost of what it costs to mine on earth today, then there you go. That is a profitable enterprise - maybe not WILDLY astonishingly profitable, but somewhat more profitable than gold mining today, which make it well worth doing.
Also lets say in the next 500 years industries have mined all the really easily mineable gold on earth, yet it is still as practically valuable and generally desirable as it is now, so the price of gold might go up 5-10X or even 100X compared to now.
This type of dynamic might make procuring even a little bit of gold on Venus a profitable enterprise, especially if you can do it inexpensively and regularly.
- Rare gems. Diamond, painite, taaffeite, etc. Some of these are valuable industrially - for instance if you could cheaply mine micro-diamonds somehow they are industrially useful and so that might pay off handsomely. You'd probably need small stone size not just "dust" size to be profitable, though. Other gems seem to be valuable primarily because they are #1 rare and #2 sought after by collectors and such primarily because they are rare.
This could potentially set up an interesting dynamic where only a few of these $X items are found, meaning that they will continue to be rare, but the 1/1000 who actually does find one is going to end up wealthy beyond their wildest imagination.
- Medically useful drugs. A lot of the cost here is in research, development, testing, getting through the regulatory system 200 times with duds to get one commercially useful and tested/safe drug. The main cost driver here is not so much the cost per ounce to produce, but the whole other structure needed to get that substance to the point you can produce AND use it. So I don't know if this translates well into a substance you would find, but maybe if there is some extremely life-saving/life-extending drug that has just been discovered and released and then it is discovered you can mine it easily by the ounce on Venus.
- Illegal drugs like meth. These are often wildly expensive, but the expense is typically driven by the illegal-ness of the drug, not the difficulty in manufacturing it per se. Meth is pretty easy to cook and is worth $2000-$3000 per ounce supposedly. But is that production cost or street cost as exaggerated by law enforcement? The fact that you can produce it on Venus & transport to Earth for $500/ounce does not necessarily translate into profit if most of the expense is in the illegal smuggling of it to earth and then onto earth and then distributing it (illegally) on earth.
But still, an extremely desirable illegal/mind-altering type drug that is easily available on Venus and then somehow easy to smuggle back to wherever it is valuable - perhaps.
- Things that have extremely high cultural cachet, are available only to the super-wealthy, and such. Caviar fits in here, rhinoceros horn, diamonds and other precious stones, things like saffron. Interesting point is it does not need to be actually efficacious (ie, rhino horn) or good at whatever category it fits into (is caviar actually the most delicious food of any type available? maybe . . . .). But if it has the reputation of being efficacious or ultra-good at whatever while also being rare - and ideally, requiring only micro-amounts of the substance to work it magic - maybe that would work.
Maybe the reputation this has for been the ultra-whatever is really only held by the ultra-wealthy but has a strong cultural hold there for some reason.
In this way it could be a bit like the current art market, where certain artists are declared by consensus of the ultra-rich collectors and those who cater to them, to be the best X. Thus it is a good thing for the super-rich to invest their money in, because all the super-rich have decided this X has a lot of value. So this in Venus terms could be special somewhat rare crystals, formations, gems, or similar.
Also the idea that something is "natural" has huge cachet, if it is "natural" and only found on Venus somehow then that makes it rare by definition, if it is supposedly curative of some condition or disease so much the better - now it is a "natural" cure that cannot be obtained any other way. Someone works to duplicate the chemical formula back on earth but now that is fake industrial product made with chemicals, not in its natural form straight from Venus, so it is worth only 1/10000 the price of the original natural and pure stuff straight from the atmosphere of Venus.
The cool thing about this is it could be just about anything, even rather commonplace. The "snow" that precipitates out of the Venusian atmosphere at some certain altitude and under certain particular conditions. But in its natural environment on Venus it picks up an unusual combination of trace elements, minerals, and such that people come to believe is extremely healthful and so on.
And only the original, natural, healthful stuff straight from Venus will do the job.
It's so rare and expensive that only billionaires and such can afford it, but it has somehow developed such a good reputation that those people will in fact pay for it. It has supposed health benefits but also is a huge status marker if you are able to take it. It's the sort of thing all the rich folk at Davos are taking. Also maybe it turns your skin a certain shade of green or yellow, or puts a certain tint into you pupils, or turns the base of your fingernails an unusual but beautiful shade of blue, or has some other tell of that kind that people start to accept as an extremely high-value status symbol, and that also fades with time if you don't keep taking the Venus Miracle Powder Super Secret Health Cure stuff.
Something like that, anyway.
posted by flug at 7:25 PM on March 23, 2022 [2 favorites]
There's a bunch of fictional precedence that Venus was once inhabited/ colonized/ visited, and extensive artificial cave systems still exist.
Within those cave systems are artifacts of high worth - either simply because they're alien, or they contain fragments of useful information, energy storage technology/ components that remain resistant to reverse engineering.
Or there's some sort of mechanism for (lucrative) interstellar travel/ exploration/ exploitation that still exists in those caves and are resistant to being relocated/ reverse engineered. (See Frederik Pohl's 'Gateway Saga')
If you're talking about moving bulk material from Venus back to Earth/ processing stations, massive railguns and space elevators beats out rocketry. You can handwave using gradient thermoelectric generators (Seebeck generator) that take advantage of the heat on Venus and the coldness of space. Venus is windy, too, and that energy can be harnessed and transformed into electricity/ etc.
Or you could posit that it's the social environment as the reason why people want to flock to it. Perhaps highly unacceptably unethical behaviour is tolerated - or even encouraged - there?
Or (very expensive) longevity treatment gets a big backlash on earth ("Why do the ultra rich get to be essentially immortal? Lets murder them all!") so for those who could afford the longevity treatment they could also afford to live on Venus where the plebs can't afford to chase them down and murder them.
If spaceflight was advanced enough, there might be value to smuggling luxury goods (or even priceless artifacts, like art) from Earth to the UltraLuxe Venusian colony(ies).
posted by porpoise at 8:36 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
Within those cave systems are artifacts of high worth - either simply because they're alien, or they contain fragments of useful information, energy storage technology/ components that remain resistant to reverse engineering.
Or there's some sort of mechanism for (lucrative) interstellar travel/ exploration/ exploitation that still exists in those caves and are resistant to being relocated/ reverse engineered. (See Frederik Pohl's 'Gateway Saga')
If you're talking about moving bulk material from Venus back to Earth/ processing stations, massive railguns and space elevators beats out rocketry. You can handwave using gradient thermoelectric generators (Seebeck generator) that take advantage of the heat on Venus and the coldness of space. Venus is windy, too, and that energy can be harnessed and transformed into electricity/ etc.
Or you could posit that it's the social environment as the reason why people want to flock to it. Perhaps highly unacceptably unethical behaviour is tolerated - or even encouraged - there?
Or (very expensive) longevity treatment gets a big backlash on earth ("Why do the ultra rich get to be essentially immortal? Lets murder them all!") so for those who could afford the longevity treatment they could also afford to live on Venus where the plebs can't afford to chase them down and murder them.
If spaceflight was advanced enough, there might be value to smuggling luxury goods (or even priceless artifacts, like art) from Earth to the UltraLuxe Venusian colony(ies).
posted by porpoise at 8:36 PM on March 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
++ flug, I love the idea of an interplanetary homeopathic atmosphere-dandruff trade exploiting billionaire influencers back on Earth.
posted by protorp at 1:27 AM on March 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by protorp at 1:27 AM on March 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
Similar to flug, you could handwave xeno-biologic compounds with any variety of uses you like and no known mechanism to get the thing to synthesize or grow in a lab or even identify the organism. It would push you to an obvious comparison (the spice must flow). Those compounds could be diffuse and free-floating (with colonists operating massive air-processing equipment to filter specks) or have smaller richer "pockets" in dense clouds with wildcat operations. Even wilder xeno-biologics in the high temperature surface environment would only be reachable by robot.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 8:22 AM on March 24, 2022
posted by a robot made out of meat at 8:22 AM on March 24, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Mizu at 1:13 PM on March 23, 2022 [2 favorites]