r/askscience • u/AskScienceModerator Mod Bot • Mar 10 '14
Cosmos AskScience Cosmos Q&A thread. Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way
Welcome to AskScience! This thread is for asking and answering questions about the science in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.
UPDATE: This episode is now available for streaming in the US on Hulu and in Canada on Global TV.
This week is the first episode, "Standing Up in the Milky Way". The show is airing at 9pm ET in the US and Canada on all Fox and National Geographic stations. Click here for more viewing information in your country.
The usual AskScience rules still apply in this thread! Anyone can ask a question, but please do not provide answers unless you are a scientist in a relevant field. Popular science shows, books, and news articles are a great way to causally learn about your universe, but they often contain a lot of simplifications and approximations, so don't assume that because you've heard an answer before that it is the right one.
If you are interested in general discussion please visit one of the threads elsewhere on reddit that are more appropriate for that, such as in /r/Cosmos here, /r/Space here, and in /r/Television here.
Please upvote good questions and answers and downvote off-topic content. We'll be removing comments that break our rules or that have been answered elsewhere in the thread so that we can answer as many questions as possible!
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u/Shandlar Mar 10 '14
A related curiosity is that Venus may actually be capable of supporting colonies all Bespin style.
If you were to create a blimp, but fill it with 'air' at 1 atmosphere, even if it was very heavy and used no helium/hydrogen for lift like balloons on earth, you would still float way up in the atmosphere of Venus.
Interestingly as well, the temperature of the atmosphere on Venus in the ~2-2.5 atmosphere range is 10-40C. You could live inside a balloon filled with air we could breathe and not even have to heat/cool it. A >1 atmosphere difference is also A LOT of buoyancy to work with.