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One of the issues with colonizing Venus is the harsh conditions at the surface. People have proposed using floating habitats in the upper atmosphere, where conditions are milder, and gathering resources from the atmosphere itself (and there's a question about that on this site). Some have also proposed using machines to gather resources from the surface, like in one of the answers to that question.

However, it might be possible to mine from Venus' surface without getting anywhere near it. There are "infrared windows" in the atmosphere of Venus: bands in the near-infrared region of the EM spectrum where light can pass through. These bands were used by the Venus Express probe to study the lower atmosphere and surface of Venus. Would it be feasible to use a powerful laser, tuned to the wavelength of one of these windows, to blast the surface of Venus and send dust into the air? The dust could then be harvested by habitats floating in the upper atmosphere, giving them access to heavy elements.

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    Blasting dust upwards is going to be extremely inefficient of dust and energy. I think you would need low-end nuclear energy levels for each blast, and would get a bunch of undifferentiated rock. – ikrase Aug 17 '20 at 06:30
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    By what energy would the surface be blasted ? Will a near- infrared laser cause a higher temperature than the 462⁰ C surface temp. ? And there's already dust near the surface, why would it go 50 km upward ? – Cornelis Aug 17 '20 at 08:37
  • So what's the difference between this and simply nuking it? – user3528438 Aug 17 '20 at 18:48
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    @Cornelisinspace Solar power. – Pitto Aug 17 '20 at 22:09
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    @user3528438 A laser would not need fissile materials and (in theory at least) could be reusable. – Pitto Aug 17 '20 at 22:11
  • Such a blast needs not just total energy but power as well. Assume you need a 10-kton blast — probably too small but a useful fiducial. That's 4.184 x 10^13 J. You could supply that much energy with 1 W incident on a small area of the surface (requiring, due to losses, more than 1 W out of the laser) but you would need 1.3 million years to do it. The surface wouldn't even notice it. The energy has to come fast and that's power. Delivering it in 1 second (probably too long) requires >42 million MW of power from the laser, not easy to provide with any known power source or laser. – Tom Spilker Aug 18 '20 at 00:58
  • @TomSpilker there are plenty of lasers that deliver short pulses of millions or billions of times larger instantaneous power than average power. A cheap circa 10 ns Q-switched or mode-locked laser does this and one example in space is the laser in Curiosity's ChemCam. Even the old ruby lasers used capacitors to build up energy then discharged them through a xenon tube to pump the crystal. All that's missing is scale and therein lies the rub – uhoh Aug 18 '20 at 01:19
  • @TomSpilker unfortunately (or fortunately) there are no rechargeable or cycle-able chemical laswers. – uhoh Aug 18 '20 at 01:21
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    @uhoh Looks like there was a typo there — did you mean rechargeable or cycle-able chemical lawyers? If so, it's probably fortunate! ;-) – Tom Spilker Aug 18 '20 at 05:35
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    @uhoh Getting >42 TERA-Joules out of a 10 ns pulse means >42 x 10^23 Watts. Even if you could get 99% conversion efficiency, that thing would blow itself to kindom come. It's far easier to drop a nuke on it — though then you get activated materials! – Tom Spilker Aug 18 '20 at 05:44
  • @TomSpilker thus my "All that's missing is scale and therein lies the rub." Ya the lack of rechargeable and scalable chemical space lasers is unfortunate for us future atmospheric Venus miners, but may be simultaneously fortunate for the rest of us! – uhoh Aug 18 '20 at 05:56
  • Even if possible this sounds so horrifically inefficient that it would never be done. – eps Aug 20 '20 at 13:43
  • @TomSpilker not a laser, but I just ran across this old and currently unanswered question: On what target will TransAstra Corp's MiniBee practice its Optical Mining technique? – uhoh Aug 24 '20 at 06:08

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