As long as they limit the passengers to people with a net worth of 100 million or higher, then I think this should be encouraged.
That would keep them safe from the giant space goat.
Now that is a reference from a frood who knows where his towel is!
This article must be a joke, no one is literally that dumb. Like Venus surface is basically hell, just some really small miscalucation and bam your dead, body will just burn to nothing. The crash site may exist or not, but it’s extremely stupid.
Alright so it’s a colony NOT on the surface, hence the floating. Now the guy is still an idiot but the idea he’s pitching is hypothetically possible.
Oxygen is less dense than the Venusian atmosphere. So hypothetically speaking, one could fill a balloon with an O₂ and N₂ mixture that is slightly oxygen richer than here on Earth and the balloon would float above the vast majority of the Venusian atmosphere where all the acid rain and huge temperatures would be. Much like a Helium or Hydrogen balloon floats here on Earth because the gas is less dense than our atmosphere here.
So the idea is to make a balloon that is large enough to have people inside of it, because they can breath the lifting gas keeping the balloon afloat. The catch is, you aren’t above ALL of the atmosphere and there’s still a lot of caustic things that the balloon would have to account for, otherwise it’ll slowly leak. We don’t have a material that would withstand some of the things in the upper atmosphere of Venus. So the guy would literally have to invent a material that would be able to withstand the conditions or be self healing enough to deal with the conditions. Both are highly unlikely, not impossible but I sure as shit wouldn’t trust him on being the inventor of such.
So yes, the surface is inhospitable. But floating a colony above the clouds is doable and something that’s been investigated. At the 50km altitude of Venus, there’s still enough atmosphere to provide protection from harmful sunlight. The atmosphere at 50km is such that a balloon at 1.03 atm pressure would not have explosive decompression in the event of a rip, providing folks enough time to get emergency O₂ and ideally fix the tear. So basically, if a tear in the balloon did happen, it would be a light breeze and not a sudden POP as the oxygen escaped. So if the balloon is really, really big, it could take hours before the CO₂ slowly seeping in offset enough O₂ to start dropping your colony into the clouds of acid. And at 50km altitude, gravity there would be about 0.9g. Additionally, Venus is much closer to Earth than Mars, but since it’s closer to the sun, it’s actually a bit harder to get to.
So right around 50km above Venus is pretty much the most Earth like we’ve discovered in the Solar System so far. There’s just all this dizzying complexity to having a floating colony on Venus. And we don’t have anywhere near the materials or support infrastructure to really support anyone going to Venus, especially untrained people. But yeah you can see some of the renders NASA has done for a Venus colony. Here’s a page I found with one of the renders they’ve pitched.
Well it’s gone from the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard to the second dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, so I guess that’s an improvement
Ok so we have established it’s possible, now why would we ever want to do it?
What do we do about the frankly insane wind speeds?
Just ignore them, I suspect. If you’re already in a giant blimp, then what’s the harm in letting the wind carry you wherever it wants to go?
Maybe the wind changes direction fast?
No worries. There are some carbon fiber types that are pretty chemically resistant. I’ll start saving scraps at work for him.
That is truly stupid, failing to account for, checks list: Radiation, solar reach, mental health, supply convoys that take years, and that’s just at a surface level…
Wow ofc it would work…
Never underestimate human ignorance. Even if they make an idiot proof system, they’ll just turn around and make a better idiot.
Well they might as well incinerate their clients, this guy refuses to be one upped by his colleague, I mean what’s his option, the other guy diluted his clients at the bottom of the ocean, so this one must go the opposite way, in space, and with fire.
You know what the problem with space travel is?
Every ‘what if’ question is answered with ‘you die.’
What if there’s a leak in the spacecraft? What if we run out of food? What if we veer off course? What if the thrusters fail? etc.
I highly doubt and I’ll put $100 down that this doesn’t happen in 2050 because the difficulties and infrastructure just aren’t there for 1000 or even 100 people to do this.
Ok, but 2050 is over 25 years away. If he can get people to sign on then he can get some money coming in, and he’ll be a billionaire running away to Brazil long before 2050. It seems to me that his plan is solid.
… You know what, that’s an excellent idea.
Hey do you want to go to live on Mars? I have a solid plan and you can put a downpayment right now to secure your seat! Hurry, only 3 spots remaining!
Sorry, you’ve got to come up with something unique. You can’t just copy Mars One. At least pick a new planet! (It sounds like Venus is taken now as well, you snooze you lose)
Ah sheeit, well if we can’t go up then we must go down! Journey to the centre of the earth where it’s probably going to be colder than up here in 25 years!
Now you’re talking! Where can I sign up? I have more money than sense so I’d be willing to throw a few hundred thousand for a ticket, or even a million if you’ll put me on the first trip!
Jules Verne already went there, durr. It’s where the dinosaurs migrated to! Wait… Dino safari?
(you guys are hilarious)It’s called Agarta bro, that’s where the dinosaurs went
Mercury or bust
You’re stuck in the 90s
What if there’s a leak in the spacecraft? What if we run out of food? What if we veer off course? What if the thrusters fail? etc.
Living the Belter life
I mean, they had a leak in the ISS, and they just covered it with tape and carried on.
Because they could get more air, they just had to nip down the gravity well. That’s a longer jog on Venus.
I mean, not every what if, some at least leave the possibility to address the situation, consider the case of Apollo 13 for example. A great many risks can also be reduced with redundancy, for example, having your maneuvering systems fail is not as bad if your craft has an extra set of maneuvering thrusters. Air travel has similarly high risk of death if major components fail, and yet that has been made safe enough to be made commonplace.
I agree that it won’t happen by 2050 though. We’ve never sent humans on an interplanetary mission before, development of new spacecraft takes many years, especially manned systems, and Venus is an especially tough environment to build for. 2050 is less than three decades away, I’d guess that we might have at most a small research outpost on the moon by then, assuming no major delays or cuts to our current program to return there, and there’s no guarantee of that. I’d be surprised if even one person was sent to Venus by that year.
Can we pick the 1,000 people? I’ve got a few I’d like to send to Venus.
Can we get a non-business major to run these companies? Clearly these folks don’t know what they’re doing.
They know exactly what they are doing. The trick is that what they are doing is different to what they say they are doing.
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Shut up, don’t discourage them!
I might be able to come up with a list of 1,000 people I’d like to send to Venus. 100 for sure.
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“It’s not gonna implode, is it?”
“Haha, of course not!”
“Whew”
“It’s space so it’ll explode!”
“How many atmospheres can this thing withstand?”
“Well it’s a spaceship, so anywhere between zero and 1.”
The one. On the outside. And it is mandatory as well.
As we disembark the planet please let oligarchs and billionaires go first. They took all the risk to achieve such great things. And if you look deep down (12,500’) you will see this is the way it has to be.
That reminds me of that scene in the Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where
spoiler
the Golgafrinchans invent an incoming world-ending tragedy, in an excuse to send into space all people with useless/supefluous jobs (bureaucrats, hairdressers, telephone cleaners, etc.) to a new planet, saying that the remaining parts of society will come after.
One must not forget that after including people like telephone sanitizers under what they deemed superfluous, the Golgafrinchans all died out from a plague contracted from a dirty telephone.
I respect the attempt to capitalise on a tragedy. Or possibly I’m disgusted by it. Either way.
it’s not the onion, but it is the post—which should be treated with equal seriousness as the onion.
Isn’t that the planet that is hotter than the planet that sits closer to the sun, has incredibly high atmospheric pressure and something that is not water rains from the skies?
Seems like a paradise, if we’re considering using a nearby planet as a toxic waste dump.
If you float high enough, you can get 1atm of pressure and not too much heat. You’d be above the nasty weather. You’d only need a very minimal space suit and breathing apparatus as well. But ocean gate is literally the last company I’d trust with that.
Sulfuric acid rains, yes. How fun!
Oh, I’m sure after what happened to the submersible that they’ll have volunteers lining up around the block for a space flight.
/s
If you go to Mars you can land and explored all possibilities inherent to being on the ground (including, most importantly, using the water ice from the south pole).
Venus on the other hand is a ball of rock wrapped in a dense and hot acid soup: you’de have to beat way worse technical challenges for, maybe, being able to locally extract from the athmosphere chemical compounds which you can just as easilly make on Earth (it’s mostly CO2 and sulfuric acid, though apparently it has 20 ppm of water).
It would make more sense to just have a moon base.
This is a scam.
I don’t wanna defend the guy but he did say floating colony, the atmosphere about 1 km up from the surface sits at earthlike temperatures and pressures-- astronauts would only need a breathing mask and some light skin protection as opposed to a pressure suit which is a major advantage.
My point is was twofold:
- What’s the point of floating up there if you can’t actually land because the challenges to do that are immense?
- What about the whole sulfuric acid problem?
It’s not as much the feasability of floating in the upper athmosphere of Venus that I was worried about, it’s that getting anywhere interesting from there is either enormously hard (hot sulfuric acid soup to go down) or useless (back to orbit from where you came and where you could just have stayed) and probably no fun by itself and unecessarily risky due to the sulfuric acid.
Tourism-wise a Moon base makes a lot more sense and is a lot more feasible for now than that, IMHO, whilst it also doesn’t seem to make sense to set up a floating base on Venus’ athmosphere to extract resources from it (because on Earth we’re hardly low on CO2 or sulfur).
PS: Thinking about it, a floating station on Earth’s athmosphere would probably be more fun than that also.
I mean, there’s basically no good economic reason for any space colonization whatsoever, outside of potentially the asteroid belt. Neither Venus nor Mars have significant resources that aren’t found in similar abundance on Earth, where extraction is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier. Tourism would be an industry, but it would almost certainly be an extremely niche business similar to OceanGate’s Titanic visits, Blue Origin’s launches, or stuff like Dear Moon. Rich people might pay very well to go visit Mars or Venus or the Moon but that pay certainly would not be enough to offset the trillions of dollars (yes, trillions) and decades that true colonization would take.
With that in mind, discussions of real space colonization are entirely theoretical and probably always will be, at least within our lifetimes. It is very conceivable that humans will land on Mars and maybe establish permanent research outposts there, on the Moon, or hypothetically Venus. But those would be far more similar to something like the ISS-- hosting a rotating crew of mostly astronauts and the occasional space tourist. I find it hard to imagine an economic case for anything more anywhere in the solar system within a reasonable span of time.
May be a silly question, but how would you go about making a floating colony? I dont think we have the tech to keep a city perpetually floating.
The theory is that since most of Venus’ atmosphere is CO2 at this level, the breathable atmosphere of a human habitat is actually bouyant, which would make suspending a colony much easier.
Doing something like that on the scale of a research presence like the ISS is within the realm of current technology-- but you are right that doing so for a whole city is not technically possible at the moment-- nor is true space colonization in general, I would argue. There’s a lot of unknowns and unsolved problems.
Why don’t they do a floating colony on Earth first as a test?
They did, it just didn’t float.
Ahh yeah the yearly “who can say bigger bullshit than Elon Musk” competition. The rally is strong this year
