To be clear, this is marketing crap to gather investors. Pretty much all “space colonization” proposals are. I was just talking about the theoretical technical feasibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OcanGate must be controlled by anarchist lizard people, posing themselves as being millionaires, with a secret plan to kill all of earth’s rich people.
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
spoilerthe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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