One convenient circumstance: A breathable Earthlike atmosphere will float at that altitude, so it would be easy to live in floating balloon habitats.
With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus?
What if the small balloons were the size of a Las Vegas resort, and the average ones where something like Manhattan?
I wonder if there'd be some tangible benefit to colonizing Venus for adventurous entrepreneurial types... "There's gold in and/or on them thar clouds!"
The society that might arise in an entirely fluid, borderless geography might have a certain attraction. Venus might wind up being the next Las Vegas, writ large in the 21st century.
With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus?
You could have ultra-high altitude balloons that can act as staging centers for rotorvators. Those would be way cheaper than space elevators to manufacture.
The lower atmosphere of Venus is denser than the surface of Earth’s ocean, but with extremely violent currents. The upper atmosphere - at the “inhabitable” level - has similar but much less dense winds, with the added henefit of a charmingly toxic and aggressive haze of sulphuric acid.
It might just about be possible to build a floating research station, at vast effort and expense, but floating cities are not going to happen without some near-magical breakthroughs in materials science and engineering.
And without access to the surface, there isn’t much to do above Venus anyway.
The acid clouds aren't that bad. People have even worked out how to manufacture PTFE out of the Venusian atmosphere, so there's your acid proofing right there. We already know how to build lighter than air craft.
And without access to the surface, there isn’t much to do above Venus anyway.
Access to the surface is perfectly doable using teleoperated robots. You can lower them onto the surface with a store of a phase-change substance for cooling. Dry ice might be suitable for that. When they run out, you haul them back up.
There's wasn't that much to do in the desert where Las Vegas is located, either.
MgH2 -> Mg + H2 (thermolysis @ 287 degC)
CO2 + H2 --Fe-> CO + H2O (water-gas shift)
CO + H2 --Fe-> C + H2O (Bosch)
CO2 + 4 H2 --Ni-> CH4 + 2 H2O (Sabatier)
2n+1 H2 + n CO --metal--> CnH(2n+2) + n H2O (Fischer-Tropsch)
2 Mg + CO2 -> 2 MgO + C
CaH2 + 2 H2O -> Ca(OH)2 + 2 H2
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 -> CaCO3 + H2OThe primary concern would be that Earth-gas would not be a good enough lifting gas in the CO2-depleted Venus atmosphere to keep the floating habitat at a cool enough altitude. Hydrogen-filled chambers would certainly work for that, but you would have to bring that hydrogen with you to Venus. By the time atmospheric oxygen becomes a risk, you would just land the dirigible and burn the hydrogen in a controlled fashion.
Why not extract the hydrogen out of the clouds of acid?
You could bring along MgH2, then once you hit the atmosphere, you can thermally decompose it into Mg and H2, then react the Mg with sulfuric acid to get MgSO4 and another H2.
Also, exchanging the fixed geography of land for the fluid geography of fluid might result in changes to the underlying nature of society. In hunter gatherer days, dissenters could simply walk to a different part of the environment. Farmer's fields and defensive walls anchored people to particular pieces of land. If everyone lived in mobile floating habitats, everyone would be free to move. This is quite likely to change the nature of government.
You also get this in a Dyson Swarm, but there's a matter of scale. A minimum viable space colony is likely to be larger and more expensive than a minimum viable floating Venusian compound.
O'Neill was overoptimistic about launch prices coming down in the near term and about the economic case for solar power satellites and for people in space to mine the materials and build and maintain the powersats, etc. But as I remember it this community made a good case that you don't need planets to live on; with their gravity wells and atmospheres and night/day cycles they're mostly a big nuisance compared to free-space habitats built with lunar and asteroid materials.
1. If we're already going to do the journey to a far off planet, it'd be nice if we didn't have to have a huge amount of infrastructure to stay alive on the planet.
2. I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. The only life we know is on Earth. Earth-like planets are a good place to start.
Dangerous assumption. That's like saying the purpose of science is to unify nature. If nature isn't unified, the goal won't make it so.
The most likely outcome is probably that we will become our own aliens. Once we send out colony ships, those people will form their own branches of the evolutionary tree. Over millennia, that will equal aliens. It doesn't really matter that they're our ancestors when they end up looking, talking, and acting completely alien.
This seems far more likely than running across other life in the local group. We're forever imprisoned to our local group, which is something like 0.001% of the observable universe. And for all we know, the total universe could be infinite. This requires strange assumptions, like running into your own doppelgangers, and infinite energy. But we can't know it's not true. And in such a circumstance, we have to face the unsettling half-empty truth that we're simply alone.
A lot of sci fi seems to somehow overlook our cultural/social baggage and yet those are precisely what are crippling us now, and likely to retard our progress in the future too, if not outright destroy us.
To clarify, I believe that within a generation or two, people on another planet will hardly relate to their originating culture and will see it as an other. This change will at first be benign, merely based on differences of day-to-day life on a developing colony, but later, after initial material support largely dissipates, would see it as something to cast off or, should they not openly revolt or request a plebiscite, will treat it diplomatically as if it were another country, or as it is in this case, as literally another world.
Consider that when traveling between a host and colony settlement takes literal weeks, months, or years, sending information would likely also similarly be costly and would take prohibitively long times for many real time applications: latency up to several hours or days to arrive could be expected for even small downloads. This borderline resets communication the era of writing letters, if I may be a bit dramatic, because this absolutely neuters a huge amount of modern culture.
Cultural products made on earth would be costly and difficult to ship, so we’d find that earth films, games, internet, are mostly not going to bridge the gap. Even after infrastructure for communication improves, the latency problem of “space is big” isn’t going to go away. For example, would you read 15 HN pages if each page, no images, no modifications, took 15 minutes to load? I suspect not, and you’d fill that time with something else that an earthling software engineer might not.
It’s all elements of culture. The earth news cycle? Almost wholly irrelevant, besides economics and space-related news, which impacts what is sent and relations with home.
Celebrities? People will find it hard to care about celebrities who will never visit them, and who have works they’re not hearing until weeks, months, or years after they stopped being relevant on Earth.
To fill this gap, people on the colonies will be making their own, and however bad the gap is earth -> space culture wise, due to the difficulty that limited resources will impose, culture from space -> earth will likely be rather rare.
So, culture is going to start diverging, relatively hard and rapidly. Separated from leaders, most current cultural information, old national borders, credible risk of counterattack from earth for anything short of armed revolution (space war or military pacification against one’s own people would likely be an economic and political Vietnam, and you definitely can’t launch a surprise attack when people can see the weapons or troops launching), people will mostly stop giving a shit about their home world and will become naturalized on their new ones.
Two or three more generations like that and you’ll eventually be talking about people on Mars, for example, as if they were from Australia.
Sure, if a "clone" of Earth is found, it would make things created here more reusable on the new planet, but seems like a pretty limited way of viewing the potential for ventures in space.
More to the point, is anyone aware of the requirements of non-planet staged space operations would look like and how viable such plans would be compared to planet dependent operations.