OceanGate co-founder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050
OceanGate co-founder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050
Guillermo Söhnlein, who co-founded OceanGate, is also heading up an effort that’ll allow up to 1,000 people to live in a floating, space station-like structure in Venus’ atmosphere by t…
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.
142That would keep them safe from the giant space goat.
35Now that is a reference from a frood who knows where his towel is!
11
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.
49Alright 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.
35Well 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
10Ok so we have established it's possible, now why would we ever want to do it?
7No worries. There are some carbon fiber types that are pretty chemically resistant. I'll start saving scraps at work for him.
3That 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.....
1
Never underestimate human ignorance. Even if they make an idiot proof system, they'll just turn around and make a better idiot.
2Well 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.
2
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.
34Ok, 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.
24What 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
12I mean, they had a leak in the ISS, and they just covered it with tape and carried on.
4Because they could get more air, they just had to nip down the gravity well. That's a longer jog on Venus.
2
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.
3
Can we pick the 1,000 people? I've got a few I'd like to send to Venus.
28Can we get a non-business major to run these companies? Clearly these folks don't know what they're doing.
25They know exactly what they are doing. The trick is that what they are doing is different to what they say they are doing.
15Permanently Deleted
8
Shut up, don't discourage them!
7
I might be able to come up with a list of 1,000 people I'd like to send to Venus. 100 for sure.
22Permanently Deleted
7
"It's not gonna implode, is it?"
"Haha, of course not!"
"Whew"
"It's space so it'll explode!"
18"How many atmospheres can this thing withstand?"
6"Well it's a spaceship, so anywhere between zero and 1."
6The one. On the outside. And it is mandatory as well.
2
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.
16That 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.
5One 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.
11
I respect the attempt to capitalise on a tragedy. Or possibly I'm disgusted by it. Either way.
15it's not the onion, but it is the post—which should be treated with equal seriousness as the onion.
13Isn'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.
12If 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.
1Sulfuric acid rains, yes. How fun!
1
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
11Why don't they do a floating colony on Earth first as a test?
10They did, it just didn't float.
8
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.
10This is a scam.
4I 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.
3My 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.
3
Ahh yeah the yearly "who can say bigger bullshit than Elon Musk" competition. The rally is strong this year
9Gotta love rich people trying to make their personal space kingdom instead of fixing the mess they made down here.I call dibs on the joypad. Don't worry, I'm decedent at Gran Turismo.
9click/rage bait
7No way...this is just marketing crap to gather investors.
6To 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.
2
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.
5Cool let’s start with all of their friends and family.
5yea.... at least mars has the potential of people being able to walk on the surface (with spacesuits).
Venus... Well. It's pretty deadly. Its like the Australia of planets. Everything will kill you.
Deadly winds. Acid rain. Scorching hot.
Isn't, too many positive traits....
4Why Venus? Because Mars was somehow taken?
3Cause it sounds new and exciting and will get him more suckers to defraud, presumably.
2