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Floating Cities On Venus
Geoffrey.landis writes "Some of you may have heard me talk about colonizing Venus. Well, for those who haven't, Universe Today is running story about floating cities on Venus. It's a reasonable alternative for space colonies — after all, the atmosphere of Venus (at about 50 km) is the most Earth-like environment in the solar system (other than Earth, of course). '50 km above the surface, Venus has air pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0C-50C range, a quite comfortable environment for humans. Humans wouldn't require pressurized suits when outside, but it wouldn't quite be a shirtsleeves environment. We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.'"
It is always this way. I've been saying that we should attempt manned missions to Venus using balloons for years, and now that somebody else suggests it I feel compelled to start poking holes in the idea.
It is quite nice as a there-and-back science mission but for a long term colony it's a terrible environment. The local resources are incredibly difficult to get hold of if you have to send a balloon down to get them, remember that the record for longest lasting machine on the Venusian surface is slightly over an hour.
The only reason to go there and take humans along is if space travel has become cheap and easy enough that you can do it on a whim.
100 years?
There are places that are like that NOW. You just don't hear too much about it on a regular basis.
I have actually been to China, and I can tel you.. I BELIEVE that 16 out of 20 of the worlds most polluted cities are in that country.
We don't need to go to Venus to have to take those kinds of precautions. I think we will need to take similar precautions in 25 years in certain parts of the world. Actually, scratch that. Those parts of the world will have people that cannot AFFORD to take those kinds of precautions.
Considering the cost of colonizing Venus though, I highly doubt that "regular" people will get to go at all.
I think before we talk about other places, we should probably get the kinks out of everything by putting something on our own moon.
How about building cities that float in the oceans on earth first? We can already go there, and even do go there all the time. We can get back to land just as easily as we can get to the ocean. It's very fast to get there, weeks or hours depending on whether your city is large enough to have an airport. Going to the moon sounds nice, but we should make and follow through on plans to do something more practical first.
How about building cities that float in the oceans on earth first?
We have already. They are called Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.