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.'"

Comments

Venus proves GW skeptics

[tjstork]

According to Wikipedia, the mass of Venus's atmosphere is roughly 93 times that of the earth, and Venus's atmosphere is 97% CO2 while the earth's atmosphere is 400ppm or 0.04% CO2. So, we're looking at 2250 times as much CO2 as on the earth.

Thus, the curious mind might be tempted to reasonably ask, why is Venus not 2250 times as hot as the earth? Or, conversely, if we examine the two knowns of CO2 planetary heating in the entire human experience, we could probably conclude that a doubling of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere would yield a fraction of a degree in heating, not the massive amounts of heating preached to us by the IPCC.

Re:Instant Global Warming

[Bob-taro]

Probably. I can't imagine Mercury having much of an atmosphere at all above 50km.

Venus's atmospheric pressure at 50km is close to Earth's at the surface, according to the article.