Future tech Floating colonies on Venus
High above the carbon-dioxide-laden clouds, this planet could turn from hostile to relatively hospitable for future astronauts
It’s incredibly hot, with a searing average temperature of over 460 degrees Celsius (860 degrees Fahrenheit). Its atmosphere is thick with choking carbon dioxide, laced with poisonous sulphuric-acid clouds that hang above a parched desert-like landscape, renewed by the angry eruptions of volcanoes. Without a doubt Venus – with its additional high-pressure environment that has a crushing power almost 100 times that of Earth’s – is unfriendly for life. Sending astronauts to a world that can cook, crush and choke in just a few seconds and hoping they survive is ambitious to say the least.
However, according to some – such as Geoffrey Landis of NASA’s Glenn Research Center – where there’s a will there’s a way. In a concept that sees fiction meet science, Venus could be the next go-to destination for colonisation. Forget attempting to touch down on the parched, unpredictable surface. Forget trying to pass through the suffocating atmosphere. There’s a new concept, and it’s straight from the pages of futuristic novels. Floating cities akin to levitating island Laputa of Gulliver’s Travels fame or airborne habitats are the new way forward, creating an unusual twist that would see humans living relatively comfortably in hostile conditions, surfing above the surface.
In general Venus is unfit for habitation, but some 50 kilometres (31 miles) above the surface a different story is told: the dense carbon-dioxide atmosphere gives way to an environment similar to our own as it cools down to somewhere between 0 and 50 degrees Celsius (32 and
122 degrees Fahrenheit) and the pressure is a more forgiving one bar. However, even in these conditions we would not be able to wander around quite as comfortably as we do here on Earth. The air is still toxic for us to breathe and the acid that rains down would spell disaster. But with a supply of air and the right protection, this is a seemingly small hurdle to overcome.
According to Landis, getting a city the size of New York to float might seem like a far-flung idea, but with the simple premise of buoyancy it might actually be feasible. It’s just a question of finding some type of lifting gas, Landis says, and that gas is the nitrogen and oxygen found in our own atmosphere. When the air we breathe meets with carbon dioxide, floating occurs, bringing a lifting power just over half that of helium, which we know is what gives hot-air balloons their effortless flight. Using the same principle, floating colonies are envisioned with breathable air domes to lift a city off the ground, with storage tanks of readily available hydrogen and helium allowing the lifting power to be adjusted. The problems faced by a Venusian colony at first glance seem to gradually disappear as it slowly builds height in Venus’ skies.
Further still, hanging above the carbondioxide-laden clouds, solar panels could take advantage of the sunlight reflected from the thick atmospheric smog, providing almost twice the energy Earth can from above its cloud layer. The 400 kilometre (250 mile) per hour winds that rage around Venus’ circumference and provide this terrestrial planet with its so-called superrotation sweep up even more power for these levitating platforms. Venus might be unwelcoming, but with these tricks to avoid its hostility, why shouldn’t we head to the second planet from the Sun?