While many are looking to colonize Mars, the possibility of building a civilization on our other neighboring planet has arisen.
Venus appears to be a deadly, uninhabitable, planet with an extremely dry surface, and no liquid water. The temperature is hot enough to melt lead, and the atmosphere is so thick, that when standing on the surface you would experience air pressure 90 times as strong as Earth’s.
However, there is an area of Venus that could support a human colony. Its upper atmosphere, at an elevation of about 31-38 miles, the atmosphere has a far more mild temperature, and thus could hold a possibility of a human colony in the sky.
Using giant ‘balloons’ or blimps, to be more accurate we could create floating cities. For an object to float, it needs to be lighter than the planet’s atmosphere. Due to Venus having such an extraordinarly dense atmosphere, we would be able to make a blimp float by simply filling it with Earth’s air.
In addition, NASA has created an aerobot (which would be a helium balloon paired with a Venus orbiter) to learn more about Venus. The orbiter would stay far from Venus’s atmosphere and take measurements while the balloon would travel into Venus’s atmosphere. There have been several successful tests of this technology, and scientists are hopeful that we will be able to send balloons to Venus, thus making the future possibility of a floating colony skyrocket.
A colony on Venus wouldn’t be too far fetched, as we already have the technology to create floating cities. Mars is always going to be under exploration and under contemplation, but Venus could be just as inhabitable. All we have to do is look to the skies.
RELATED STORIES:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jpls-venus-aerial-robotic-balloon-prototype-aces-test-flights
https://www.universetoday.com/15570/colonizing-venus-with-floating-cities/
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20030022668.pdf
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-01/the-surprisingly-strong-case-for-colonizing-venus
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/how-to-colonize-venus/
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https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/astronauts/become-an-astronaut/
