Via Toby, a detailed proposal for floating colonies on Venus. I heard Geoff Landis talk about this at Boskone a while back– the basic idea is that the Venusian atmosphere is so dense that you could easily build structures that would float high enough up in the atmosphere to be above the hellish temperatures. You still have to deal with the sulfuric acid clouds, but what would life be without its little challenges.
The post linked above adds an extra, counter-intuitive motivation to the picture:
There are many other reasons to colonize Venus. First and foremost, human survival is dependent upon our expansion and colonization of space as Stephen Hawking recently made so clear. Venus is enticing for such a proposal for the three very important reasons: location, location, location. One, it is Earth’s closest neighbor (excluding the Moon). Two, the colony is located in the dense atmosphere and thus it blocks harmful solar radiation naturally–problems that would be encountered on the Moon and Mars. The third is Venus’ relative position to the coveted asteroid belt. It seems counterintuitive that Venus has a prime location for reaching the asteroid belt considering it is closer to the sun than Earth and the asteroid belt is even further than Earth but astrodynamics says otherwise.
I have to admit, the asteroid angle isn’t one that had occurred to me. The author links to a detailed explanation, though, so I’m inclined to believe it.
The thing is, I’m not convinced. Not about the math– that I buy– I just don’t quite understand the whole asteroid belt thing. Space enthusiasts are forever pointing to asteroid mining as a compelling reason for space exploration, and I really don’t quite get the point. Is there some project you have in mind that needs a billion tons of nickel?
Because, really, that’s the roadblock here, and it’s a big one. In order for asteroid mining to be a compelling reason for space exploration, there needs to be a compelling reason for mining asteroids, and I’m just not sure what that is. Yes, the asteroids offer vast quantities of various metals and other elements in convenient orbiting chunks, but I’m not sure what it is that we’re supposed to do with them.
I mean, I don’t see a lot of engineering projects here on Earth languishing because we don’t have enough metal. Not enough oil, sure, not enough money, absolutely, but is there anything underway that’s stalled out because we just can’t mine nickel fast enough to meet the demand?
And that’s where the asteroid mining plans go awry, to my mind. It’s supposed to be a way to get commerical interests involved in space exploration, but for it to really be interesting to industry, there needs to be a way to make money off it, and I’m not sure what that is. I mean, say you manage to mount an expedition to the asteroid belt, and bring a giant chunk of rock back to Earth. Now what?
Absent some project that requires vast quantities of whatever you can mine out of the rock, the main effect of this would seem to be a global crash in the price of whatever you can mine out of the rock. At which point, I don’t know how your recoup your investment. This is barely Economics 101– if you have a billion tons of nickel sitting around, and nothing to do with it, the price will be very low. We’ve done the experiment, after all– ask the Spanish about all that New World gold…
It seems to me that space enthusiasts would be better off if they aside thinking up clever new ways to reach the asteroid belt cheaply, and and started thinking up clever new reasons to reach the asteroid belt cheaply. Come up with something that creates a demand for what’s out there, and then you’ll have a market for ways to get there. Without a reason to go there, it doesn’t really matter how good your transportation ideas are.
(And circular arguments like “We need a billion tons of nickel to build space ships to mine the asteroids/ colonize the moons of Jupiter/ fly to Alpha Centauri” are cheating.)