Hey There! Welcome to Life Noggin!
It seems like everyone wants to go to Mars
nowadays.
The red planet has been all the buzz with
organizations like NASA and SpaceX promising
to get us there in the next ten-ish years,
but there are so many problems with living
on Mars.
Instead, some experts think we’d be better
off heading for the scorching, toxic land
known as Venus!
Yes, really.
People have been talking about going to Mars
since the 1950s and we obviously haven’t
made it yet.
Many of the problems with this idea revolve
around money and technology, but there’s
more.
Since Mars has less than half the gravity
than we have on Earth, we’d need to figure
out how to combat physical issues like muscle
degeneration and vision problems.
And spacecrafts would need to be able to land
safely on a planet with hardly any atmosphere
to slow them down.
Powerful solar storms bombard the surface
with crazy high levels of radiation.
And it’s freezing there, with temperatures
dropping to almost negative 125 celsius.
Humans would need some serious protection
if they really wanted to live on Mars.
We may need another option.
Venus.
You may be saying, “Blocko, Venus is like
425 degrees and the air is poisonous.
Plus, the atmospheric pressure would crush
us!”
And you're correct!
You're so smart, but people have some pretty
viable ideas for space colonies in Venus’s
neck of the woods.
About 50 km above Venus’s surface, there’s
an airspace with similar gravity, pressure,
and solar radiation protection to what we
have here on Earth.
The temperature ranges from about 30-50C,
creating a fairly livable atmosphere.
This all sounds pretty promising and NASA
thinks so too.
In 2015, NASA announced their High Altitude
Venus Operational Concept, aka HAVOC... which
I feel like isn’t the most optimistic name
for a space mission.
This project would send two astronauts to
Venus’s upper atmosphere, hovering in spaceships
above the clouds.
This initial trip would last 30 days and could
lead to future colonization of Venus’s airspace.
Floating cities!
How cool would that be?!
Humans wouldn’t even need pressurized suits
or radiation shields to go outside!
Sure, they’d still need oxygen and something
to protect them against Venus’s sulfuric
acid rain, but no more bulky astronauts suits?
Sounds good to me!
And the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen
and sulfur in Venus’s atmosphere could be
used to create breathable air, fertilizers
for crops, and even water!
You may be wondering how these floating cities
would be powered.
NASA has given some clues as to how this could
work (and we’ve got some ideas too).
Firstly, the vehicles would be equipped with
massive solar panels to take advantage of
the sun’s energy.
Second, there’s the possibility of using
the carbon in the atmosphere to generate electricity
via graphene-powered superconductors or synthetic
photosynthesis.
People living in these floating cities could
also eventually begin to terraform and colonize
the surface of Venus with the right technology,
but that’d take a while.
Some have proposed flooding the lower atmosphere
with hydrogen to create an ocean that’d
cover 80% of the planet.
Others suggest striking the planet with large
objects to speed up it’s rotation, hopefully
warming the planet and changing its atmosphere.
These plans would be really difficult but
personally, I think living in a floating city
sounds cooler anyway.
So what planet should we explore next?
Let us know in the comment section below!
Living on Mars or Venus seems like a cool
idea, but if you’re curious about how you
could live on a moon without a spacesuit,
check out this video from our friends Seeker.
Saturn has 62 confirmed moons with more being
discovered all the time, and 2 of these moons,
Titan and Enceladus could be habitable.
As always, MY NAME IS BLOCKO!
This has been Life Noggin.
Don't forget to keep on thinking!
