It's not
easy to find comfortable places to stay elsewhere in the solar system. However,
Geoffrey Landis, a scientist at NASA's Glenn Research Center, suggests that
Venus might be a good place to look.
I know what you're thinking. Venus? Surface temperature of 914 degrees Fahrenheit (490
degrees Celsius) with about 92 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth's
surface? Doesn't sound very hospitable.
However, Landis, a science fiction writer in his spare time,
suggests that we think a bit outside the box. In a recent interview, he
suggested building a city in the clouds about 31 miles (50 kilometers) above the
surface.
At that altitude, the atmosphere of Venus is at its most
Earth-like. The atmosphere has an air pressure of about one bar and the
temperature ranges in the 32-122 degrees Fahrenheit range (0-50 degrees Celsius). You'd need breathing
apparatus, but probably not a space suit.
Landis adds that a city might not be as difficult to build —
and to keep afloat — as you might think.
"Because the atmosphere of Venus is CO2, the gases that
we live in all the time, nitrogen and oxygen, would be a lifting gas,"
Landis said. "On Earth, we know to get something to lift, you need
something lighter than air. Well, on Venus, guess what? Our air is lighter than
air, or at least lighter than the Venus atmosphere."
"If
you could just take the room you're sitting in and replace the walls with
something thinner, the room would float on Venus," he remarked.
SF fans are no doubt hoping that Lando Calrissian will be
available to act as administrator; as long as you're building Cloud City, you might as well do it right.
Star Wars fans may recall that Cloud
City is an installation on the planet Bespin, first seen in The Empire
Strikes Back in 1980. Bespin has a habitable layer from about 93-112 miles (150-180
kilometers) down from space with an oxygen atmosphere and normal pressure.
Another example of this idea in science fiction is Stratos
City from the 1969 Star Trek episode The
Cloud Minders.
Readers with an interest in the classics know that this is
not a new idea; the floating island of
Laputa forms one of the wondrous locations of interest in Jonathan Swift's
book Gulliver's Travels, which
was published in 1728.
From Colonizing Venus with floating cities.
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with
permission of Technovelgy.com)
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