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“Waterworld,” sans Kevin Costner.

Whenever someone mentions Waterworld, I go off.

"Niagara Falls," he said, "... slowly I turned, step by step ..."

No, not that kind of "going off", but more like going off on a tangent.

Actually, a Hohman Transfer Orbit, rather than a tangent, but the point is that I start thinking about a real Waterworld that we are going to be settling one day soon.

It's a planet that has no dry land anywhere to step foot on. We'll have to make our settlements out of stuff that will float on the ocean of that world.

But it won't be like Costner's world. The gravity and the pressure will be okay, as will the temperature, but we won't be able to breathe the air.

Our air, too, we'll have to provide, but we can generate it out of the local materials.

So, basically, we'll have to build shelters that float, where we can grow our food, and the growing of our food will also provide us with the oxygen we need to breathe.

From that ocean-world's ocean, we'll extract the materials we need to patch up and expand our shelters, and even make whole new settlements from the raw materials.

Interested?

And no, this isn't one of those distant planets they've discovered orbiting a star 400 light-years from here. Eventually they'll find one or two, or even several, but we'll never be able to get to them.

We can't even get to the next nearest star, which is only four light-years away, (a mere 24 quadrillion miles).

This "Waterworld" is right next door.

We call it "Venus".

All right, I've been saying something slightly incorrectly. Venus has no water, or almost none.

What it does have is carbon dioxide, about a hundred Earth-atmospheres worth of it or more. And heat. Lots of heat.

So why do I call it a water world? Well, if you think about that vast amount of carbon dioxide as not that much different from water, and treat it like water, then that's what you have!

Most of Venus' carbon dioxide is trapped close to the surface, where you wouldn't want to be anyway. Rather like an ocean of steam. Stay out of there!

But above that, on top of that ocean, the conditions are what I described above; Earth temperature and pressure, nine-tenths of Earth's gravity, and air you can't breathe.

But your vegetables and geraniums and sunflowers can breathe it, and they'll breathe out air you can breathe!

So here's how it works. You go there, (I don't know how. See Hohman transfer orbit.) And when you get there, you descend into the atmosphere on parachutes, and inflate a balloon as you descend.

Stop at thirty-five miles altitude.

That's very high, (and would be very thin and cold!), in an Earth atmosphere, but on Venus, that's where the pressure is Earth-normal, the temperature is Earth-normal, and the gravity is just enough under Earth-normal to make you feel stronger and light on your feet.

So now you have filled up your geodesic-framed greenhouse with oxygen and nitrogen, and made sure that the Teflon based plastic enclosing it is secure and leak-free. Now is the time to spread dirt around on the floor and plant your seeds.

Yes, dirt will be hard to come by, and water too. That's the problem of living on a new world.

The good news is that the air you breathe, oxygen and nitrogen, are lifting gases in a carbon dioxide atmosphere like Venus'. Ordinary air has about half the lifting capacity of helium here!

Need more air? You can get nitrogen from the atmosphere. Oxygen you'll have to extract from carbon dioxide, or wait for the plants to do it. Building materials? Well, you could use bamboo, if you want to grow it.

Your shelters will have to be wrapped in that Teflon plastic I mentioned, but you can get the ingredients for it from the atmosphere as well.

All told, it's a lot more work than you might want to take on. But the promise is there. Energy, room, opportunity, ...

And it's all right next door!!!