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To: NicknamedBob

Hey Bob, wasn’t this an idea you floated a while back?


27 posted on 12/22/2014 9:19:37 AM PST by Dead Corpse (A Psalm in napalm...)
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To: Dead Corpse; BenLurkin
"Hey Bob, wasn’t this an idea you floated a while back?"

It's one I've been thinking about for a while. Jokes abound, but Venus offers the most Earth-like conditions of any other planet in the solar system, at the appropriate altitude.

Here's the right way to think about it: Venus is like a water-world, with a globe-girdling ocean of carbon dioxide rather than water. If you float around on the surface of that "ocean", you'll enjoy remarkably Earth-like conditions. The gravity is just under Earth's. Remember that Venus is Earth's "twin".

And up at fifty kilometers altitude, you're above the sulfuric acid clouds, where the pressure and temperature are at Earth-normal values.

So how do you stay up? In a carbon dioxide atmosphere, such as Venus has, ordinary air is a lifting gas. Oxygen and nitrogen have half the lifting capacity in Venus atmosphere as helium has here.

The big advantage is that you can walk around inside your balloon component instead of just hanging in a gondola from it.

Picture a really big "jungle gym", such as we had on the elementary school playgrounds when we were kids. For extra safety, make it a double layer, and pump the space between the frames with pure nitrogen (which you get from Venus!). Then the rest of the interior has regular air, a mix of nitrogen and oxygen, eighty/twenty. The oxygen comes from plants, which take it out of the carbon dioxide. Basically, you're living inside a greenhouse!

You walk around in your greenhouse, smell the flowers, pick the fresh vegetables, and live a peaceful existence, just being wafted along in your cloud city at about 300 kilometers per hour.

At Venus' super-rotation ("Jet Stream") speed, your day will be closer to a week, so you'll have to adjust to being really off the clock. I think it would make a great retirement facility.

29 posted on 12/22/2014 2:51:50 PM PST by NicknamedBob ("Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel. May all my enemies go to ...." -- Ogden Nash)
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