Mars No More! Why Tech Giants Want VENUS Instead | Unveiled

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Mars No More! Why Tech Giants Want Venus Instead</h4>

For decades, it’s looked as if Mars is the true, final frontier for space exploration. Of course, there are lots of worlds beyond Mars, but humans living permanently on the Red Planet has been a goal that scientists have been dreaming about since the dawn of the space age. Today, though, some people have already stopped believing that Mars is the future, and instead want to turn their attention to Venus.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: why do tech giants now want to go to Venus, instead of Mars?

In 2023, the businessman Guillermo Söhnlein founded the Humans2Venus Foundation. Söhnlein has a long history of “space entrepreneurship”, encouraging wealthy industrialists to invest in space research since the early 2000s. However, he’s also one of the founders of OceanGate, the company now best known for the catastrophic implosion of its Titan submarine in  June 2023. Söhnlein left OceanGate way back in 2013, a decade before the implosion that would kill the sub’s five passengers – including the company’s CEO and co-founder, Stockton Rush. Now, Söhnlein has plans to put people on Venus by 2050 – or, rather, into Venus’s atmosphere. He’s relying on the cloud colony concept, a popular, hypothetical type of human habitat that could keep people alive on Venus, a planet so notoriously deadly that it’s nicknamed “Earth’s evil twin”. Söhnlein has long drawn connections between ocean research and space research, which is why pivoting from deep-sea exploration to space makes a certain sense. He wants to build a big enough colony that 1,000 people can live on Venus, perhaps permanently. His plan has been met with some skepticism, however; after all, OceanGate showed us what can happen when wealthy entrepreneurs ‘innovate’ in such domains.

Many might also wonder: why Venus, and not Mars? Mars has a lot of problems, that’s true, like significant exposure to radiation, but its temperatures – while extreme – certainly aren’t on Venus’s level. Plus, many space companies, from private ones like SpaceX to NASA itself, have continued to invest in Mars research and Mars missions, with the hope of sending humans to the Red Planet sometime soon. But, in the meantime, Venus hasn’t been totally abandoned by established researchers; NASA is, in fact, building multiple spacecraft to go to our evil twin. The first is called VERITAS, short for “Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy”. VERITAS is going to be loaded up with instruments that can study Venus from orbit like never before. Secondly, there’s DAVINCI, the “Deep Atmospheric Venus Investigation of Noble gasses, Chemistry, and Imaging”, which will actually go to the planet’s surface for the first time in decades. They’re both set to launch by the end of the 2020s, arriving on Venus circa 2030. So, it’s not like Venus has been completely abandoned, and is in desperate need of outside industrialists to fund important missions to go there. Then again, maybe NASA’s comparative sense of caution is less appealing to the raw romanticism of forging a new path for humankind in this inhospitable environment. In short, Venus is still quite a hard sell.

Nevertheless, while the surface of Venus is so extreme that we’ll probably never be able to live there, the clouds tell a different story. The atmosphere is still completely non-breathable, but we’d at least be protected from radiation and would benefit from Venus’s other Earth-like qualities – its gravity, for instance, which is very similar to the gravity on Earth. The idea of living there is plausible enough that NASA has created its own concepts, notably the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, or “HAVOC”, showing how these cloud-habitats might come to be. Essentially, the atmosphere on Venus is so dense that regular air floats. This is the same principle behind airships on Earth - using light gasses like helium and hydrogen to float. But the fact that, on Venus, we could potentially use just Earth’s regular air is a huge benefit, since it doesn’t have the major drawbacks of substances like helium or hydrogen; helium is expensive in the volumes needed for airships, while hydrogen is highly flammable. Regular air, by contrast, is abundant and won’t ignite - so there are reasons for optimism there. As well as that, airships and balloons do already exist. We’ve had them on Earth for hundreds of years, so there isn’t any especially new-fangled technology required. And, in general, the idea of building floating cities isn’t new either. It’s as old as other heady space concepts like orbital cities and colonies, imagined by Soviet scientists in the early 1970s. 

Of course, the Soviets were also the ones to hit many of the most significant Venusian milestones, with - for example - Venera 4 successfully measuring the atmosphere of Venus in 1967. At this time, scientists were still hoping to find liquid water there – which we now know would certainly be impossible when Venus’s surface temperatures are around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. But since those high temperatures are all caused by the thick atmosphere trapping heat, we also know that building high in the cloud belt is a good idea. Over the years we’ve actually grown surprisingly knowledgeable on what would and wouldn’t work.

But, still, one question remains; why would we want to live on Venus anyway? Yes, it would be an exciting development for science and space research, but what would be the point? While it’s likely that Venus, as a terrestrial planet so similar to Earth, has plenty of resources that we could potentially extract, the actual  process of extracting them would be extraordinarily difficult. Since we would be unable to ever reach the surface, everything would have to be done remotely with equipment designed to withstand both immense atmospheric pressure AND extreme heat. This is much more complex than even deep-sea research is. Some of the principles of withstanding pressure would work, sure, but submarines and submersibles don’t have particularly extreme temperature gradients to contend with. The lowest sea temperature ever recorded on Earth, for instance, was measured underneath a glacier in Antarctica, and was 27.3 degrees Fahrenheit – not that cold at all, while the warmest sea temperature ever clocked is 99 degrees Fahrenheit in the Persian Gulf. So, we would need machines LIKE submarines, but which can withstand never-before-experienced temperature extremes. On the one hand, this is possible and we have lots of building materials that wouldn’t melt in Venus’s atmosphere – steel, for instance. But on the other hand, would it be worth the expense? Probably not.

And so, we’re back to the idea of exploring Venus simply for exploration’s sake. And perhaps the only possible return on investment for private companies would be the probably high price tag that tickets to Venus would command - although, Söhnlein doesn’t appear to have said anything about charging his Venusian colonists yet. To return to OceanGate, traveling down to the Titanic wreckage doesn’t generate any resources, so OceanGate funded its endeavors by charging massive amounts of money to its super-rich passengers. A ticket on the doomed 2023 voyage cost $250,000. That’s for a trip that was supposed to last only a few hours, had it been successful. But we’d need to massively expand with Venus in our sights.

Right now, it is even more expensive to go into space commercially, with Virgin Galactic charging almost half a million dollars a ticket. And for Blue Origin’s maiden flight on New Shepard, the tickets ran as high as $28 million – unless you were invited as an honorable guest, like William Shatner was, and paid nothing. Venus is still something far bigger, though. An average trip there would take around 4 months just to arrive, and could take six months or more. This means that any Venus company would need to charge ticket prices that cover the costs of building the rockets, the long-haul spacecraft, and the colony construction itself. And this is for a journey that would certainly carry huge risk even if everything went as planned. Any colony would quickly become basically the most expensive hotel to ever exist, and stays of many months would be mandatory. If we take Virgin Galactic as a baseline, which charges $450,000 for a 90-minute space journey, it would cost $7.2 million for one day in space. Then, if we assume that one of these Venus trips takes four months either way, and then maybe you want to stay for a few months, we’ve got a year of time both in space and on Venus itself. Estimating using Virgin’s numbers, this would cost an enormous $1.73 billion dollars for one, year-long trip to Venus. On average, the world’s billionaires keep about 1% of their wealth as liquid cash. This is still a massive amount of money, sure, but they would likely need to liquidate more assets just to cough up the funds for such an eye watering venture. 

For now, while attention might be moving away from Mars to some degree, the interest in Venus is at an early stage. And there are clearly some sizable problems to iron out. In this video we haven’t even considered all of the other issues that could (and would arise). The problems of extreme isolation, even with 1,000 people. The impractical communication lag, with Venus being on average about 3 light-minutes away from us on Earth. This would be no easy task. And while Söhnlein may want his Venus city to house a thousand, with just 2,700 billionaires in the world, how likely is it that he’d ever get a thousand of them to visit at once? And how likely then that there aren’t any catastrophic disasters along the way, and that everything gets funding and goes 100% to plan? 

What do you think? Is there a place for private industry like this in space exploration, or is it so ludicrously expensive, and dangerous, that space colony construction should stay with space agencies instead? Venus is certainly a fascinating planet and increased study is always exciting… but we’ve still got a long way to go before we send humans there. Not that that will deter the richest of the rich. Because that’s why some tech giants are abandoning Mars for Venus.