Why future generations may prefer floating above Venus to colonizing Mars

NOTE FOR 2020 READERS: This is the 12th in a series of open letters(opens in a new tab) to the next century, now just 80 years away. The series asks: What will the world look like at the other end of our kids' lives?

Dear 22nd Century,

Is there life on Mars?

Human life, I mean. Or does a pioneering percentage of you have your heads in the clouds of a closer planet instead?

It’s not the sort of thing we take surveys about, because we’ve got a lot on our political plate right now. But if you were to ask the average 21st century Joe which planet we are most likely to establish permanent habitation on first, Mars would win in a landslide. It’s just a given. It’s NASA’s official plan — has been ever since the first President Bush announced we’d land on the planet by, ahem, 2019(opens in a new tab) — as well as Elon Musk’s highly theoretical plan for 2024(opens in a new tab). We’ve watched and read The Martian(opens in a new tab), cheering for deposits of ice and potatoes grown in Mars' barren soil.

We didn’t pay so much attention to the downsides of trying to settle so far from home. We ignored reports of toxic sands on the red planet(opens in a new tab) that might poison human visitors, let alone our potatoes. We didn’t really consider the surface radiation problem(opens in a new tab), or the minimum 260 days of cosmic radiation that will bombard (and could really mess up) astronauts' brains(opens in a new tab) on the way there. So much radiation, in fact, that it could double their risk(opens in a new tab) of getting cancer over a lifetime.

But what if there were another option? What if there were a planet you could travel to in roughly half the time? One that is increasingly full of mystery —and that is, due to the weird nature of orbital dynamics and slingshot maneuvers, actually on the way to Mars? What if we didn’t set foot on this planet —avoiding all the overtones of Martian “colonization,” a word that is being widely reconsidered in a year when we’re tearing down Christopher Columbus statues(opens in a new tab) — but simply floated above its cloud layer instead?

Step out of the shadows, Venus, your time has arrived. 

Over the last decade, planetary scientists have started beating the drum for more Venus missions. Partly, this is because we keep discovering more mysteries about our sister planet — strange dark spots, active volcanoes, and a three-billion year period where it had liquid water and potentially life. Partly it’s because we keep finding exoplanets in what’s known as “the Venus zone” around other stars — two more were discovered(opens in a new tab) as I wrote this — and would love to know what makes them tick. (Oh yeah, and scientists may have some urgent interest in studying a planet with a greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide. Can’t imagine what that reason might be(opens in a new tab).)

And we are most definitely heading back there, after a long lull. India(opens in a new tab), Russia(opens in a new tab), and Europe(opens in a new tab) are all looking at launching Venus orbiters in the next decade. In February 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic hit, NASA announced(opens in a new tab) that two Venus missions had been shortlisted for its next Discovery mission, to be announced in 2021. 

“I haven’t seen the Venus community this energized for years,” says Noam Izenberg, a veteran planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “It’s a groundswell for more missions. It’s got real momentum.”

And then there’s the fact that NASA scientists, five years ago, produced a little-known plan(opens in a new tab) that treats Venus “as a destination for humans to reside.” Still conceptual in our age, but a possible reality by yours, this plan requires no technology we don’t already have. Zeppelin-like balloons can float at a safe altitude, atop the clouds 50 kilometers (or 31 miles) above Venus’ surface. You wouldn’t fill them with explosive hydrogen or expensive helium, but nitrogen and oxygen. That is, regular Earth air.

Never mind wearing heavy claustrophobic astronaut gear on Mars; the temperature 50 kilometers up on Venus is balmy, and the sun here is just as bright as on Earth. Here the atmosphere protects you from solar radiation. Here the gravity feels like Earth. You can go outside — on a viewing deck, say — wearing little more than a fireman’s respirator. Never mind space tourism to our dusty old moon; Venus could be the real economic driver. We still have no idea of what amazing cloud formations it offers. Imagine vast silver cruise liner balloons chasing the sunset, on a planet that spins so slowly you can almost make it stand still.

“It fires the imagination, it’s human adventure stuff,” enthuses Izenberg. “Picture the first Venus selfie.”

And there’s more. With the right balloon technology, you might even have a full-on, Empire Strikes Back-style Cloud City.

The 50-kilometer high layer of Venus “is in many ways the most Earthlike place in the solar system, with temperature and pressures at values close to what humans like to live at,” says Geoffrey A. Landis. He’s a NASA planetary exploration engineer, currently working on a landsailing Venus rover(opens in a new tab), as well as the author of The Sultan of the Clouds(opens in a new tab), an award-winning 2011 science fiction story set in “11,000 floating cities” above Venus, each one of them “kilometer-diameter domes [that] easily lifted a hundred thousand tons of city.”

In short, we could be on the cusp of a much-needed renaissance in Venus exploration. One that ends with you in floating habitats, as also predicted for Venus in the 22nd century by another popular science fiction franchise, The Expanse. (Although that particular prediction didn’t have a happy ending.)

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