Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Could humans live in the clouds of Venus?

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Daniel and Kelly talk to Guillermo Sohnlein about life in the Venutian cloudsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, am I remembering correctly that your kids are almost in college? That's right. They're in high school,

so college is just around the corner. Oh my gosh, it goes so fast. Do they want to stay close to home, or are they, needing a little distance from their parents. Well, the oldest wants to be far enough away that we can't pop into surprising. So how far is that?

Are we talking like a long car drive, one state over, a whole country? This is the loophole my wife is relying on because she's willing to travel a long way to just pop in on somebody. All right, so maybe they need to consider like universities in Australia? I'm wondering if Elon Musk is going to build a university

on Mars they might be able to attend. You know, he's got enough kids to fill the first class of students by himself. And if Elon is your dad, nowhere in the solar system is far enough away. Hi, I'm Daniel. physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I was definitely ready to leave home when it was time to go to college. I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I'm adjunct at Rice University, and I also was ready to go when I started college. California was not far enough from Ohio, but I was, I stuck with that. And welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe in which

we take your mind to new locations to explore new ideas and think about living. in other places where we download the entire workings of the universe into your little brain. My friend and co-host Jorge isn't here today, but I'm very glad to be joined by Kelly. Hi, Kelly. Thanks again for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. And, you know, I think that maybe we should change the introduction to my friend and co-host Jorge isn't available today. But my friend and co-host Kelly is, I want to be upgraded to friend and co-host status.

You are definitely a friend and a co-host, NFL scientist, and a colleague, absolutely. All of those things. Oh, what a great day for me. You win all the prizes. And you're also a great person to be talking to about today's topic, about casting not just our minds, but maybe our bodies and our lives and our families out of the little envelope of the earth

and into the solar system and maybe even the rest of the universe. And not just the places that you usually think of. We're talking about settling places that I think of as maybe some of the worst places in space, but there are people who disagree with me. So the question today is, could humans live on Venus? That's right. You might be wondering why anybody ever lives anywhere other than the best place on Earth,

otherwise known as Southern California. But for some reason, humans do live in the northern reaches of Norway and the hottest deserts on Earth. And so humans do seem to have this appetite for living in crazy places, maybe even on Venus. So we went out there to ask our audience if they thought it was possible for humans to live on Venus.

If you would like to participate in this audience answer segment for future episodes, please don't be shy. Write to me to questions at danielanhorpe.com and I'll put you on the list. So think about it for a minute

before you hear these answers. Do you think humans could live on Venus? Here's what people had to say. It might be possible for us to live on Venus, but obviously we'd need protection from the extreme pressure, temperature, radiation, and poisonous gases. I guess in the ice caps in the northern region, but we'd be vaporized before we got there, correct?

So yes and no. Well, just today I heard that Venus is a sister planet to planet Earth. So for that reason, I'd say perhaps. Humans could live on Venus if we could construct a strong enough structure. Look, never say never. That's my motto, okay? So obviously, humans could not live on the surface of Venus. We don't know any life that could manage that pressure and temperature.

But there's definitely a habitable zone up in the atmosphere, kind of best-spin, like Cloud City style, where we kind of have, like, balloon or other floating habitats, and there's possibility there, is it worth pursuing? I think everything's worth pursuing. Spend more money on science. There's no way you can live on Venus and be a human unless you have some insanely good air conditioning system because it's several hundred degrees there. Absolutely not for three reasons.

Crushing air pressure, extreme air toxicity, and extreme heat. Humans could live pretty high up in Venus, kind of like the Jets, and maybe a blue, Lume City or something like that. On surface, no. Further out, no, but somewhere in the middle, middle of clouds. So what do you think of these answers, Kelly? I think that the listeners who said never say never, which was an interesting, you know, repetition in the answers are really going to like the guests that we have on the show today. I think there's a wonderful optimism there. You know, the sense that problems that seemed impossible 10 years ago or 50 years ago might be solvable now. And the humans are just so ingenious and always coming up with new solutions,

which means that places that used to be impossible to imagine living might eventually one day be like cozy and comfortable. Maybe. Who knows? Humans like to dream big. And on today's show, we've got a pretty big dreamer. I mean, why do you think humans like to dream big, Kelly? You wrote a whole book on this where you were not exactly, you know, in favor of space colonization in the near term. why do you think it captures the imagination? What are the motivations for everybody casting their ideas and maybe even their families and their descendants out past the comforts of Earth? To be honest, I've been asked this question a lot,

and I don't think I will ever have a perfect answer. But I think it's because we all think different things are awesome. You know, like I have a vodka bottle filled with tapeworms from a road killed porcupine on my desk. And I think that's awesome. And I like looking at it sometimes. And there are some people who think it would be awesome. to move to space.

And like, I can totally get both of those things. I don't know. I think humans, we find our little niches that we think are awesome and we want to go. And space is particularly inspirational. You know, I think most of us, you and I talk on the show all the time about looking up at the stars and all the big thoughts it makes us have and how small it makes us feel. And yeah, I don't think I have a really good answer. But I think just, you know, it's kind of awesome.

And that's a good enough reason to do a lot of things as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Well, I think it would be awesome if all the tapeworms on Earth were evicted and sent to space. Daniel. So the combines your two awesomenesses. No, no. I am so glad you don't have any power over these things, Daniel. They have to stay here where people like me can study them.

All right. Well, we have a fun expert to talk to today who knows a lot about what it might be like to live outside of the Earth's comfort zone, out in space, and maybe even in the atmosphere of Venus. Yeah, so our guest today is Guillermo Sunline. I've had the pleasure of meeting Guillermo in person. We've chatted virtually a couple times. He's a really fun guy to talk to. He's got big ideas.

He was an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He got an A.B. in economics from UC Berkeley and a JD from the UC College of Law in San Francisco. He's an explorer, an entrepreneur, and a philanthropist. And today we're going to talk to him about a space venture studio he's working on called Humans to Venus, where their goal is to get a thousand people living in the Venusian atmosphere by 2050. And there's a lot of challenges with that goal.

but Guillermo is the right person to be working on it. So let's talk to him about why he thinks this is a good plan for humanity. I'm skeptical but fascinated. Let's do it. Same. Welcome to the show, Guillermo. We're excited to have you here.

Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward to it. Yeah, me too. So you and I have met IRL once. And it was a lot of fun. So I'm excited to be chatting with you again about all of your awesome Venus stuff. You are the only person I've ever talked to

who made me think that maybe V. Venus isn't quite as bad, but we'll get there. Okay, so we're talking about settling space. And so first let's talk about why space is so hard to settle. So humans are like super well adapted to life on Earth. What are some challenges that space poses to the human body? Yeah, geez, where to start with that. I mean, you know this from writing your book, right?

I mean, first of all, we're adapted to our gravity here on Earth, which I'm sure we'll come back to in a minute here talking about Venus. Then we've got the protection of our atmosphere. So we've got both the breathable air that we take for granted as we take our breaths every day. Plus keeping us nice and cozy and warm from the cold of space and at the same time keeping us from getting fried by the sun, which is basically this big star that we're just living very close to. So yeah, geez, where to start. I mean, on top of all that, obviously we have to eat and drink water, which is easy to get, relatively speaking, here on Earth, and it gets harder as you leave Earth. So one of the things that

I always say is I think people that work in space or work at trying to get humans into space are probably some of the biggest environmentalists and conservationists because they have a true appreciation for how important Earth is for the human body and how well, as you said, how well adapted we are to Earth and how ill adapted we are to basically living anywhere else. So it is our precious homeworld. We got to take care of it. I was surprised at how many people in the space community are environmentalists who are really interested in sustainability because I think that when I, when I as an ecologist talk to my friends, a lot of them would be like, oh, but the space people, they don't care about Earth, they just want to dump it and leave it behind

and go leave somewhere else. But that has not at all been my experience with the community since interacting with you all. Yeah, I think that's one of the frustrating things, you know, as you're dealing with the media or the general public or even friends and family, right? They're like, you know, why are you trying to leave Earth? We have so many problems here on Earth. It's like, yeah, I know. But, you know, it's also the best way to draw attention to those problems on earth and help find solutions for them. So at least for some people, it's the best way for, you know, for people like me and maybe you, I don't know. I think it's really interesting that you comment that humans are well adapted to Earth, but ill adapted to anywhere else. Because

one of the things I think about for human adaptation is how amazing it is that we've been able to live in so many different environments. Like what else other than, you know, bacteria can adapt to like really cold and really warm and really wet and really dry? And we've built cities basically everywhere on the earth, except maybe Antarctica. Is that just because we're considering a pretty narrow range of habitats compared to like the extraordinary radiation and dryness and wetness and insanity of space? Yeah, that's exactly, as you were saying that, that's exactly what I was going to say. You know, it is such a narrow band, relatively speaking.

You know, the temperatures is a big one, right? You mentioned, you know, the hottest place on Earth and the coldest place on Earth. range-wise is nothing compared, let's say, to the dark side or light side of the moon, or, you know, day or night on Mars. And so it is a very narrow range. And, again, kind of focusing on the core advantage of Venus, all of that is still within 1G of gravity. So even if you think about, even astronauts in low Earth orbit, they're still experiencing

1G of gravity. You know, the reason they float is because they're constantly falling off Earth in response to the one G of gravity. But even that, we're still within one G of gravity. Or even if you think about pressure, atmospheric pressure, as you know, I've done work underwater, taking humans underwater and subs. And going from the surface of the Earth, let's say at sea level, where you have one atmosphere of atmospheric pressure, and go into space, to the vacuum of space, it's a change of only one atmosphere. Going underwater, it's a change of one atmosphere every 33 feet, roughly every 10 meters going down because you've got the weight of the atmosphere on top of you,

plus you have the weight of the water on top of you. But we don't live underwater. And right now, we don't live in the vacuum of space. And so even atmospheric pressure-wise, we're really only in a very narrow range from sea level to maybe, you know, some high altitude. And that's about it. So basically, Earth is like the Southern California of the solar system. You know, we say we have seasons, but really it's not winter. Yeah, yeah, it's always 68 and sunny, you know. So then why should we ever leave? It seems great here.

Well, you know, it's funny. I just had that, I've had that discussion several times and I just had it last week with a couple of students that I'm mentoring, you know, about why should we leave? And the short answer, I think, is we should never leave, right? I mean, if you think about it from a survival standpoint, survival instinct standpoint, if you're somewhere comfortable and it's not dangerous to you and it's got water, and air and food and, you know, why would you ever leave? And the thing is, I kind of look at this, like in nature, when you look at an ant colony or a beehive, right? Once the queens have a good location for their hive or their colony, they don't move the colony, they don't move the hive. But they know that at some point, those circumstances may change, and they may need to move

the colony and the hive. And so in both cases, they always have a small, subset of the colony or hive that is always going out and looking at other places. You know, they're kind of, you know, to use human terms, they're out exploring. You know, they send scouts out in different places. And they end up losing a lot of ants and a lot of bees in the process. But some of them make it back and they convey information to the queens. And at some point, the queens make a decision that it's time to move the colony or move the hive. And now they've got some information and they actually do move them for the survival of the colony

or hive. I think to a certain extent, I think that's kind of what's driving a little bit of, let's say, Elon Musk looking at Mars as a potential second home for humanity, is that at some point we may decide we need to move humanity somewhere, or at least a portion of humanity. And by the time that day comes, it's going to be too late to think about it. Like we have to have already, you know, taken some steps in that direction. I think that's at the core of what's driving someone like Elon to look at taking humanity off planet. But I agree with you. I mean, until something like that happens, like rationally, why would you ever leave Earth? So that's why Elon wants to settle space? Why do you want to settle space? This is where it gets a little bit philosophical, but going

back to the ant and bee analogy, I think genetically, psychologically, I don't know, there's a small subset of homo sapiens that are wired the same way those scouts are in the beehive or in the colony. And I think I'm just wired that way. I think that's also why within the explorer community, forget space for a second, right? Just the general explorer community. Like if you go to the Explorers Club and talk to anybody there, any of the members there about the that they're working on. And they go some of the places Daniel was just talking about, you know, the deserts, the poles, you know, high altitudes.

Probably the most common question that an explorer gets asked is why, right? Why are you doing this? It just doesn't make sense. It seems it's counterintuitive. It goes against your survival instinct to take a risk climbing that mountain or doing whatever. And every explorer, since you get asked that question so often, you come up with an answer that you give. But it never feels like a complete answer.

It never feels like a fulfilling answer. And I think if you talk to explorers, I think at the core, it's because they don't know really why they're doing it. And I think the reason they don't know why they're doing it is because they're just wired that way. You know, they're just being themselves. That's one question that explorers never ask each other. You never hear an explorer.

I remember at the Explorers Club ask another member, hey, why are you doing that? Like, they already know that the answer is, I don't know, it's because I'm being myself, you know, and that's what I do. It's like asking those ants what you're doing, and they're just like, we're just anting. Yeah, yeah.

Or at least the scouts, yeah. They're just doing what they think is right. I like it, and I feel like, you know, the parasitologist that I work with, no one is like, why are you elbow deep in fish guts for a worm? This is because we love the worms. It's very different.

But anyway, okay, so where are we going to settle? So in my book, the two most common places I hear about people wanting to settle are rotating space stations where they argue that you can control so many different aspects of your environment. It's really great. And Mars. So I'd love to hear your takes on the pros and cons of those two locations so that we can then set up the even better option of Venus. I'd love to see some sort of free-floating rotating structure, somewhere kind of O'Neillian kind of future. I think the big advantage to that one, obviously, that everyone pushes for is you've got the artificial gravity, right?

The whole reason it's rotating is so that we have this artificial one G of gravity, which I think is a big advantage, obviously, because I'm looking at Venus. But for me as an explorer, what I like about that option is that you can take that rotating ship and just point it out on the exit, on the off ramp off the solar system and just go. You know, it's a one-way trip, just go, kind of like Star Trek to boldly go where no one's gone before. And I would love that. If we had that built, I'd sign up for that right now. But obviously, the con to that is just the cost is just enormous, right?

I mean, the biggest engineering structure we've built as humanity is the International Space Station. And that cost a huge amount of money. It took a lot of time. And it's not nearly, you know, the size that a big rotating kind of free-floating station would have to be. Or free-floating community would have to be. So that's the obvious con on that one. Are you imagining something that's self-sustaining? I mean, if you're going to point this thing out of the solar system,

and needs to not rely on Earth's infrastructure, right? Are you talking about something at that scale where it's like making its own food, et cetera? Yeah, yeah. So that's a great point, you know, because then you've got the structure that's kind of a free-floating, rotating structure. But then you've got the question of geography, like where are you going to put it?

And if you put that in orbit around Earth, that's fine. If you've got it still within the solar system, you know, you can kind of still be dependent on Earth for imports and potentially exports. But if you do what I just suggested, which is just point it out and just go, yeah, then you've got to make sure that that thing's fully self-sustaining. And if you think about it, you know, that's going to require a lot of infrastructure and a lot of people, you know, to really get to the point where that society is, is as specialized as it needs to be to put everything together.

And the lot of recycling and redundancies. Yeah, it would be tough but awesome. Yeah, my favorite, I'll tell you, my mind got blown about a year ago. I'd heard this before, but there's a YouTube video out that I watched over and over again. Now I can never remember which economist it was that did this. Maybe as I tell you this, you'll know which one it is. It's from like the 70s where he holds up a pencil and he talks about thinking about what it would take to build a pencil from scratch. And if you think about it, it takes like millions of people to build that

number two pencil, right? If you just think about just the wood for the pencil, right, requires a whole timber company and you got to go cut down the tree. Okay, but to do that, you need saws. So somebody's got to make the saws. And for the saws, you're going to need metal. So someone's going to need the metal for the blades for the saws. And someone's going to have to build all that. And if you think about that, the saws get made at a factory. Well, someone's got to build the factory and you've got to power the factory. Now, all of a sudden, you realize if you go through every single nuance of that supply chain for that number two pencil, it's millions of people that you need to get even just to that number two pencil.

You know, sometimes I'll hold up. I think actually, Kelly, I may have even done this when we last saw each other in Slovakia. I held up a beer bottle with someone I was talking with, and I just pointed to the label, forget the bottle, forget the beer, just the label, the printed label that goes on the beer bottle. You know, if you think, you know, the paper that goes in that, the adhesive that goes in that, the paint that goes on that, the design, putting the label, and just getting that label ready.

And then you think it takes millions of people just to even make that label. And in the world here on earth, I guess we just take a lot for granted because we've got 8 billion people, right? And they're spread out everywhere. And we have so many people that we can specialize in these various areas. But when you think about trying to replicate that beer bottle label in space, or as Daniel was saying, you know, in a free-floating station that's going out toward outside the solar system, you're not going to have millions of people to create all that. So that's where things get interesting is when, you know, we start going off planet, but we try making that community as self-sustaining as possible.

And I think that's also a big premise of Kelly of your book, right, that we haven't fought through a lot of those things yet. We're so focused on, you know, the technology and the science of getting humans off this planet. But there's a lot of other stuff that we need to consider when we talk about doing that at scale. And those millions of people on Earth can just go outside and take a big breath of fresh air.

And so, you know, those million people in space, you also need to provide them the air they breathe, everything down to that, it gets complicated. Yeah, it gets complicated in a hurry. So Daniel, to one thing you were saying before, a couple years ago, I was talking with some friends, we were talking about just kind of even trying to replicate a community like that, like an off-world community like that,

just trying to replicate that here on Earth, right? If you just started, let's say you wanted to set up 1,000 people here on Earth to live somewhere remote and be as self-sufficient as possible, we realized, at least through the thought exercise, that the first people you had to start with was the medical community, right? Because you got to make sure that these people don't die, right? And that can stay healthy and then can reproduce and have kids and grow them into adulthood

and all that. So you have to start with a medical community. And all of a sudden we realized, man, this gets complicated in a hurry because let's say you start with a hospital, right? But that hospital has got to be unlike any hospital. you've ever seen on earth because, first of all, it has to have every specialty, right? You've got to have dentists. You've got to have obstetricians like cardio. You've got to have everybody all in one hospital, number one. Number two, it's got to be a teaching hospital because

you don't have medical schools that you can rely on. So you're going to have to teach the next generation of medical professionals that come up. Then it's also going to have to be its own pharmaceutical company because you're not going to be able to just order drugs from a drug company to have them delivered there if you really want to be truly self-sustaining, right? So you're going to have to develop your own drugs there. And you've got to be a medical devices company because if you're a dentist or an orthodontist and your drill breaks, you can't just order another drill. You've got to make one. Now, all of that can be helped with modern robotics and AI and all sorts of stuff, but it still means that you need all that functionality all in that one hospital.

And if you think about that, that all of a sudden you're getting, I don't know, like 300 people, 400 people, 500 people at a minimum. And now all those people have families, right? And all those families have to live somewhere. Everyone's got to live somewhere. So you need, you know, houses and food and sewage and water and security and all that stuff. It's hard to make a fully self-sustaining society with only a thousand people. So it's just crazy even just doing the thought exercise, even if the numbers are all off, you know, and everything I just said, the premise still stands that it gets complicated very quickly. All right. You convinced me I'm never leaving Southern California. I'm here to stay. Let me share an anecdote and I don't think he'll mind my sharing this. So a few years

ago, there was a group that was contemplating what it would take to set up a permanent presence on the moon. So this was like eight years ago, nine years ago. And at the time, this was the, I think the third organization in about a year that did these like workshops where they would bring people together and just have them talk about, you know, what would it take to set up a, you know, a permanent presence on the moon. And, and so, and so. So this organization got 12 of us together in Chattanooga, Tennessee for a weekend. And it was pretty good. They brought people together that kind of understood space but came from different backgrounds.

So you had a scientist, an engineer, an entrepreneur, a marketer, a lawyer, like you had different people. And the facilitators, the first thing they did on the morning of the first day of this weekend workshop is they went around and they had everyone answer the same question, which is what would have to be set up? on the moon for you to go visit there, right? Not even to go live there, just to go visit there. And there were different answers depending on, you know, someone said, you know, I'm willing to go when they have the first music festival there because then that means that they've got enough infrastructure that people could go and it's safe enough and all that. One person said, you know, I'll go when they have the first hotel there, you know.

There were 12 people in the room. The two ends of the spectrum on one end was me. I said, I'll be the first one there. Like, you send me, I don't care. There's got to be nothing. That's fine. I'll go and I'll help set everything up for you guys, you know, to follow. The other end of the spectrum, interestingly enough, was Andy Aldrin, right?

So his dad was Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. And Andy surprised all of us because he said exactly what Daniel just said. He says, I'm never going. It doesn't matter what you've got set up there. I'm never going. And he said, I like my air, I like my food, I like my water, I like my gravity, I like my radiation protection. I'm staying right here. And first of all, it took us all by surprise that some, I don't know why in our minds we just figured, well, the son of the second man walk on the moon.

Of course, he's going to want to go. And it surprised us that he said, no. And so we asked him, like, why do you have that, you know, this feeling, this opinion? And he said precisely because I grew up around astronauts. I grew up with people who risked their lives leaving this planet. I know how dangerous it is up there. I know how rough it is. I know how, you know, as we were talking earlier, how well-suited we are for Earth.

And like, why would I want to take that risk? I'm perfectly happy being here. Now, that was a few years ago. I don't know if his mind's changed. But the fact remained that, you know, the people that I think are, most aware of the risks of leaving this planet, sometimes they're the ones that, like, you know what, I'm perfectly happy staying right here. On that note, let's all take a break to think about what it would take to convince us to go to the moon, and we'll be right back.

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So we're back, and we are talking about settling space. So, Guillermo, let's quickly talk about Mars and why Mars is less good in your mind than Venus. And then we're, let's move on to talking about Venus. First of all, I'm not entirely convinced that Mars is less good because it depends on different parameters and why you're going to where you're going. But each possible destination in space has its drawbacks, right? It's got its pros and cons just like being here on Earth, right? Which is an aside.

I was trying to figure out where to live next. And every city on Earth that I thought about living had its pros and cons and I couldn't make up my mind. So it's a similar thing. I think, you know, the biggest advantage. to Mars obviously is just humans are used to walking on hard surfaces and you know so landing on the moon and landing on on Mars makes sense which is the drawback by the way to the free floating stations we were talking about earlier that's almost like being on a

cruise ship stuck out in the middle of the ocean as opposed to actually be ending up somewhere where you can you know walk on on ground the biggest disadvantage I see to Mars is the lack of gravity, it's the same as the moon. The difference is that the moon is so close to Earth. It's only three days away. You can go there and come back. It's kind of a weekend trip almost going back and forth. I don't want to minimize the risk of going to the moon and back. But geographically, on a solar system level, it's basically our backyard. Whereas Mars is a lot further away. And if you've got problems out there, and with the lack of gravity or anything else,

it's tough to get any help. And we already know from our own history of human spaceflight, even with limited short duration hops to the moon and low Earth orbit, that we don't react that well to lack of gravity. Our bodies, as we keep talking about, our bodies are well suited for 1G of gravity here on Earth. And so to go to Mars, where it's so far away, It takes so long to get there.

You're kind of committed to being in zero gravity, the whole way there and the whole way back. And then when you get there, it's only 38% of Earth's gravity. You know, we're just not sure how the human body is going to react to that. It could be that it's fine, but it could be that it's not. And if you're looking at being there from a Homo sapien expansion into the cosmos's perspective, being there multiple generations, and that's where the problems come up, where we're not sure if humans can reproduce in less than one G of gravity,

and I know Kelly's heard me say this before, right? You know, we're not sure if we can conceive, we're not sure if we can carry a fetus to term, we're not sure if we can deliver a baby without defects, and most importantly, we're not sure if that Martian-born Homo sapien baby can grow into adulthood and reproduce themselves. So it's entirely possible that we could be going

to Mars and then kind of die out within one generation because we can't reproduce. I think that's the biggest challenge. I'm hoping that I'm wrong. I'm hoping that we get there and everything works out or we can figure out ways around it. But as of right now, given what we know, that is probably the biggest risk of going to Mars from a species standpoint, at least from a long-term permanent, multi-generational standpoint. Now, the pro of Mars, I think, is from my standpoint, because I'm one of these explorer ants, explorer bees, is, you know, we're on the third rock from the sun here, and Mars is the fourth rock from the sun. So it feels like we're on our way out of the solar system.

You know, it's closer to the asteroid belt, and we can get to some of the asteroids in the asteroid belt. We can get through that and get to the moons of Jupiter and move on beyond. It seems like we're heading in the right direction, either in actuality or something. psychologically, it feels like we're going out in that direction. I think that's the biggest advantage that Mars has. So I think most people wouldn't listen to the list of cons that you said and then think, well, we should go to Venus instead. So when we were doing the research for our book, Venus was always compared unfavorably to hell.

And I remember reading about the Russian Venera probes. They, like, landed and immediately was squished and then melted. So we list, in our book, we put Venus is one of the less good options. Yeah. Why were we wrong? Well, so I've told you this before. I think even the first time we met is until four years ago, I agreed with you. And I think every time we have to, when we talk about Venus, we've got to get past the everything you just said.

If we land on the surface of Venus, we're going to get crushed or we're going to get fried or both. because the pressure and the temperature at the surface is just horrendous for Homo sapiens. Or we have to combat the other end of the sci-fi spectrum, which is terraforming Venus, right? Can we change it so that we take their big atmosphere and make it more amenable to us? Which, of course, we don't even know if it's possible, and even if it's possible, it would take centuries. So, like, it's total sci-fi. So I think what changed for me four years ago is I was reading, a white paper about those Soviet-era-venera missions that you were talking about.

And for people who were listening who don't know, and I didn't know this until four years ago, the former Soviet Union has more experience learning more about Venus than anybody else because they've sent, I don't know, a dozen or so probes in orbit and through the atmosphere and to the surface of Venus. So four years ago, I was reading this white paper about some of the data collected from these missions. And there was a chart in particular that stood out, which showed that, yeah, on the surface of Venus, the pressure is horrendous and the temperature is horrendous, but about 50 kilometers off the surface in the Venusian atmosphere, there's like a 10 kilometer wide swath of the atmosphere where it's basically one atmosphere of pressure, which is about what is sea level here on Earth. and where temperatures range from 25 to 50 degrees centigrade, which is definitely hot, but it's not fatal.

It's not going to burn, you know, melt your suit or anything. I want to see that on the advertising for Venetian homes, not fatal. That's really going to say. Yeah. The Zillow advertisement. Yeah. Hey, yeah, but you know what? As we were talking about earlier, that's a claim that you can't make on Mars or the moon, right?

You know, you can't make the not fatal on pressure, on gravity, or on temperature. So that's one reason where all of a sudden I looked at and go, wait a sec. And by the way, let's back up. The whole reason I was looking at that white paper to begin with was because of the gravity that we were talking about earlier, right? The problems with making a Martian community multi-generational and not knowing if we can reproduce. I started thinking, well, it'd be nice if we found somewhere in their solar system that had one of gravity that was not one of these, you know, human constructed spinning, rotating structures. And since gravity is related to size and mass of the object, obviously Venus would be the best

choice because it's 98% the size of Earth and it has 98% of our gravity. But we are talking about a human constructed something, right? Because as you say, the surface is way too deep. The nice region is not on the surface. There's no surface to walk around 50 kilometers above. 50 kilometers also like that is very, very high. I'm terrified of heights. You're talking about living 50 kilometers above the surface on some human constructed platform.

I'm really going to be having to trust those engineers. Yeah, yeah. Well, so you're right. Now, backtracking one step, though. I'm talking about human constructed and rotating just so we can get artificial gravity. I see. Right. You know, at least on Venus, whatever the human constructed structure is, you don't have to spin it around and rotate it and hope that it doesn't break apart because you've got one G of gravity, right?

And I want to come back to the rest of what you just said because I think that that's very important. But let me just keep kind of going through the thought process originally from four years ago. Because when I looked at it, I thought, well, this is perfect. We've got one G of gravity and 50 kilometers off the surface, we're going to have decent temperature, decent pressure. I dug further into the white paper and the data that they collected seemed to suggest that the Venusian atmosphere is still so thick that even at 50 kilometers, as you said, that's very high up, but their atmosphere is so thick there, like there's people living there. I don't know why I just said that, but, you know, Venus's atmosphere is still so thick that what's left above you at 50 kilometers is still. still thick enough to provide adequate protection from the sun's radiation, even though Venus is closer to the sun and it does not have a magnetic field the way we do.

So I thought, wow, this would be like a perfect place, you know, as close as it gets off Earth. Digging a little further, it turns out Venus is also closer to Earth than Mars is and has a more similar orbit than Mars. If you've looked at Mars or thought about Mars you've seen. even listening to Elon talk, you know that there's a launch window every 26 months where we can launch anything toward Mars. And that's in large part because we have a fairly circular orbit around the sun and Mars has a fairly more elliptical orbit around the sun. Whereas Venus is a lot more

circular kind of like ours. So it kind of makes it easier to get to and from Venus. Is there a regular launch window though? And if so, what is the time frame there? Yeah. So I think the transit time is a lot shorter, but it's also more regular, like it's always three to four months, whereas Venus can be anywhere from six to nine months. And in some cases, if you hit it on the wrong time, you may as well not even try because, you're never going to catch it coming around. But also importantly, you're using less fuel to catch it. You need less delta V. We promise not to get too technical. But so anyway, I started looking at all that. But the problem is, as we've said before, you know, I'm not

technical. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a scientist. So I was looking at this going, okay, this, I can't be the first person to have seen this, right? So of course, the first thing I did is a Google search. And it turns out NASA had actually looked at this already. A few years ago, they created a thing called Havoc. NASA loves their acronyms, right? So Havoc, high altitude Venus operational concept. And they had come up with this concept of having basically floating research stations in the Venusian atmosphere. And I thought, okay, well, if NASA's looked at it, then I'm not completely nuts. There's got to be other people that have looked at it and kept doing more Google search and poking around.

And it turns out a lot of people around the world have looked at this, including the Russians. And so it just kind of became interesting saying, okay, there's all these experts everywhere that have actually looked at this. And I thought the same thing Kelly did, you know, when you and Zach were researching your book. It's like, well, then how can we don't know about this? You know, why is it such a hidden gem kind of thing? And I think it's because all these people are kind of working in isolation around the world. And because the world is so focused on moon, Mars, and beyond, and because, as you were saying, you know, the conventional wisdom on Venus is that it's hell, everyone's afraid of poking their head up

and being labeled some sort of lunatic on it. And so I started, before I poked my head up and started being labeled a lunatic, I started trying to have private conversations with people that had talked about this or discussed this or put out videos or blogs or whatever. And the more I talk to people, the more it seemed to make sense. So you said floating in the Venusian atmosphere. So floating to me implies like no work needs to be done. But like propellant will constantly need to be used to keep this thing up. So it doesn't, you know, fall down so everyone dies. Yeah. Yeah. No. So that's great. So actually that's a good sideway to come back to what Daniel said earlier about living on this man-made structure,

floating somewhere and trusting it and being afraid of heights and all that. So the interesting thing in Venus's atmosphere, which is primarily carbon dioxide, and it's very, very dense, it is so dense that if you take our normal breathable air and put that in a balloon, it will actually float in Venus's atmosphere, which means that if you're looking to build something that's livable, you could essentially take something, and this is, an engineer did this, I didn't do the calculation. So if it's wrong, someone else can work around it. If you take, let's say, a football stadium that's domed and you fill it with normal, breathable air, it will create enough lifting force in Venus's atmosphere to keep the whole football stadium afloat. Does that check out

particle physicist, Daniel? That's a whole lot of particles to calculate all of at once. But doesn't that depend a little bit on the extra mass, like, you know, how heavy is the football stadium, et cetera? But, you know, it might. I mean, you can float like huge battleships that are basically bubbles of air in the water. That's effectively what we're talking about, right? Yeah. Yeah, something like that. So, again, not being an engineer and not being a scientist, I tend to live my life trusting engineers and scientists. And instead of questioning them, Maybe I should question them more. But for something like that, it seems to me like that's an engineering problem.

Like you put enough engineers on that, they'll figure out how to make this thing float. So two things. Kelly, to your point. And after the first few disastrous crashes, they'll really figure it out. Yeah. So you don't want to be in the first wave, but eventually. Well, and hopefully, you know, the first few waves are going to be autonomous and there won't be anyone on them until they figure it out. Right?

Yeah. But, you know, Kelly, to your point, despite the fact that this thing may kind of float like you said with like little or no effort there is going to still have to be you know maintaining that that equilibrium and keep it floating and then there's probably going to need to be some sort of system to keep it kind of station keeping you know make sure it doesn't dip too far down or too far up because if it goes down it's going to be subject to the additional pressure and temperature too far up it's it's going to be cold and all that stuff so there's going to have to be some adjustment there

But Daniel, going back to your earlier point about having the sphere of heights and all that stuff, I think it's because when you think about it, you're kind of thinking of like a small like research station kind of thing. But imagine an entire building or a football stadium, right? Or a mall, right? You could kind of, or a cruise ship, right? You're always on this big structure and it's floating. and I think it's also, I guess, related to that is one thing that we don't have a lot of, from a science standpoint, we don't have a lot of photographs or video of the Venusian atmosphere.

So we're not even sure what the view will look like from up there. It's very dense atmosphere. There are a lot of clouds there. And so it may just be kind of like when you're in an airplane and you're flying through clouds or you're flying right above clouds. You may not even get a sense for how high up you. are anyway. And if I fall off this platform, right? I'm not just going to be on my own. I'm going to be in some sort of breathable suit anyway. Say I'm like working on the outside of it.

I fall off. I'm wondering because of the pressure, will I actually fall off or will I just float next to it? Is it more like being underwater where if you like lose your grip, you're floating next to it as opposed to like actually plummeting towards the surface? You know, that's a great question. I don't think I've ever been asked that question in the last four years. I have no idea. So since I'm not an engineer or scientist, I'm going to have to ask somebody, you know, to help out with that. Because a part of me says, well, you've got gravity pulling you down, right? So it is like being one G of gravity. It is going to pull you down. But I guess to your point, is the atmosphere so dense that it wouldn't be able to pull you down. Would you float? Like, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. The same physics should apply to a person in an air bubble as they do to a football stadium in an air bubble, right? So, oh, that's a great question. Let's all take a break and see if we can figure out the answer. and we'll come back in a second to chat more about Venus. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

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So I think that living in Venus would also have some. really interesting material science problems that would need to get solved. In particular, I'm thinking about the fact that there are lots of clouds made of sulfuric acid that you'd be floating on top of in the Venusian atmosphere. What do we know about how well habitats can survive, stuff like that? Yeah, so that's great, because there are two things that I was kind of excited about because there are two huge cons to Venus, right? You asked me earlier the cons to Mars.

There are two huge cons to Venus. One is that the atmosphere is primarily CO2, so we can't breathe it. And the other one is what you just mentioned is the clouds are made of sulfuric acid. So when I read that, I'm like, oh, well, now what do we do? But I kind of researched a little bit more. And so the first thing we'd have to do on the first one is we'd have to be able to convert the CO2 into breathable air. And the thing with that is if you're scuba diver, you know that scuba divers have been using re-breathers for a long time now. And so there is a method of converting CO2 into breathable air.

By the way, a few weeks ago, I was in Boston at a conference. And after one of the sessions, we were at one of the receptions. And I happened to be talking with a guy. And before he even knew what I was working on with the whole Venus thing, I asked him what he was working on. He said he was an atmospheric scientist. And I'm like, oh, wait, I've got three questions for you. So question number one, is it possible to turn CO2 into breathable air just from an atmospheric chemistry standpoint? And he said, yes, it depends on what scale, but yeah, it can be done.

And it depends on how much money it's going to take to do it or resources it's going to take to do it. But yes, from a chemical standpoint, it can be done. I think that's the Sabadiere reaction. Didn't Moxie just do that on Mars? I think they had a box on Mars that was converting the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Anyway, so sorry. Yeah, I think that's a problem we've made some progress on. Yeah, exactly.

Well, that's my point with this, is that these are not like we don't need to like invent the warp drive or something, you know, to make this happen. You know, because number two is can we extract water from sulfuric acid clouds and CO2 atmosphere. And he said, yeah, absolutely. That's a no-brainer. I said, okay. And then the third one is what your question was, right? Do we have materials that can withstand sulfuric acid? And he said, yes, and the two most common ones are glass and the big long scientific name that I don't know, but the common name is teflon. Right? So we've got teflon that's resistant to sulfuric acid. And and glass. So I asked him, well, given CO2 and sulfuric acid, can you make Teflon out of it?

It's like, well, you'd need fluorine or something like that. You'd add it in, but you could create it. So the bottom line is it sounds like even the biggest obstacles to setting up shop in the Venusian atmosphere are from an engineering perspective and from a scientific perspective, we can probably overcome even today. we really wanted to do it. It's not like, like I said, it's not like we've got to invent warp drive or artificial gravity or anything else like that. So to try to bottom line it, so I think what you are arguing is that, so rotating space stations

awesome but super complicated and Venus is less complicated because you don't have to spin. And Mars has a lot of benefits, but if not living in 1G is a game stopper, then Venus is a better option. Yeah. I mean, in some ways you could think about it. know, in the U.S., NASA's been following this moon, Mars, and beyond strategy for a couple of decades. And the rationale behind that is, you know, kind of like the crawl, walk, run approach, right? We start in Leo that's crawling. We're getting used to kind of be operating in space.

Then we go to the moon, which is our planetary backyard to build up some of the competencies and that develop some of the technologies. And then we're going to actually go out to Mars. So it's kind of like this crawl walk run kind of thing. But if you think about it in many ways, Venus may actually be a better next stepping stone because at least we don't have to worry about all these weird orbital mechanics. We don't have to worry about gravity. We don't have to worry about, you know, what's the hardest part? You ask anybody on Mars missions, what's the hardest part about a Mars mission?

And it's the hard landing on the surface, you know, surviving that hard landing. I don't know what the success rate is on the Mars missions. but, you know, most of them failed just during the landing. And, you know, we don't have to worry about that on Venus. We got to make sure that, you know, we don't fall through the 50 kilometer mark and implode on the way down to the surface. But it's a lot of challenges that we're going to have going to Mars, that we're not going to have going to Venus. And so there's an argument to be made that maybe Venus is even a good training ground for going to Mars or beyond. Would it be fair to say that it's not necessarily

that we don't have the same problems but they're just a little easier? Because Venus will still have some orbital mechanics to worry about and getting just the right spot in the Venusian atmosphere is tough, but maybe not as tough as landing on Mars. But space is never easy. Problems never go away.

Yeah, yeah. That's why I never say that it's easy or even that it's better because it's just different, right? Because you're right. We've got similar problems but they may be easier to solve, but we also have some problems on Venus that you don't have on Mars, like dealing

with the CO2 atmosphere and dealing with the sulfuric acid clouds and dealing with, you know, we haven't even talked about the mechanics of this, but, you know, in both cases, you're probably orbiting the planet and then you're going down to where the human community is. On Mars, you're going from orbit down and landing on the surface, and then in Venus you're going down to the atmosphere. In both cases, you also have to be able to come back. So from Mars, you're launching from the surface back to orbit before coming back to Earth or whatever. And that's something we know how to do because that's how we've got there to begin with, right?

We launched off the surface of Earth into orbit and then beyond. But launching from an atmospheric platform back to orbit is something we really haven't done. We've tested, but we don't have a lot of experience doing that. And certainly not humans, right? We haven't launched humans from a hot air balloon or from a stratospheric balloon into orbit. So those are challenges that we,

we haven't faced yet and that we won't face on Mars or the moon. But on the flip side, a lot of those things are, like I said, are challenges that like I said, I keep kind of tritely saying we don't have to reinvent warp drive or something like that to do that. It's something that we could even start testing. That's the other nice thing, by the way, with Venus is so much of the technologies and the operational capabilities we're going to need to develop or about operating in an atmosphere. So we can actually test some of those here on Earth, right?

We could test high-altitude balloons and trying to launch rockets into orbit from there. And people have tried that and have tested it. But we could develop those capabilities. We could develop some of these larger floating structures and try. The other thing we haven't tried is point-to-point transportation within the atmosphere. If we had two balloons with stations, can we get from one to the other, you know, floating over there and some sort of transportation? system. So it's things that we could test here on Earth before we actually go to Venus. It's tougher to test stuff for Mars because we can't simulate the gravity and everything else.

We're coming up on the end of our hour and my plan for wrapping things up was to ask if you would personally go to Venus given the chance. But I feel like we've had enough comparisons to the scout bees that the answer must be yes. So what is the answer? I think the advantage to living in Venus because of the 1G of gravity is it'll be relatively straightforward to go back and forth between Venus and Earth, especially for anyone born on Venus, right? Any Homo sapien born on Venus is going to be used to 1G of gravity there, and so they can easily come back and visit here on Earth and go back. Any Homo sapien born on Mars is going to be used to 38% of Earth's gravity. So coming to visit here on Earth, to them, it will feel like they're constantly pulling a two and

a half G turn in an airplane. And that's going to be uncomfortable. At a minimum, it's going to be uncomfortable. You know, at worst, it's just going to cause all sorts of health problems. So I don't think very many Martian homo sapiens, assuming we can conceive and be born there and all that, I don't think very many of them are ever going to be able to come back to Earth, whereas Venusians will kind of be more of a society that will have closer ties with Earth and go back and forth.

Now I'm kind of talking more sci-fi, futuristic, you know, 100 years from now. But I think that for that reason, I think I'd rather live on a floating platform in Venus than on some surface of Mars station, which, by the way, is probably going to be underground anyway. So it's going to be just as claustrophobic as staying stranded on a little floating station in the middle of the Venusian atmosphere. Yeah, Daniel's afraid of heights and I'm claustrophobic. So I suspect that Daniel and I are going to be staying on Earth.

And Guillermo, you can visit us from Venus because it'll be convenient. Yeah, sounds good. I'll send you pictures. Okay. Was there any more questions you wanted to ask, Daniel? You know, I think a lot about where I moved because it influences not just where my kids live, but where they're from. You know, I moved to Southern California and now I have to hear my kids say, like, I'm from Orange County, which is a bit of a shock to the system.

So how do you feel about moving to Venus and then? and having your kids be like, I'm Venusian. I think it would be cool. You know, I was just thinking about this because I was watching for all mankind. And, you know, not to spoil it for people who haven't watched it yet, but it's just interesting, the evolution of off-world communities

when they're on the moon or on Mars and versus Venus, which, by the way, is not part of the for all mankind. And I think that kind of will evolve over time. And I think to a certain extent, Kelly and Zach kind of talked about this in their book, too. But if you just kind of look at the history of human expansion from one piece of landmass on Earth to another piece of land mass on Earth, you know, initially, first of all, the demographics of whoever's in this new community change over time. You know, the first ones are the explorers, and then you've got settlers, and then you've got natives who were born there. And a lot of them will always come back because they're originally from wherever they were from.

And eventually you get to a point where you've got people that were born and raised in this new community that have never been back to their ancestor, you know, their parents' homeland or their grandparents' homeland. And so they start developing their own identity. And eventually they'll kind of become more independent because they'll have their own language, their own culture, their own belief system and all that. I think that's going to be more true on Mars than on Venus, I think over time. I think the moon will never have that identity because it's just so easy to go back and forth. I think it's always going to be tied to Earth's identity. I think Venus will have its own identity and people will say, hey, I'm Venus, I'm from Venus. But it'll still be fairly closely tied to Earth because it's relatively easy to go back and forth.

over time, a lot of Venusians will never come to Earth, just like a lot of Earthlings will never go to Venus. But Mars is really going to be where there's going to be, I think, an independence movement because of just the physical problems of Martian Homo sapiens coming back to Earth and vice versa. So I think, yeah, I'd be perfectly okay with descendants saying that they're from Venus. In fact, I think it'd be pretty cool. It does sound pretty cool. Well, thanks very much for answering all of our questions. Really appreciate your time. Yeah, sure.

It's great. It's always great talking with Kelly and Daniel. It's great meeting you. All right. It's super fun to talk to Guillermo. So what do you think in the end, Kelly? What are the chances that they're going to get a thousand people to live floating in the atmosphere of Venus by 2050?

I think that conversations like this make me realize just how harsh space is, you know, that Venus, that by listening to someone, like Yermot, at the end, you could be like, well, maybe Venus isn't quite as inhospitable as I thought. To me, that just says that everything out there is just absolute rubbish. It's just really bad living out in space. But, you know, it does, I don't know. I don't think we're going to be living, having space settlements anywhere in space by 2050. And I think if you ask Yermo, he'd say that they're shooting for 2050, but, you know, he wouldn't hang his hat on that date.

That's my not answer, answer to your question. is, what do you think? My answer to my question is that the question is totally bogus because it's impossible to predict this kind of stuff. Humanity and human civilization technology changes so quickly and the changes happen faster every year that, you know, the technology required could be invented. The what is impossible today could be totally possible in five years. Somebody could invent some new kind of material which makes these things really easy or simple. And so it's impossible to predict. And I like their strategy of like, let's aim for it. Let's push for it. that's exactly the kind of work you have to do to make it possible. You have to push forward

on all these boundaries and do basic research and try to crack problems. And you know, even if they don't figure this out, this kind of work could lead to new ideas that helps solve other problems. And so I'm in favor of like, let's do all of it, you know, all the science and all the engineering. Sure. I'm with you. And I can tell you that it's a lot of fun drinking with Guillermo. Well, thanks very much for bringing him on the show. And thanks again to Guillermo for answering all of our questions, well-meaning and naive as they were. Thanks very much, Kelly, for joining us today. And thanks everybody for taking this mental trip to Venus with us.

Thanks, friend and co-host, Daniel. Thanks, friend and co-host, Kelly. And thanks to all the listeners. All right, tune in next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, and. Insta and now TikTok.

Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, it's HoneyGerman, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment

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