Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00 For decades, it looked as if Mars is the true final frontier for space exploration.
00:05 Of course, there are lots of worlds beyond Mars, but humans living permanently on the
00:09 red planet has been a goal that scientists have been dreaming about since the dawn of
00:12 the space age.
00:13 Today, though, some people have already stopped believing that Mars is the future, and instead
00:17 want to turn their attention to Venus.
00:20 This is Unveiled, and today we're answering the extraordinary question; why do tech giants
00:24 now want to go to Venus instead of Mars?
00:27 Do you need the big questions answered?
00:29 Are you constantly curious?
00:31 Then why not subscribe to Unveiled for more clips like this one?
00:34 And ring the bell for more thought-provoking content!
00:38 In 2023, the businessman Guillermo Sondheim founded the Humans to Venus Foundation.
00:43 Sondheim has a long history of space entrepreneurship, encouraging wealthy industrialists to invest
00:49 in space research since the early 2000s.
00:51 However, he's also one of the founders of OceanGate, the company now best known for
00:56 the catastrophic implosion of its Titan submarine in June 2023.
01:01 Sondheim left OceanGate way back in 2013, a decade before the implosion that would kill
01:06 the sub's five passengers, including the company's CEO and co-founder, Stockton Rush.
01:11 Now, Sondheim has plans to put people on Venus by 2050, or rather, into Venus' atmosphere.
01:18 He's relying on the "cloud colony" concept, a popular, hypothetical type of human habitat
01:23 that could keep people alive on Venus - a planet so notoriously deadly that it's nicknamed
01:28 "Earth's evil twin".
01:31 Sondheim has long drawn connections between ocean research and space research, which is
01:35 why pivoting from deep-sea exploration to space makes a certain sense.
01:39 He wants to build a big enough colony that 1,000 people can live on Venus, perhaps permanently.
01:44 His plan has been met with some scepticism, however.
01:47 After all, OceanGate showed us what can happen when wealthy entrepreneurs innovate in such
01:52 domains.
01:53 Many might also wonder, why Venus and not Mars?
01:56 Mars has a lot of problems, that's true - like significant exposure to radiation - but
02:01 its temperatures, while extreme, certainly aren't on Venus' level.
02:05 Plus, many space companies, from private ones like SpaceX to NASA itself, have continued
02:10 to invest in Mars research and Mars missions, with the hope of sending humans to the Red
02:15 Planet sometime soon.
02:17 But in the meantime, Venus hasn't been totally abandoned by established researchers.
02:21 NASA is, in fact, building multiple spacecraft to go to our evil twin.
02:26 The first is called VERITAS - short for Venus Emissivity Radioscience InSAR Topography and
02:33 Spectroscopy.
02:34 VERITAS is going to be loaded up with instruments that can study Venus from orbit like never
02:39 before.
02:40 Secondly, there's DAVINCI - the Deep Atmospheric Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry
02:45 and Imaging - which will actually go to the planet's surface for the first time in decades.
02:51 They're both set to launch by the end of the 2020s, arriving on Venus circa 2030.
02:55 So, it's not like Venus has been completely abandoned, and is in desperate need of outside
02:59 industrialists to fund important missions to go there.
03:03 Then again, maybe NASA's comparative sense of caution is less appealing to the raw romanticism
03:08 of forging a new path for humankind in this inhospitable environment.
03:12 In short, Venus is still quite a hard sell.
03:16 Nevertheless, while the surface of Venus is so extreme that we'll probably never be
03:20 able to live there, the clouds tell a different story.
03:23 The atmosphere is still completely non-breathable, but we'd at least be protected from radiation
03:27 and would benefit from Venus' other Earth-like qualities.
03:30 It's gravity, for instance, which is very similar to the gravity on Earth.
03:34 The idea of living there is plausible enough that NASA has created its own concepts - notably,
03:40 the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, or HAVOC - showing how these cloud habitats
03:45 might come to be.
03:47 Essentially, the atmosphere on Venus is so dense that regular air floats.
03:52 This is the same principle behind airships on Earth - using light gases like helium and
03:56 hydrogen to float.
03:58 But the fact that on Venus we could potentially use just Earth's regular air is a huge benefit,
04:03 since it doesn't have the major drawbacks of substances like helium or hydrogen.
04:07 Helium is expensive in the volumes needed for airships, while hydrogen is highly flammable.
04:13 Regular air, by contrast, is abundant and won't ignite.
04:16 So, there are reasons for optimism there.
04:18 As well as that, airships and balloons do already exist.
04:22 We've had them on Earth for hundreds of years, so there isn't any especially newfangled
04:26 technology required.
04:28 And in general, the idea of building floating cities isn't new, either.
04:32 It's as old as other heady space concepts like orbital cities and colonies, imagined
04:37 by Soviet scientists in the early 1970s.
04:40 Of course, the Soviets were also the ones to hit many of the most significant Venusian
04:44 milestones, with, for example, Venera 4 successfully measuring the atmosphere of Venus in 1967.
04:51 At this time, scientists were still hoping to find liquid water there, which we now know
04:56 would certainly be impossible when Venus' surface temperatures are around 900 degrees
05:01 Fahrenheit.
05:02 But since those high temperatures are all caused by the thick atmosphere trapping heat,
05:07 we also know that building high in the cloud belt is a good idea.
05:11 Over the years, we've actually grown surprisingly knowledgeable on what would and wouldn't
05:15 work.
05:16 But still, one question remains… why would we want to live on Venus, anyway?
05:20 Yes, it would be an exciting development for science and space research… but what would
05:24 be the point?
05:26 While it's likely that Venus, as a terrestrial planet so similar to Earth, has plenty of
05:30 resources that we could potentially extract, the actual process of extracting them would
05:34 be extraordinarily difficult.
05:36 Since we would be unable to ever reach the surface, everything would have to be done
05:40 remotely with equipment designed to withstand both immense atmospheric pressure and extreme
05:45 heat.
05:46 This is much more complex than even deep sea research is.
05:49 Some of the principles of withstanding pressure would work, sure, but submarines and submersibles
05:54 don't have particularly extreme temperature gradients to contend with.
05:58 The lowest sea temperature ever recorded on Earth, for instance, was measured underneath
06:02 a glacier in Antarctica and was 27.3 degrees Fahrenheit - not that cold at all.
06:08 While the warmest sea temperature ever clocked is 99 degrees Fahrenheit in the Persian Gulf.
06:12 So, we would need machines like submarines, but which can withstand never-before-experienced
06:18 temperature extremes.
06:19 On the one hand, this is possible, and we have lots of building materials that wouldn't
06:24 melt in Venus' atmosphere - steel, for instance.
06:27 But on the other hand, would it be worth the expense?
06:30 Probably not.
06:31 And so, we're back to the idea of exploring Venus simply for exploration's sake, and
06:35 perhaps the only possible return on investment for private companies would be the probably
06:40 high price tag that tickets to Venus would command.
06:43 Although Sondlein doesn't appear to have said anything about charging his Venusian
06:47 colonists yet.
06:48 To return to Ocean Gate, travelling down to the Titanic wreckage doesn't generate any
06:53 resources, so Ocean Gate funded its endeavours by charging massive amounts of money to its
06:58 super-rich passengers.
06:59 A ticket on the doomed 2023 voyage cost $250,000.
07:04 As for a trip that was supposed to last only a few hours, had it been successful.
07:08 But we'd need to massively expand with Venus in our sights.
07:12 Right now, it is even more expensive to go into space commercially, with Virgin Galactic
07:17 charging almost half a million dollars a ticket, and for Blue Origin's maiden flight on New
07:21 Shepard the tickets ran as high as $28 million - unless you were invited as an honourable
07:27 guest like William Shatner was and paid nothing.
07:30 Venus is still something far bigger, though.
07:33 An average trip there would take around four months just to arrive, and could take six
07:37 months or more.
07:39 This means that any Venus company would need to charge ticket prices that cover the costs
07:43 of building the rockets, the long-haul spacecraft, and the colony construction itself.
07:48 And this is for a journey that would certainly carry huge risk, even if everything went as
07:52 planned.
07:54 Any colony would quickly become, basically, the most expensive hotel to ever exist.
07:59 And stays of many months would be mandatory.
08:02 If we take Virgin Galactic as a baseline, which charges $450,000 for a 90-minute space
08:08 journey, it would cost $7.2 million for one day in space.
08:13 Then, if we assume that one of these Venus trips takes four months either way, and then
08:17 maybe you want to stay for a few months, we've got a year of time both in space and on Venus
08:22 itself.
08:23 Estimating using Virgin's numbers, this would cost an enormous $1.73 billion for one year-long
08:30 trip to Venus.
08:32 On average, the world's billionaires keep about one percent of their wealth as liquid
08:35 cash.
08:36 This is still a massive amount of money, sure, but they would likely need to liquidate more
08:40 assets just to cough up the funds for such an eye-watering venture.
08:44 For now, while attention might be moving away from Mars to some degree, the interest in
08:48 Venus is still at an early stage.
08:51 And there are clearly some sizeable problems to iron out.
08:54 In this video, we haven't even considered all of the other issues that could and would
08:58 arise; the problems of extreme isolation, even with a thousand people; the impractical
09:03 communication lag, with Venus being on average about three light minutes away from us on
09:08 Earth.
09:09 This would be no easy task.
09:11 And while Sondlein may want his Venus city to house a thousand, with just 2,700 billionaires
09:17 in the world, how likely is it that he'd ever get a thousand of them to visit at once?
09:21 And how likely, then, that there aren't any catastrophic disasters along the way?
09:25 And that everything gets funding and goes 100% to plan?
09:29 What do you think?
09:30 Is there a place for private industry like this in space exploration?
09:34 Or is it so ludicrously expensive and dangerous that space colony construction should stay
09:39 with space agencies, instead?
09:41 Venus is certainly a fascinating planet and increased study is always exciting, but we've
09:46 still got a long way to go before we send humans there.
09:49 Not that that will deter the richest of the rich.
09:52 Because that's why some tech giants are abandoning Mars for Venus.
09:57 What do you think?
09:58 Is there anything we missed?
09:59 Let us know in the comments, check out these other clips from Unveiled, and make sure you
10:03 subscribe and ring the bell for our latest content.