Strap a solar thruster to the sun, and the Earth and Venus can be used as generational ships. The rest of the solar system will follow the sun. The starlifting array needed to power the thruster will keep the sun “young.” There’s more than enough Hydrogen and Helium to dump in as fuel.
Venus is a fixer upper, but it just needs several oceans worth of water ice, and some cyanobactera flung at it to cool it down. Maybe we can look into diverting some comets into Venus, I dunno.
Isn’t Venus’s atmosphere dense? If so, you could just float a Bespin-like Cloud City on a convenient layer of the atmosphere to avoid the boiling temperatures below and the crushing weight of the air…
You could, or you can add water and cyanobactera. Venus’s atmosphere is pretty close to what ours was minus the water and cyanobactera when the planet mostly coole d off after the collision with Theia.
If it takes thousands of years, monitoring air density can probably give you at least a couple centuries heads-up, like “we expect in 150 years from now that the atmosphere will thin to the point our cities lose buoyancy. That gives us approximately five generations to think of a solution.”
Maybe land in the water that you plan to introduce? By the way, where’s that coming from?
The solution would be to evacuate back to Earth, because the surface still would be hostile to human life. Or don’t waste the resources, and have some patience.
Or move the cloud cities to one of the gas giants (presumably where the water is coming from anyway, or at least one of their moons, so the interplanetary transport infrastructure would already exist at this point.
The water should be coming from the comets or at worst the asteroid belt.
Lifting a city out of a gravity well only to deposit it on Jupiter or Saturn, not only is a waste of resources, it won’t work.
Mars isn’t a viable terraforming candidate because it has a mass of about 1/3 that of The Earth. No human can live there for any extended period of time.
The problem you have with all of the gas giants is the opposite issue. Once the city achieves boyancy, as everything that falls into a gas giant will, it will be so deep into the gravity well that humans would be crushed.
Strap a solar thruster to the sun, and the Earth and Venus can be used as generational ships. The rest of the solar system will follow the sun. The starlifting array needed to power the thruster will keep the sun “young.” There’s more than enough Hydrogen and Helium to dump in as fuel.
Venus is a fixer upper, but it just needs several oceans worth of water ice, and some cyanobactera flung at it to cool it down. Maybe we can look into diverting some comets into Venus, I dunno.
Isn’t Venus’s atmosphere dense? If so, you could just float a Bespin-like Cloud City on a convenient layer of the atmosphere to avoid the boiling temperatures below and the crushing weight of the air…
You could, or you can add water and cyanobactera. Venus’s atmosphere is pretty close to what ours was minus the water and cyanobactera when the planet mostly coole d off after the collision with Theia.
But the cyanobacteria will take time to work. What about the thousands of years in the meantime?
I wouldn’t want to build a city that I know will fall to its doom at some nebulous point in the future.
If it takes thousands of years, monitoring air density can probably give you at least a couple centuries heads-up, like “we expect in 150 years from now that the atmosphere will thin to the point our cities lose buoyancy. That gives us approximately five generations to think of a solution.”
Maybe land in the water that you plan to introduce? By the way, where’s that coming from?
The solution would be to evacuate back to Earth, because the surface still would be hostile to human life. Or don’t waste the resources, and have some patience.
Or move the cloud cities to one of the gas giants (presumably where the water is coming from anyway, or at least one of their moons, so the interplanetary transport infrastructure would already exist at this point.
The water should be coming from the comets or at worst the asteroid belt.
Lifting a city out of a gravity well only to deposit it on Jupiter or Saturn, not only is a waste of resources, it won’t work.
Mars isn’t a viable terraforming candidate because it has a mass of about 1/3 that of The Earth. No human can live there for any extended period of time.
The problem you have with all of the gas giants is the opposite issue. Once the city achieves boyancy, as everything that falls into a gas giant will, it will be so deep into the gravity well that humans would be crushed.