2y ago

OceanGate's cofounder wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050, and says we shouldn't stop pushing the limits of innovation

www.businessinsider.com

Guillermo Söhnleinm told Insider he has wanted to make humanity a multi-planet species since he was 11 years old, and that OceanGate was part of that ambition.

47 comments

I feel like the public response will be slightly more negative this time.
- No. We should encourage this, he might help us get rid of 1000 billionaires. Can you image the good that would bring to earth.
  
  Implode the rich.
  
  Send Elon first
  
  removing 1000 of the 2640 billionaires in a single project would be the most blessed timeline
  
  Plus, there might be the added benefit of learning how to send people we want to come back.
- Publicity will be off the charts for any future efforts by Oceangate, Inc.
  Investments and volunteers will be the main challenges.
In keeping with company policy of using innovative and affordable materials, they've also made the hull of their spacecraft out of wet cardboard and it's controlled with a laptop trackpad.
- I hear they have already named their spaceship the Columbia Challenge.
  
  I guess if James Cameron can name his submersible Challenger Deep...
Yeah, you guys go first though. As many billionaires as you can cram in that spaceship.
But.... The ocean is on this planet and that failed pretty terribly. No thanks. I'll stay on Earth.
- "Earth is hard" - Billionaires cosplaying as inventors
- Don’t worry, you won’t be able to afford this anyway.
  
  But if we could convince all billionaires that this is a great idea and all of them would go...
  
  Unless you volunteer for the beta testing.
It's ok, guys. This time they're making the whole facility out of SNES controllers.
Props to the journalist for keeping the written version of a straight face while having to include such paragraphs as
If a space station could be designed to withstand the sulfuric acid in the clouds, Söhnlein says, hundreds to thousands of people could someday live in the Venusian atmosphere.
alongside quotes describing the Titan as "a calculated risk" that is "not deserving of a negative connotation" because without previous experience handling brittle carbon fiber vessels whose single window was rated for a third of the intended depth, "certification would only have served to give the vessel the illusion of safety, which could have led to complacency."
Can't wait to hear Söhnlein and friends livestream it as their living pod is slowly eaten away by venusian acid, upon which time they, like their seafaring colleagues, will become extremely portable indeed.
- I think a SNES controller is way too reliable. Should be an Apple mouse that definitely wont be needing to be charged at the worst time possible.
  I think they will also need to fire way more engineers who tell them the way they do things are too dangerous.
  
  An old Kensington Turbomouse trackball for the Mac.
  Possibly the worst pointing device I ever used. Worse than the hockey puck mouse they put out with the original iMac. Every time I used it, it would pinch the skin on my hand at the edges of the trackball. I still use a trackball now, a Logitech M570. It's terrific.
- This is my favorite part of the article:
  Söhnlein said the Titan passengers' deaths shouldn't stop humans from continuing to investigate carbon fiber hulled submersibles as a way to reach the bottom of the ocean.
  "Forget OceanGate. Forget Titan. Forget Stockton. Humanity could be on the verge of a big breakthrough and not take advantage of it because we, as a species, are gonna get shut down and pushed back into the status quo," he said.
  Those two sentences really highlight how crazy this guy is.
  
  I think he has listened to a few too many motivational speakers.
- To be fair, game controllers are some of the most robust objects man has ever created
  
  Then why did my friend always make me use the broken one?
  
  Dude. That's quite the hyperbole. I don't think game controllers are even in the top 100 of the most robust objects man has ever created.
  
  Except when you get a soft drink too close. Then you have buttons that are sticky forever.
Remember, when the wealthy people talk about going to space... You aren't going to be invited.
Until the mines are ready for workers.
- Can you imagine being under Elon Musk's control on Mars?
  "Woke people get air rationed."
Dude can't build a submersible right, but wanna-be Lord Figg wants to create Cloud City on Venus.
I admire his ambition, but he might want to leave this one for real professionals.
I fully support OceanGate’s mission of removing as many billionaires from the planet as possible
Proof that billionaire isn't much smarter than normal people
Why Venus? Because Mars is already taken by Musk?
- Venus has similar gravity to Earth. It is just about the same size and density. The atmospheric gasses can be turned into many different kinds of compounds provided enough energy and you could theoretically mine ore from the surface. It is much closer to Earth than mars as well. We recently detected through spectroscopy gasses in the atmosphere that are associated with the byproduct of life, so scientifically, it makes sense to have a science facility above the atmosphere to experiment further. The reality is that it’s more technically achievable to send a facility in orbit around another planet than to build a ground facility. Far less fuel needed. The gases in Venus’s atmosphere might also be able to be used as fuel.
  
  Yeah, not sure if "floating colony" means orbital but if he means somehow in atmosphere those people are gonna have a bad time with the 900F degree temps and the 100 atmospheres of pressure
  
  It would be nearly impossible to mine ore from the surface. We don't have the technology to keep something functional on the surface for more than a few minutes before it melts. A planet where you can't access/visit the surface doesn't seem like a good planet for humans to live.
To be fair, it's probably not too hard to find 1000 suicidal people. I do not know why companies would invest in that, though.
It's a neat idea, and not one he came up with first, but considering his resume... I'd rather somebody else do the "making it happen" part .
- Don't listen to this guy. If he wants to test drive a station in the Venusian atmosphere, fucking let him.
He should probably get in touch with the Mars One people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarsOne

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