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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A large number of probes have been landed on Venus already throughout the 70’s. They were able to take pictures and measure temperature on the surface for about an hour at most. That was over 50 years ago. I’m sure we are capable of constructing machines that can withstand the conditions for much longer now. In 30 years though we might not even deem that necessary and just capture an asteroid and orbit it around the planet and build the base of operations atop that.
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