Only 1000, and not until 2050? Let’s send lots more than 1000 of them immediately. They’re super rich, so they must be super smart, right? Isn’t that commonly accepted? Send 'em NOW, and they can use their super rich super brains to figure out everything on the way there.
Simple as. /brushes hands together, done and dusted stylee
Not much, I’d say. If anything, it’s just more evidence that he’s a grifter. He bailed on OceanGate after starting that, and is now running a new grift. It’s what grifters do.
Or this one
Anyone remember the 1960 film, The Silent Star? It was re-shown on screens throughout my childhood as, First Spaceship on Venus, Planet of the Dead, and Spaceship Venus Does Not Reply. After finding a craft from Venus buried in the Gobi desert the world launches an international expedition to Venus.
In a science fiction first, (I think) it even had a African officer, played by Julius Ongewe on the crew (head of communications, of course). Sadly he gets left behind on Venus.
However, perhaps that’s the intent with the rich.
How about a system where the rich who have to leave could be picked by popular vote?
And once they get there, then what?
What is a floating Venusian habitat going to produce to justify its existence?
A station in orbit around Earth? There are useful processes that can only (or more efficiently) be done in microgravity.
Lunar base? Same thing, plus access to resources.
What, besides basic science, can be done way up in Venus’s atmosphere? You will emphatically not have access to the surface.
The basis of a lot of science is experimentation and repeatability.
Let’s send them down to the surface one at a time until we’re sure there’s no access to the surface.
A bit O/T, but we’re already there for best-in-class smaller batteries, and could get to that within a few years if we really wanted to. But in practice it’ll probably move in the opposite direction for both EVs and home or grid scale storage. We’re going to move from e.g. NMC to LFP because they’re much cheaper and require much less of many of the metals whose supply we are currently concerned about. You can then pack more kWh in if you want, and the energy density is close enough that there’s relatively little range penalty, which becomes less of an issue anyway as charging infrastructure improves.
On the OP: I don’t see a problem with this at all. For many reasons. Also, if we’re in any kind of position in the 2040s for someone to pull this off, even as a scam that only idiots fall for, that means the future has mostly gone much more right than I might otherwise expect.
Those Old Scientists had an episode where the “elite” were up in the clouds, and everyone else was toiling in the toxic mines.
Chef’s kiss explainer
2050? I’ll take the over.
I think I saw this a long time ago.
Ah yes, there it is.
In 1988, real estate agent and con artist John Barlow is placed in suspended animation after a freak accident. He is revived in the distant future, in a confusing world filled with hypersexualized advertisements, vapid entertainment, and people who exhibit erratic, nonsensical behavior. Shortly after being revived, Barlow is introduced to two men who tell him that the current state of society is the fault of the “morons,” the world’s vast population of unintelligent people, who greatly outnumber the much smaller population of intelligent people.
While the term “m*rons” would never make the cut today, and the whole eugenics subthread is pretty yucky, the rest of this is a terrifyingly accurate prediction.
Leave Levon far behind.
Don’t mind me, I’m just leaving a few facts here:
Anyway, good luck with your startup!
Is he going to call the ship they go there on “The B Ark”?
I’ll watch your stuff until you get back.
Why let a few inconvenient facts get on the way? That’s like saying that you should worry about safety constraints…
Oh I have a LIST of people who should be first to go on this thing.
And since we all know this is a grift and will likely never get off the ground… literally… can we just move to a Terry Pratchett style idea of giving these crooks the opportunity of either execution or running specific leadership agencies with a LOT of oversight that sends them back to execution if they blow it (see Going Postal)?
I’m tired of having them end up as President, but a proper grifter on the line for their life to set up a system that actually extracts billionaires’ money and makes sure future billionaire’s can’t exist is pretty much what we seem to need.
Wish I could hear Shatner’s reaction to that prop.
“You want to put… a jock strap… with… three pots of paint on my head?”
This is dumb.
Get a probe that can survive more than than a few hours on/in Venus’ atmosphere, then we can talk.
I can burrow through an elephant…
