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In science fiction, floating cities and islands are a common trope, which range from cities and islands that float on water to ones that float in the atmosphere of a planet by purported scientific technologies or by magical means. While very large floating structures have been constructed or proposed in real life, aerial cities and islands remain in the realm of fiction.
Seaborne floating islands have been found in literature since Homer's Odyssey , written near the end of the 8th century BCE, described the island of Aeolia. [1] They reappear in Pliny the Elder's Natural History of the 1st century CE.
Richard Head‘s 1673 novel The Floating Island describes a fictional island named Scotia Moria. In The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle , the characters sail to a floating island, which later becomes fixed in place. In the DC comics story of Wonder Woman, Themyscira is a group of floating islands. In Jules Verne‘s Propeller Island , the characters are on an artificial floating island that is actually a huge ship. In Yann Martel‘s novel Life of Pi , there is a floating island.
In the treatise De Grandine et Tonitruis ("On Hail and Thunder", 815), Carolingian bishop Agobard of Lyon describes Magonia , a cloud realm populated by felonious aerial sailors. [2]
In the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the island city of Laputa was revealed to be floating in the sky. Laputa purportedly levitated through use of artificial magnetism. It was primarily a fictional device that was intended to satirize far-fetched pseudo-scientific proposals:
During the 1920s, science fiction author Hugo Gernsback speculated about floating cities of the future, suggesting that 10,000 years hence "the city the size of New York will float several miles above the surface of the earth, where the air is cleaner and purer and free from disease carrying bacteria." To stay in the air, "four gigantic generators will shoot earthward electric rays which by reaction with the earth produce the force to keep the city aloft." [4]
In 1960, the architects Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed the construction of a 1-mile-diameter (1.6 km) thermal airship, which they called Cloud Nine. This megastructure would be a geodesic sphere that, once it was sufficiently heated by sunlight, would become airborne. [5] Fuller and Sadao envisioned that Cloud Nine would float freely in the Earth's atmosphere, giving residents and passengers a migratory lifestyle. They believed that it might be a partial solution to the depletion of non-renewable resources.
A team including Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao [6] was commissioned by United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to design the Triton City, a floating city intended to provide housing near Tokyo or Baltimore. The proposal called for tetrahedron–shaped modules supporting large housing blocks of 5,000 inhabitants each, and which would be anchored to the ground. A large model of the habitat is on display in the lobby of the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. [7]
In Isaac Asimov's story "Shah Guido G.", the hereditary Secretary-General of the United Nations ("Sekjen") is a tyrant who rules the Earth from a flying island called Atlantis.
A design similar to Fuller's Cloud Nine might permit habitation in the upper atmosphere of Venus, where at ground level the temperature is too high and the atmospheric pressure too great. As scientifically and fictionally described by Geoffrey A. Landis, the easiest planet (other than Earth) to place floating cities at this point would appear to be Venus. [8] Because the thick carbon dioxide atmosphere is 50% denser than Earth's atmosphere, breathable air with a composition similar to the latter is a lifting gas in the dense Venerean atmosphere, with over 60% of the lifting power that helium has on Earth. [9] At an altitude of 50 km above the Venerean surface, the environment is the "most Earthlike in the solar system", according to Landis, [10] with a pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures ranging between 0–50 °C (32–122 °F). [11]
In addition to Venus, floating cities have been proposed in science fiction on several other planets. For example, floating cities might also permit settlement of the outer three gas giants, as the gas giants lack solid surfaces. Jupiter is not promising for habitation due to its high gravity, escape velocity and radiation, but the Solar System's other gas giants (Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) may be more practical. In 1978, the British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus envisioned floating factories in the atmospheres of Jupiter refining helium-3 to produce fuel for an interstellar probe. Michael McCollum notes that the "surface" gravity of Saturn (that is, at the visible cloud layer, where the atmospheric pressure is about the same as Earth's) is very close to that of Earth, and in his novel The Clouds of Saturn, he envisioned cities floating in the Saturnian atmosphere, where the buoyancy is provided by envelopes of hydrogen heated by fusion reactors. Uranus and Neptune also have upper atmosphere gravities comparable to Earth's, and even lower escape velocities than Saturn. Cecelia Holland populated Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus with mutant humans, the Styth, in floating cities in her only SF novel, Floating Worlds (1975). Donald Moffitt's novel Jovian (2003) features floating cities forever floating in the Jovian atmosphere, a worthwhile enterprise due to their ability to extract useful gases. The book concentrates on the cultural differences (and political tensions) developing between "Jovian" humans and Earthbound ones.
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The greenhouse effect occurs when greenhouse gases in a planet's atmosphere trap some of the heat radiated from the planet's surface, raising its temperature. This process happens because stars emit shortwave radiation that passes through greenhouse gases, but planets emit longwave radiation that is partly absorbed by greenhouse gases. That difference reduces the rate at which a planet can cool off in response to being warmed by its host star. Adding to greenhouse gases further reduces the rate a planet emits radiation to space, raising its average surface temperature.
Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable for humans to live on.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is a rocky planet with the densest atmosphere of all the rocky bodies in the Solar System, and the closest in mass and size to its orbital neighbour Earth. Orbiting inferiorly, it always appears close to the Sun in Earth's sky, as either a "morning star" or an "evening star". While this is also true for Mercury, Venus appears more prominent, since it is the third brightest object in Earth's sky after the Moon and the Sun. Venus has historically been a common and important object for humans, in both their cultures and astronomy.
An aerobot is an aerial robot, usually used in the context of an unmanned space probe or unmanned aerial vehicle.
Laputa is a flying island described in the 1726 book Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. It is about 4+1⁄2 miles in diameter, with an adamantine base, which its inhabitants can manoeuvre in any direction using magnetic levitation. The island is the home of the king of Balnibarbi and his court, and is used by the king to enforce his rule over the lands below.
An atmosphere is a layer of gas or layers of gases that envelop a planet, and is held in place by the gravity of the planetary body. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low. A stellar atmosphere is the outer region of a star, which includes the layers above the opaque photosphere; stars of low temperature might have outer atmospheres containing compound molecules.
A megastructure is a very large artificial object, although the limits of precisely how large vary considerably. Some apply the term to any especially large or tall building. Some sources define a megastructure as an enormous self-supporting artificial construct. The products of megascale engineering or astroengineering are megastructures.
The planet Venus has been used as a setting in fiction since before the 19th century. Its opaque cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface—a "cosmic Rorschach test", in the words of science fiction author Stephen L. Gillett. The planet was often depicted as warmer than Earth but still habitable by humans. Depictions of Venus as a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like beasts or other monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s. Some other stories portrayed it as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. The absence of a common vision resulted in Venus not developing a coherent fictional mythology, in contrast to the image of Mars in fiction.
Observations of the planet Venus include those in antiquity, telescopic observations, and from visiting spacecraft. Spacecraft have performed various flybys, orbits, and landings on Venus, including balloon probes that floated in the atmosphere of Venus. Study of the planet is aided by its relatively close proximity to the Earth, compared to other planets, but the surface of Venus is obscured by an atmosphere opaque to visible light.
The colonization of Venus has been a subject of many works of science fiction since before the dawn of spaceflight, and is still discussed from both a fictional and a scientific standpoint. However, with the discovery of Venus's extremely hostile surface environment, attention has largely shifted towards the colonization of the Moon and Mars instead, with proposals for Venus focused on habitats floating in the upper-middle atmosphere and on terraforming.
Saturn has made appearances in fiction since the 1752 novel Micromégas by Voltaire. In the earliest depictions, it was portrayed as having a solid surface rather than its actual gaseous composition. In many of these works, the planet is inhabited by aliens that are usually portrayed as being more advanced than humans. In modern science fiction, the Saturnian atmosphere sometimes hosts floating settlements. The planet is occasionally visited by humans and its rings are sometimes mined for resources.
The terraforming of Venus or the terraformation of Venus is the hypothetical process of engineering the global environment of the planet Venus in order to make it suitable for human habitation. Adjustments to the existing environment of Venus to support human life would require at least three major changes to the planet's atmosphere:
Uranus has been used as a setting in works of fiction since shortly after its 1781 discovery, albeit infrequently. The earliest depictions portrayed it as having a solid surface, whereas later stories portrayed it more accurately as a gaseous planet. Its moons have also appeared in a handful of works. Both the planet and its moons have experienced a slight trend of increased representation in fiction over time.
The atmosphere of Venus is primarily of supercritical carbon dioxide and is much denser and hotter than that of Earth. The temperature at the surface is 740 K, and the pressure is 93 bar (1,350 psi), roughly the pressure found 900 m (3,000 ft) under water on Earth. The Venusian atmosphere supports opaque clouds of sulfuric acid, making optical Earth-based and orbital observation of the surface impossible. Information about the topography has been obtained exclusively by radar imaging. Aside from carbon dioxide, the other main component is nitrogen. Other chemical compounds are present only in trace amounts.
An extraterrestrial vortex is a vortex that occurs on planets and natural satellites other than Earth that have sufficient atmospheres. Most observed extraterrestrial vortices have been seen in large cyclones, or anticyclones. However, occasional dust storms have been known to produce vortices on Mars and Titan. Various spacecraft missions have recorded evidence of past and present extraterrestrial vortices. The largest extraterrestrial vortices are found on the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, and the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.
Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) was a joint NASA–ESA proposal for an exploration of Saturn and its moons Titan and Enceladus, where many complex phenomena were revealed by Cassini. TSSM was proposed to launch in 2020, get gravity assists from Earth and Venus, and arrive at the Saturn system in 2029. The 4-year prime mission would include a two-year Saturn tour, a 2-month Titan aero-sampling phase, and a 20-month Titan orbit phase.
The possibility of life on Venus is a subject of interest in astrobiology due to Venus's proximity and similarities to Earth. To date, no definitive evidence has been found of past or present life there. In the early 1960s, studies conducted via spacecraft demonstrated that the current Venusian environment is extreme compared to Earth's. Studies continue to question whether life could have existed on the planet's surface before a runaway greenhouse effect took hold, and whether a relict biosphere could persist high in the modern Venusian atmosphere.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Solar System:
DAVINCI is a planned mission for an orbiter and atmospheric probe to the planet Venus. Together with the separate VERITAS mission, which will also study Venus, it was selected by NASA on 2 June 2021 to be part of their Discovery Program. Its acronym is inspired by Leonardo da Vinci in honor of his scientific innovations, aerial sketches and constructions.
Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) is a mission concept by the aerospace companies Northrop Grumman and LGarde for a powered, long endurance, semi-buoyant inflatable aircraft that would explore the upper atmosphere of planet Venus for biosignatures as well as perform atmospheric measurements. The inflatable aircraft has a trapezoidal shape that is sometimes called delta wing or flying wing, and would have dual electric-driven propellers that would be stowed during atmospheric entry.
This illustration from the magazine Science and Invention of February 1922, …