Between Love and War - Last Nights BDS

  I opened at least twenty tabs in my internet browser last night, scouring MU's databases for proposals of interstellar colonization. Nothing really came to light. Before I began my search I had began to take Geoffrey A. Landis' proposal about floating cities above Venus' dense atmosphere seriously. According to Wikipedia, whose sources I have yet to entirely verify, because of the large amount of carbon dioxide in Venus' atmosphere, a light structure filled with breathable oxygen would float above the clouds. In an article for Universe Today, Landis explains why colonization of the surface of Venus is largely impractical: the thick atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect, making the temperature below the clouds hot enough to melt lead; Venus does not contain any water; a day on Venus is considerable longer than an Earth day (one Venetian day is the equivalent of  243 Earth days). Carl Sagan proposes that these obstacles could be overcome through a process called terraforming, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "the process of transforming a planet into one sufficiently similar to the earth to support terrestrial life," however the amount of time, energy, and supplies necessary to complete the terraforming of Venus make it impossible in the near future.

  It is obvious I am still in the "collecting" stage of my story, inwardly debating at what degree Venus should be colonized. Aesthetically, floating cities fascinate the imagination, but in all practicality, there are great dangers associated with them. The real question for my story is when it is possible to terraform Venus, would we also have the technology to travel faster than the speed of light? If so, this would make terraforming Venus, or even constructing floating cities, irrelevant. Why waste the time and resources? Other potentially Earth-like planets have been discovered, which we would be able to travel to instantaneously.

  Therefore I then focused my research on faster-than-light (FTL) travel. By this point it had been well past thirty minutes and I realized that any further research would overwhelm me, especially that which dealt with Einstein's theory of Relativity, wormholes, warp-speed, and  general bending and stretching of space. I resolved to return to this idea, as well as consider alternatives to Venus, such as Mars, or the Jovian System (the Moons of Jupiter). For now, it seemed war had triumphed over love. As much as I adored Landis' idea of floating cities on Venus, putting it into practice in my writing seemed unnecessary without first considering the alternatives. Next stop: Mars.