Yikes! Despite the tragic implosion of the Titan submersible, OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein wants to send 1,000 people to a floating colony on Venus by 2050.
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Less than two months after the tragic loss of five people — including OceanGate co-founder and CEO Stockton Rush, who ventured down to see the Titanic shipwreck 13,000 feet below sea-level — the co-founder of the company is now wanting to conduct another experiment. However, this time they want to go opposite the bottom of the ocean: into outer space.
In 2009, Söhnlein co-founded OceanGate Expeditions with Rush, and then in 2013, he stepped away. Since the passing of his co-founding member, the 57-year-old Argentine-born businessman has stepped into the spotlight and is now revealing that he believes 1,000 humans could colonize the planet of Venus within the next 30 years.
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In a new interview with Business Insider, Söhnlein says that by 2050 he will attempt to send a thousand people to Venus with his own company, aptly-titled, Humans2Venus. On LinkedIn, the founder and chairman describes it as “a private venture focused on establishing a permanent human presence in the Venusian atmosphere.”
Söhnlein told Insider, “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.”
While most of the past focus on shipping humans to outer space to colonize a planet has been about Mars, Söhnlein shared findings by NASA that claim there is a sliver of the Venusian atmosphere, about 30 miles from he surface, where humans could possible live and survive.
He also claimed that he picked Venus because of gravity. The planet is often referred to as Earth’s “sister planet,” due to their similar size, mass makeup, and similar surface gravity.
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Now, Söhnlein’s theory of wanting to send these one thousand people to Venus includes a vision of creating a floating colony that could withstand Venus’ clouds, that produce sulfuric acid. This is just one of the many elements of the planet’s atmosphere that makes it uninhabitable to humans.
Aside from having to figure out humans withstanding the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere, Söhnlein still has to figure out how his proposed space station for these 1,000 colonists will survive the 224 mile-per-hour hurricane-force winds on the planet.
While there are still many questions to answer, Söhnlein did admit to Insider that his plan is “aspirational,” adding, “but, I think it’s also very doable by 2050.”
Elsewhere, in February there was a blog post uploaded to the Human2Venus website, where Söhnlein wrote in-part, “I am not an engineer or a scientist, but I have ultimate faith in the abilities of both. Therefore, I always figured that they would be able to overcome the myriad challenges facing us in the extreme environment of space […] When I was 11 years old, I had a recurring dream that I was the commander of the first human community on Mars. I have spent the more than four decades since then doing whatever I could to help humanity become a multi-planet species.”
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