Hollywood and Netflix love to dramatize historical waves like the California gold rush and glamorize the hardships, but the reality is that during gold rushes, most wealth was generated not by miners, but by those who supplied and supported them.
Samuel Brannan, a merchant during the California Gold Rush, bought up mining supplies from around the country and resold them in California at massive markups, earning upwards of $5,000 a day (or roughly $120,000 a day in today’s economy). Merchants, boarding houses, saloons, laundries, gambling and entertainment parlors earned far more money—and importantly—more consistent income than miners themselves! The economic boom around gold made more money in California than the gold itself, and led to the phrase, “Sell the shovel, not the gold.”
Gold rushes were important drivers of expansion, far outstripping the actual gold, and set up states like California and even countries like Australia and New Zealand with thriving economies.
What would it take for us to see a gold rush in space?
It’s easy to look at ideas like mining asteroids or the Moon or setting up colonies on Mars as the 21st-century equivalent of a gold rush, but like historical gold rushes, the real value won’t come from anything shiny and glamorous.
In my latest novel, I propose that Venus, rather than Mars, the Moon or any asteroid, is better suited for a gold rush.
But isn’t Venus a seething, boiling, crushing hell? Why, yes, it is… We could no more build a city on Venus than we could build one at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but here on Earth, we avoid places that would crush us like a bug on a windscreen. Instead, we float above them in cruise ships.
How feasible is this on Venus?
It’s actually realistic. The insane density within the Venusian atmosphere means that a nitrogen/oxygen mix on Venus works roughly as well as hydrogen or helium in blimps here on Earth, and that means instead of being limited to just the basket beneath a blimp, we could live INSIDE them, breathing the air they use to float among the clouds. NASA’s HAVOC project even explored this idea, although there are no plans for this to proceed.
From a practical perspective, the real problem is the insane wind speeds and the sulphuric acid in the clouds, but (as discussed in my latest novel, Gold Rush) these could largely be resolved by crashing a modest-sized comet into the planet! It’s terraforming done easily.
Also, from a practical perspective, it’s important to note that at the altitude these blimps would float at, the temperature would be balmy, around 50-60F or roughly 10-15C and the air pressure is almost the same as here on Earth. If the acid were removed from the atmosphere, you could walk around outside your blimp with little more than SCUBA gear on!
And then there’s the industrial potential… Venus gets almost TWICE as much sunlight as Earth, so energy is super-abundant. Ah, but you can’t mine resources on Venus. No, and for rare metals and things like iron and copper, that is a problem, but ALL the carbon in biology comes from the air. It’s all come from plants turning CO2 into sugars and that propagating throughout the ecosystem to build your body, bones and brain, etc. In terms of percentage of body mass, carbon is second only to oxygen! Carbon is an astonishingly versatile element, and there is no shortage of it on Venus. Oh, and the byproduct of mining carbon out of the atmosphere of Venus is oxygen! It’s win-win.
Mars gets all the airtime from pundits, but physically, it is closer in size to the Moon than it is to Earth, and this means it is problematic. Even if Mars was terraformed, its gravity is so weak it can’t hold onto an atmosphere and without a magnetic field, it gets pummeled by cosmic radiation.
Not one planet in our solar system measures up to Earth, but Venus is far closer than it might at first seem.
Realistically, we’ll settle Mars before we get to Venus, but it is interesting to consider just how astonishingly viable Venus is as a planet. Far from being hellish, it might be a better long-term option than Mars and second only to Earth.
Crashing comets into planets is a rare event in the universe, but it’s not entirely implausible, with Comet 31/Atlas soaring past Mars later this year!
Somewhat fortuitously, as the book launches, this interstellar comet is racing through our solar system, having come from elsewhere within our galaxy. As this scenario is the set-up for my story, I’d like to think the cosmos is helping out with a marketing stunt. Seriously, though, there are even some astronomers suggesting this is a deliberate fly-by being conducted by an extraterrestrial intelligence, but I still think my cosmic marketing suggestion is far more realistic.
Gold Rush is available now as an ebook, paperback and hardback, with the audiobook coming soon. If you want to explore the possibility of First Contact with an extraterrestrial civilization settling on Venus, grab a copy today!
