If it takes thousands of years, monitoring air density can probably give you at least a couple centuries heads-up, like “we expect in 150 years from now that the atmosphere will thin to the point our cities lose buoyancy. That gives us approximately five generations to think of a solution.”
Maybe land in the water that you plan to introduce? By the way, where’s that coming from?
The solution would be to evacuate back to Earth, because the surface still would be hostile to human life. Or don’t waste the resources, and have some patience.
Or move the cloud cities to one of the gas giants (presumably where the water is coming from anyway, or at least one of their moons, so the interplanetary transport infrastructure would already exist at this point.
The water should be coming from the comets or at worst the asteroid belt.
Lifting a city out of a gravity well only to deposit it on Jupiter or Saturn, not only is a waste of resources, it won’t work.
Mars isn’t a viable terraforming candidate because it has a mass of about 1/3 that of The Earth. No human can live there for any extended period of time.
The problem you have with all of the gas giants is the opposite issue. Once the city achieves boyancy, as everything that falls into a gas giant will, it will be so deep into the gravity well that humans would be crushed.
Well if you can fill an ocean on Venus by the the time the cyanobacteria makes its atmosphere lose density, or even a great lake, then the cloud cities have somewhere to land safely.
I wouldn’t want to build a city that I know will fall to its doom at some nebulous point in the future.
If it takes thousands of years, monitoring air density can probably give you at least a couple centuries heads-up, like “we expect in 150 years from now that the atmosphere will thin to the point our cities lose buoyancy. That gives us approximately five generations to think of a solution.”
Maybe land in the water that you plan to introduce? By the way, where’s that coming from?
The solution would be to evacuate back to Earth, because the surface still would be hostile to human life. Or don’t waste the resources, and have some patience.
Or move the cloud cities to one of the gas giants (presumably where the water is coming from anyway, or at least one of their moons, so the interplanetary transport infrastructure would already exist at this point.
The water should be coming from the comets or at worst the asteroid belt.
Lifting a city out of a gravity well only to deposit it on Jupiter or Saturn, not only is a waste of resources, it won’t work.
Mars isn’t a viable terraforming candidate because it has a mass of about 1/3 that of The Earth. No human can live there for any extended period of time.
The problem you have with all of the gas giants is the opposite issue. Once the city achieves boyancy, as everything that falls into a gas giant will, it will be so deep into the gravity well that humans would be crushed.
Well if you can fill an ocean on Venus by the the time the cyanobacteria makes its atmosphere lose density, or even a great lake, then the cloud cities have somewhere to land safely.
You can’t take this away from me.