In June 2023, OceanGate Expeditions sent its unregulated submersible, Titan, down to see the wreckage of the Titanic. All five people on board, one of which was company co-founder Stockton Rush, were killed when the vessel suffered a “catastrophic implosion” roughly 90 minutes into the journey. While you would think such a horrific tragedy would cause a bit of reflection and increased attention to safety, you’d be wrong. In fact, OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein is setting his sights a bit higher, out of the ocean and off into space.
- Sohnlein left OceanGate in 2013. Since then, he went on to create a new company, Humans2Venus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the company is “a private venture focused on establishing a permanent human presence in the Venusian atmosphere,” per his LinkedIn page. How random is that?
- He doesn’t really care about what happened to Titan. In fact, Guillermo Sohnlein is shockingly flippant about the fact that five people were killed and thinks we should all move on already because there’s work to be done. “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,” he told Insider.
- So, what does he want to do? His goal is pretty simple. Sohnlein wants to send 1,000 people to live on a floating colony on Venus by the year 2050. It’s probably important to note here that this is literally less than 30 years away and humans have never even reached Venus, let alone gone down into the atmosphere, but sure, bud.
- Sohnlein has had the same dream since he was 11 years old. He has always wanted to release humanity from its early shackles and allow our species to live on multiple different planets. Why he picked Venus is anyone’s guess.
- So, is it actually possible in any way? According to Sohnlein, NASA found a tiny part of the atmosphere on Venus that’s about 30 miles in the air that humans might potentially be able to survive in. Sounds… promising? Lest we forget that the entire planet is enrobed in sulfuric acid clouds, gets winds of nearly 224 miles per hours, and pretty much a million other things that would basically be a death sentence for humans.
- Sohnlein literally has zero qualifications, but he is eccentric and rich, so he thinks it could happen! “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,” he wrote in a February 2023 blog post on the Humans2Venus website.
- He also thinks he could make it happen faster than NASA. We gotta note here that NASA is a government agency with some of the country’s best scientific minds and billions in funding. Still, Guillermo Sohnlein is ready to race them to Venus. “I could fully understand the political and economic realities that prevented NASA from adopting a ‘Moon, Venus, Mars and Beyond’ vision instead of its current ‘Moon, Mars and Beyond’ long-term plan,” he said, adding that “a *private* group could certainly advocate such a vision.” Good luck on that one, pal.
