What Would It Mean to Live in the Clouds?

If one can dream up a better future for humanity or for whatever species humans evolve into, why replicate the past?

Lava rolls across the surface of Venus, fiery waves puffed high by heat intense enough to melt lead. Volcanic eruptions spit sulfurous gas into the air, which condenses into clouds that rain acid. Three land masses stand above the molten plains: Aphrodite Terra, Ishtar Terra, and Lada Terra, named after Greek, Akkadian, and Slavic goddesses. The Maxwell Mountains flank the eastern side of Ishtar Terra, its tallest peak higher than Everest, looming like Mount Doom over Mordor. A place no one would go unless they had to, unless they were willing to burn.

In 1970, the USSR’s Venera 7 spacecraft landed on Venus. Before it was engulfed in flames, it lasted twenty-three minutes, long enough to transmit readings of the planet’s 887-degree Fahrenheit surface temperature and 92-bar atmospheric pressure—equivalent to being three thousand feet under the Atlantic Ocean. Eleven years later, Venera 13 lasted on the surface for almost two hours, transmitting data and images until the planet swallowed it up too.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, an underdog of human space futures. When it comes to putting boots on the ground, humanity’s collective gaze points toward Mars, Earth’s second-closest neighbor. Proponents of Mars habitation argue that the roughly twenty-four-hour day and Arctic temperatures make it “similar” to Earth and relatively comfortable compared to anywhere else. Others argue that Mars is no place to settle, especially given the deadly radiation that would force people to live in domes or, more likely, in subterranean habitats. If the idea is to free humanity from confinement to a single planet, what kind of liberation would be found underground?

Neither the Venusian surface nor subsurface is habitable, but some scientists think humans could live in the clouds. NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis has proposed constructing cloud cities in the Venusian atmosphere, some thirty-five miles above the surface, where the temperature and atmospheric pressure drop into livable ranges, the planet’s suffocating carbon dioxide atmosphere thins out, and lighter oxygen molecules comprise the air (which could, according to a recent study, contain microbes).

Landis and other scientists envision giant solar-powered airship habitats. In 2015, NASA initiated the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) project, which would have culminated in a thirty-day crewed mission to the Venusian atmosphere. Though NASA and the European Space Agency plan to send orbiters into Venus’s atmosphere in the next decade, the HAVOC project has not received funding, its supporting research archived indefinitely.

Perhaps the idea of living thirty-five miles above a planet’s surface seems fantastical. Perhaps living inside a planet seems preferable to living above it. Every time I step off a boat or plane, I bounce on the ground, relieved at its solidness. Aside from Earth itself, I don’t like walking on moving vehicles. I don’t trust that we can both cut through space at different speeds without tempting gravity to do one of us in.

While I don’t want to live on or above another planet, the idea of living in the clouds captivates me. It feels both impossible and somehow inevitable, both futuristic and primeval. Every time I ride in an airplane, I half expect an announcement saying it’s all a joke, that we should all deboard. It’s sheer lunacy that a plane weighing well over 100,000 pounds can soar higher than vapor; I feel as though I’m in the middle of the greatest magic trick in history. The dichotomy between fantasies involving humans’ place in the sky and the constraints of physics and resources represents a species-defining opposition. A needle that can be threaded, but only with steady hands and a willingness to shift paradigms when it comes to possible ways to live.

Do humans need solid ground under their feet? Do they need their own planet(s)? Hominids have spent 99 percent of their history as nomads, settling down only in the last eight thousand years. Humans moved with animal herds and the changing seasons, adapting to Earth’s rhythms rather than forcing the planet to adhere to theirs. When I see proposals to terraform or to nuke Mars, I worry humans have forgotten how to acclimate to different environments and why doing so is important. Could Venus help remind us?

Humans have always created myths about the sky—the shape-shifting, color-changing entity from which sound, water, and light burst forth. If the direction all things go is down, then we all come from above. The ancient Greeks believed the clouds were Nephelai, a cluster of nymphs who would gather water from the rivers, bring it to the sky, and pour it over the land. In Navajo origin stories, the clouds, which represent the four directions and hold the four basic elements, combined to create man and woman. The Haudenosaunee believe that people originally lived in the sky until one of them, pregnant, fell through a hole down to Earth. Humans have long intuited that our species—that everything—is made of what Carl Sagan famously referred to as “star stuff.”

Would humans in Venusian cloud habitats feel a sense of wonder or fulfillment in animating these myths? Would they feel liberated, adrift, or both? Closer to the divine or further from it?

I wonder too what would happen to the idea of being grounded. Throughout most of history, humanity has gone barefoot, maintaining constant and direct contact with the earth. Unlike most of the shoes we wear now, the moccasins and animal hides worn by early humans were highly conductive. Part of why temples and mosques require visitors to remove their shoes, aside from cleanliness, is because it’s tough to have a holy experience with rubber soles as buffers. Being barefoot is central to Buddhist prayer and life. Hindu rituals involve circumambulation, or walking barefoot, inside of or even to temples twenty miles away. To enhance the benefits of grounding, some worshippers practice Angapradakshina, in which they bathe in a nearby river or sea and then roll on the temple floor. Grounding is also called “earthing.”

Some scientific studies suggest that grounding may have tangible benefits because it enables Earth to conduct electrons into one’s body. That transfer eventually reaches an equilibrium in which the electrical potential of one’s body is the same as the electrical potential of Earth, which creates what Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman referred to as the “umbrella” effect, minimizing the impact of external electrical forces.

Would humans in Venusian cloud habitats feel a sense of wonder or fulfillment in animating these myths?

It’s nearly impossible to study what the absence of something as fundamental as the ground and grounding could mean for people. Standing barefoot in the grass or letting sand drift through one’s fingers decodes into relief, a sense of coming home. I do those things myself. Grounding has been fundamental to human existence, so how would our species evolve if people didn’t or couldn’t touch the ground? Would our hunter-gatherer DNA reawaken from its long slumber and help humans realign the crooked spines of our anthropocenic lifestyles? I can only guess that humans would develop beliefs and rituals around the clouds—the ephemeral shapes and faces morphing around them. Would “clouding” become a thing?

As I envision people bobbing in the Venusian atmosphere (for whatever reason, I picture them in transparent bubbles, rather than on ships), it’s easy to imagine them communing with a spiritual current. Perhaps this reflects my astro-nerd vision of heaven, with solar panel–covered dirigibles rather than pearly gates but transcendent nonetheless. Imagining some kind of strange nirvana in the clouds of Venus contradicts most sci-fi stories that take place on spaceships. Battlestar Galactica maintains a sweaty claustrophobia for multiple seasons as humans search for a new home, for ground under their feet. No one wants to live on a spacecraft forever. I’m not even sure I could handle the trip to the moon or Mars if the living space is roughly the size of a minivan. As someone who sits in the aisle seat on every flight, at every movie, and at every faculty meeting, the thought makes me tug at my collar.

And yet, the proposal appeals more than any I’ve heard to settle on Mars, even though I’m not sure humans should actually try to inhabit the clouds of Venus (or anywhere else). Perhaps I romanticize the Venusian idea because we can’t stick a flag in the clouds or strip them of resources. Humans would have to do things differently.

To assume that humans could (or should) ensure the species’ existence by becoming multiplanetary, as though humanity’s terrestrial mistakes wouldn’t recur, is staggeringly shortsighted. If one can dream up a better future for humanity or for whatever species humans evolve into, why replicate the past?

We can’t stick a flag in the clouds or strip them of resources. Humans would have to do things differently. 

Although it’s explored in sci-fi, the concept of cloud cities in the Venusian atmosphere isn’t as tightly tethered to what exists right now or what has existed in the past, which might help humans release themselves from strangulating and seemingly congenital constructs. Maybe the species needs to be galvanized into upending paradigms by something otherworldly.

The etymology of the word cloud is itself a story of change. It derives from the Old English clud, which is similar to clod, a big lump of earth. The word began pertaining to the vaporous white gossamer shapes I’m writing about here in the thirteenth century. The word then took on gloomy and ominous associations, including something that hangs over one’s head. In the mid-1600s, the phrase “in the clouds” began to refer to people or ideas that were “unreal” or “fanciful.” That idiom still exists, but now pilots and astronauts strive to reach and dwell in those clouds, just as the gods once did (and perhaps still do). Just as humans living above the clouds of Venus might.

Those people would be in good company. Venus knows something about metamorphoses too. When it was a young planet, Venus may have been habitable (Mars was and perhaps still is, and not only by humans). Some 500 million years ago, Venus experienced a complete global resurfacing. Scientists disagree about whether the obliteration and subsequent reformation of the Venusian surface happened gradually or catastrophically, but they agree that volcanic eruptions destroyed and then remade the planet’s face. That event also contributed to the lack of plate tectonics on Venus. Pieces of the planet no longer overlap or subduct, don’t force whatever’s inside to the surface or into the sky.

What can I say—I’m a sucker for people, species, or planets that have remade themselves.

Venus rotates the opposite direction of all the other planets except Uranus. Scientists believe it once rotated counterclockwise but reversed due to a massive collision, atmospheric tides, or a long process during which the planet’s rotation slowed and went retrograde. The idea of an entire planet slowing, stopping, and then turning the other way seems perhaps like an obvious metaphor, but it comforts me nonetheless, as does the notion that on Venus, the sun still rises—in the west.