Having already launched an undersea adventure tour company with a near-perfect safety record, Argentinian-born entrepreneur Guillermo Söhnlein tells Insider he's thinking even bigger and better with his next project: Sending 1,000 colonists to go spend the rest of their lives in giant blimps floating perpetually in Venus's atmosphere, with a target date of 2050 for the first departures.
"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," Söhnlein said of his vision to station the population of a small town in a theoretically habitable sliver of atmosphere approximately 30 miles above the surface of the Stygian nightmare planet in blimps he maintains will be designed to resist corrosion by clouds of sulfuric acid. Addressing the design flaws that caused the little mishap that last month took the lives of his former partner and four other souls, Söhnlein said "I don't think that should have a negative connotation because you could almost argue that it's a critical element of humanity moving forward… If we didn't have people that like this, we'd probably all still be in caves."