Cloud cities. You know them, you love them, and I want them in my conworld. The last story I posted here takes place in one.
Economically, here's how I see this panning out:
- A gas giant has economically exploitable gases.
- Floating extraction platforms similar to oil rigs are set up to extract those gases.
- These platforms develop ancillary economies to support the people mining those gases.
- These ancillary economies attract more and more people, diversifying the overall economy to the point that the platforms become floating cities.
In terms of physics and chemistry I'm on much shakier ground. This isn't a rock-hard sci-fi setting, so I'm willing to fudge things, but I like learning about the real world through my worldbuilding so it's fun to try and make it work.
The cities are held aloft by Flanar pontoons and stabilized in part by the extraction equipment hanging down from the underside of the city into the layer where the extractible gases can be found.
At first I imagined the cities being sealed from the outside, but that makes them no different than orbital colonies save for the presence of gravity, so I want them open.
Right now I imagine there being a belt of breathable air, encircling the planet, limited to a certain range of heights and possibly combined to certain latitudes, where the cities can be found. They would drift along with the wind currents, so the air speed would be near zero, allowing people to venture outside without being blown away.
One possibility I entertained was that the whole planet is mostly oxygen and argon, but that doesn't seem likely.
On other places where this question has come up people suggested a Venus-like super earth, so a massive rocky planet with a very thick atmosphere. That would still necessitate sealed cities I think.
What if transpermia carried life from one of the worlds it evolved on, perhaps billions of years ago, and it's taken hold in the atmosphere and adapted to a new habitat. So life is from one of two planets, and might be solely microscopic. Maybe it congeals into great living clouds.
This life created some kind of important substance on the planet that is running out, which gives a reason to have gas mining operations on the planet, as well as creates conflict between scientists wanting to study the life and this novel ecosystem and the miners wanting to make money.
And maybe it can only survive near the equator or poles, which is where it creates the belt of breathable atmosphere.
All good ideas. Another possibility, the oxygen is a byproduct of the refining of mined gases, so the more you "pollute" the more breathable the atmosphere becomes
That's another good one. Maybe the oxygen build up could cause some kind of environmental catastrophe. Like there's sporadic events where the atmosphere catches fire, and if we do it too much the entire planet bursts into flames. Maybe it's a methane gas giant like Neptune but with enough internal heat to have a reasonably temperate altitude at normal pressures.