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DreamerOfRain t1_j8h0wff wrote

Reply to comment by WimWumRay in Is it true the humans could breathe and live in the atmosphere of Venus? by Impossible_Mine_1616

Big step up from basically anywhere else in the solar system other than earth though. And Iirc oxygen is buoyant enough in this atmosphere that you can live inside oxygen balloons which solves some logistic problems of building the cloud city.

Overall venus is a serious contender for off world colonisation when we get to that point along with mars and moon

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UnamedStreamNumber9 t1_j8jsy6e wrote

I kind of like the concept in one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels where they build a completely opaque planetary sunshield in front of Venus and freeze all the co2 out of the atmosphere. Then they have some kind of foamed concrete insulation/pavement over the entire surface of the planet to keep it down when they open the sunshield back up. Lastly, they wind a superconducting coil completely around the planet, pole to pole, and use it to create a motor in the sun’s magnetic field to create some rotation

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2112eyes t1_j8x58c1 wrote

That's dope. I also liked the Terminator City on Mercury, where the city rotates around the planet with a rail just on the terminator line so it never gets too hot or cold.

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SvenTropics t1_j8qahsn wrote

I guess the hard part is that you can't use any materials there to construct anything. Nothing in the foreseeable future would be able to survive a trip to the surface and back. So everything would have to be extraterrestrial. With Mars or a moon colony, the thought is that you could mine raw materials from the surface and use them to construct things. Venus doesn't even have a moon you could mine.

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DreamerOfRain t1_j8qi4t7 wrote

Yeah but you can already easily extract a lot of useful things from the dense atmosphere like carbon, nitrogen, sulfur that is useful in agriculture to sustain population.

Also, the surface environment is hellish, but it can be withstand with more robust engineering that are designed to withstand heat and pressure like from deep sea and deep earth environment compare to lightweight probes full of sensitive electronics. For example mechanical tethers and drill could be dropped from baloon high above to anchor and extract resources. It will be a monumental feat of engineering, but nothing that would be impossible to overcome with near future technology.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Venus colonisation is that it might not be viable economically. Compare to the readily available Helium -3 on the moon or the vast amount of ore and other resources on Mars that are easily accessible on the surface, Venus don't have much that is going to excite investors to dump trillions upon trillions on it. Maybe if we were able to discover something really interesting there, like remnant of a civilization or something, then there would be interest. Otherwise it will probably be at most a research base to utilize the venus environment to test technology.

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SlickMcFav0rit3 t1_j8ukh73 wrote

Getting stuff off the moon (or asteroids) and into orbit around Venus would be way cheaper than getting materials off of Earth or Mars, so that's one option

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