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> The colonization of Venus is also a fascinating idea that isn't talked about much in comparison to the Moon or Mars. Essentially, the surface is too hot for c

• entropicdrifter 7y ago
  The thing is, if we were to develop the tech needed to cool Venus, it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to just use it here on earth to offset CO2/CO emissions and reverse the greenhouse effect.
  • rbanffy 7y ago
    That does nothing in terms of increasing Earth's surface area. Either we cap the population or we expand to other habitats.
    • blaser-waffle 7y ago
      Or we mature enough to stop expanding exponentially
    • lokedhs 7y ago
      There are vast expanses of desert in Sahara that no one lives in. That land is much easier to settle than another planet, yet we don't do that.
• rbanffy 7y ago
  That's an interesting article. I wonder how practical would it be to harvest hydrogen (protons, really) from solar wind using magnetic lensing. Tha same tech could be useful for Mars. Depending on the shape of the parasol, the same support structures could be used for the lenses, focusing a stream of hydrogen nuclei on a small area of the planet. This focused plasma stream could also compensate some of the forces on the parasol (it'd need to be closer to the Sun than the Sun/Venus L1 point and balanced by light pressure) allowing the parasol to be smaller.