7 ms·

Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system From another perspective, its atmosphere is "one of the most Earth-like in the solar system", and scienti

Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system From another perspective, its atmosphere is "one of the most Earth-like in the solar system", and scientists long ago postulated the idea of establishing floating cloud cities. Big balloons filled with nitrogen and oxygen would naturally settle at the right altitude, 30 miles above the surface, where gravity, ambient pressure, and radiation aren't far off that of Earth, and temperature hovers around a balmy 86°F. Since the pressure inside and outside is matched, punctures wouldn't cause explosive decompression, providing time to repair damage or leaks. You wouldn't need a bulky pressure suit to venture outside, just some comparatively simple breathing apparatus, and of course protection from the nasty sulfuric acid in the atmosphere (akin to acid rain). The habs would be coated in Teflon to resist it. More about this crazy idea here: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161019-the-amazing-cloud-cities-we-could-build-on-venus https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161019-the-amazing-clou...

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? How do visitors or pioneers deorbit and land at the floating city? If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Literally how floating works. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) > Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? Why is this unique to Venus versus anywhere else in space? > If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Yes. Same as if your rocket is trying to land at your Moon or Mars base (or hell, your Earth landing pad) and goes off course, it squashes your colony like a crouton.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
    > By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) Literally how flying planes off Aircraft Carriers works.
    - psunavy03 1y ago
      Speaking as a former naval aviator, we haven't cracked the whole "cats and traps with an SSTO" bit yet.
  - boolit 1y ago
    > By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble-but I’m no physicist.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble No more than for a floating platform on the ocean. (Or frankly any sea or airborne firing platform.) If your launch mass is a significant fraction of station mass, and you can't counterweight, you could float it off to the side and then have the baloon detach when its engines fire. But none of this is in even the top thousand problems that come with colonising Venus.
      - dr_dshiv 1y ago
        You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out. Assuming these cloud cities have landing strips, right? Managing ballast might be a challenge…
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out This requires engineering the rocket to withstand structural loads in two directions as well as a ~90-degree rotation under thrust. Not trivial. (It's been a major handicap for airlaunch on Earth.) Landing on and taking off from floating platforms is like the one part of Venusian colonisation we've actually solved.
- M95D 1y ago
  > How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Aerobraking with the balloon? A balloon the size of a city would slow down very fast in a thick atmosphere like that, then slowly descend until it reaches the stable altitude. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? Spaceplane? Take off like a glider on a slope runway, then ignite the rocket. > If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? That's a true problem. Local manufacturing would be on the surface. An elevator or cable car could make the connection to the ground facilities, if the winds aren't too strong. But the manufacturing of the materials would be extremely difficult in surface conditions. > If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Nope. See first answer. > Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely. Possibly. But the biggest question is why go there?
  - Zardoz84 1y ago
    Facilities on the surface of Venus ? What drug did you take? First. High temperatures in a corrosive atmosphere. Also, there aren't winds. There are currents. At the surface the atmosphere it's supercritical. It's more like a fluid than a gas.
- Symmetry 1y ago
  Gonathan Goff wrote bunch on what you have to work with in terms of what you can extract from Venus's atmosphere. While metals would need to be imported if you're going to pick some place in outer space to live its hard to do much better. https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/page/2/ https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/page/2/
  - glenstein 1y ago
    One fascinating idea I haven't heard talked about is, if we ever are able to make super-strong carbon composites, they could be used on Venus for passive floating dragnets to scrape raw materials from the surface. They could float just enough to drag the surface from one end and be carried along by winds from the other, and then be passively triggered to float back to the upper atmosphere to be harvested. Thanks to the extreme bouyancy of Venus, a small amount of compressed air could passively lift much more than it would on Earth, making Venus's bouyancy a secret super power. And you could design nets with creative combinations of hooks, one-way valves and so on to gather a payload as it passively drags the surface. And seaweed-style distribution of compressed air capsules could make it fault-tolerant even if ripped into segments by the horrific winds of the middle atmosphere. The temperature, torsion, and corrosion are as extreme as it gets, and it may not be realistic, and/or it may not be feasible to think such payloads could float through the hurricane force winds and be recoverable in any systematic way at higher altitudes. But it has a tantalizing feeling of "holy heck this bouyancy super power might be useful" in the event we had material strong enough to do it. That would give a hypothetical Venus settlement access to iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, some titanium, and bunches of silicon dioxide.
  - hwc 1y ago
    Yeah, if you can't send robots to the surface to mine necessary minerals, don't bother building floating cities.
chickenbig 1y ago
Nice link, shifts the perspective a bit. Guess it would be like living on a floating oil/gas platform.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
Just don't fall off the side of those platforms. It'd be interesting to see what additional "personal atmospheric floatation" devices would be needed.
- teekert 1y ago
  You can't because you need to be encapsulated in a balloon to keep the toxic atmosphere out.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    EVAs are still likely necessary. Tethering would be useful.
    - freedomben 1y ago
      Indeed, though to keep it interesting we should put pinholes through every tenth one
    - astroflection 1y ago
      I see a new action/thriller space movie on the horizon.
      - dredmorbius 1y ago
        Cue Sandra Bullock for At the End of My Tether. That Movie Guy Voice: Above a world ... where the atmosphere will eat the flesh off your body ... and crush your eyeballs flat, only a thin kevlar tether stands between you ... and eternity...
akk0 1y ago
Living like little organelles inside a giant cell membrane
a3w 1y ago
Venus is room temperature with low radiation, if you dig in. Living on Venus was floating around as an easier alternative to living on the Mars surface. Room temperature is 21°C, I have no idea how many freedom fries units that is.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
  > Room temperature is 21°C Debated, was 23 or 25 in my college textbooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_temperature > I have no idea how many freedom fries units that is. Kind of a bad attempt at humor? Imperial units is fine.
  - bryant 1y ago
    Imperialist here. Freedom fries was funny.
    - yndoendo 1y ago
      Had to add metric to an imperial unit application since it is to be sold internationally. I live in a Fahrenheit country so I set my phone, computer, and car to Celsius to learn how the the temperatures readings feel. I 100% agree, "Freedom Fries Units" is quite fitting. Turns out I prefer Celsius over Fahrenheit in day to day usage.
  - antonvs 1y ago
    The US doesn't use Imperial units. It uses US customary units, which are different from Imperial in several significant ways, because the Imperial system evolved after the US split from the British Empire. Also interestingly, US customary units are defined in terms of metric. So in a sense, the US does use the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
    - Podrod 1y ago
      I often correct people regarding the US not using Imperial as well but to be fair the only significant difference these days is in fluid measurements. Weight and length measurements were standardised between US customary and Imperial back in the 1950s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound
Symmetry 1y ago
The Venusian atmosphere at that altitude is super dry, only a few score ppm of water making it much drier as Earth's Atacama desert. So while that water vapor is extremely acidic in terms of raw ppm its not too far outside the limit of what OSHA allows and is probably fine since you aren't breathing it.
- glenstein 1y ago
  If I understand correctly there's still a little bit of residual hydrogen bound up in the sulfuric acid molecules. And if you added it all up close to the amount of water you'd get from one of our Great lakes in North America. (At least if you combined it with oxygen, of which there's plenty on Venus). The article mentioned something about heavy water which I don't understand very much. But it's a problem. The tragedy of both Mars and Venus is that billions of years ago? It seems like they both might have had abundant liquid oceans of water. Which doesn't mean they would have supported life, but they would have been so much closer to habitable and a much better starting point. Instead, it's like if you're deadbeat brother house-sat them for a weekend and threw a bender and trashed the houses, that's what we're left with now.
  - Symmetry 1y ago
    A big issue is that neither seem to have developed photosynthetic life[1] and without a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere they don't have an ozone layer. That means that UV light penetrates further and breaks up water into its constituent parts allowing the light hydrogen to be blown away by the solar wind over geological time scales. [1] It's looking increasingly plausible that Mars developed primitive life, but I'd bet heavily against photosynthesis. That took way longer than chemosynthetic life on Earth.
    - glenstein 1y ago
      I think the article speaks to the point you're making also, that the UV light may have been an important (if not primary) mechanism for blasting away Venus' water. So even if someone snapped their fingers and made Venus perfectly terraformed, it probably once again would begin the process of losing its water. And any life would have to survive a brighter sun.
glenstein 1y ago
Exactly right, and it's a fascinating prospect. Earth like temperature and atmospheric pressure, and better protection from radiation than even Earth. Major advantages Venus has over Mars are that (1) it's closer, (2) aforementioned radiation protection, (3) no issue of aggressive bone decalcification. Radiation on Mars is brutal and it doesn't get talked about enough. Anyone without sufficient protection from surface rays would have 5-10 years before they come down with some form of terminal cancer. When Andy Weier went on book tour for Artemis he talked about how cities have to have an economic rationale for existing, which is why in his story, the Moon would be oriented around tourism. Venus seems to be disadvantaged in terms of having practically no access to rare or heavy metals because you can't safely get to the surface and even if you can, is basalt (which in many ways is great and chemically diverse and rich, like the nutritious potato of surface rocks, but it won't yield concentrated veins of valuable metal). But what Venus does have is enough carbon ready to be processed into liquid fuel, while skipping complicated mining and extracting and refining processes that complicate the matter on Earth and would similarly complicate it from any other source in the solar system. You would have to source hydrogen from somewhere to synthesize fuel. But in a way that's an advantage, because you could source it from an asteroid, keep it in space, and just send up the carbon feedstock from Venus. You'd probably rather do it that way anyway, avoiding some of the more brutal costs of sending water weight in and out of the gravity well. So you pull the carbon feedstock from Venus, you synthesize fuel in space, and you're the premiere source of rocket fuel in the solar system. Economic rationale! The pin that might burst this bubble is that Venus's carbon feedstock advantage might not matter, because the water rather than the carbon maybe the more critical variable, and the second best options for sourcing carbon (mining, processing) may be good enough that Venus's advantage doesn't matter. Then there's the buoyancy, another extreme eyebrow raising advantage given Venus's hellscape on the surface. It's remarkably easier to be buoyant on Venus than Earth, in some ways you could consider it an ocean planet, but it's an ocean of extremely thick air. Which is not only extremely important for any hypothesized floating settlements, but might open the door to buoyancy based passive dragnets to scrape and retrieve raw materials from the surface. But that too would hinge on having incredibly powerful carbon weaves netting and economics making it worth it. But still, there's something intriguing there. Anyway, I feel like there's a wiiiide open lane in public communication and in hard sci-fi for a deep dive on Venus colonization, Kim Stanley Robinson style, and I just want someone to occupy that damn lane already.
SwtCyber 1y ago
Like, Mars gets all the hype, but you're dealing with bone-dry cold, no atmosphere to speak of, and brutal radiation. Meanwhile, Venus has breathable pressure, decent gravity, and no need for pressurized suits... you just have to float above an acid bath.
- jmsaucier 1y ago
  I think part of it is that everyone knows that the sun will expand. Why move closer when you can get further away?
  - brnt 1y ago
    It'll be a minute before that becomes a concern. Also, if we can deal with Venus, we can reverse global warming in Earth first?
jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
Wow thank you for laying out this info. I've always read the theories on the Venus floating colony but the info on pressure and temp I had no idea about.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? How do visitors or pioneers deorbit and land at the floating city? If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Literally how floating works. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) > Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? Why is this unique to Venus versus anywhere else in space? > If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Yes. Same as if your rocket is trying to land at your Moon or Mars base (or hell, your Earth landing pad) and goes off course, it squashes your colony like a crouton.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  > By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) Literally how flying planes off Aircraft Carriers works.
  - psunavy03 1y ago
    Speaking as a former naval aviator, we haven't cracked the whole "cats and traps with an SSTO" bit yet.
- boolit 1y ago
  > By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble-but I’m no physicist.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > I think Newton’s third law may cause trouble No more than for a floating platform on the ocean. (Or frankly any sea or airborne firing platform.) If your launch mass is a significant fraction of station mass, and you can't counterweight, you could float it off to the side and then have the baloon detach when its engines fire. But none of this is in even the top thousand problems that come with colonising Venus.
    - dr_dshiv 1y ago
      You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out. Assuming these cloud cities have landing strips, right? Managing ballast might be a challenge…
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > You fly the rocket on the bottom of a plane, then fire it out This requires engineering the rocket to withstand structural loads in two directions as well as a ~90-degree rotation under thrust. Not trivial. (It's been a major handicap for airlaunch on Earth.) Landing on and taking off from floating platforms is like the one part of Venusian colonisation we've actually solved.
M95D 1y ago
> How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Aerobraking with the balloon? A balloon the size of a city would slow down very fast in a thick atmosphere like that, then slowly descend until it reaches the stable altitude. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? Spaceplane? Take off like a glider on a slope runway, then ignite the rocket. > If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there? That's a true problem. Local manufacturing would be on the surface. An elevator or cable car could make the connection to the ground facilities, if the winds aren't too strong. But the manufacturing of the materials would be extremely difficult in surface conditions. > If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape? Nope. See first answer. > Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely. Possibly. But the biggest question is why go there?
- Zardoz84 1y ago
  Facilities on the surface of Venus ? What drug did you take? First. High temperatures in a corrosive atmosphere. Also, there aren't winds. There are currents. At the surface the atmosphere it's supercritical. It's more like a fluid than a gas.
Symmetry 1y ago
Gonathan Goff wrote bunch on what you have to work with in terms of what you can extract from Venus's atmosphere. While metals would need to be imported if you're going to pick some place in outer space to live its hard to do much better. https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/page/2/ https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/page/2/
- glenstein 1y ago
  One fascinating idea I haven't heard talked about is, if we ever are able to make super-strong carbon composites, they could be used on Venus for passive floating dragnets to scrape raw materials from the surface. They could float just enough to drag the surface from one end and be carried along by winds from the other, and then be passively triggered to float back to the upper atmosphere to be harvested. Thanks to the extreme bouyancy of Venus, a small amount of compressed air could passively lift much more than it would on Earth, making Venus's bouyancy a secret super power. And you could design nets with creative combinations of hooks, one-way valves and so on to gather a payload as it passively drags the surface. And seaweed-style distribution of compressed air capsules could make it fault-tolerant even if ripped into segments by the horrific winds of the middle atmosphere. The temperature, torsion, and corrosion are as extreme as it gets, and it may not be realistic, and/or it may not be feasible to think such payloads could float through the hurricane force winds and be recoverable in any systematic way at higher altitudes. But it has a tantalizing feeling of "holy heck this bouyancy super power might be useful" in the event we had material strong enough to do it. That would give a hypothetical Venus settlement access to iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, some titanium, and bunches of silicon dioxide.
- hwc 1y ago
  Yeah, if you can't send robots to the surface to mine necessary minerals, don't bother building floating cities.

chickenbig 1y ago

Nice link, shifts the perspective a bit. Guess it would be like living on a floating oil/gas platform.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago

Just don't fall off the side of those platforms. It'd be interesting to see what additional "personal atmospheric floatation" devices would be needed.

teekert 1y ago
You can't because you need to be encapsulated in a balloon to keep the toxic atmosphere out.
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  EVAs are still likely necessary. Tethering would be useful.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    Indeed, though to keep it interesting we should put pinholes through every tenth one
  - astroflection 1y ago
    I see a new action/thriller space movie on the horizon.
    - dredmorbius 1y ago
      Cue Sandra Bullock for At the End of My Tether. That Movie Guy Voice: Above a world ... where the atmosphere will eat the flesh off your body ... and crush your eyeballs flat, only a thin kevlar tether stands between you ... and eternity...

akk0 1y ago

Living like little organelles inside a giant cell membrane

a3w 1y ago

Venus is room temperature with low radiation, if you dig in. Living on Venus was floating around as an easier alternative to living on the Mars surface. Room temperature is 21°C, I have no idea how many freedom fries units that is.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
> Room temperature is 21°C Debated, was 23 or 25 in my college textbooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_temperature > I have no idea how many freedom fries units that is. Kind of a bad attempt at humor? Imperial units is fine.
- bryant 1y ago
  Imperialist here. Freedom fries was funny.
  - yndoendo 1y ago
    Had to add metric to an imperial unit application since it is to be sold internationally. I live in a Fahrenheit country so I set my phone, computer, and car to Celsius to learn how the the temperatures readings feel. I 100% agree, "Freedom Fries Units" is quite fitting. Turns out I prefer Celsius over Fahrenheit in day to day usage.
- antonvs 1y ago
  The US doesn't use Imperial units. It uses US customary units, which are different from Imperial in several significant ways, because the Imperial system evolved after the US split from the British Empire. Also interestingly, US customary units are defined in terms of metric. So in a sense, the US does use the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
  - Podrod 1y ago
    I often correct people regarding the US not using Imperial as well but to be fair the only significant difference these days is in fluid measurements. Weight and length measurements were standardised between US customary and Imperial back in the 1950s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound

Symmetry 1y ago

The Venusian atmosphere at that altitude is super dry, only a few score ppm of water making it much drier as Earth's Atacama desert. So while that water vapor is extremely acidic in terms of raw ppm its not too far outside the limit of what OSHA allows and is probably fine since you aren't breathing it.

glenstein 1y ago
If I understand correctly there's still a little bit of residual hydrogen bound up in the sulfuric acid molecules. And if you added it all up close to the amount of water you'd get from one of our Great lakes in North America. (At least if you combined it with oxygen, of which there's plenty on Venus). The article mentioned something about heavy water which I don't understand very much. But it's a problem. The tragedy of both Mars and Venus is that billions of years ago? It seems like they both might have had abundant liquid oceans of water. Which doesn't mean they would have supported life, but they would have been so much closer to habitable and a much better starting point. Instead, it's like if you're deadbeat brother house-sat them for a weekend and threw a bender and trashed the houses, that's what we're left with now.
- Symmetry 1y ago
  A big issue is that neither seem to have developed photosynthetic life[1] and without a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere they don't have an ozone layer. That means that UV light penetrates further and breaks up water into its constituent parts allowing the light hydrogen to be blown away by the solar wind over geological time scales. [1] It's looking increasingly plausible that Mars developed primitive life, but I'd bet heavily against photosynthesis. That took way longer than chemosynthetic life on Earth.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    I think the article speaks to the point you're making also, that the UV light may have been an important (if not primary) mechanism for blasting away Venus' water. So even if someone snapped their fingers and made Venus perfectly terraformed, it probably once again would begin the process of losing its water. And any life would have to survive a brighter sun.

glenstein 1y ago

Exactly right, and it's a fascinating prospect. Earth like temperature and atmospheric pressure, and better protection from radiation than even Earth. Major advantages Venus has over Mars are that (1) it's closer, (2) aforementioned radiation protection, (3) no issue of aggressive bone decalcification. Radiation on Mars is brutal and it doesn't get talked about enough. Anyone without sufficient protection from surface rays would have 5-10 years before they come down with some form of terminal cancer. When Andy Weier went on book tour for Artemis he talked about how cities have to have an economic rationale for existing, which is why in his story, the Moon would be oriented around tourism. Venus seems to be disadvantaged in terms of having practically no access to rare or heavy metals because you can't safely get to the surface and even if you can, is basalt (which in many ways is great and chemically diverse and rich, like the nutritious potato of surface rocks, but it won't yield concentrated veins of valuable metal). But what Venus does have is enough carbon ready to be processed into liquid fuel, while skipping complicated mining and extracting and refining processes that complicate the matter on Earth and would similarly complicate it from any other source in the solar system. You would have to source hydrogen from somewhere to synthesize fuel. But in a way that's an advantage, because you could source it from an asteroid, keep it in space, and just send up the carbon feedstock from Venus. You'd probably rather do it that way anyway, avoiding some of the more brutal costs of sending water weight in and out of the gravity well. So you pull the carbon feedstock from Venus, you synthesize fuel in space, and you're the premiere source of rocket fuel in the solar system. Economic rationale! The pin that might burst this bubble is that Venus's carbon feedstock advantage might not matter, because the water rather than the carbon maybe the more critical variable, and the second best options for sourcing carbon (mining, processing) may be good enough that Venus's advantage doesn't matter. Then there's the buoyancy, another extreme eyebrow raising advantage given Venus's hellscape on the surface. It's remarkably easier to be buoyant on Venus than Earth, in some ways you could consider it an ocean planet, but it's an ocean of extremely thick air. Which is not only extremely important for any hypothesized floating settlements, but might open the door to buoyancy based passive dragnets to scrape and retrieve raw materials from the surface. But that too would hinge on having incredibly powerful carbon weaves netting and economics making it worth it. But still, there's something intriguing there. Anyway, I feel like there's a wiiiide open lane in public communication and in hard sci-fi for a deep dive on Venus colonization, Kim Stanley Robinson style, and I just want someone to occupy that damn lane already.

SwtCyber 1y ago

Like, Mars gets all the hype, but you're dealing with bone-dry cold, no atmosphere to speak of, and brutal radiation. Meanwhile, Venus has breathable pressure, decent gravity, and no need for pressurized suits... you just have to float above an acid bath.

jmsaucier 1y ago
I think part of it is that everyone knows that the sun will expand. Why move closer when you can get further away?
- brnt 1y ago
  It'll be a minute before that becomes a concern. Also, if we can deal with Venus, we can reverse global warming in Earth first?

jsbisviewtiful 1y ago

Wow thank you for laying out this info. I've always read the theories on the Venus floating colony but the info on pressure and temp I had no idea about.