"terraforming Earth" = Terra-forming Terra Like... reshaping the Earth in a Earth-like shape! Cool, isn't it? Now, getting the tongue off the cheek, you're rig

"terraforming Earth" = Terra-forming Terra Like... reshaping the Earth in a Earth-like shape! Cool, isn't it? Now, getting the tongue off the cheek, you're right, it makes a lot of (at least an economical) sense to look under our nose at the swaths of unexploited but with a higher promise land and, you know, use them?! Only that the thing is, Venus colonization is more than just a new place that we could find useful to extend into for a current-way of day-to-day human life. It is a lot more! Some may tell you that it is bad to have all the eggs put in the same basket and Venus would be a good second basket, but again it would be a lot more than that. Imagine that so far we haven't had any signs of another life-form living in our universe. As small the chance for this to stay this way as it may be, we can assume for now that the entire universe is ours to extend into. And we need to become capable of doing it. We may "start" doing that by colonizing our own galaxy. For that we should become capable of colonizing planets in some reasonably-close star systems first. And for that it would be desirable for us to learn how to do that using a planet somewhere nearby, in our solar system. And yes, for that we should become capable of colonizing without much struggle harsh places like deserts (in polar or other regions), subterranean and ocean depths here on Earth. And more, those should become self-sustained, to mimic conditions of some far-away colonization prospects. In the long run Venus is just one of the intermediary steps, but an important one. We as a species need that kind of colonizing experience. Of course it won't happen right away, but setting the goal of colonizing Venus is in itself a task that rise awareness and spurs in the meantime other important intermediary necessary goals. Biosphere 2 falls in this category, but we need more, and more - we need context for which these kind of projects would come to make sense.