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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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If you go to Mars you can land and explored all possibilities inherent to being on the ground (including, most importantly, using the water ice from the south pole).
Venus on the other hand is a ball of rock wrapped in a dense and hot acid soup: you'de have to beat way worse technical challenges for, maybe, being able to locally extract from the athmosphere chemical compounds which you can just as easilly make on Earth (it's mostly CO2 and sulfuric acid, though apparently it has 20 ppm of water).
It would make more sense to just have a moon base.
I don't wanna defend the guy but he did say floating colony, the atmosphere about 1 km up from the surface sits at earthlike temperatures and pressures-- astronauts would only need a breathing mask and some light skin protection as opposed to a pressure suit which is a major advantage.
My point is was twofold:
It's not as much the feasability of floating in the upper athmosphere of Venus that I was worried about, it's that getting anywhere interesting from there is either enormously hard (hot sulfuric acid soup to go down) or useless (back to orbit from where you came and where you could just have stayed) and probably no fun by itself and unecessarily risky due to the sulfuric acid.
Tourism-wise a Moon base makes a lot more sense and is a lot more feasible for now than that, IMHO, whilst it also doesn't seem to make sense to set up a floating base on Venus' athmosphere to extract resources from it (because on Earth we're hardly low on CO2 or sulfur).
PS: Thinking about it, a floating station on Earth's athmosphere would probably be more fun than that also.
I mean, there's basically no good economic reason for any space colonization whatsoever, outside of potentially the asteroid belt. Neither Venus nor Mars have significant resources that aren't found in similar abundance on Earth, where extraction is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier. Tourism would be an industry, but it would almost certainly be an extremely niche business similar to OceanGate's Titanic visits, Blue Origin's launches, or stuff like Dear Moon. Rich people might pay very well to go visit Mars or Venus or the Moon but that pay certainly would not be enough to offset the trillions of dollars (yes, trillions) and decades that true colonization would take.
With that in mind, discussions of real space colonization are entirely theoretical and probably always will be, at least within our lifetimes. It is very conceivable that humans will land on Mars and maybe establish permanent research outposts there, on the Moon, or hypothetically Venus. But those would be far more similar to something like the ISS-- hosting a rotating crew of mostly astronauts and the occasional space tourist. I find it hard to imagine an economic case for anything more anywhere in the solar system within a reasonable span of time.
May be a silly question, but how would you go about making a floating colony? I dont think we have the tech to keep a city perpetually floating.
The theory is that since most of Venus' atmosphere is CO2 at this level, the breathable atmosphere of a human habitat is actually bouyant, which would make suspending a colony much easier.
Doing something like that on the scale of a research presence like the ISS is within the realm of current technology-- but you are right that doing so for a whole city is not technically possible at the moment-- nor is true space colonization in general, I would argue. There's a lot of unknowns and unsolved problems.