People always talk about making colonies on Mars.
Why not Venus?
Its closer than Mars.
The gravity is almost the same as on Earth, which means there less danger of Bone Decalcification and Muscle loss.
I know that Venus has like 400°C on surface, high preasure and atmosphere full of acid and winds.
Winds can be use to generate power.
Atmosphere full of Sulfuric acid but it can be use to make water (H2SO4 contains H2O) and Carbon dioxide is what plants need to live(the sun light can generated artificially).
My guess, by the time we be ready to send people to Venus we will develop materials strong enough to withstand pressures of the planet's antmosphere.
So, does it sounds like Earth's sister is better candidate for our early stage of colonising other planets?

Sorry, if I missed or didnt uderstand some scientific facts to back up my theory but am not an astronom or astrophysics.

1856982

Yes, several landers from the former Soviet Union have landed on Venus. They were only able to send us information for a short time because the extremely high temperature and pressure on the surface of Venus melted and crushed the landers.

Yeah, anything we send kinda... gets melted and destroyed pretty quickly. Not somewhere you would want to try to build a permanent settlement. I don't think we've ever landed a probe there that lasted longer than a couple of hours at most.

My guess, by the time we be ready to send people to Venus we will develop materials strong enough to withstand pressures of the planet's antmosphere.

First, that's a big if. You would need some kind of super material that can withstand absurd temperatures and pressures and is acid-resistant. You would need to be able to make suits out of this material or else everyone on the planet would be stuck in their capsule/base all the time. That means no repairs, no exploration, nothing. Well, I suppose you could use robots but you'd have to deal the wear and tear on those. It would be a pretty miserable existence.

Second: We can theoretically settle Mars NOW, with existing materials and technologies.

Atmosphere full of Sulfuric acid but it can be use to make water (H2SO4 contains H2O) and Carbon dioxide is what plants need to live(the sun light can generated artificially).

Where are you getting the power to do all this? Wind, you said, but you'd need a damn big windmill to get any decent amount of electricity. Good luck getting that to Venus in the first place, much less assembling and maintaining it. Solar would be out of the question since Venus' atmosphere is ridiculously thick. Nuclear energy might be an option, but again to produce enough energy for a true settlement you would need something quite large and heavy.

I have heard that the upper layers of Venus's atmosphere are considerably more hospitable then the surface and due to higher air density and marginally lower gravity would, theoretically, allow for aerostat colonies. I imagine conditions would be little better then the international space station but apparently people have run the numbers and its possible.

Forgive me if I'm mistaken though, I'm just remembering this from a while back.

1856982

Its closer than Mars. > It's also closer to the sun, which can cause all sorts of problems when our dear star is having a flare-up.

The gravity is almost the same as on Earth, which means there less danger of Bone Decalcification and Muscle loss. > You can also just set up a centrifugal colony to artificially produce gravity where there are no planetary bodies.

The gravity is almost the same as on Earth, which means there less danger of Bone Decalcification and Muscle loss.
I know that Venus has like 400°C on surface, high preasure and atmosphere full of acid and winds.
Winds can be use to generate power.
Atmosphere full of Sulfuric acid but it can be use to make water (H2SO4 contains H2O) and Carbon dioxide is what plants need to live(the sun light can generated artificially).
> It's easier to add something into the mix of an environment than it is to remove/refine it.

My guess, by the time we be ready to send people to Venus we will develop materials strong enough to withstand pressures of the planet's antmosphere. > I'll have to respectfully disagree that those points in time will come even close to coinciding with each other.

So, does it sounds like Earth's sister is better candidate for our early stage of colonising other planets? > Not really.

1857020 Curse my slow typing, you've got a great deal of good points that overlap with my own.

1857064
Maybe we could build something like Buckminster Fullers floating cities.

1857020>>1857089 Thank you for making things clear.

1856982
It's just too extreme and hostile an environment for near-term technology. We could settle it in the same sense that we could build an interstellar nuclear pulse starship if we really wanted to, but it would be such a colossal undertaking that we'd basically have to turn the world into one big Apollo Program, and even then it would take up a good fraction of a century.
Mars has some disadvantages, but it's comparatively docile (we already have experience with sand and fine dust) and wouldn't require nigh-invincible bathyscaphes and the huge R&D required for the necessary adaptive and self-repairing infrastructure, because there ain't no way colonists are going to be able to go outside every time something breaks, which would be all the time.

I think we might land people on it before we really settle Mars, though, like with cities and a music scene and beer brewed with any microorganisms we find there and such. An airship to float around the Venusian skies, a lander, and a couple powered suits to plod around for a few hours and take samples and plant a (ceramic) flag is a noble and manageable endeavor.

In any case, though, I think it's ultimately easier, not to mention more elegant and natural, that we adapt ourselves to Mars or Venus (and anywhere else, or just vacuum) using genetic engineering and cybernetics than to try to build fragile enclosed colonies or terraform unique and interesting environments - that are beautiful the way they are - before they've yielded all their secrets. If you're going to live on another planet, own that, and actually live in and appreciate its environment instead of turning everything into more Earth, like making tacky tracts of green suburban lawns in the desert. But we'll probably end up doing different versions of all of those.

1856982 CO2 concentrations would be to high, pressure suits and equipment would be expensive.

1857149 Ah, if only. Unfortunately such mega structures remain a dream for the more distant future I fear. Then again, we have very nearly perfected the humble tower...

Applying the same techniques to a different structure can't be too much harder to do.

That's more of a far-future terraforming project, maybe after we develop an easy way of stripping the majority of the planet's atmosphere...

1856982
I'm just gonna add to what has already been covered here. There's more than just the acidic pressure-cooker atmosphere and the high surface temperature. The surface is essentially a volcanic hellscape. Forget for a moment how you're going to build something on Venus. Where are you going to put it that isn't in the danger zone of an active volcano? It would be like trying to build a settlement in the lava field of Mt. Kilauea even while it is still erupting.

In short, I see there being a semi-permanent outpost in the polar craters on Mercury before any surface expeditions to Venus.

1857064

Indeed. Here's a take on the concept from some sci-fi called Eclipse Phase.

A surface colony on the other hand? Unlikely.

1857020

You would need some kind of super material that can withstand absurd temperatures and pressures and is acid-resistant. You would need to be able to make suits out of this material or else everyone on the planet would be stuck in their capsule/base all the time.

I would like to point out that this is an area of science that we are developing in rapidly. With the development of ever stronger carbon fibers and even some advancements in the theoretical creation of new types of particles (Ooh, don't hate on me as I haven't cited the research but I heard that a technique has possibly been discovered for making particles out of photons), I would not be surprised if they come of with a theoretically viable material in the next few years.
But I totally and completely agree that it would be a massive waste of resources to bother trying to colonise a hell-hole like Venus when not only is our own planet the only one supporting life but we have a much more suitable option in Mars if need be.
I also consider it highly ironic that this would be brought up as a possibility, because the conditions on Venus are exactly like the theoretical highly improbable mass extremes of the effect on earth's atmospheric conditions of higher temperatures and acidification due to air pollution. (i.e., acid rain but worse, ultra greenhouse effect, but worse, desertification and air unsuitability, but again, far worse) The fact is that we would have to use so much of the Earth's resources to run such a mission of colonizing Venus, that we would turn the one currently inhabitable planet we have into a wasteland, so I'm definitely seeing any of this colonizing business as pointless. Our world is beautiful, and we are perfectly adapted to live on it, and nowhere else. I find it odd that people should think an entire planet of red desert would be a great place to live even at massive expense, when our own planet has enough red desert that you could just catch a plane to move to. (I'd love to see Uluru some day)