[monkeyfun]

If you're interested in human habitation of Venus overall, you may find it interesting to learn Venus is probably preferable kept at about its current temperature or only made a little colder.

See, the atmosphere at ~50 altitude... happens to be about 1 bar (which happens to be Earth's atmospheric pressure ASL)... and happens to have temperatures that can support human and plant life!

And better still, the atmosphere being mostly co2 with a little nitrogen actually means normal Earth air is a lifting gas! Starting to see where this is going?

It's not too hard to imagine the skies of Venus full of floating habitats that move to stay in the sunlight, or occasionally dock with tethers or balloons carrying cargo from extremely reinforced mining facilities deep underground (where they could be much more protected most of the time from the pressure/temperature/corrosion) -- a future where people (or machines!) might scoff at the idea of cooling off Venus and losing out on such an excellent habitation zone, one which could also fairly easily support elevated runways or launch platforms to more cheaply reach space from.

With Venus also having 91% of Earth's gravity, and those atmospheric conditions at high altitudes that add some radiation shielding and would probably let a human worker only need a very limited suit more akin to a hazmat or firefighting suit with SCBA to work outside habitats... Venus is actually easily the single best planet for humans to live on after Earth!

(Can you tell I'm writing a story set there? Hehehe)

[kaashif]

It actually is hard for me to imagine that. I wouldn't want to live in a floating habitat held aloft by balloons.

Maybe if I were a bird I'd be comfortable with it, but it's just disturbing. No solid ground...

[monkeyfun]

Haha, i totally feel that. Maybe people will have little personal balloons for emergencies like that :p

At the same time, do consider how you already count on conventionally supported structures like bridges, buildings, tunnels, etc. not to have any defects or design flaws. Or once-in-100-years storms or earthquakes.

This magnifies further if you've ever flown on a plane or sailed on a ship. It only takes the right series of failures to be plummeting to the bottom. Now imagine people who spend months or years counting on technology and redundancy to keep them alive in space, and might expect to do so indefinitely.

Exposure therapy, baby!

[kjkjadksj]

You won’t, but some people work for months on oil rigs in the middle of nowhere.

[babyent]

Wow and then we get Lando

[pastage]

You need to give us more. I feel that just the heat is a tricky problem, even at 50km altitude. Anything todo with Venus is very much scifi at the moment. It might be easier than a moon base but we can not know.

[monkeyfun]

Oh it wouldn't be easier than a moon base or simple orbital habitats. And as for Venus being scifi, anything to do with space colonization period is scifi right now; humans haven't even stepped foot on another celestial body of any kind in over half a century.

Rather my meaning was that it's (a little shockingly) the best suited planet for humans in terms of most closely and reliably resembling conditions humans could survive in, which relates to the terraforming notions I was replying to.

It'd be overwhelmingly harder to make all of Venus Earthlike than to just use the existing relatively Earthlike regions of the upper atmosphere to our advantage along with their unique properties. Cool off Venus and you just get a big ocean of liquid or frozen co2 to have to deal with after a loooong time and a lot of construction. Keep it like it is and a fraction of the resources/effort will yield far more utility while we can still enjoy a segment of the atmosphere.

Scifi? Of course!

Cool? Without a doubt!

[jodrellblank]

Isaac Arthur on YouTube makes videos on sci-fi ideas that we might be able to do within the laws of physics, albeit not with today's technology. He did a video on Colonizing Venus some years ago, and an updated one a few months ago, and some others around colonisation and teraforming of the planets in the Solar System:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=isaac+arthur+ve...