First Human Colonies Should Be Among Venus' Clouds

StartsWithABang writes: When we talk about humans existing on worlds other than Earth, the first choice of a planet to do so on is usually Mars, a world that may have been extremely Earth-like for the first billion years of our Solar System or so. Perhaps, with enough ingenuity and resources, we could terraform it to be more like Earth is today. But the most Earth-like conditions in the Solar System don't occur on the surface of Mars, but rather in the high altitudes of Venus' atmosphere, some 50-65 km up. Despite its harsh conditions, this may be the best location for the first human colonies, for a myriad of good, scientific reasons. NASA proposed something similar last year and released a report on the subject.

Comments

Re:Huge waste of Resourses

[Anonymous Coward]

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.

Re:Incredibly farfetched

[angel'o'sphere]

Erm ???

It must be very very large so it can "float" in the high pressure atmosphere of Venus like a ship floats on the seas of Earth.

That was actually a no brainer :-/

Re:Fail deadly

[__aaclcg7560]

NASA had proposed several Apollo to Venus back in the 1970's, including a triple flyby that would take 800 days. The rational back then was to keep funding to manned space program going after the Moon landings were completed.

https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/manned-venus-flyby/

Longer

[Tablizer]

hot enough so that the longest any spacecraft functioned on the surface was mere seconds;

The Soviet landers lasted more than a half hour. But they did require massive cooling systems.