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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.
On Venus, no need to stick your head out the window into the atmosphere. The atmosphere will eat through the walls and into you.
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This is the only reason people live in Canada. Because if you're high enough, you don't really care about the climate.
You are welcome on my lawn.
By the time off-world colonies are viable, pollution on Earth will be a non-issue, because the exact same technology needed to sustain an offworld colony is the technology that would allow us to clean and recycle absolutely everything here on Earth. Because that's exactly what you need for a self-sustaining offworld colony: recycled everything. On Earth, we're lucky enough to have a natural biosphere that gives us tons of recycling capacity for free: just dump wastewaster and CO2 and feces into the wilderness and, like a miracle, fresh air blows back, clean water falls from the sky, and food grows out of what was once someone's shit. Up to a certain capacity at least. If we can't even manage to recycle the excess of ours that that massive free hand up nature gives us can't handle, then we're nowhere close to being able to settle offworld where we have to do all of that work ourselves.
Like you say, Antarctica or the desert or, hell, the ocean floor, would all be a cakewalk compared to anywhere off Earth.
There is good reason to settle offworld when we can (not keeping all our eggs in one basket), but until we're capable of even settling all of the comparably idyllic places on our own planet that aren't "worth settling" at the current difficulty levels, then we don't stand a chance of settling anywhere offworld.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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The atmosphere does have 900 degree sulfuric acid at the surface and just above. It also has a surface pressure like being a mile underwater. Carbon dioxide is actually a fluid at that pressure, not a gas.
However at the altitude where the atmospheric pressure is like Earth's, it's not actually livable by itself, but it it isn't a hellish, crushing inferno either. It may well offer advantages over Mars. Having gravity be Earth-similar is important for long term habitation. More of an atmosphere to deal with radiation without having to bore into the surface is pretty useful as well.
More to the point, you don't have to have a fragile balloon or something to keep the settlement up there. Venus is made up of a lot more CO2 by far than Earth is. Carbon Dioxide is heavier than either Nitrogen or Oxygen. Your settlement's air supply would literally be your flotation gas. The only "no fail" tech you would need, would be the same no fail tech you'd need to live on Mars. And with significant CO2, you have a much more ready supply of something that can be turned into Oxygen with scrubbers than you would on a comparatively airless Mars.
As someone who is involved (peripherally) in the "New Space" movement, IMHO the first purpose of space development will be the availability of new resources and technologies. An economist a couple of years ago predicted that space development would have the potential to increase the standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10. That seems optimistic to me, but a reasonable goal. One popular example (see Planetary Resources, Inc.) regards the availability of Platinum, which is a very useful industrial metal, but is unfortunately $1300 per ounce. Platinum mining is expensive, dangerous, and disastrous both ecologically and socially. This greatly restricts is usefulness although it is used in those expensive catalytic converters in your car - that's why they're expensive. The best astronomical physicists believe that some of the Near Earth Asteroids contain single-digit percentages of Platinum. If this is true, then a 100 meter asteroid would contain a dozen times as much Platinum as has ever been mined. Retrieving this material to Earth could drop the price to between $10 and $100 per ounce, and this would still be economically viable for the company to process in space and ship it down to Earth.
There are many other examples. Technologically, the range of industrial processes that are presently either expensive or impossible on Earth due to gravity and air, that could be done in the high vacuum and microgravity of space is broad but it is likely that an order of magnitude more new processes that have not even been envisioned yet will be discovered or invented. Orbital production of high quality integrated circuits might well be one - one of the most expensive aspects of IC manufacturing is the requirement to build a huge facility and maintain a high level clean room environment. In space that could be done with not much more than a bit of Mylar.
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