One convenient circumstance: A breathable Earthlike atmosphere will float at that altitude, so it would be easy to live in floating balloon habitats.
With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus?
What if the small balloons were the size of a Las Vegas resort, and the average ones where something like Manhattan?
I wonder if there'd be some tangible benefit to colonizing Venus for adventurous entrepreneurial types... "There's gold in and/or on them thar clouds!"
The society that might arise in an entirely fluid, borderless geography might have a certain attraction. Venus might wind up being the next Las Vegas, writ large in the 21st century.
With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus?
You could have ultra-high altitude balloons that can act as staging centers for rotorvators. Those would be way cheaper than space elevators to manufacture.
The lower atmosphere of Venus is denser than the surface of Earth’s ocean, but with extremely violent currents. The upper atmosphere - at the “inhabitable” level - has similar but much less dense winds, with the added henefit of a charmingly toxic and aggressive haze of sulphuric acid.
It might just about be possible to build a floating research station, at vast effort and expense, but floating cities are not going to happen without some near-magical breakthroughs in materials science and engineering.
And without access to the surface, there isn’t much to do above Venus anyway.
The acid clouds aren't that bad. People have even worked out how to manufacture PTFE out of the Venusian atmosphere, so there's your acid proofing right there. We already know how to build lighter than air craft.
And without access to the surface, there isn’t much to do above Venus anyway.
Access to the surface is perfectly doable using teleoperated robots. You can lower them onto the surface with a store of a phase-change substance for cooling. Dry ice might be suitable for that. When they run out, you haul them back up.
There's wasn't that much to do in the desert where Las Vegas is located, either.
MgH2 -> Mg + H2 (thermolysis @ 287 degC)
CO2 + H2 --Fe-> CO + H2O (water-gas shift)
CO + H2 --Fe-> C + H2O (Bosch)
CO2 + 4 H2 --Ni-> CH4 + 2 H2O (Sabatier)
2n+1 H2 + n CO --metal--> CnH(2n+2) + n H2O (Fischer-Tropsch)
2 Mg + CO2 -> 2 MgO + C
CaH2 + 2 H2O -> Ca(OH)2 + 2 H2
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 -> CaCO3 + H2OThe primary concern would be that Earth-gas would not be a good enough lifting gas in the CO2-depleted Venus atmosphere to keep the floating habitat at a cool enough altitude. Hydrogen-filled chambers would certainly work for that, but you would have to bring that hydrogen with you to Venus. By the time atmospheric oxygen becomes a risk, you would just land the dirigible and burn the hydrogen in a controlled fashion.
Why not extract the hydrogen out of the clouds of acid?
You could bring along MgH2, then once you hit the atmosphere, you can thermally decompose it into Mg and H2, then react the Mg with sulfuric acid to get MgSO4 and another H2.
Also, exchanging the fixed geography of land for the fluid geography of fluid might result in changes to the underlying nature of society. In hunter gatherer days, dissenters could simply walk to a different part of the environment. Farmer's fields and defensive walls anchored people to particular pieces of land. If everyone lived in mobile floating habitats, everyone would be free to move. This is quite likely to change the nature of government.
You also get this in a Dyson Swarm, but there's a matter of scale. A minimum viable space colony is likely to be larger and more expensive than a minimum viable floating Venusian compound.