I sympathize with the author's points, but the headline is misleading - the only reason they posit to move to Venus is because Elon Musk wants to move to Mars.

Yes, Venus can be as habitable as Mars, but there's a big problem - like it or not, we have to extract resources from a place to live there, and there just isn't much we can extract from Venus. Extracting any resources from the surface means mining them from a hellscape, and then lifting them out of the gravity well into the clouds. (Though, to be fair, maybe we could just park a few asteroids in orbit and use those.)

The thing is, Mars is a dump.

Every detail is wrong, excepting only that there is dirt. When dirt is your best feature, you have to fall back on hype.

Venus and Mars are both extremely difficult environments, overwhelmingly moreso than Antarctica, the middle of the Takla Makan Desert, undersea, or in orbit, and also much harder to get to and from. No one has attempted living sustainably in any of those, and there is no proof they could if they tried.

So, only billionaires' public fantasies make them seem doable at all. Of the two, the cloud tops of Venus are somewhat less all-around hellish.

Antarctica or the Takla Makan Desert don't give you any "advantage" over the existing habitable zones on earth - mars does and that advantage is that it's a different fucking planet.

Mars is also a stepping stone to the belt and the outer solar system and like it or not it's our next frontier.

Antarctica isn't going to yield you the same reaches as the belt will or heck even Mars because currently "polluting" Mars would actually be beneficial or at the least immaterial.

Humanity needs a new frontier to expand too, we tried making space our next frontier but it didn't caught on, maybe now it will if not it will be quite sad imo as it would leave the digital frontier as the only other frontier to expand into.

We don't need a stepping stone to the Belt. The Belt is right there. Mars is at best a distraction, more likely a deep, deep hole.

Phobos could be useful.

Earth is also just wet dirt, what makes it fertile can be replicated on small-scale elsewhere.

Earth: Life, water, air, air pressure, warmth, gravity, sunshine, dirt.

Venus: Water vapor, air pressure, warmth, gravity, more sunshine.

Mars: Dirt.

Mars: dirt, water (likely as brine), air, air pressure, warmth, gravity, sunshine.

You just get a lot of dirt, and a lot less of the others, but brine can be purified, air can be compressed to get pressure, useful minerals can be mined from the soil and rocks, which unlike Venus, isn't under a scorching acid bath.

I.e., just dirt. All else must be manufactured in small spaces, where possible at all.

Gravity is 1/3 normal, period. Sunshine is at 1/2 normal. Warmth is lacking. Air pressure is lethal.

When you have to lie to make it seem appealing, it is the lie that sticks, not the appeal.

I was talking about small spaces all the time! Of course people wouldn't live in the Martin outdoors, but in the Martian underground.

Most things can manufactured most places, with varying degrees of difficulty. A key factor is where you start. My lists were where you start, in each environment. Starting at Earth-normal pressure, Earth-normal temperature, and Earth-normal gravity is advantageous, vs starting with none of those things. Venus has them, Mars manifestly does not.

But even in ideal circumstances, manufacturing Earth-normal gravity on Mars will not be possible.

While I tend to agree with the idea of colonizing a planet as similar as Earth as possible, I also think the barrenness of Mars actually simplifies logistics.

On Venus, you have to deal with high temperatures, acid rain, the bigger gravity well, and the ever-present danger of your floating city falling down. On Mars there's a lot less of everything, but ruling out a meteor, the things you have to deal with are gentler. Not even a dust storm would kill you if it caught you outside in your spacesuit, as it would feel like a breeze.

http://www.mars-one.com/faq/mission-to-mars/what-are-the-ris...

Venus also requires a lot more energy to lift mass from the surface since it’s nearly the same size as Earth. Its escape velocity is 10.3 km/s. Earth is 11.2 km/s and Mars is 5.0.

Could you use balloons to lift things from the surface to the cloud city level?

That's a good question, I have no idea! You'd have to pump it full of gas against a pressure of ~1300 PSI. Googling around, that's about equivalent to a kilometer under water.

Granted, it's not impossible - ocean oil rigs operate at those depths - but they're not operating at 500 degrees celcius.

The heat at the surface (864 deg F) melts lead, so it doesn’t seem feasible.

To hell with the Mars and Venus hype - let's create an actual settlement on the Moon! Step one in doing that is creating an actual space station - not just an orbiting can that a few people can survive in. An actual station with regularly-scheduled flights people can utilize to go to and from the Earth - flights on a craft resembling an airplane and taking off and landing at a place more akin to an airport. Likewise, we need regularly-scheduled flights between the space station and the Moon port. This way we have a steady supply of people and material going to and from the Moon. Once we've gotten to the point where we can demonstrate the viability of a small village on the Moon complete with everything such a village requires, then we can talk about going to Mars.

Until then I'm calling these Mars settlement fantasies head-up-your-arse rubbish! Besides which, who knows? Perhaps after extensive experience living in space and living on the Moon we may decide there are advantages to not wasting your time clinging to rocky planets. Or vice-versa. Or we may discover pros/cons to each and which kinds of people or more adaptable to which. As it is we can't say anything because we have no real experience living anywhere else but on Earth.

> An actual station with regularly-scheduled flights people can utilize to go to and from the Earth

Consider that Elon is talking about one-way trips to settle Mars. People won't fly back to Earth for decades, if not generations. The objective is settling Mars, not making a spaceport.

And if you're serious about settling Mars then you need to think strategically, not tactically. The goal of chess is to force a checkmate. That's not your first move.

That is a strategic option. Given the interplanetary shuttle capacity Earth has now (read: zero), doing one-way trips is the quickest and less costly way to find if Mars can be settled. Volunteers are told they would be risking their lives, because doing round trips is unfeasible yet.

Establishing round trips from Earth to Mars would need several Space Xs to finance it, or that the current one thrives for some decades more. Governments are not interested on it if it doesn't translate to votes.

> Most of our biggest Mars advocates currently are wealthy white men

Compared to the Black community who wants to go to Venus? This article is just toxic.

But some decent humans do also raise the point and it's because of two reasons.

1) Floating cities are cool Hollywood style, people can see how it's hard to do on Earth so they shift it to a place where it's so hard and complicated they can no longer see the blockers, it looks easy again.

2) People need to fork things. It's fun to start something from scratch instead of just doing the hard work on the existing system and working with it.

Mars is hard, part of the reason is because we have done so much work understanding it and working towards the goal.

No: Compared to 99.99999% of humanity, including even the overwhelming majority of absurdly wealthy white males.

Does it matter that Venus has a lot of extra energy "lying around", so to speak? On Mars everything is very cold, but a floating cloud city on Venus would have some crazy thermal and chemical gradients to tap below it. I can imagine tons of engineering challenges in those conditions, but it seems like the analog of "geothermal" energy on Mars would be less useful than Earth's, and could be considerably more useful on Venus.

"Let's move to"... time would have already run out for us centuries before reaching the technological level enough to us being able to move a significant portion of mankind elsewhere. And far more time will take to significantly terraform (at the level of being able to stay outside any tightly closed construction) any other planet.

And if we will live in a totally manufactured environment, the space itself (around Earth or Sun). Asteroids may provide the base materials for that kind of space habitats.

But, again, we might have run out of time already. Survival in a world with diminishing food (because compromised agriculture or fish resources by global warming and environmental destruction) will become a priority, and the civilization may not be able to sustain a strong enough space program able to do that kind of colonizations. We must try to fix what happens here before thinking in going (in such scale, at least) elsewhere.

Frankly what competitive advantages does Venus allow for of these sorts of floating cities in contrast to on Mars or just Earth?

They mentioned two advantages over Mars in the article:

* gravity (and bone density)

* radiation

Over Earth? Absolutely no advantage, other than maybe it is easier to get approval to build a giant blimp. But I feel like if you wanted to build a floating city in international waters nobody would get in your way. They might rob you, though.

Plus matching air pressure and ambient temperature, and more insolation.

But, yes, building in the middle of Antarctica would be overwhelmingly easier, safer, and cheaper. Nobody does, though.

Venus is closer to the sun, so, solar panels generate more W/mm^2 there.

Maximum solar irradiance at 1AU is 1351 W/m^2.

Maximum solar irradiance at 0.723AU is 2584 W/m^2.

PBS Space Time did a short (7 minute) episode called "Should We Colonize Venus Instead of Mars?" [1] that gives several advantages Venus has as a colonization target compared to Mars (and covers some of the difficulties).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag

The advantage of Mars and Venus compared to Earth is that they are not Earth. Humans explore. It’s what we do.

It seems very likely the Earth will also benefit. The technology developed to sustain humans in other places in the solar system possible will be impactful back home.

I think the fact that we may only have 30-50 years' worth of human civilization left on Earth is a competitive advantage for both other planets.

I assume you are referring to climate change here. (maybe you have set omething else in mind?)

While climate change is super-important, and we absolutely need to do whatever we can to negate it, it is not a threat to global civilization.

Even if the effects of climate change are orders of magnitude worse than we expect, the planet most suitable for human life will remain Earth. Because, um, we can breathe the air, drink the water and the temperature is within the ranges we easily tolerate. (not to even get into issues of magnetic fields etc)

Will the earth of the future support 7 billion people? Probably yes, possibly no, but whatever number it does support will forever dwarf the people living in venus or mars.

Will our "civilisation" look different 50 years from now? Undoubtedly yes. But it's radically changed in the last 50,100 and 150. Certainly those times counted as civilised did they not?

There will be civilisations on earth for a long long time (baring nuclear anialation) - our adaptability (think Sahara /Siberia) is, if anything, a little too aggressive.

Climate change is not a threat to local civilization, but is a very definite threat to global civilization. 30-50 years may be radically over-optimistic.

Worldwide, governments are responding to the crisis in almost perfectly maladaptive ways. As hundreds of millions of refugees are barely beginning take flight, fascist governments are arising to keep them out of temperate zones, tending ultimately toward global war. Certainly, pockets will survive, but global civilization, as such, is much less secure.

> I think the fact that we may only have 30-50 years' worth of human civilization left on Earth is a competitive advantage for both other planets.

We're centuries away from self-sustaining colonies on either Venus or Mars, so if your timeline was right, that's be a reason not to bother with either.

Why do we only have 30-50 years of civilization left on Earth? I haven't heard of anything that would make the planet uninhabitable on such a short timescale.

This isn't crazy talk:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-06-08/collapse-of-ci...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Steffen

From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09593... :

> This paper focuses on a comparison of recently collated historical data for 1970–2000 with scenarios presented in the Limits to Growth. The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compare favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the “standard run” scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century. The data do not compare well with other scenarios involving comprehensive use of technology or stabilizing behaviour and policies. The results indicate the particular importance of understanding and controlling global pollution.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/30/environm...

And even if you agree with that Venus and Mars are like literal hellscapes in comparison to what the earth would be like in that situation.

It’s not crazy talk, but it’s understandably hard to believe or follow. You being downvoted so hard is disheartening. Still, as we speak, civilization is undergoing a massive shift towards renewable energy and sustainable policies. Our capitalist world order is so stable some people (who were admittedly wrong) called it “the end of history”. Topics like cutting working hours are more common I think. And the birth rate is halving itself. Just some thoughts. The strong, dire language of these articles makes it sound like a done deal anyway.

Hearing statements like this make a lot of people deny Climate Change is happening at all.

Is this in reference to a new apocalypse religion?

Yes

> Look, it’s our beautiful friend Venus. Contrary to popular belief, Venus is not our “sister,” and it does not have a gender. Neither does Mars. Actually, they are just rocky bodies surrounded by gas, in orbit around the Sun!

Let’s throw 2400 years of knowledge in symbolism and philosophy in the trash and yay Descartes, Heiddegger and Kant!

How do you 'land' on Venus? Would you just inflate large heat resistant balloons in orbit and let them atmosphere break and settle at the right altitude? Parachute in, then inflate?

"Most of our biggest Mars advocates currently are wealthy white men who own aerospace companies. In other words, they aren’t just interested in exploring Mars for its own sake — or creating human habitats for the good of all people."

How is this not considered hate speech? Is it just commonly accepted now that all rich white men are evil?

The article made some interesting arguments and I don't want to start a argument, but when I think of Musk, Branson and Bezos, I believe they are all persuing space for the betterment of mankind not self enrichment or empowerment. They already have vast wealth and power and there are far more profitable or evil ventures available for them to exploit if they really wanted to.

> Contrary to popular belief, Venus is not our “sister,” and it does not have a gender.

Gender is socially ascribed (sex is different, so is gender identity), and thus defined by popular belief. (There's an evolving norm that for people, socially ascribed gender should conform to gender identity out of respect for the individual, but since Venus isn't a person and doesn't have a gender identity, that doesn't seem applicable here.)

And that’s the fate of the modern man: to look at a planet called Venus and see a gender, instead of asking why or trying to figure out how we came to that conclusion. By investigating that, one could easily understand also why it is inhabitable.

May be hard to ingest, but I suggest the Treatise of the Sphere to begin with.

Yes, its considered "feminine" because some guy decided to name the planet with the godess name.

Its trivia.. nothing to get offended about.

Venus’s atmosphere is a heck of a lot more toxic than that of Mars.

You and Russia can have Venus.

Both are CO2. Mars's is too thin to survive breathing pure oxygen at the same pressure, so you need a pressure suit, besides, to go outside, and a big pressure vessel to live in. And, it is always colder than Antarctica, so you need to be heavily bundled up.

The cloud tops of Venus are at earth standard temperature, pressure, and gravity. The overabundant CO2, cracked, yields both breathing air and construction material. Sunlight, for power, is 2x as abundant as on Earth, and many moreso than on Mars, although the 50+-hour nights require more energy storage capability. An analog of geothermal power generation, relying on higher temperatures at lower strata, might be more practical.

The only particularly inconvenient details are access to metals, probably requiring asteroid mining; and getting there and away safely. It is quite tricky to shed enough velocity on the way in, and to get enough back on the way out.

A large orbiting ring with a radius that puts its circumference at cloud-top level, rotating at a rate that puts the lower rim at rest relative to the habitat, would go a long way to easing both arrival and departure. At the upper rim, its lineal velocity would be twice orbital, good for both capturing arrivals and flinging departures.

Face it, Mars is a dump. The smart money favors Venus.

You can't handle the atmosphere on Mars either though? Who cares if the lower atmosphere is toxic if you won't contact it anyway? It is like complaining about the atmospheric pressure in the Marianas trench.

Here I fixed the artist impression photo shared in the post to better explain:

https://i.ibb.co/PThSqLM/372927-B4-5928-4-A84-9-DD9-22184-B2...

Yeah?

* Venus' avg temp: 880°F (471°C).

* Length of day in earth hours: 116d 18h 0m.

* Weather: storms of sulfuric acid clouds and a crushing atmosphere more than 90 times

The proposal in the article is to use aerosats to float in a milder, less corrosive part of the upper atmosphere.

If this were possible/feasible, why have there been no successful and large scale examples of this happening on earth? Say, in the middle of the Pacific ocean.

While this is a far out of reach idea, Venus' atmosphere has some advantages over Earth's atmosphere. From a link in the article:

> On Earth, we know to get something to lift, you need something lighter than air. Well, on Venus, guess what? Our air is lighter than air, or at least lighter than the Venus atmosphere.” [1]

[1] https://www.universetoday.com/15570/colonizing-venus-with-fl...

This is thought experiment stuff, way out in the future. We would already be doing it on Earth at that point if there was a reason to.

Yeah it’s amazing how people don’t research basic facts.

Why not both?

..and the moon and space stations

Ok so as he wrote, the problem are both capitalism and Elon Musk. Got it. We should go to Sovienus.

Humans will not "live" anywhere in the solar system other than on the earth where we evolved. We may "survive" temporarily elsewhere, like on the ISS, but we will never "live" there. Earth is our only abode...

Down votes? Really? Space is perfectly analogous to the ocean. We can put on a mask, fins and a SCUBA and swim about effortlessly. But do we "live" in the ocean? No, we only temporarily "survive" there due to technology. Evolutionarily we left the ocean behind billions of years ago. We can never again live in the ocean even if we build a colony on the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It will simply be a technological "survival" device and nothing more. And would anyone choose to explore the Trench with actual humans? Of course not. That's what robots are for. And the same goes for space...

Because you clearly didn’t read the article, which covers how both Mars and Venus can be made to have stable habitable zones.

That will become a problem when an asteroid or supervolcano or any other unpreventable disaster comes along and makes Earth uninhabitable. We're going to have to find a way to live off of Earth if we want to continue to exist.

The earth has been a long series of disaster movies. Massive extinctions after massive extinctions. Why do you think we as a species should be exempt? Are we that special?

We have the capability to possibly avoid an extinction. Do you argue we should refrain from exercising it? That we should put forward anything less than our best effort at survival? Why? What do we gain by giving up without trying?

You can't hate people for trying... to survive... That is literally what all life does.

Why?

People have successfully adapted to all kinds of unexpected habitats here on Earth. Isn't your argument the same as someone from 70,000 years ago saying "Africa is our only abode"?

No, because wherever you went 70k years ago there would be an atmosphere you could breath, H2O to drink and things you could eat. And wherever you landed you would still be shielded from solar radiation and enjoy 1G gravity...

>atmosphere you could breath

There are peoples like the Sherpas who live in high places where others can't breathe easily. Apparently their ancestors genetically adapted to these habitats [0].

>H2O to drink There are peoples like the Bedouin whose whole way of living is based on dealing with the scarcity of water in the desert.

>enjoy 1G gravity

Well, you got me here. There are apparently slight differences on Earth, ranging from ~9.76 to ~9.83 m/s^2, but yes, other planets would be much different.

Anyway, I'm not saying it won't be very difficult for people to adapt, but I just don't see a good reason to say that extraterrestrial life won't ever be commonplace.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_adaptation_in_hu...