Will never happen without major science fiction grade technology, the atmosphere is way too thick to even think about sending anything larger than a tiny probe into.

Nobody is going to want to live through either those days or those nights

The only thing venus has, that makes it interesting for human settlements, is earthlike gravity - but the rest is pretty hell like.

The Earth weighs more than everything else between the sun and Jupiter combined, and Venus is 80% of that.

But yes, I also see no way of "fixing" the g of mars(which is likely way too low for humans), unless we go into the buisness of planet building.

We don't really have a way to know until we get experimental data (real humans on Mars). Until then, it's all just (un)educated guesses.

We know that long time weightlessness causes damage, so 38% of earths gravity will likely have some bad effect, too. This is not just wildly speculating. But yes, for finding out, whether humans still can bear it, we will have to find out and there is no shortage of volunteers.

First you want to get your self-replicating probes occupying the Oort cloud, whatever. Get ready to sort and aim. You start with your "rocky" bodies, skipping them off of Venus' atmosphere, just ripping it off in big hunks, until you're down to about one Earth atmosphere.

Next, you flat up drop your icy bodies into Venus, because it really needs water.

During that time you'll want to start constructing your insolation shield, to help cool things down.

Only after that can you move Mercury into place.

The outgassing CO2 could be captured and turned into carbon and oxygen, with the carbon put to industrial use or into biomass and the oxygen feeding a 400 millibar O2 atmosphere in settlements.

But a sudden volcanic triggered burst of CO2 would be a forever ongoing global risk.

Sometimes the will just isn't there.

(Gavin Menzies, the author behind the claim China circumnavigated the world before Columbus was born, wrote a third book about how Atlantis did it first. It was equally convincing.)

And I don't see how a colony on Mars even helps with probes. We send material from Earth to Mars and then send probes from Mars? How is that more efficient? Do we even know what materials could theoretically be mined on Mars? And probes are launched with gravitational assists.

Humans are evolved to fit this gravity well. We use the gasses and metabolites here. Trying to leave the planet and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of our solar system is ridiculous. Our lives are fragile and our lifespans too short to make anything offworld viable.

With the pace of technology, our AI robot descendents will be inheriting the stars instead. And there's nothing wrong with saying human life was just a stepping stone.

“Trying to leave the savanna and make it all work in the dark, cold, bleakness of Europe is ridiculous.” - some early hominid, fairly recently

And once we had done that, we couldn't go back in significant numbers before inventing sun cream to functionally replace the melanin our bodies no longer produced in enough quantities to prevent our skin burning and developing cancer just from being in the sun.

Technological progress may make this all faster than evolution, but a mechanism that's optimised for Venus may freeze solid on the hottest day in Death Valley, Earth.

Ask yourself why. What's the real job to be done? What's the real economic situation? How does it map to human desires?

Robots will do the job even better than us and will see 10,000x the investment. Gradients of least resistance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser

Human history offers plenty of precedent for this; "we want to run things our own way", "all the land is taken where we live", etc. I don't wanna live in Scottsdale, AZ either, but someone does.

(And I'm saying that as an optimist because I want the billionaires to develop that tech: the ability to fully terraform Mars into a self-sustained world is necessarily also sufficient to handle any imaginable damage to Earth up to and including a surprise impact with a moon-sized rock that excavates the crust and mantle everywhere to a depth of a few thousand km, meaning that things like greenhouse gases and biodiversity would become as easy to fix in that future as a single broken window is today; even just the bare minimum of a single self-sustained domed city on Mars means most environmental issues have to be "solved").

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate_deficiency

Nevertheless, I think "my skin burned and blistered" is a bit more immediate with the painful feedback, even if it's not as extreme.

We should empower them to go where we can't. In a sense they'll be our children, carrying the torch and memories of humanity with them.

Like if they have a society, maybe their founding myths will involve a baby robot created by some (non-human) robot deity, or if they are more rational a pseudo-scientific story of evolution from a toaster.

The Soviet Union did send probes to Venus back in the 70s. But, indeed, it would be great to have new and higher resolution photos. I am always amazed when looking on the surface of a foreign world.

What do you mean?

Venus has already received its fair share of probes, the Venera missions, some weighted upwards of five tons

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

They did many different types of measurements, and lasted from one to two hours before their batteries running out, some atmospheric probes lasted days

Might be cooler at the poles.

Or it is 93x atmospheric pressure, which is what 'bar' indicates...

I can also guess what ninety atmospheres entails in terms of engineering, because I know that's the pressure at about 900 m water depth (by virtue of the SI units, which are based off water: P = hρg), which few submarines can even reach.

The same thing goes for 'as long as/as big as xxx football fields': which one? American or association? I know what a square metre is, I know what a square kilometre is, just use the damn units.

I really think pop-sci and science education should emphasise standard units (read: SI, not USC) and being able to estimate orders of magnitude.

There's a pedantic comment below (I saw it coming a kilometre away), but why not make life simple and just say 'about 90 atmospheres'?

The steam pressure is not about the numbers so much but a kind of hyperbole , "you know that thing which hauls tonnes of steel purely on pressure made in a steam boiler , yeah the pressure on Venus is 4 times that pressure "

I found it an interesting fact.

I didn’t think of it that way initially, but this makes sense, thanks.

Otherwise, it's your reference to submarines that contextualizes the number, same as the insides of a steam engine does for others

I realised that after the fact. What I meant to say is that standard units should be used, and individuals should be left to contextualise said units of their own accord, instead of it being done for them.

Oh and I like the unit ‘bar’ because it’s the customary unit for espresso machine pressure (and I’m an espresso nerd with my own machine at home). Espresso machines make espresso by forcing hot water through a puck of finely ground coffee at a pressure between 8 and 12 bar. If you’ve ever worked with an espresso machine, you’ll have an intuitive sense for how much pressure that is (a lot). Venus having 10 times that pressure is also impressive.

I think we should be aggressively seeding its atmosphere with extremophiles, hoping that something evolves to transform all that free energy into life.

https://www.humans2venus.org/why-venus

Would people floating 50 km up be able to just ignore that sort of vulkanism? I have no idea but I hope some science fiction author investigates and writes a story on the topic.

Moreover, if we are to consider possibilities beyond our current capabilities, why not focus on building space stations with artificial gravity instead? There would be no need to be tethered to Venus when we could exist without any attachment (although we would still be subject to gravity of other entities).

The main point against is that there is no reason for anyone to go there. Cloudtops on Venus are immensely resource-poor, most importantly in hydrogen. I agree with you that there is no advantage to a floating colony over a spinning one.

The one place on the solar system whose colonization is often ignored is Mercury. It has an extremely low axial tilt, meaning that all the craters on it's poles are permanently shadowed. It is also constantly bombarded by solar wind, which produces water (ionized hydrogen impacts oxide rocks, and binds to the oxygen). Then the water is a gas that bounces around until it impacts the bottom of a shadowed crater, which is cold enough to freeze it. Based on data from the MESSENGER mission, the south pole of Mercury alone has more water than all of Mars.

That's not really a point in favour compared to an orbiting spinhab. You only need it to float so that it doesn't fall to the ground. And you can achieve that by not leaving orbit in the first place.

A floating habitat would have less access to orbit, would have density / weight contraints and would have to deal with the corrosivity of the venusian clouds.

Those are very different engineering challenges. Separating similar pressure gas mixtures is question of porosity, but not force. Separating different pressures of the same gas mixture is not just a question of porosity, but you also need manage the forces created by the overall pressure differential.

Edit: If you take a helium balloon into space (or high enough in our atmosphere) it explodes rather than just slowly leaking and equalizing it's gas mixture with the atmosphere.

That will come in handy when we deconstruct Mercury to provide the raw materials for a Dyson swarm.

So, AIUI, it's easier to get to Alpha Centauri than to "fall into" the star we orbit.

Note that at sufficient height over Venus, air is buoyant, so quite a few designs for Venus assumes at least part of the habitation itself is within the structure of the blimps, and the pressure means leaks are much more manageable. You also get a "free" radiation shield on Venus thanks to the induced magnetic field, and that alone might well be enough to make it more attractive than a larger space station.

We don't know if a full Earth gravity is necessary for human health in the long term, or if we could get away with something less, like half a gee. And we don't know how small the centrifugal force gradient has to be between the feet and the head for people to be comfortable. It might turn out that we could just get used to it, like how people get over space-sickness, so a spinhab with a relatively small radius might be fine. All we know for sure is that prolonged exposure to zero gravity causes a gradual decay in bone and muscular strength.

There was a plan for the ISS to have a spinning module to study these questions but it never happened. It's a shame, that kind of experiment would be far more valuable than whatever public relations crap they're doing up there. I actually find it astounding that we haven't even tested long term partial-gravity on animals yet.

https://hackaday.com/2021/06/08/iss-artificial-gravity-study...

It would actually be easier than on Earth because on Venus atmospheric pressure increases like crazy as you get near the surface. So an habitat pressurized at 1 Earth atmosphere would naturally float in Venus' atmosphere like a submarine or whatnot floats in Earth's oceans.

My understanding is that at the relevant altitude in Venus' atmosphere the temperature would also be very Earth-like so no big heating/cooling issues, either. I have read some say that the upper atmosphere of Venus is actually the most human-friendly environment in the solar system outside of Earth.

It's actually not a far-fetched proposal.

But of course at the right height breathable air is also buoyant on Venus, and that's one of the key things that makes floating habitats attractive - we can use air for lift and live inside the balloons, and thanks to the equivalence of pressure small leaks shouldn't be an issue. Multiple compartments plus some spare, un-inflated sections, and you can have decent redundancy.

(I am planning a book set in part on Venus, but it's book 6 of a 6 book cycle and I'm currently being very slow about finishing book 3)

Plus makes emergency procedures for leaks MUCH cheaper - light emergency ponchos and masks, and just walk over to the next sealed building.

I'm assuming you mean sealed buildings inside the blimps here, because you'd have nowhere to walk to on the outside on account of being 50km above ground. In which case you probably wouldn't need anything in the case of a leak.

  I am 100% confident that should human society settle on the planet we will totally ignore the fact that's going to happen one day and it will be a amazing catastrophe when it finally does occur.

How 'one day' is that one day volcanic event on Venus compared to one of the extinction events Earth has had?

The whole planet exploding, however? Lava flowing across the whole planet at the same time? Hilariously catastrophic.

1 - https://www.goodreads.com/series/112296-the-broken-earth

The relevant question from the GP was, how long ago was the last time this happened on Venus? Because we've got something similar here around 60 million years ago.

does the fact that Venus has no moon play into the lack of tectonics?

_On_ Venus? That seems unlikely; if anything it'd be _above_ Venus (there's a not-that-absurd argument that sections of Venus's atmosphere are far more hospitable than, say, Mars, and of course this tickles sci-fi writers' love of big airships, so it comes up a lot in fiction).

(Though I assume that even then, the whole surface exploding would be undesirable.)

If we allow for pretty long timescales, we are pretty much doing that with Yellowstone here on Earth.