Not much to gain by going there. Wildly corrosive, too hot, too hard to terraform with present tech.
At 50km high it is literally the most Earth-like environment in the whole of the solar system (outside of Earth / the ISS / Tiāngōng obviously)
You wouldn’t even need a spacesuit or a pressure suit to stand outside, just a respirator and some light protection against acid
One of the only places in our system where you could feel the wind of another planet in a cool 25C against your face without protection except for eye goggles (not for very long though, again, acid).
The idea of floating outposts there is at least 50 years old (and comes from a soviet scientist originally IIRC); balloons filled with breathable air - which is a nice reserve for the same as a bonus - would have enough buoyancy at this altitude to support relatively large outposts attached to them. Not only that, the cosmic ray protection afforded by the atmosphere at that altitude is basically similar to the one on Earth; and those balloons wouldn’t need to be pressurized either, just filled, meaning if you get a leak you have potentially hours to fix it (or even days / more if you connect several such balloons together with some buoyancy margin).
Maybe we should try terraforming earth before we start to look elsewhere idk.
Me: Can we go to Venus?
Mom: No, we have Venus at home.
The Venus at home:
Terraforming isn’t on the table anywhere. We can’t even stop fucking up this planet, let alone unfuck it, let alone apply much more advanced unfucking tech on planets without any of the environmental cycles we take for granted.
Space programs do science stuff and military stuff. Revisiting Venus would be for science stuff.
Space programs definitely do science and stuff. All I meant to say was that Venus might not be the lowest hanging fruit for scientific discovery.
It’s really expensive to go there. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
I see now how my post could read as an elon-fanboi type “colonize all the things” and that was not what I intended.
I do think Atmospheric sensor clusters on Venus would be pretty awesome. It could give us an interesting set of insights into a wildly different environment.
