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Yeah I always like the sound of a Venus colony more, similar gravity being one of the main benefits but guess being stuck in a habitat in the clouds doesn't satisfy the same explorative instinct as Mars where you could actually walk on a new land



Not immediately, but we could put a gigantor solar panel up as a sun shade and literally freeze out the CO2 on Venus and beam all the power to earth.


Beaming the power to Earth is probably not going to work very well because of the diffraction limits involved.

Also Venus and Earth orbit at different speeds, so in best case you have to beam the power "only" about 40 million km, and sometimes it's over 250 million km and the sun is in the way. The cycle is a little under 2 years long, so there are many-month-long periods of time where your power capacity is reduced massively, and you need alternative sources on Earth anyway.

If you were going to generate power from the Venusian sunshade, you may be better to use it to locally refine something very energy dense like nuclear fuels and physically ship them back. Luckily for us, refining Venusian CO2 into synthetic hydrocarbon fuel and shipping that back is probably not practical either (you'd need to move millions or billions of tonnes of it) or we'd have to contend with VenuGas Inc. adding "alien fuel" carbon to the atmosphere as well.

You could also put a sunshade up at earth and use it to offset the global heating problem (but not things like ocean acidification). Due to the magnifying effect of greenhouse gases, blocking solar radiation before it enters the atmosphere is disproportionately effective, rather like putting shutters outside a window rather than leaving it clear and using air-conditioning.


Wouldn't it be far easier to solve our own problems here than to engineer a solution which could make Venus habitable?


Looking at the current state of humanity, I don't think so.


Are you letting ChatGPT do all the engineering and construction for Venus or are you gonna run into those pesky "human" problems there too?


If all the Venus-related activities are controlled by a single political entity, those pesky human problems probably won't be a big problem.


Indeed, when opening a hatch and allowing scalding ultra-high-pressure sulphuric acid into the habitat is an option, dissent will be fairly easily handled!


That's not what I mean. If you look at many of the problems in the world now, they're geopolitical, caused by conflicts between countries. If you had a bunch of different countries trying to all colonize Venus or wherever all at the same time, it would inevitably lead to war. But if only a single country were doing it and no one else was involved, they would only be limited by their own technical or economic or manpower limitations.




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