The old tired counterargument: nobody colonized Earth’s cloud-tops yet, and they sure are easier to get to.
Also, if you have the means to colonize Venus, you don’t need to colonize Venus anymore. The ship that took you to Venus is a better place to live in that the colony.
There are reasons to colonise Venusian cloud-tops that don’t exist for Earth ones (reducing xrisk, scientific discovery, etc)
Building a research base is not the same as colonizing.
Living in space long-term has lots of drawbacks, mainly to do with radiation and the lack of gravity.
Well, if we want to seriously travel in space, even in our own solar system, we will have to solve those problems anyway (in a form of radiation shielding and rotational gravity). And by solving them, we will end with a flying colony.
Colonizing skies seems unrealistic because it seems to me like you would want to be able to land, rather than floating endlessly in an atmosphere rather than in a vacuum. THe main use for this seems like a fuel station as NTR rockets can use CO2 or things cracked from CO2.
Critically, Venus has no water.
Also, would a colony ship actually be long-term? Most locations in the inner solar system can be reached in under 5 years even under Hohmann orbit.
The old tired counterargument: nobody colonized Earth’s cloud-tops yet, and they sure are easier to get to.
Also, if you have the means to colonize Venus, you don’t need to colonize Venus anymore. The ship that took you to Venus is a better place to live in that the colony.
And the obvious counter-counterarguments:
There are reasons to colonise Venusian cloud-tops that don’t exist for Earth ones (reducing xrisk, scientific discovery, etc)
Living in space long-term has lots of drawbacks, mainly to do with radiation and the lack of gravity.
Building a research base is not the same as colonizing.
Well, if we want to seriously travel in space, even in our own solar system, we will have to solve those problems anyway (in a form of radiation shielding and rotational gravity). And by solving them, we will end with a flying colony.
… Not sure.
Colonizing skies seems unrealistic because it seems to me like you would want to be able to land, rather than floating endlessly in an atmosphere rather than in a vacuum. THe main use for this seems like a fuel station as NTR rockets can use CO2 or things cracked from CO2.
Critically, Venus has no water.
Also, would a colony ship actually be long-term? Most locations in the inner solar system can be reached in under 5 years even under Hohmann orbit.