Living on Mars?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Venus isn't *that* much closer to the Sun than we are--in fact, the temperature at the cloud tops is around -70C, because the albedo of the clouds are so high they reflect away most of the incoming heat. It's the small remnant which gets trapped *under* the clouds that gives rise to the hellish temperatures at the surface. It's also worth noting that the Magellan spacecraft which was sent to map Venus' surface via radar was orbiting the planet for more than four years without any major reliability issues--the main reason they had to terminate the mission was because the solar arrays had degraded to the point they couldn't reliably power the spacecraft, so if our hypothetical Venus orbiter used something other than solar cells to power it, it could presumably last much longer.

Yeah, that wasn't the issues I had in mind. More radiation exposure for any humans on board the hypothetical Venus orbital base. As someone posted, there is a weird pseudo-magnetic field on the far side of Venus (plus, you know, having a planet in the way is probably good protection too).

Aside from the gravity, though, I'm just not seeing a major cost/benefit advantage?

But that's the issue that started this all: is there really a major cost/benefit to any extraterrestrial base right now? It really always comes down to "putting our eggs in more than one basket", in which case the benefit is infinite and cost is therefore irrelevant to some (including, let me be clear, me), but the benefit is 0 and costs therefore excessive for others.

I don't have an answer to this. I have not seen anything that suggests that having a colony in mars or Venus would be economically beneficial. There might be some economic benefits to a Moon base, but that'd never be really self-sufficient, and it's not much of a second basket when anything that destroys Earth would probably take the moon with it as well. So, yeah, I admit that my idea of a floating Venus colony with quasi-magical mining robots its probably more sci-fi than anything else.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Grey Wolf