A young Venus had water for 2B years, habitable for longer than Mars

Neither are ships, but we have become pretty good at keeping them buoyant, primarily by properly compartmentalizing the internal space.

Isn't the dv/dt really the issue? If Venus has stable high altitude wind, would the speed really matter?

Oh, and the air has enough sulfur dioxide to kill you, because otherwise it would be too easy.

Vega 2 Dropped a balloon probe over 40 years ago that lasted at least a few hours as it floated at its level and traversed 11,000Km. Why not hope that in another couple of hundred years we could make something that could last significantly longer, and could house a manned station? Before then, small steps?

Venus is a hellscape by comparison to Earth, but we are incredibly resourceful apes with imaginations unbound by meagre constraints.

Well I suppose my point is that it would probably be a good idea to advance balloon tech on earth first before attempting such a thing on Venus. Finding people willing to risk their lives is well and good, but if trillions of dollars worth of equipment and mission planning go to waste very quickly, I wager it'd be hard to find funding for such missions.

I used to read a lot of science fiction as a teenager, but as I got older, much of it and particularly the idea of colonization of other planets lost its appeal.

The issue is that I see extraterrestrial bases as being like research stations in Antarctica, except even less self-sufficient. Whenever you have a problem with something on Earth, you can always go down a level in technology, all the way back to the stone age if necessary. Your machine breaks down or gets stuck, you can get out of it and duct tape it, bash it with a rock, weld it. You have the whole industrial supply chain that goes back to digging things out of the dirt. It doesn't always work, but it's fundamentally different from anywhere off earth, where if your high tech solution fails, it's game over; either you're dead immediately, or you're dead eventually because a solution would take months or years to get from earth, or you're very, very lucky and you can get saved from earth at vast expense.

There are only two ways that make sense to me to actually create self-sufficient colonies - terraforming other celestial bodies, or modifying ourselves to suit them. But those aren't very near term, and the genre of science fiction that doesn't involve either isn't, I think going to ever become reality.

Thanks for doing the math. That’s a shame I thought I was on to something!