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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Upper atmosphere of Venus could be high value, if we just shift the states and view the surface as deep underwater and the clouds as land.

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I thought the atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. What makes it potentially high value?

Earth-normal gravity, Earth-normal temperature, Earth-normal pressure, concentrated solar power, breathing air is buoyant, plastic and carbon fiber structural material--and breathing air and water--are convertable from atmosphere, cloud water is heavily enriched with deuterium. Way nicer than Mars.

You can operate an unshielded nuke plant tethered some distance below your balloon habitat, no worries about leaks.

We don't know whether humans can survive for long at Lunar or Martian gravity. Zero-G we know is a problem. So, Venus might be the only other notionally habitable planet.

Its also closer, and moster closer than Mars.

it is extremely unlikely that humans can’t live on a Mars, in suitable habitats. One third gee is far closer to one gee in effect than it is zero gee.

There is no basis for any kind of quantitative estimate of likelihood.

Flatlander wishful thinking is soon fatal out in the asteroid belt. You quickly learn better, or die.

This is possible, but we don't actually know for sure. Only in the last few years has there been hardware on the ISS capable of creating partial-g for rodents [1], and so far (in published research, at least) it hasn't been used for anything except 1g.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-10998-4

Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus also have very close to Earth-normal gravity. I don't know what a human habitation at surface-level would be like on such a world, or how to escape the gravity well if you ever wanted to leave, but when it comes to surface gravity, it's pretty weird that our planetary system has five planets with almost the same gravity.

It's either an amazing coincidence, or something about planet formation in our solar system that makes ~1G planets very likely.

Gas-planets would be a challenge with no habitable surface, especially those with high winds. Would a floating sky habitat be any easier than just living in space?

But anything at or near Neptune receives very little light. There's a big gap between Mars and Jupiter (5.2au vs 1.5au), 10au to Saturn, and then a massive gap to Neptune (30au); anything habitable probably needs to be in the Mars-Venus band, fairly close to the sun.

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