But having solid ground is still nice.
A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously.
The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very...
There will never, ever, ever[1] be a scenario where if you weighed up the options of "expand into some less habitable area of the Earth" versus "expand to Mars", the latter is the better option either 1) financially, or b) quality of life.
Nobody[2] ever picks the dramatically more expensive and dramatically worse option!
Also, people that are desperate enough to even consider living in the least desirable -- but still just barely habitable -- parts of planet Earth are essentially by definition too poor to afford interplanetary travel.
And no, no amount future sci-fi technology can possibly overcome the simple energy costs of this! If someone can afford the hugely energy intensive interplanetary travel, and the up-front investment required to survive incredibly harsh environments, then by definition they could more productively invest that here on Earth! It's the cheaper and better option in every possible way, and always will be.
This will remain true even if it's standing room only on the entire planetary surface -- it'll be cheaper to build levels upwards while digging downwards.
Maybe our atmosphere will become horrifically polluted? Sure, okay, air filters are faaar cheaper than a full vacuum-capable space suit!
Etc, etc, etc...
[1] Okay, fine, maybe in a million years. Whatever ends up preferring Mars at that point will no longer be "human" by any sane classification.
[2] For some values of nobody. There are morons that buy overpriced branded handbags made of literal trash. I doubt idiots like that will make for a successful, self-sustaining colony.
Building a city in Antarctica will be economically viable long before building a city on Mars is.
And, rarely, have economic considerations been the only driver for those great societal leaps.
It's unlikely that we can persist in our current trajectory for another 100 years without catastrophic climate events puttung a stop to all of these endeavours.
At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."
Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else, where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.
Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.
Anyone know of speculative plans of this sort?
Any effort is only temporary though, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so the sun is constantly stripping atmosphere off it. It’s not a renewable resource there like it is here.
The advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.
Keeping humans alive is hard.
I don't think it is possible to ever transport enough to make this happen.
We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?
It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment.
For mars this just isn't happening unless we ship half of Earth's people and resources over there. Who will have to live on a toxic planet.
But we can't even ship all that stuff there because we don't have enough fuel to do that (it requires many times the payload in fuel) and all the launches would make earth uninhabitable. Terraforming mars is therefore science fiction unless we break a lot of barriers like clean fusion, space elevators etc. And even then the material question will remain a problem.
I think even reverting climate change on earth, a much easier problem than terraforming a remote planet, is a pipe dream. If we're going to be going carbon capture at that global scale, we're going to need to extract so much material, manufacture so much equipment, transporter it all, deal with all the captured carbon, maintenance, power etc all stuff that's not possible to do completely carbon neutral, that we're just polluting a lot more. Especially if we want to do it at a timescale where it still matters.
NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen" [1].
(Turns out there's a region in Antarctic with them too, so we can always test things there.)
2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.