It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.
But back to how hard it is. There's mid-atmosphere winds that are effectively persistent hurricanes. It's hotter than a pizza oven, and the thick co2 air might as well be an ocean, because it has that much crushing force.
In my opinion, people should get excited about the thick atmosphere, because it's also the secret superpower that unlocks all the near term possibilities. Floating in the upper atmosphere is more like being a ship in an ocean, and if we ever got materials strong enough (graphite-carbon composites?) we could do some really cool passive dragnet + air balloon lift kinds of things to recover surface resources and lift them to a hypothetical settlement.
The one need-to-have resource that, as far as I know, there's none of on Venus whatsoever, is iodine. So even in the best case you'd have to import that. Oh, and water. You can get some out of the sulfuric acid rain but probably not as much as you want.
Granted, these are all assuming technology advances and big time scales, but trying to practice a golden rule here and be as charitable to the exercise as possible and not bean soup the discussion to death, which is a pet peeve of mine.
We are facing an existential crisis in the form of climate warming on Earth that we are unable to address properly. The thing is, terraforming Earth is the easiest thing to do: we already live on it, it's already liveable. Mars, Venus or any other body in the solar system is magnitudes harder to transform on almost every aspect.
So unless humanity demonstrates it can tackle the easiest terraforming endeavour that be, anything else is firmly in the science fiction realm.
As far as being science fiction… obviously? Terraforming Venus is a very long term project. It’s scientifically possible but hasn’t already been done. I guess I don’t understand what “science fiction” is supposed to mean. Like, Jules Verne writing about long distance underwater submarines? Trips to the Moon launched from Florida?
Putting data centers in space is also a dumb idea due to the difficulty of dissipating heat, solar radiation, maintenance challenges and more.
Maybe I do get it. It’s not about the actual impact. It’s entirely about performing. Profit (which is literally just a measure of whether the return on something is greater than the inputs) is somehow evil, but losing money on something (ie it costs more in inputs than its outputs) is good.
He has yet to do any of this. He had an idea that plenty of others have had, and have mostly dismissed due to concerns with feasibility. Granted, orbital DCs could one day be feasible with enough investment; I will not pretend that it is impossible. But for him to pretend that it is a solution for today's problems is at best the folly of a wealthy idiot and at worst a cynical attempt to juice the value of SpaceX before its IPO.
Maybe he'll fail this time. Maybe he'll figure it out.
But I like the fact that he is trying rather than spending his money on mansions and yachts.
Don't worry, he's doing that, too. And I'd dispute that he's trying; I've seen the SpaceX S-1, and it's looking like he took a successful business and rolled some failures into it to move money around. Everything is just a vehicle to make him wealthier; I don't believe anything he says in regards to helping humanity with his ventures.
Terraforming is so conceptual at this point that I wouldn't take a hard stance on either being easier or harder. You never know what a few generations of studies will teach us; and what misconceptions we hold dearly that our descendants will laugh at us for.
By "surface" do you mean the ground of Venus? The odds of a mining operation happening on the ground of Venus seems like science fiction at best, impossible at worst. Between the high winds, corrosive atmosphere, outlandish heat and extreme pressure any vehicle on the surface would be torn to shreds likely within a few hours (which has so far been the case for all landers that actually survived the landing) - and that's not even getting into the idea of getting things off the ground. Extraction from the atmosphere would likely be the only method unless something significant changes with the entire planet. Refining those materials would require a lot of machinery being in Venus's orbit that we'd have to get there, as well. Speaking of the conditions though...
> It is also possible to terraform Venus
Everything is hypothetical at best regarding this and would require a level of time and resources no government nor company would want to invest for an outstanding "maybe".
We can't even properly terraform inhospitable places within Earth.
Hell, if anything we are very quickly un-terraforming Earth into a place inhospitable to human life.
We are failing the great filter very hard.
I would argue that it is very much opposite. Venus has already 80% mass of Earth. Mars on other hand have not much different gravity than that of Moon and Moon is much closer to Earth if you plan to make something suitable for older folks that look for lighter gravity.
We’ve not terraformed anything, ever, but now we can compare the difficulty of terraforming of one planet versus another? “It’s possible”? So is turning lead into gold.