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[Rolepgeek]

Sounds like most depictions of heaven I've seen. And it really is paradise, compared to most favorable planets in the solar system. Easiest to colonize, long as you have the floating bits.

[i2amroy]

The main problem that I could see with Cryogenics that we just can't solve is the culture shock of suddenly skipping forward x amount of years.

You already get essential culture shock like that whenever someone moves to a new country/etc.; it's bad, but it's not like it's so serious a problem that it would actually stop someone from doing it.

The one major way we've tried and gotten to work is saturating the organism in question with an antifreeze solution, usually Glycerol, I believe. The goal is low temperature, not actual freezing, so if you lower the freezing point of the water involved, you can make it work, at least in theory. Prolonged stasis is probably still not viable.

Yeah, the major problem right now is actually the fact that most of said antifreeze solutions are actually pretty toxic, so right now we're working on the assumption that the damage the the toxic chemicals we are using to keep your cells from exploding is less than the damage that said cells exploding would do.

[GiglameshDespair]

Ya know, if you consider an unbreathable atmosphere and no ground to be "paradise".

It has its perks, compared to, say, deep space or Mars, the most likely candidate.

The pressure means that if you spring a puncture, you won't get explosive decompession or anything like that; you'd have time to fix the leak before things got dangerous.
At that height, you could go outside without a pressure suit - you'd need oxygen, and protection from the mere 75^oc temperature, but you wouldn't need a pressure suit. If you can get a few kilometres higher that drops to the perfectly survivable 27^oc
The atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide, which can used for agriculture.

You'd have similar gravity to Earth, which is necessary for truly long term space habitation, and Mars' gravity is much lower, so the health effects of low g may still be an issue on Mars. The atmosphere provides shielding against space radiation pretty much the same as Earth, which is something Mars lacks in a major sense. It's also closer than Mars, with more launch windows to get there with our current rockets.

It has its downsides, mainly the difficulty of any colonies sourcing metals and water, but even so - the atmosphere of Venus is surprisingly liveable.

[Egan_BW]

Heh, just pointing out that no other planet is likely to be more paradise than earth, which is right, you know, here. Not the word I'd choose for any other place, and hardly for here.

[chaotic skies]

The problem with earth is it's one big target that has all out valuables and can be easily wiped out from one relatively small asteroid. If we sprout out to Venus, we suddenly have two targets. Earth, is less protected but easier to survive on, and Venus' thick atmosphere would stop almost any asteroid from hitting ground. Combine that with the fact that most people would be living in mobile habitats, around the poles, where they are much less likely to be hit by a stray asteroid. Even if an asteroid were to hit ground, we would already be dealing with the heat from it, and almost any other effect would be canceled out by height and distance. Venus actually seems a lot safer than Earth, if you ask me.

[Parsely]

Venus is also worthless compared to Earth.

[Fniff]

The problem is, we humans are spoiled when it comes to home planets. Earth is a pretty rad place to live. Moving to anywhere else in our solar system is like moving from a mansion to a shack.

[chaotic skies]

Eh. Robots, mine the surface. Is it as a base to launch missions out of. Put excess population from Earth there. Use it to conduct dangerous experiments in one of the most remote places possible. It has it's uses, they're just not as obvious as you might expect.

[Parsely]

The problem is, we humans are spoiled when it comes to home planets. Earth is a pretty rad place to live. Moving to anywhere else in our solar system is like moving from a mansion to a shack.

You're underselling it a bit I think. "Spoiled" implies Venus would simply be a less pleasant place to live. There is no sustainable way to live on Venus. All current plausible plans for colonization rely on Earth, so if we're talking about an Earth destruction scenario, there is no alternative. If Earth dies, humanity dies.

Eh. Robots, mine the surface. Is it as a base to launch missions out of. Put excess population from Earth there. Use it to conduct dangerous experiments in one of the most remote places possible. It has it's uses, they're just not as obvious as you might expect.

As it is today, you can't just put people somewhere else. Not only is it prohibitively expensive to fly people to another planet (which means you won't be offloading any significant amount of Earth's population), even if you could put a million people on a rocket and send them somewhere else, they have to volunteer, and I don't think people are going to be falling over one another to go to another planet when Earth is a pretty awesome place to live by comparison.

[GiglameshDespair]

It would depend if any theoretical Venusian colony could obtain resources by asteroid mining for water and metals. If it could, it'd be able to be independent from Earth.

[Parsely]

It's more complicated than that I think. You need to fuel your spacecraft, turn raw materials into something usable, and then get stuff down to the surface, not necessarily in that order. People need to live in habitats and regularly use space suits without getting themselves killed, which takes training, so there needs to be a selection process.

[GiglameshDespair]

We haven't been talking about surface colonies.

[Parsely]

Oh, so a space station? That sounds... Even worse.

E: Oh you mean floating colonies. Re-reading the arguments, that doesn't sound totally awful.

[chaotic skies]

I'm not thinking this is going to be doable today. I doubt it'd be doable in the next 10 years; I'm just saying that we could do it, with the right amount of preparation.

[Rolepgeek]

Venus is also worthless compared to Earth.

Not at all. Excellent place to grow food, with a bit of work(and water), and if I remember right, minimum energy requirements for getting to the outer system (or at least Ceres) are lower from there than from Earth. Combine that with more launch windows than Mars, and you have a perfectly respectable reason to start a colony there in a theoretical fiction setting. This isn't for the present time, of course. Set up the interplanetary transport system and you should have steady supplies. I like 'how would's and 'what ifs' more than 'it couldn't's, anyway :p