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[Culise]

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.

It does kinda help that we evolved and adapted to Earth, so it's only natural that we're well-suited to an environment that we and our predecessors have literally spent aeons developing in.  It's sort of an application of the weak anthropic principle; if we evolved on Venus to survive 92 atm of pressure under temperatures of over 700K and regular rains of sulfuric acid all with a surface insolation of around 10% of that on Earth, we'd probably look at Earth with horror.  I mean, there's next to no atmosphere, it's so cold and bright, and that oxygen-rich atmosphere?  Oxygen not only is horrifically reducing, but it also stinks worse than selenium.  Not like that sulfur on Venus, even if they do share the same column on the periodic table; that doesn't smell at all. 

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Are artificial gills scientifically possible?
Not a rebreather but a device (heck a back pack with an air tube) that gets breathable air from ocean water.

[chaotic skies]

Theoretically? Wouldn't be very difficult. Use an electrolizer to separate the water, separate the oxygen, release everything else. Boom, infinite oxygen tank. Only problem is power requirements, I believe.

[Tack]

A floating colony above the clouds on Venus is probably the only way, true.
I mean, the air on the surface is so thick that a gentle breeze is like a hurricane, and so tumultuous that they constantly have gale-force winds. Which actually makes me prefer the acid rain.
But I think everyone's been talking about how deadly it is so let's skip to- how we'd make it work.
Zepplins?

[Amperzand]

Are artificial gills scientifically possible?
Not a rebreather but a device (heck a back pack with an air tube) that gets breathable air from ocean water.

Two difficulties:

One, pure oxygen is dangerous and will cause health issues with prolonged exposure.

Two, flow rate. The way fish do it involves getting the absorbed gas out of water, but you'd need to process a very great deal of water to make it work for human needs.  Alternatively, you can electrolyze it, but that takes a lot of electricity, with all the downsides it brings, and either needs to be done at an extremely high energy, making things even safer, or slowly enough to carry no real advantages with regard to longevity.

[Erkki]

A floating colony above the clouds on Venus is probably the only way, true.
I mean, the air on the surface is so thick that a gentle breeze is like a hurricane, and so tumultuous that they constantly have gale-force winds. Which actually makes me prefer the acid rain.
But I think everyone's been talking about how deadly it is so let's skip to- how we'd make it work.
Zepplins?

It appears that there actually isnt too windy in Venus' surface, was a surprise in the 1970s. The atmosphere is heavily layered.

Pressure and temperature there are still quite lethal. 

[Parsely]

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

Where do they get water? If they have water they could make rocket fuel, and provide air and drinking water for the colonists. There's no surface water on Venus and we have no idea if there is water beneath Venus' surface, and if there was water down there you'd have to fly down to the surface and back up to your colony, so you have to consider that problem as well. It also doesn't have any moons, so no potential for frozen water there either. So the nearest place to get water is Earth, which is unacceptable if we're expecting these humans living there to have a system that is anything resembling self-sufficient.

[GiglameshDespair]

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

Where do they get water? If they have water they could make rocket fuel, and provide air and drinking water for the colonists. There's no surface water on Venus and we have no idea if there is water beneath Venus' surface, and if there was water down there you'd have to fly down to the surface and back up to your colony, so you have to consider that problem as well. It also doesn't have any moons, so no potential for frozen water there either. So the nearest place to get water is Earth, which is unacceptable if we're expecting these humans living there to have a system that is anything resembling self-sufficient.

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.

As before, Venus itself wouldn't be a supply for water.

Air could be supplied via photosynthesis with plants, using co2 harvested out of the atmosphere.

[Parsely]

You need hundreds of plants to make enough oxygen for just one person to survive, so you're not making that your primary source of air. You need water to turn into oxygen to keep the people breathing.

My initial reaction about mining asteroids for ice is that it has the same problems as getting the ice from Earth, but I just learned that we actually have a list of asteroids that cross Venus' orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Venus-crossing_minor_planets There aren't a lot, but many of them pass by Venus annually, so it's possible that you could schedule missions to mine them that would be closer than Earth, if they do have the amounts of ice you would need. This probably means that you would need a space station over Venus to maintain your mining vessel(s), prepare the ice for transportation, and hold whatever you couldn't afford to send, which means even more zeroes added to the end of the cost of this project.

It heavily depends on the actual goal of the mission, but I would think that Venus is not worth sending people to. At the least it's disqualified from being a haven for humanity, seeing as the surface is apparently unlivable, which means you have to build enough real estate for millions of people floating in the sky.

E: Just have humans invent a teleporter that runs on lawn trimmings. That way you don't have to deal with all these pesky practical issues of transporting the people and stuff the colonists need and having it arrive a year after they needed it.

[Tuxfanturnip]

If you have any water, you can use it in a closed cycle to recycle CO2 by the Sabatier process and partial combustion of the resulting methane into water and carbon. And you'd need tons of plants in any case to feed everyone.

Sulfuric acid contains hydrogen and oxygen. I'm pretty sure you could electrolyze it to get some hydrogen gas at least, though I'm not sure about the energy requirements. You might have to mix it with water to do so, electrolyzing mostly water and having to combust it to go again...

Robotic surface mining might be possible if asteroids are better used elsewhere. It would rely on a lot of ridiculous materials science, but it would be possible.

[Culise]

You can also break up CO₂ directly into free carbon and molecular oxygen by introducing large amounts of energy as well, in spite of its tendency to prefer to break into carbon monoxide and a single free oxygen atom; while significantly less energy-efficient than water-electrolysis, there's certainly no lack of material once you have, say, solar power collectors in orbit over your colonies to beam power down.  Most sulfuric acid reactions will also liberate water as well; f'rex, simply mixing it with sugar will do the job.  In fact, apparently, you could break up CO₂ to get oxygen and carbon, then introduce the carbon to heated sulfuric acid to obtain more CO₂, SO₂, and H₂O. 

EDIT: Minor mental glitch there on the products of a CO₂ break-up.

[GiglameshDespair]

Millions?  No.

The number I've seen bandied about as the minimum to maintain genetic diversity is 10,000. I've seen lower figures - as low as 160 to hold a stable population - but lets go with 10k.

Earlier on in the colonisation process, they could rely on imported dna to help expand their population.

Space colonisation is going to be monstrously expensive no matter what. It depends how costly it is to build up colonies on Venus compared to Mars.

While they would be reliant on Earth for quite a while, that's true of any colony.

[Tuxfanturnip]

I can think of a few reasons to live on Venus. Maintaining fuel depots for outer system bound craft, maintaining beamed solar power satellites close to the sun, performing various astronomical observations, exploiting rich sightseers...

[Parsely]

If you have any water, you can use it in a closed cycle to recycle CO2 by the Sabatier process and partial combustion of the resulting methane into water and carbon. And you'd need tons of plants in any case to feed everyone.

Robotic surface mining might be possible if asteroids are better used elsewhere. It would rely on a lot of ridiculous materials science, but it would be possible.

Apparently it takes something like 100-300 plants (of varying size) to give a person a healthy diet, according to this website. http://www.wellfedhomestead.com/how-much-should-you-plant-in-your-garden-to-provide-a-years-worth-of-food This is very interesting. So yeah it looks like if you had the gardens to feed 10,000 people (I like Gig's number) then you'd end up with something like:
Let's assume that each leaf produces 5 milliliters of oxygen per hour, each plant has at least 25 leaves, you need 200 plants to feed someone, there are 10,000 people to feed, and a person consumes 50 liters of oxygen per hour.
(200 * 25) * 10,000) / 1000 = 50,000 liters of oxygen per hour

That's enough delicious oxygen to support 1000 people, or a tenth of your total population. That's pretty good. There are too many assumptions for this to be a scholarly estimate but surely the plants would be supporting at least some number of people which is better than nothing.

The main difficulty of robotic surface mining, I would say, is flying the vehicles down to the surface and back up to the colony. I'm still not totally sold on the idea of floating all of your facilities. Foundries, factories, living areas, agriculture, vehicle bays. At least disposing of waste would be as simple as throwing it outside.

Earlier on in the colonisation process, they could rely on imported dna to help expand their population.

I like that idea. Trading DNA in cold storage for a few thousand adult humans would save loads of money.

[Tack]

So been watching a thing which had humans stored in digital form- one to a thumb drive.
Reminded me of a previous one which had animals and plants stored as self-replicating DNA in a nutrient paste- just drop them in a life-capable water body and thirty years later they'll start swimming out.

How effective would that be for hive ships?

Which has more appeal? Digitising various engineers and botanists, along with animals, and unpacking them on entry, or cluster-bombing a lake/ocean and letting nature run it's course?

Would it be better to add humans to the planet after the other flora/fauna, so an ecosystem has time to develop, or before/during so they can aid in its development?