The "airships riding on clouds of Venus" is a scifi genre that we need way more of.

To be at 1 atm you need to be way up near 50km, but you'd probably want to be up closer to 55km to get temperatures down, filling it with higher concentration O2 to make it breathable. Making the envelope durable would be pretty crazy in H2SO4, but maybe Ti would self passivate?

Arguably, more dangerous and harder to navigate than vacuum.

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bilbo0s an hour ago | parent [-]

You guys are imaginative, I'll give you that.

But there are so many more fundamental problems with the high altitude Venusian colony idea that you would never get to the "temperature gradients > power" pipeline implementation in any case.

I mean right off the bat, imagine building or navigating anything in hurricane Katrina. Then, since we're talking 50km, imagine winds that would make the forces you're dealing with an order of magnitude more problematic.

Yeah, in terms of knowledge and technology, mankind is just not there yet to be perfectly frank.

	▲	IAmBroom 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Wind speed could be fairly irrelevant to the balloon-city; it will never touch "ground". If you can steer away from vortexes (assuming them to be rare), they simply don't matter as a safety issue. (Staying in a desirable temperature zone could create a need for resisting the wind, but that's not a safety issue.) OTOH, because wind velocity is highly tied to altitude on Venus, wind farming could be an important source of energy generation (along with chemical generation for emergency demand). Drag a fan at a hotter, lower, higher-pressure altitude, and harvest the electricity. In fact, storing an excess of wind-farm energy as chemical energy could power the occasional need to steer away from vortexes. If the problem of a chemically-inert package can be solved, floating inhabited stations could be feasible.