• LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    I stumbled on a random weird dude’s blog a while ago that had a compelling argument for colonizing Mercury, I guess there’s a band around the planet where an underground settlement would be at a pretty comfortable temperature year round, plus water deposits in various craters and shit

    Seems about as plausible as colonizing Mars is

    Of course google is useless for finding this guy’s blog post

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 days ago

      The big problem with Mercury is that it’s actually very expensive to get to in terms of energy, hence why we’ve had very few missions to it. On the other hand, Venus is a surprisingly good candidate. While it’s hellish at ground level. There is a layer of upper atmosphere that has effectively Earth like conditions in terms of temperature and and ambient pressure. And you have a ton of volatiles in the atmosphere that could be harvested. So you could technically build cloud cities there. The main problem is that the atmosphere is fairly corrosive, so you’d need materials that wouldn’t degrade in it.

      https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161019-the-amazing-cloud-cities-we-could-build-on-venus