It's easier and much more efficient to get resources such as raw materials and metals from the ground. Being in the air without option of landing means you are completely dependent on import of raw materials to repair/expand your habitat. Very inefficient as well as not economical.
It might be cheaper to get to Venus than to Mars but on Mars you can actually start mining and building factories on the ground. At some point, it becomes much cheaper and more economical. It's just the initial hurdle of getting there with enough stuff and people to start a colony which can self sustain itself and grow.
Once you have brought enough initial stuff to Mars, you get to a point where you can start extracting materials from the ground and free up all the cargo in the ships for just people and perhaps some special items you still cannot manufacture on Mars. But majority of cargo space is freed up.
>It's easier and much more efficient to get resources such as raw materials and metals from the ground. Being in the air without option of landing means you are completely dependent on import of raw materials to repair/expand your habitat. Very inefficient as well as not economical.
Assuming you overcome all the other difficulties and have a colony on Venus' skies, what prevents you from having ships that can go to the ground, get stuff, and come back?
It was my understanding that the surface of Venus is infernal, with super high temperature (hotter than Mercury which is closer to sun), rains of sulphuric acid and very high density. Building machines capable of landing there and being able to return seems like a tall order.
Since for humans it is inconceivable to go down to Venus ground (they'd die immediately from the heat), mining materials and then lifting again and returning back to the habitat in the upper atmosphere, then you'd need to automate the whole process.
The automated machine would have to be incredibly durable to survive the hellish ground environment and be able to fly away again. Also drones that would do the mining work would need to be made from incredibly strong materials. There's a reason we only send suicide probes to Venus that live maybe for couple hours before dying.
Also for humans, cold temperature is easier to survive compared to very high temperature. We can generate heating for astronauts (batteries in space suites can generate heat, we can recharge batteries from solar panels brought by the mothership or on previous automated mission, or from RTG). I'm not sure how would a cooling system for astronauts to be able to survive in 700 degrees Celsius for longer than few minutes even work.
High temperature and strong winds on surface can be beneficial to machinery. You can fight with them or you can use their help to reach goal. IMHO, an AI system and physical simulator can develop some pretty interesting ideas how to use these conditions for efficient mining and transportation.
First idea: use wind to power instruments directly via mechanical or pneumatic link.
Second idea: use silicon to produce machinery and tools.
Third idea: high temperature means it's much easier to melt ores, some metal can be collected directly in liquid form.
Fourth idea: air balloons should be very inexpensive way of transport ores to top of atmosphere, where they can be picked up by colonists.
Fifth idea: use mechanical computers to control equipment. It's not so hard to create surfaces which will perform calculations required to navigation, landing, mining, and floating back to surface. Mechanical computers can be crawled out of silicon, with liquid metal for transportation of messages, and vibration can be used to power such computer. 100kHz vibration is easy to reach. At 100kHz, it will be equal to 1kHz electronic computer.
The atmosphere of Venus on ground level is incredibly hostile.
467 °C temperature, pressure equal to 900 m underwater, winds with speeds of 100 m/s and covered in clouds of sulphuric acid it even has lightning strikes. The longest we have been able to keep a probe operational on the surface of Venus was 2 hours.While the gravity is slightly lower than on earth the pressure itself would make it incredible hard to launch anything from the surface back up. It's like launching an armoured rocket from 900 m below the sea while being bombarded by lightning and acid eating away at you + lifting up resources at the same time.
It might be cheaper to get to Venus than to Mars but on Mars you can actually start mining and building factories on the ground. At some point, it becomes much cheaper and more economical. It's just the initial hurdle of getting there with enough stuff and people to start a colony which can self sustain itself and grow.
Once you have brought enough initial stuff to Mars, you get to a point where you can start extracting materials from the ground and free up all the cargo in the ships for just people and perhaps some special items you still cannot manufacture on Mars. But majority of cargo space is freed up.