What To Do With Venus?

[Zixinus]

Out of curiosity, does anyone have any idea why something that has the roughly similar mass to Earth doesn't have a magnetic field?

Because that will put a crapper in the whole "terraforming/colonizing" thing. How are you going to protect your cloud-dwellers from the strong radiation?

Also, if local conditions could be made manageable, Venus would have one improvement over mining Earth: it is untapped. There are a lot of metals, possibly heavier metals even, that are on the surface. Stuff that we have already made good progress mining out here on Earth. If fusion power doesn't work out very well as we'd hope it would, having another supply of radioisotopes might be great.

[Borgholio]

There are two possibilities for the lack of a magnetic field. First, is that Venus simply doesn't have a very large iron core like we do. Second, is that the massively thick and stable crust is bottling up so much heat inside the planet that the various layers have not differentiated much. Without a fairly clear boundary between the inner and outer core, for instance, you have no way to generate a magnetic field.

[Wicked Pilot]

What about some kind of spectacular nuclear technology where you could separate CO2, and then 'break' the carbon atoms into something more useful like hydrogen?

[SCRawl]

What about some kind of spectacular nuclear technology where you could separate CO2, and then 'break' the carbon atoms into something more useful like hydrogen?

Carbon fusion would make more sense, but at that point energy comes practically for free. I can't even think of how you'd fission carbon.

[Borgholio]

Carbon fusion is orders of magnitude more difficult than hydrogen fusion...it also has a smaller energy return on investment than hydrogen due to the greater energy input required.

[agent009]

Planetary Theme Park

Convert the atmosphere to oxygen/nitrogen, but keep the pressure. Have floating cities riding up where normal humans can breathe. Seed the world with lifeforms that swim in the high pressure air. Flying whales, floating forests, etc. People can telepresence down or wear a diving suit to visit the surface.

So much pressure of O₂/N₂ would kill any biological life faster then sulfuric acid. My recent analysis shows that humans and other terrestrial mammals could live under pressures as high as 40 ATA provided the atmosphere consisted primarily of neon and helium, but O₂/N₂ atmosphere would be seriously poisonous at pressures above 10 ATA.

As for flying whales - even at it's current pressure of 92 ATA and nearly 44 g/mol molar mass, Venusian atmosphere still only has density of about 165 kg/m³ (that is just 16.5% of the density of water). This is still way too low for any vertebrate to possibly achieve aerostatic lift, which is basically a function of density difference. Much less so if you replace CO₂ with lighter gases - this would significantly reduce density under the same pressure.

A good way to increase atmospheric density is to pump some SF₆ (sulfur hexofluoride) into it - it has more then 3 times molar mass of CO₂, but is absolutely non-toxic and considerably less narcotic (though, it still has about 4 times the narcotic effect of N₂). If you replace all CO₂ in Venusian atmosphere with SF₆ while maintaining the same pressure, it will be half as dense as water - but that kind of air would have narcotic potency about 25 times greater then N₂O (nitrous oxide, aka "laughing gas" - the stuff they use in hospitals for general anesthesia) has under standard Earth pressure.