[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

*quality video and another great science channel I did not know about. Thanks!

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Lendl.

Why don't we *promote Venus?

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Monday, March 9th, 2015 4:41pm PDT - promote requested by Mordhaus.

I don't want either Mars or Venus.

I WANT THEM ALL.

BTW, we do need to prepare cloning data for Billy Dee Williams to ready for this.

Er, "surfacism" has some pretty practical reasons behind it. For a start, if something goes wrong with your colony, it doesn't plummet several KMs into an acidic pressure cooker that will melt it.

That said, if Lando is on board, so am I.

Uhmm.. there is one reason we are targeting mars and not venus.. water. We are not colonizing anything if we have to bring our own water. Mars will not be a colony until we find the glaciers we are looking for.

Since we won't be terraforming planets this century, if ever. I say colonize the moon first.

We have to bring nearly everything with us anyway, air, water, food, building supplies, etc. The moon is closer, so incredibly cheaper to ship to. Also, it's possible to send a rescue mission or send up unexpectedly needed equipment, not so on other planets.

Cloud cities ignore the insurmountable problem all Mars colony ideas have ignored, radiation. As far as I know, Venus is like Mars and has no magnetosphere, meaning little to nothing to protect from solar radiation. Being above the atmosphere, or on Mars without one, makes it worse. On the moon, you could expect underground colonies and few surface excursions, and the rock could provide the protection and seal in atmosphere. That could also be done on Mars....but why?
Also, as I understand it, they have found water on the moon, so one less thing to ship to space (although there's all the water we need already flying around Saturn if we can harvest the rings).

If they're really thinking 'cloud cities', why isn't anyone making them on earth? It would be like making more of the one thing no one has manufactured yet, more 'land'. The same could be said for underground colonies. Come on, science, get to it!

Fun video.
But I believe in surfacism.

Venus may gets its due farther out in the future but mars comes first simply because we don't boil or get crushed.

It is the same reason the bottom depths of the ocean haven't been probed.

I liked the video, the questions at the end made it sound like he knows his stuff which is awesome. I don't think we're going to see the end of surfacism ever. It'd be stupid to add levels of complexity and danger to a habitat.

I'm not ruling out sky cities long into the future, but I think that the NASA concept art is to future sky cities what an 1850's flying machine is to modern day flight.