Hello, friends! I’m going through some major life changes right now, which leaves me very little time for writing. And yet, because I am the person I am, I must write something! So for the next few weeks, I’m just going to write some quick, easy posts sharing my favorite facts about each planet of the Solar System. Today, let’s talk about my #1 favorite fact about Venus.
Venus hates you. More than any other planet, Venus wants you dead. If you ever try to land on Venus, she’ll kill you a dozen times over before you even touch the ground.
First, there’s the sulfuric acid. It rains pure sulfuric acid on Venus. Then there’s the heat. You know how small amounts of carbon dioxide are slowly warming our planet? With a 96% CO2 atmosphere, Venus is way beyond Earth-like global warming. That 96% CO2 atmosphere traps enough heat to make Venus the hottest planet in the Solar System (hotter even than Mercury, despite Mercury being so much closer to the Sun). And now let’s talk about pressure. Venus’s atmospheric pressure is so extreme that it makes more sense to compare it to the pressure at the deepest depths of Earth’s oceans. Remember that submarine full of billionaires that imploded near the wreckage of the Titanic? That’s what Venus will do to your spacecraft if you try to land there.
Anyone who knows anything about space will tell you Venus is an absolute hellhole. But that’s not my #1 favorite fact about Venus. My #1 favorite fact is that there is a way to survive a trip to Venus. Just don’t land. Stay at an altitude of 55 kilometers (34 miles) above the surface. That’ll put you safely above the sulfuric acid rainclouds. The temperature and pressure are almost Earth-like at that altitude, too. Conditions are surprisingly nice. So someday, if we could build a floating city on Venus—something like Cloud City from Star Wars—Venus could end up being one of the nicest places for humans to live in the entire Solar System.
Thanks for reading, friends! Stay tuned. We’ll continue this next week with my #1 favorite fact about Earth, followed by my #1 favorite fact about Mars.
i-love-space.com 
I don’t think I could ever feel comfortable living in the clouds of Venus, knowing that if anything went wrong, a descent into hell would follow. And I wonder what Venusian settlers would do in that environment, what their economy might be based on. Of course, I wonder that about everywhere else in the solar system too, except maybe for the asteroids, but Venus seems like an extreme case.
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