I had a fictional concept of gas mining in the atmosphere of Venus (like Bespin's Cloud City) but I couldn't think of a way to mitigate corrosion of the materials you'd use to build it by the sulphur dioxide...

(On Venus at 50 miles up, the atmospheric pressure is approximately the same as Earth, whereas on the surface it's the equivalent pressure of Earth's Mariana trench.)

> whereas on the surface it's the equivalent pressure of Earth's Mariana trench.

The surface pressure on Venus is around 90 atm which is equivalent to the pressure one km below the ocean surface. The Mariana trench is a little over 11 km deep.

Cheers, I kinda dredged the numbers up from my memory.

If we're talking about what humanity's future off Earth might look like, it's actually highly unlikely that it's on planets at all, given how hostile such places are, the huge energy costs of entering and leaving gravity wells and how inefficient planets are at creating living area per unit mass. Orbital habitats using spin gravity seem way more likely with places like the Moon and Mercury being the source for the required raw materials.

Suddenly not so much Star Wars as much as it is Gundam :p

Or Culture series :)

Planets are protective, you're going to have a tough time dealing with radiation poisoning spending a lifetime in space without them.