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Colonizing Venus

Isaac Arthur · 730.8K views · 2017-09-07 · 29:02

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Overview

Isaac Arthur examines options for colonizing Venus, from vast floating habitats in the temperate upper atmosphere to full terraforming of the planet. It is a long-form speculative futurism episode in his solar system colonization series.

On Hacker News

HN commenters cite it as the go-to reference for the idea of living in Venus's atmosphere rather than on the surface.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2017–2026

Topics

Space exploration & spaceflightFuturism & technology and society
Search by tags
space colonizationterraformingfloating citiesvenusfuturism

What people said

alistproducer2 · 2020-05 · Recommendation

I enjoy Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel where he explores topics like colonizing Venus. Here's the video: [VIDEO]

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jakeogh · 2018-03 · Recommendation

Outward Bound: Colonizing Venus: [VIDEO] Caution: don't click unless you have nothing else to do today.

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jmyeet · 2026-05 · Reference

Obligatory Isaac Arthur reference [1]. I still think humanity's far future is in orbitals in space, not on planets and certainly not on planets as hostile as Venus is. I'm not sure how well living at 50km above the surface would work. You still need a lot of buoyance to float large structures. The atmosphere is also a solvable problem. One idea I've heard is using so-called "fusion candles". That is a fusion-powered device in the atmosphere that sends waste gas into space and waste matter to the ground in an equilibrium that keeps them airborne, all powered by fusion. You could extract carbon and/or oxygen this way from the plentiful atmospheric CO2. Still, if you ever got the atmosphere down to a non-hellish level at surface, the surface would still be covered with all sorts of exotics and metals, many of them toxic. You'd probably be looking at geologic timescales to rehabilitate it. But whenever these terraforming questions come up (often with respect to Mars), people really don't appreciate the scale and the energy budget required. The energy budget is many orders of magntidue what our civilization currently uses. If you have access to that much energy, there are far better options. [1]: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Isaac Arthur, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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