cross-posted from: https://retrofed.com/c/ask@piefed.social/p/2414142/if-you-could-visit-any-celestial-body-outside-of-earth-which-would-it-be
Assuming you are properly equipped to handle the extreme conditions of space, of course. Does not have to be a planet, or even in the Solar System. Any planet, moon, asteroid, star, or other celestial body is available in this hypothetical!


Venus. There are some fascinating photos.
Same, but I’d prefer to be in a bubble at 1 atmosphere floating several thousand feet up, filled with earth air and vegetation. Surface there is no fun at all.
It’s a shame we prioritize martian colonization. Venus has a similuar gravity, so close enough to not worry about muscle degradation. We could build floating cloud City above the cruising pressure depths.
Wikipedia link that explains what I am trying to say better
This says nothing about colonization – only about crewed NASA missions. And:
It was a pie-in-the-sky concept used as an engineering challenge.
We prioritize Mars even though it’s farther than Venus and has lower gravity because you want to colonize the surface.
Tbf, a proper mars colony (as opposed to like some kind of research base analogous to the sorts of thing we have in antarctica) is similarly far off, the challenges compared to venus are just a bit less obvious because the harshness of dealing with, say, dangerous regolith and low gravity are less visually obvious than those of dealing with a crushing and corrosive atmosphere.
I’m honestly not really convinced that mars or any planet makes a good target for space colonies. Mining/resource extraction maybe, but you cant realistically build any kind of space colony until the infrastructure exists to obtain materials and manufacture everything a society needs in space, just on account of how expensive launching stuff from earth is, and since that infrastructure would need to come before large numbers of people do and therefore must be automated, there’s not a particular need to have a space colony on the same site as a resource extraction facility. Given that, I think that the various concepts for centrifugal space habitats make more sense, where you can set your day length and simulated gravity where humans prefer them, and dont need to worry about taking off from or landing in a deep gravity well every time you want to enter or leave the thing.
Yup, fuck gravity wells, once you’re out, stay out. Particularly fond of the idea of dropping a nickel iron asteroid into a near pass of the sun (yeah, hella delta-v, probably more efficient to do it in situ, but it’s such a nice image) till it’s cherry red, setting off a bomb in the middle to make a bubble, patch the holes, fill with air, spin it up for gravity. Quick and dirty homestead. But really O’Neill cylinders are a better choice.
The caustic atmosphere is a bigger hurdle than the pressure.