I love the idea colonizing our sister planet Venus. Nearly identical in size and composition to Earth - but so volatile. Mining resources would there would be practically impossible due to the pressure on the surface, never mind the cataclysmic surface turn-over events. On top of that, due to the lack of a magnetosphere, solar winds often react directly with Venus' upper atmosphere...
On Mars we might be able to build large stables domes, or close off caverns for additional radiation shielding. We could mine the planet itself for resources, and even grow crops there.
The grandparent is talking about Venus atmosphere.
It seems the conditions in the upper atmosphere of Venus are acceptable.
If you can manage living in floating cities (that it's cool but makes it a very difficult endeavour) then, Venus is close to Earth than Mars and the gravity is similar to the one in Earth.
The GP was mostly downvoted because of the unnecessarily supercilious tone. Instead of explaining why they thought Venus was better for this purpose, GP just chose to end with a haughty-sounding "I don't think they have thought this through." Considering GP is a random stranger on the internet, and "they" is SpaceX/Elon, the downvoting is natural.
Maybe. But I think that it's, precisely, because we are random strangers in the Internet and we all know how easy is to misunderstand intentions by text, that we should think two times before downvoting.
It's my personal opinion that downvoting is used too easily in HN.
Sometimes it seems that we are trying to filter opinions that we don't agree with, instead of policing good manners and filter irrelevant to the subject comments.
It turns out that that the atmospheric mix of Earth's surface (of N₂ and O₂) would naturally settle at the atmospheric column very near where the temperature is pleasant by Earth standards. Such floating colonies would basically be completely palatable by Earth standsrds (albeit perhaps with temperatures more reminiscent of Australian outback or Qatar than those of Europe or the US).
Floating colonies present their own issues, but it would solve concerns about long-term low-gravity impacts of Mars or the challenges of requiring a fully-pressurized environment suit all the time outdoors.
The idea is that you would use breathable air as the lifting gas to prevent this problem. The pressure difference would be low enough that it would take an event that would be fatal to everyone anyways to cause a rapid drop.
In my understanding the biggest issue is getting the mass of the structure there as you can't easily mine the surface and it doesn't have any moons to get a bulk of the material from, so you would have to wait for asteroids of the right type to be in position to mine on your way there.
At that altitude, the atmosphere doesn't shield you from radiation, you are closer to the Sun, so there is more of it, the planetary magnetic field just isn't there to compensate, the surface is inaccessible so you can't use it and, if anything fails, you fall to a fiery, corrosive death in minutes.
Not that it's not worth terraforming, eventually, but Venus is marginally better than a space station. Pretty much the only thing it offers is gravity.
On Mars we might be able to build large stables domes, or close off caverns for additional radiation shielding. We could mine the planet itself for resources, and even grow crops there.