The Venus Question

Venus (2480s onward). After the phosphine claim of 2020, Venus was held untouched under the Venus Question until its clouds could be surveyed, as Europa is now. The surveys found no life and the phosphine proved to be non-living chemistry, but a whole cloud deck can never be proved empty, so the Question was never fully closed. The Vesta Crisis taught the Parishad that a bloc must own its supplies, and the one it could not own was nitrogen, which every habitat's air needs and which came from the Settlement's Titan. Venus's air holds about three times the nitrogen of Earth's whole atmosphere. In the late 2480s the Parishad began the Shukra stations, cloud cities about 50–55 km up, where the pressure is near 1 bar and the heat Earth-like, and where breathable air is a lifting gas, so the habitats float on their own air. The Settlement invoked the Venus Question to stop them; the Parishad answered with the surveys. By 2497 about 2 million people live there and the first nitrogen ships have sailed, beginning to break Titan's hold. The Venus sunshade planned in the Mirror Race remains a plan.