Terraforming website

If we ever do get around to producing that many habitats, we'll need quite a bit of nitrogen. Which just happens to be more plentiful on Venus than on Earth... (at least in atmospheric partial pressure... it's less than 2% of the atmosphere, probably making it harder to separate out, but there's not as many NIMBY's around on Venus to complain about taking their nitrogen.) Anyone else think Venus could be more valuable as a resource for O'Neill habitats than for it's living space? Unless of course we find useful amounts of nitrogen in asteroids.

Actually now that I think about it, perhaps nitrogen could be an early export of floating cities on Venus, like described here: http://www.universetoday.com/2008/07/16/colonizing-venus-with-floating-cities/
I suppose it's also possible then, in a sufficiently far future, such floating cities could themselves contain more useful surface area than a terraformed Venus (taking into account a terraformed planet would probably also need decently sized oceans...). Of course, this would be quite far in the future, possibly as far as would be necessary for terraforming Venus.

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

-Herman Melville

--- On Thu, 8/21/08, sailor.barsoom wrote:
From: sailor.barsoom
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Terraforming website
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Received: Thursday, August 21, 2008, 2:21 AM

Then again, if you're going to smash Mercury, how about using it to
manufacture an unholy number of O'Neill habitats having a total
livable area hundreds of thousands of times that of Mercury, Venus,
Earth, the Moon, and Mars put together?