Life on Venus?

Yay, lets spend BILLIONS to make sure if there is microbes in the clouds of Venus or not.

Personally, I think tax dollars have bigger priorities to be spent on.

Besides, if they find some, so what?

Do they want to bring it back to earth?

See if human’s can live with it?  No Thanks.

Exactly! What’s the rush – they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. Everyone seems dead-set on colonizing Mars and drilling asteroids on the edges of the solar system for minerals over the course of the current century so I’m sure that with all that going on they’ll eventually send some small vessel to collect some samples from the clouds of Venus and to bring them back here. The asteroid mining business is supposed to make everyone involved richer beyond their wildest dreams so that’s when space travel is really bound to heat up.

That’s certainly a possibility that the demand will lower over time, but perhaps future technologies will find more different uses for such materials. From a humanitarian perspective there will no longer be a scarcity of resources or child labor in third world countries and buildings and products will be made out of more strong materials much more cheaply and electrical devices will be more durable and less prone to failing because you could have all of the internal components like conductors made out of platinum and things like that at a very low cost. For a few decades at least it would generate the sort of wealth we’ve never seen like a platinum age or the economic bubble of Japan in the 80s times a thousand, and it would stay an important source of jobs for perhaps centuries to come.

Materials like coal and ore are quite common on Earth, yet the mining industries for those are some of the biggest and most important. There will always be a demand for essentials as well as luxury items, and even when luxury items become less luxurious they’ll find more luxurious ones to replace them. Such a big industry could provide stable jobs to millions of people and completely revolutionize Earth’s economy. Now combine with this the colonization of Mars and you’ll see a rapid growth in development on Mars with cities being built quickly because money and means are no longer challenges to overcome. Seas of AI-driven 3D printers using those materials to build futuristic cities and green houses on Mars, and people buying and developing their own properties there like in the old west but without hostile natives. Imagine! Not even the sky’s the limit!

Take me there.  I am ready!!!