SargeRho

What long term negative effects would colonizing other planets have? Spreading life to lifeless rocks? Reducing the possibility of humanity going extinct?

We don't 'need' to do anything. Not needing to do something is not a good reason why we shouldn't do it. Nearest planet with an easily accessible solid surface, an atmosphere, and all or most necessary materials for a colony laying around quite literally. Personally, I'd rather live on a planet with a solid surface than a space station.

Any particular reason why?

Only half of SpaceX' flights so far were NASA flights, the other half were commercial launches. You will find that, in fact, most of their future launches are commercial, not NASA: http://www.spacex.com/missions

Stirling engines are fairly simple, though. And since they mostly consist of a few large parts, they're one of the things that 3d printing could produce in Space.

Easy access to cislunar space, and I'd guess studying the psychological effects of being away from Earth for extended periods of time. Also radiation protection.

Hm? No. Mars has many more accessible elements than Venus. Venus' are locked away under 450°C and 100 atmospheres. While they're literally laying around on Mars. Then you still have to get rid of a large portion of the atmosphere, and that's not exactly easy. Venus is already incredibly reflective because of its clouds, too. Unless you want to import just about everything, you'll have to do something about the atmosphere. Not to mention it'll remain hot for quite a while. While we can begin to develop spacecraft to colonize and make use of Mars, for all intents and purposes, right now.

Why would the atmosphere cool? You would have to somehow blast away over 90% of its atmosphere. If anything, Venus is going to continue heating up.

And what resources does Venus have? CO2, Sulphuric Acid, Nitrogen...that's 5 elements, that are actually in abundance. Everything else, you'll have to import. Mars has just about everything, particularly metals. I don't think the gravity and extra radiation protection on Venus are worth more than the abundance of resources on Mars.

Any NBC weapon for starters, so nukes, anthrax, sarin gas, etc. A MOAB could probably also be classified as a WMD, since it's meant to wipe out a large area.

You'd only fire the laser while the debris is coming "towards" you from the horizon, so that the force produced on the space debris slows it down. And space weapons aren't forbidden, only space WMDs are. ASAT missiles are, after all, surface to space or air to space weapons.

Using a laser to push space debris won't work all that well. However, using a laser to vaporize one side of a piece of space debris could produce enough thrust to de-orbit it.

So it is exactly as hard as it sounds. If you need to import a very large portion of the resources you need, you can't really build a colony there.

Yes, Venus has indeed been mapped: http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/sos/features/combined_venus_lon_180_center.png On Mars, there's ice under the surface and possibly liquid water deeper under ground. Venus' crust is bone-dry, which is why it doesn't have plate tectonics, but instead a cycle wherein the surface is renewed catastrophically every few hundred million years or so. There is simply no reason to want to send people to Venus.

Mars may well harbor subsurface life. While Venusian conditions aren't exactly favorable. There's no liquid water, for one.

All the resources you need to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars are in the ground. Mining the surface of Venus is...problematic, to say the least. Plants don't fare well in high-CO2 environments, because they're not anaerobic.

Early 2016.

At that distance, a laser beam will already have dispersed quite a bit, covering a considerable area.

No, but an IR telescope, possibly even a regular IR camera, might be able to if you're up on a mountain. While a rocket is very bright, it's not bright enough to be visible by the naked eye from 380,000km.

Would you rather build a manned base on Mars? With all of the scientific installations that modern laboratories have? That's the point. You can do far, far more analysis on Earth than a Mars rover ever could.

"just some rocks and soil" that are immensely valuable.

Yes, I think so. We can analyze things on Earth in far greater detail than on Mars. Unless we had a science-outpost on Mars.

The Red Dragon would stay on Mars. Getting from Mars to Earth is doable with a small 2-stage rocket, which is exactly what'd be done here.

Actually, it seems like a Crew Dragon could land on Mars on its own.

The radiation emitted is pretty much across the whole spectrum, so red and blueshift aren't going to do anything: It'll still be bright white.