The ISS is orders of magnitude cheaper, safer, and closer to home. The experiments done there could be done by robots/craft or by launching humans in individual tin cans but at greater expense and higher failure rates.
I’d love to see humans afloat on Venus, but I tried really hard to argue with the grandparent and I can’t really see what humans bring to the equation that a decked out sensor array wouldn’t do for significantly cheaper other than simply humans being at Venus and learning how to keep humans alive at Venus.
humans are more flexible. They can look around and see interesting things and change plans to look at that instead. This is both good and bad - sometimes interesting things are more interesting than the plan, sometimes they are commonplace and the plan would have been better. Humans can often figure out on the spot how to put a tool to use for some completely different purpose.
A human on mars controlling the rovers would have explored a lot more than the rovers did - assuming they survived as long as the rovers have (this assumption is probably false even if we could get humans there - humans are fragile in ways robots are not)
Mars makes sense. There’s an environment they can interact with and a tool in a human’s hand is superior to a tool in a robot’s hands. For instance if nothing is found at six inches, a human can dig to twelve inches, but a robot might not be equipped for that. I’m struggling to see any scenario where humans-in-bubble-with-sensor-array is superior to sensor array when talking about the Venusian atmosphere. You can potentially respond to things in seconds rather than minutes, but I don’t think that’s a reasonable trade off for the risks and costs.
> humans are more flexible. They can look around and see interesting things and change plans to look at that instead.
That's true, but that doesn't matter so much floating in the Venusian clouds. Making a manned blimp has zero advantages over a robot blimp controlled from a space station. The only thing a manned blimp would have over a robot one is the humans could potentially do unplanned maintenance. However, the cost of that is orders of magnitude more complexity and cost over a robot blimp (life support and rockets to get back into orbit) and a hard deadline to end the mission. You could probably send five robot blimps or more for the cost of a manned one, which could potentially remain operational long past their design life. Send them one or two at a time, so ad-hoc modifications can be made.
It's really a no-brainer to chose options besides human exploration of the Venusian atmosphere.
I’d love to see humans afloat on Venus, but I tried really hard to argue with the grandparent and I can’t really see what humans bring to the equation that a decked out sensor array wouldn’t do for significantly cheaper other than simply humans being at Venus and learning how to keep humans alive at Venus.