If humans are ever going to colonize another planet in the Solar System, the obvious choice would be Mars. But a vocal minority has long made the case for Venus. They argue that Venus has one huge advantage over Mars — it has almost the same gravity as Earth.
However, there's the problem of its scalding-hot temperature. Back in the early 1980s, French scientist Christian Marchal proposed a way to cool Venus by creating a giant cloud of dust between it and the sun.
Idaho Statesman - Oct 3, 1982
source: Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (1995), by Martyn Fogg
Cooling Venus in this way might be doable, but critics have noted that, even if you succeeded in cooling it, Venus has no water, and you need water to get rid of the carbon in its atmosphere.
Marchal's supporters have subsequently expanded his idea by proposing that we could first hydrate Venus by bombarding it with hundreds of icy asteroids. Of course, doing this would significantly increase the difficulty and cost of the whole terraforming project.
Basically, none of us will ever live to see any of this happen.
More info:
Marchal, "The Venus-new-world project," in
Acta Astronautica, May–June 1983;
"The Terraforming of Venus," by Martyn Fogg.
Category: Science | Spaceflight, Astronautics, and Astronomy