The closest humans had come physically to Venus was through the establishment of an orbiting space station. Called the Venera it orbited the planet at a distance of half a million miles and was continually manned by a small crew of astronauts. It main function was to monitor and study Venus from a safe distance and it represented the very closest that humans could physically approach Venus.
Since it was obvious that humans could not live and work on Venus, and remote control machines were of extremely limited value, it was generally agreed that robots were the only answer. The solution lay in developing robots that could survive under Venusian conditions. For an effective mining colony to be established on Venus using robots, and operating without direct human supervision, they had to be robots that could imitate human capability to an astonishingly high degree. These robots had to have the power to make self generated decisions and carry out the necessary actions to ensure an orderly mining operation. These robots had to be possessed of a technical sophistication and performance capability hitherto unknown in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. The degree and sheer complexity of the mental programming that needed to be developed to ensure that was phenomenal and many doubted that it could even be done.
This compelling exigency forced many of the major Earth corporations to invest heavily in further robot research and development. They worked frantically to be the first to come up with a viable solution to the challenges posed by the Venusian environment. Primitive androids were already in existence on Earth. They were off a very basic type which were involved in simple tasks such as butler roles for rich people, acting as chauffeurs and working as security personnel. To develop an android that could effectively work on Venus in the required manner would require a massive technological leap.
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The Venusian Androids
The mid twenty first century saw Earth succumb to a phenomenon that can only be described as Venus fever. An amazing discovery on that far distant planet had had the effect of unleashing a frantic race to be the first to get to Venus, to be the very first in establishing the presence of intelligent beings on the planet’s surface and to be the first to exploit the natural resources of the world many described as Earth’s sister planet.
