Solar System in fiction close to the Sun and its surface was exposed to extremes of temperature. The asteroids were too tiny and airless. By the early 20th century, prospects for life in the Solar System focused on Venus, the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and especially Mars. With the onset of the Space Age, planetary probes cast increasing doubt on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life in the Solar System, at least life of any magnitude greater than organisms such as bacteria. By the mid-1960s, it was firmly established that life could have no foothold on the hostile surfaces of Mercury or Venus,
Terraforming of Venus intervention for the purpose of building colossal mountains on Venus to serve as islands of colonization in the skies of Venus. Since Venus only has a fraction of the water on earth (less than half the earth's water content in the atmosphere, and none on the surface), water would have to be introduced either by the aforementioned method of introduction of hydrogen, or from some other extraplanetary source. Paul Birch suggests the possibility of colliding Venus with one of the ice moons from the outer solar systems, thereby bringing in all the water needed for terraformation in one go. This