I really think that there's two missions that are needed before one could contemplating sending a manned mission. One, we need a long-term atmosphere study mission, optimized for say 40-60km altitude and at least one year's duration, with some propulsion so that it can adjust its latitude. It's mission would be to get detailed characterization of the atmosphere (and how it varies), improve our surface maps, and practice maintaining a (small) breathable atmosphere in its lifting envelope (perhaps with a small lab animal payload, something with a naturally short lifespan that would be expected to die before the mission ended?). The other would be a phase-change balloon lander to demonstrate at multiple landings and ascents in different areas of interest - no sample collection capability of relevance, rather long time between dives, mostly automated actions on the surface, etc, but collecting enough data to get a better idea of exactly what is where on the surface and how hard it would be to get at.
With those things, I think a manned mission becomes quite plausible. And for a lot cheaper than Mars. The Hohmann transfer time is 2/3rds of what a Mars transfer time is, power is ridiculously abundant so you save a lot of weight there, you don't need shielding or (for the most part) structural strength in your habitat (the habitat is of course far larger, but it's a thin skin rather than a pressure shell), you can get your water locally from a gas/mist rather than a mined solid (again, generally easier and more reliable), local agriculture is far more plausible with the abundant light (although still probably not something you'd want to rely on for early missions), and so forth.
There's really only one thing that's tough about a Venus mission, and that's getting people back. Venus is a notably deeper gravity well than Mars, which is great while you're living there, but not so great when you have to leave.
Our probes have established that blowing sand is basically a non-issue on Mars.
Martian dust? You mean the stuff that is believed to have killed Mars 3 through coronal discharge? That may have led to Pathfinder's battery failure? That did this to Curiosity's coin?
Mars’ dust storms aren’t totally innocuous, however. Individual dust particles on Mars are very small and slightly electrostatic, so they stick to the surfaces they contact like Styrofoam packing peanuts.
“If you’ve seen pictures of Curiosity after driving, it’s just filthy,” Smith said. “The dust coats everything and it’s gritty; it gets into mechanical things that move, like gears.”
The possibility of dust settling on and in machinery is a challenge for engineers designing equipment for Mars.
This dust is an especially big problem for solar panels. Even dust devils of only a few feet across -- which are much smaller than traditional storms -- can move enough dust to cover the equipment and decrease the amount of sunlight hitting the panels. Less sunlight means less energy created.
In “The Martian,” Watney spends part of every day sweeping dust off his solar panels to ensure maximum efficiency, which could represent a real challenge faced by future astronauts on Mars....
“We really worry about power with the rovers; it’s a big deal,” Smith said. “The Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed in 2004, so they’ve only had one global dust storm to go through (in 2007) and they basically shut down operations and went into survival mode for a few weeks.
And the thing is, Rovers are a far kinder target than anything that humans will be working with. There are such big gaps between every little deliberate movement that they undertake, it's a very light workload.
There's no dust on Venus. There is some variation in clouds, but sunlight is constantly abundant. You even get almost as much power on the undersides of your panels as the topsides, due to reflection.
It seems somewhat unlikely considering that the atmosphere is 150ppm sulfur dioxide and only 20ppm water vapor
That's because the vast majority of the gas is present in the form of SO2 and to a lesser extent SO3 and H2S, not H2SO4. H2SO4 is only stable within a relatively narrow temperature range; it is not stable anywhere near Venus's surface (vaporizing at about 40km) far above where the vast majority of Venus's atmosphere's mass is. That said, the concentration is higher than I remember it. But:
it will almost certainly break down whenever a droplet collides with a solid object.
From the link above: "Below about 57 km, the vapor pressure of sulfuric acid and water over the cloud particles is relatively high, and therefore sulfuric acid clouds can evaporate in a relatively short period of time." So you're not going to end up with the surface sitting around with a layer of wet acid on it. And the mass loading is just so low, like 8 milligrams per cubic meter of air. That's just not much acid, that's like the concentration you find in volcanic fogs on Earth (like the one I was breathing a year ago:P). It's nothing like dunking an object in a vat of sulfuric acid. And again, most plastics are immune or at least highly resistant to sulfuric acid damage.
The biggest killer of plastics in general is UV radiation. On Mars, there's no protection from it. On Venus, there is.
My understanding is that the Vega probe died while it's battery should have still had an operational
It shouldn't be Nevada, nor Antarctica like someone else mentioned. It should be somewhere with near-surface permafrost, with good road access to keep costs down. Mars isn't a dry desert, nor is it a glacier, it's ice mixed in with sand, dust, muck... honestly, I think the Icelandic highlands would be perfect. The last time I was out there I actually ran into some geologists who were studying a new volcano there to help better understand Mars;)
The contest should be NASA funded - it'd be a (relatively) low cost way for them to retire a lot of risk. They should solicit plans from a wide range of sources and fund half a dozen or more. It shouldn't just be "a rover". They should be given a standard cylinder that all of their hardware has to fit in (representing the landing craft), and a weight limit. The teams should be required to build their proposal and put it into a shipping crate, which would then be delivered and transported to the test site. They would then be powered on and left to their own devices, tasked to build the best "shelter" that they can.
If they could do it on Earth, they could (with some modifications) probably do it on Mars.
Rather strange how he recommends 50km altitude. I mean, you could tolerate those temperatures, but they'd be quite uncomfortable. Might as well float several kilometers higher where temperatures are comfortable. Pressure is lower, of course, more like being on a tall mountain than like being at sea level - but who cares? It's not like you'll be breathing the atmosphere, you have to have a gas mask either way.
Also, he overplays the SOx concentration. It's actually not that high of a percentage of the atmosphere, it's not like diving in a tub of H2SO4.
You know very well that we're talking about floating colonies here, so why even mention the other two?
- Giant floating cities capable of surviving sporadic acid baths and the strong chaotic winds of the upper atmosphere, also probably beyond our current technology
1. They are only "giant" in the sense that blimps are giant: big, but not heavy or bulky. And weight and bulk are what matters in terms of delivery of payload.
2) There are no "sporadic acid baths". What exists in Venus's clouds is akin to bad smog on Earth - ultrafine mist droplets, each nucleated with an acid. Sulfuric acid is highly hygroscopic and self-dilutes. Most plastics (aka, what you'd make an envelope out of) are immune to attack by sulfuric acid.
Mars too has its own corrosives that are far worse with plastics - perchlorates, windblown abrasive particles and high radiation levels, to be specific.
3) There is nothing at all that prevents us from doing it with current technology. More to the point, we've already had balloons floating on Venus.
Floating cities are probably the most viable with current technology, but to date we haven't even managed to keep a floating probe alive for more than a few days - The sudden pressure changes from strong up and down drafts wreak havoc with balloons.
I'm sure that you know fully well that this isn't the reason for the Vega probes only lasting for a few days. They only lasted for a few days because they had no solar panels. They were not designed to last for more than a few days, they operated entirely on battery power.
The bobbing is A) not due to updrafts, but due to a natural cyclic effect in the balloons, B) a slow process, and C) only occurs in fully passive vehicles that do nothing to regulate their altitude.
We can't get down to the surface to acquire mineral resources to fuel growth
We most absolutely can, and have. It's not hard having a vehicle last for hours on the surface just from simple insulation and thermal inertia. Do you mean "get back up"? We can do that too, it's called a phase change balloon.
More to the point, Venus' surface minerology is probably one of the best places in the solar system to find interesting and rare minerals, due to its exotic conditions. There may even be metal snows there. And of the places we've landed and sampled, the sort of minerology we've found at most of them is associated with rare mineral deposits on Earth (we also believe that there's carbonatites there, which are likewise associated with rare minerals here).
and do you really want to bet the life of your children on your blimp-city never having a problem that would force it out of the sky?
I'd ask the same thing about a Mars colony. Except for the fact that a Venus blimp would have far more atmosphere, and be pressure-equalized with its surroundings, while a Mars habitat would contain far less air and be strongly positive-pressure relative to its surroundings. A one square meter hole in a a 10-man Venus balloon would be bad but you can probably patch it before any issues (altitude loss, oxygen loss, smog intrusion) get to serious levels. A one square meter hole in a 10-man Mars colony will have every person unconscious in under a minute.
And for the other two options - well then you still have to deal with the fact that Venus's day is 116.75 Earth-days long.
You really haven't thought this through, have you? Are you thinking that it would be tethered to the surface? It's in the atmosphere - the timeperiod that matters is Venus's superrotation period, which is about 4 days (2 bright, 2 dark). Or you could be near the poles and basically pick your day length. The moon, by contrast, has month-long days.
Not a space station. A cloud station. I'm not sure how you missed that:
"and an aerial base" " hardware that you don't want to put into a vehicle repeatedly traveling into such hellish conditions." "an N2/O2 envelope lofting your base station" "the atmosphere at altitude is so earthlike" "just floating in clouds above a hellscape
The Venusian cloudtops between about 51 and 55km are the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth. They're not hellish like the surface. There's bad "smog" and no oxygen, but apart from that it's earthlike gravity, earthlike pressures, earthlike temperatures, etc, to a degree found nowhere else in the solar system except Earth.
Radiation is far lower than on the moon and on the surface of Mars because Venus has an actual atmosphere. Magnetic fields aren't the only things that shield one from radiation - an atmosphere is the other. None of the three (Mars, Venus, or the Moon) have meaningful magnetic fields, while the moon has no atmosphere and Mars a nearly irrelevant one. But Venus at "habitable altitude" has nearly as much atmosphere over it as Earth. The radiation levels a person would be exposed to there, without shielding, are high by Earth standards, but not generally dangerous. I've read a study which showed that even during the most major historical solar events known the flux in Venus's cloudtops wouldn't be enough to cause radiation sickness.
I'll be long dead and buried before I let you, good sir, besmirch the honourable name of Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck! A giraffe's neck is long because of generations of neck-stretching to reach the branches of acacia trees, and I will hear no more of this prattle pretending otherwise. Good DAY, sir!
I'm a big fan of Venus as a destination. Scientifically, it makes a lot more sense than Mars - we know far less about it, and there's a real benefit to the latency reduction provided by humans concerning Venus surface rovers (which can only tolerate the surface conditions for relatively short periods before they need to float back up) than to Mars rovers, which are fine just sitting around and letting their batteries charge while waiting for more instructions. A thorough Venus survey program requires "diving" rovers based on phase-change balloons to explore the surface, and an aerial base station to hold all of the power generation, coolant handling, sample analysis, high gain radio communication, etc hardware that you don't want to put into a vehicle repeatedly traveling into such hellish conditions. The easiest way to get a lifting gas on Venus is to split CO2 into CO and O2 (the same technology being tested on the Mars 2020 rover); O2 is a lifting gas there. And there's already N2 in the atmosphere. So if you have an N2/O2 envelope lofting your base station, you pretty much already have livable space. Combine this with how Venus is easy to get to with frequent launch windows, easy aerocapture/aerobraking, far lower dangerous ionizing radiation, dramatically more solar radiation, nearly Earthlike gravity, etc, and how the atmosphere at altitude is so earthlike that a person might even be able to step outside with nothing more than a facemask on**... it's very easy to make the case for Venus rather than Mars.
** - The known SOx and CO levels are dangerous to human eyes, but it's not certain that they rise to the point that they'd be dangerous to bare or lightly shielded skin for reasonable exposure durations. Either way, no pressure suit, cooling, or heating would be required.
I think the main thing Mars has going for it over Venus is "romance" (ironically). If people go to another planet, they want to have their feet on the ground, touching alien soil, hiking in alien canyons, etc, rather than just floating in clouds above a hellscape. Then again, I'm sure Venus has its own beauty to it.
We're pretty sure that - in particularly limited areas - there's water, in some form (ices, hydrated minerals, etc). The problem is not only that you have to set up large-scale offworld mining, melting, filtering, and storage (an engineering project of quite significant note, given the harsh environment and the cost of delivering hardware to the lunar surface), but you also have to create low-cost reusable rockets designed for repeat operation on the moon with little to no maintenance, fueled by materials from the lunar surface. Which is a vastly harder, more expensive task. After all, it makes no financial sense to mine a tonne of water from the surface of the moon and then deliver it into lunar orbit or beyond with 10 tonnes of hardware/propellant sent from Earth, which in turn took 100 tonnes to get off the surface of the Earth. Everything has to be long-term operable entirely in the lunar environment with lunar resources.
There's not any realistic budgeting scenario where it's even remotely cheaper, all capital costs included, to get your water from the moon in the remotely near future than to just launch it from the earth on existing rockets. But, if your goal is to advance the tech of reusable rockets, space mining, in-situ propellant production, etc, then by all means go ahead. Just don't pretend like you're doing it as a "cost saving measure" for a Mars mission.
It's changed one thing: the fact that he said he'll leave the embassy if they rule against him.
Of course, if Assange is known for anything these past few years it's "keep the focus on me" stunts. Remember the time when he said he'd be leaving the embassy "very soon"? Held a press conference and everything.
The prosecutor's office has already announced that there will be no restrictions on his internet access - there's actually a court ruling on that. That's only for people accused of computer crimes who are deemed a high risk of conducting more from prison, and people who are deemed likely to try to interfere with cases against others from within prison.
I love how we not only know that velociraptor had feathers, but exactly for example that it had on each arm exactly 14 secondary wing feathers of modern style (with rachis and barbs). We know pretty much everything except for what the color patterning was and how they actually used them;)
Birds are often underrated. Cassowaries, for example, can be deadly - they attack sort of like a Deinonychus, with one "weapon claw" designed for slashing while they jump.
The old-school "lizardlike" T-rex of Jurassic Park fame hardly seems frightening at all when you compare it to what it would be like if they had given it an amazon parrot's threat display. When they get hormonal - such as when you give them a treat or mess with their "home" - they literally pulse their eyes. The pupil gets huge, then shrinks to a pinpoint, again and again, flashing orange / black / orange / black... Meanwhile they crouch low and move in rigid movements, all of their feathers flared out in a fan, held tightly rigid. And they bite as hard as they can onto whatever is nearby - even inanmiate objects, they just feel compelled to bite something and clamp down with all their strength. They're so overcome by hormones that if, say, it was a treat that triggered the display, they may well destroy or lose it in the process and not even care.
Now picture that being done by a tyrannosaur. Plate-sized predator eyes pulsing hypnotically while they lock their vision onto you, body low, moving ridgid, giant feathers radiating out, and so enraged that it can't help but take massive snaps at whatever trees happen to be nearby... while never averting its gaze from you.
A Jurassic Park-style "rear back and roar" is one thing. But a creature so mad with hormones that it goes, "SEE WHAT I'M DOING WITH THIS TREE? THAT'S GOING TO BE YOU, MOTHERF'ER!" is a whole different story.
Birds are usually only non-threatening to us because they're small. But if they were huge, they'd be like monsters.
There are large neighborhoods in London now that are effectively under Sharia Law (not that you'll hear anything about it in the SJW controlled media).
How do you know that they didn't really mean collage kids?
Pretty funny hearing someone whine about others not being able to behave like functioning adults when said individual can't even write like a functioning adult - including the phrase "functioning adult".;) Also amusing hearing someone whine about others whining too much.
Whether a standup comedian comes across as offensive or not is really simple. If it seems to an audience member that they might actually believe what they're saying about a group, then they come across as offensive. If it's clear to the audience member that they don't, then it doesn't.
If John Cleese has a problem with people consistently interpreting him as offensive, then he should probably brush up on his material and/or delivery. Seriously, comedians whining about their audiences? If John Cleese doesn't like being criticized over his act, then I think he should take a lesson from the famous John Cleese: you're being too sensitive if you find any criticism of yourself to be cruel.
Funny that you mention both Assange and the president of Bolivia in that same context, given that Assange later admitted to having "SWATed" the president of Bolivia, leading to the president of Bolivia to demand an apology from him. He was the source of the misinformation that Snowden was on the president's airplane.
Slashdot Mirror
I really think that there's two missions that are needed before one could contemplating sending a manned mission. One, we need a long-term atmosphere study mission, optimized for say 40-60km altitude and at least one year's duration, with some propulsion so that it can adjust its latitude. It's mission would be to get detailed characterization of the atmosphere (and how it varies), improve our surface maps, and practice maintaining a (small) breathable atmosphere in its lifting envelope (perhaps with a small lab animal payload, something with a naturally short lifespan that would be expected to die before the mission ended?). The other would be a phase-change balloon lander to demonstrate at multiple landings and ascents in different areas of interest - no sample collection capability of relevance, rather long time between dives, mostly automated actions on the surface, etc, but collecting enough data to get a better idea of exactly what is where on the surface and how hard it would be to get at.
With those things, I think a manned mission becomes quite plausible. And for a lot cheaper than Mars. The Hohmann transfer time is 2/3rds of what a Mars transfer time is, power is ridiculously abundant so you save a lot of weight there, you don't need shielding or (for the most part) structural strength in your habitat (the habitat is of course far larger, but it's a thin skin rather than a pressure shell), you can get your water locally from a gas/mist rather than a mined solid (again, generally easier and more reliable), local agriculture is far more plausible with the abundant light (although still probably not something you'd want to rely on for early missions), and so forth.
There's really only one thing that's tough about a Venus mission, and that's getting people back. Venus is a notably deeper gravity well than Mars, which is great while you're living there, but not so great when you have to leave.
Martian dust? You mean the stuff that is believed to have killed Mars 3 through coronal discharge? That may have led to Pathfinder's battery failure? That did this to Curiosity's coin?
Nasa says:
And the thing is, Rovers are a far kinder target than anything that humans will be working with. There are such big gaps between every little deliberate movement that they undertake, it's a very light workload.
There's no dust on Venus. There is some variation in clouds, but sunlight is constantly abundant. You even get almost as much power on the undersides of your panels as the topsides, due to reflection.
That's because the vast majority of the gas is present in the form of SO2 and to a lesser extent SO3 and H2S, not H2SO4. H2SO4 is only stable within a relatively narrow temperature range; it is not stable anywhere near Venus's surface (vaporizing at about 40km) far above where the vast majority of Venus's atmosphere's mass is. That said, the concentration is higher than I remember it. But:
From the link above: "Below about 57 km, the vapor pressure of sulfuric acid and water over the cloud particles is relatively high, and therefore sulfuric acid clouds can evaporate in a relatively short period of time." So you're not going to end up with the surface sitting around with a layer of wet acid on it. And the mass loading is just so low, like 8 milligrams per cubic meter of air. That's just not much acid, that's like the concentration you find in volcanic fogs on Earth (like the one I was breathing a year ago :P). It's nothing like dunking an object in a vat of sulfuric acid. And again, most plastics are immune or at least highly resistant to sulfuric acid damage.
The biggest killer of plastics in general is UV radiation. On Mars, there's no protection from it. On Venus, there is.
I kind of like the idea, with some variations:
It shouldn't be Nevada, nor Antarctica like someone else mentioned. It should be somewhere with near-surface permafrost, with good road access to keep costs down. Mars isn't a dry desert, nor is it a glacier, it's ice mixed in with sand, dust, muck... honestly, I think the Icelandic highlands would be perfect. The last time I was out there I actually ran into some geologists who were studying a new volcano there to help better understand Mars ;)
The contest should be NASA funded - it'd be a (relatively) low cost way for them to retire a lot of risk. They should solicit plans from a wide range of sources and fund half a dozen or more. It shouldn't just be "a rover". They should be given a standard cylinder that all of their hardware has to fit in (representing the landing craft), and a weight limit. The teams should be required to build their proposal and put it into a shipping crate, which would then be delivered and transported to the test site. They would then be powered on and left to their own devices, tasked to build the best "shelter" that they can.
If they could do it on Earth, they could (with some modifications) probably do it on Mars.
Rather strange how he recommends 50km altitude. I mean, you could tolerate those temperatures, but they'd be quite uncomfortable. Might as well float several kilometers higher where temperatures are comfortable. Pressure is lower, of course, more like being on a tall mountain than like being at sea level - but who cares? It's not like you'll be breathing the atmosphere, you have to have a gas mask either way.
Also, he overplays the SOx concentration. It's actually not that high of a percentage of the atmosphere, it's not like diving in a tub of H2SO4.
You know very well that we're talking about floating colonies here, so why even mention the other two?
1. They are only "giant" in the sense that blimps are giant: big, but not heavy or bulky. And weight and bulk are what matters in terms of delivery of payload.
2) There are no "sporadic acid baths". What exists in Venus's clouds is akin to bad smog on Earth - ultrafine mist droplets, each nucleated with an acid. Sulfuric acid is highly hygroscopic and self-dilutes. Most plastics (aka, what you'd make an envelope out of) are immune to attack by sulfuric acid.
Mars too has its own corrosives that are far worse with plastics - perchlorates, windblown abrasive particles and high radiation levels, to be specific.
3) There is nothing at all that prevents us from doing it with current technology. More to the point, we've already had balloons floating on Venus.
I'm sure that you know fully well that this isn't the reason for the Vega probes only lasting for a few days. They only lasted for a few days because they had no solar panels. They were not designed to last for more than a few days, they operated entirely on battery power.
The bobbing is A) not due to updrafts, but due to a natural cyclic effect in the balloons, B) a slow process, and C) only occurs in fully passive vehicles that do nothing to regulate their altitude.
We most absolutely can, and have. It's not hard having a vehicle last for hours on the surface just from simple insulation and thermal inertia. Do you mean "get back up"? We can do that too, it's called a phase change balloon.
More to the point, Venus' surface minerology is probably one of the best places in the solar system to find interesting and rare minerals, due to its exotic conditions. There may even be metal snows there. And of the places we've landed and sampled, the sort of minerology we've found at most of them is associated with rare mineral deposits on Earth (we also believe that there's carbonatites there, which are likewise associated with rare minerals here).
I'd ask the same thing about a Mars colony. Except for the fact that a Venus blimp would have far more atmosphere, and be pressure-equalized with its surroundings, while a Mars habitat would contain far less air and be strongly positive-pressure relative to its surroundings. A one square meter hole in a a 10-man Venus balloon would be bad but you can probably patch it before any issues (altitude loss, oxygen loss, smog intrusion) get to serious levels. A one square meter hole in a 10-man Mars colony will have every person unconscious in under a minute.
You really haven't thought this through, have you? Are you thinking that it would be tethered to the surface? It's in the atmosphere - the timeperiod that matters is Venus's superrotation period, which is about 4 days (2 bright, 2 dark). Or you could be near the poles and basically pick your day length. The moon, by contrast, has month-long days.
Not a space station. A cloud station. I'm not sure how you missed that:
"and an aerial base"
" hardware that you don't want to put into a vehicle repeatedly traveling into such hellish conditions."
"an N2/O2 envelope lofting your base station"
"the atmosphere at altitude is so earthlike"
"just floating in clouds above a hellscape
The Venusian cloudtops between about 51 and 55km are the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth. They're not hellish like the surface. There's bad "smog" and no oxygen, but apart from that it's earthlike gravity, earthlike pressures, earthlike temperatures, etc, to a degree found nowhere else in the solar system except Earth.
Radiation is far lower than on the moon and on the surface of Mars because Venus has an actual atmosphere. Magnetic fields aren't the only things that shield one from radiation - an atmosphere is the other. None of the three (Mars, Venus, or the Moon) have meaningful magnetic fields, while the moon has no atmosphere and Mars a nearly irrelevant one. But Venus at "habitable altitude" has nearly as much atmosphere over it as Earth. The radiation levels a person would be exposed to there, without shielding, are high by Earth standards, but not generally dangerous. I've read a study which showed that even during the most major historical solar events known the flux in Venus's cloudtops wouldn't be enough to cause radiation sickness.
I'll be long dead and buried before I let you, good sir, besmirch the honourable name of Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck! A giraffe's neck is long because of generations of neck-stretching to reach the branches of acacia trees, and I will hear no more of this prattle pretending otherwise. Good DAY, sir!
So your goal is to loosen up the ground with a couple (dozen? hundred?) tonnes of mining explosives? Okay, what's the next step?
I'm a big fan of Venus as a destination. Scientifically, it makes a lot more sense than Mars - we know far less about it, and there's a real benefit to the latency reduction provided by humans concerning Venus surface rovers (which can only tolerate the surface conditions for relatively short periods before they need to float back up) than to Mars rovers, which are fine just sitting around and letting their batteries charge while waiting for more instructions. A thorough Venus survey program requires "diving" rovers based on phase-change balloons to explore the surface, and an aerial base station to hold all of the power generation, coolant handling, sample analysis, high gain radio communication, etc hardware that you don't want to put into a vehicle repeatedly traveling into such hellish conditions. The easiest way to get a lifting gas on Venus is to split CO2 into CO and O2 (the same technology being tested on the Mars 2020 rover); O2 is a lifting gas there. And there's already N2 in the atmosphere. So if you have an N2/O2 envelope lofting your base station, you pretty much already have livable space. Combine this with how Venus is easy to get to with frequent launch windows, easy aerocapture/aerobraking, far lower dangerous ionizing radiation, dramatically more solar radiation, nearly Earthlike gravity, etc, and how the atmosphere at altitude is so earthlike that a person might even be able to step outside with nothing more than a facemask on**... it's very easy to make the case for Venus rather than Mars.
** - The known SOx and CO levels are dangerous to human eyes, but it's not certain that they rise to the point that they'd be dangerous to bare or lightly shielded skin for reasonable exposure durations. Either way, no pressure suit, cooling, or heating would be required.
I think the main thing Mars has going for it over Venus is "romance" (ironically). If people go to another planet, they want to have their feet on the ground, touching alien soil, hiking in alien canyons, etc, rather than just floating in clouds above a hellscape. Then again, I'm sure Venus has its own beauty to it.
We're pretty sure that - in particularly limited areas - there's water, in some form (ices, hydrated minerals, etc). The problem is not only that you have to set up large-scale offworld mining, melting, filtering, and storage (an engineering project of quite significant note, given the harsh environment and the cost of delivering hardware to the lunar surface), but you also have to create low-cost reusable rockets designed for repeat operation on the moon with little to no maintenance, fueled by materials from the lunar surface. Which is a vastly harder, more expensive task. After all, it makes no financial sense to mine a tonne of water from the surface of the moon and then deliver it into lunar orbit or beyond with 10 tonnes of hardware/propellant sent from Earth, which in turn took 100 tonnes to get off the surface of the Earth. Everything has to be long-term operable entirely in the lunar environment with lunar resources.
There's not any realistic budgeting scenario where it's even remotely cheaper, all capital costs included, to get your water from the moon in the remotely near future than to just launch it from the earth on existing rockets. But, if your goal is to advance the tech of reusable rockets, space mining, in-situ propellant production, etc, then by all means go ahead. Just don't pretend like you're doing it as a "cost saving measure" for a Mars mission.
Cue the creepy movie tension music!
"It Came From The Billing Department 2: The Revenge Of Accounts Receivable"
Meh, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Swaziland... what's the difference? ;)
It's changed one thing: the fact that he said he'll leave the embassy if they rule against him.
Of course, if Assange is known for anything these past few years it's "keep the focus on me" stunts. Remember the time when he said he'd be leaving the embassy "very soon"? Held a press conference and everything.
The prosecutor's office has already announced that there will be no restrictions on his internet access - there's actually a court ruling on that. That's only for people accused of computer crimes who are deemed a high risk of conducting more from prison, and people who are deemed likely to try to interfere with cases against others from within prison.
Thank YHVH that this expensive ego-driven sideshow will (theoretically) be ending. :P
I love how we not only know that velociraptor had feathers, but exactly for example that it had on each arm exactly 14 secondary wing feathers of modern style (with rachis and barbs). We know pretty much everything except for what the color patterning was and how they actually used them ;)
Oh, by the way, related to your story: Johnny Cash was once nearly killed by an ostrich. ;)
Birds are often underrated. Cassowaries, for example, can be deadly - they attack sort of like a Deinonychus, with one "weapon claw" designed for slashing while they jump.
The old-school "lizardlike" T-rex of Jurassic Park fame hardly seems frightening at all when you compare it to what it would be like if they had given it an amazon parrot's threat display. When they get hormonal - such as when you give them a treat or mess with their "home" - they literally pulse their eyes. The pupil gets huge, then shrinks to a pinpoint, again and again, flashing orange / black / orange / black... Meanwhile they crouch low and move in rigid movements, all of their feathers flared out in a fan, held tightly rigid. And they bite as hard as they can onto whatever is nearby - even inanmiate objects, they just feel compelled to bite something and clamp down with all their strength. They're so overcome by hormones that if, say, it was a treat that triggered the display, they may well destroy or lose it in the process and not even care.
Now picture that being done by a tyrannosaur. Plate-sized predator eyes pulsing hypnotically while they lock their vision onto you, body low, moving ridgid, giant feathers radiating out, and so enraged that it can't help but take massive snaps at whatever trees happen to be nearby... while never averting its gaze from you.
A Jurassic Park-style "rear back and roar" is one thing. But a creature so mad with hormones that it goes, "SEE WHAT I'M DOING WITH THIS TREE? THAT'S GOING TO BE YOU, MOTHERF'ER!" is a whole different story.
Birds are usually only non-threatening to us because they're small. But if they were huge, they'd be like monsters.
Meh, I've got a small descendant of a coelurosaurian theropod standing next to me - he's not so tough.
(Actually, I take that back - an elephant-sized predatory variant of him would be terrifying)
The funny thing is, I wasn't in any way shape or form taking the piss out of them. (If I wanted to that, I would simply have posted this ;) )
Careful, you might get bombed by association ;)
I think we've hit peak right-wing here.
How do you know that they didn't really mean collage kids?
Pretty funny hearing someone whine about others not being able to behave like functioning adults when said individual can't even write like a functioning adult - including the phrase "functioning adult". ;) Also amusing hearing someone whine about others whining too much.
Whether a standup comedian comes across as offensive or not is really simple. If it seems to an audience member that they might actually believe what they're saying about a group, then they come across as offensive. If it's clear to the audience member that they don't, then it doesn't.
If John Cleese has a problem with people consistently interpreting him as offensive, then he should probably brush up on his material and/or delivery. Seriously, comedians whining about their audiences? If John Cleese doesn't like being criticized over his act, then I think he should take a lesson from the famous John Cleese: you're being too sensitive if you find any criticism of yourself to be cruel.
Funny that you mention both Assange and the president of Bolivia in that same context, given that Assange later admitted to having "SWATed" the president of Bolivia, leading to the president of Bolivia to demand an apology from him. He was the source of the misinformation that Snowden was on the president's airplane.