I don't get your argument - do you think that vegans eat less total calories per day or something? Of course it's "per calorie" that matters, not "per 100 grams". You write things like "keyword: dried" as if water soaking into them when they cook is supposed to somehow change the nutritional picture - I mean, what the heck?
You think that the Masai eat the same thing as the Inuit?
Yes, the Inuit traditionally eat some plant foods, but the vast majority of their calories traditionally come from meat. While the Masai survive off of cattle and notably cattle blood - a meat diet, yet a very different one from the Inuit. Yet both of them are abnormally high in their meat percentage - 80-90% of calories, versus 10-40% among most hunter-gatherers. And some tribes consume little to no meat at all. It depends on the area and the tribe.
Again: humans are omnivores. We have adaptive digestive systems, which have helped us fill niches all over the world.
But that's just the issue... you're not actually producing the insects yourself in entirity, you're buying what the insects eat and simply converting that into insect biomass. When you garden, you're producing all of that biomass yourself.
I have no clue where you got this. Cooking and fermentation break down cell walls (cellulose). Raw soybeans are poisonous. Are you saying that there are people out there eating raw, unfermented soybeans and not getting protein as a consequence?
Cooking proteins is a mixed bag. Sometimes they become more bioavailable. But they can also break down via the Mailard reaction (bonding with sugars, a process similar to caramelization), or worse simply through pyrolysis where carbohydrates aren't available, leading to degradation products with adverse health effects. Other processes - including what's commonly used in soybeans, fermentation, but also things like germination and mere soaking - can also increase protein availability (and other benefits, such as breaking down chelators and enzyme inhibitors) without causing significant protein degradation.
All of this applies to both meats and vegetables.
In general, minerals become more available (sometimes significantly more available) in vegetables after cooking; in meats the effect isn't as pronounced. Vitamins and other phytochemicals are a mixed bag - some, like vitamin C, tend to be broken down by cooking, while others, like lycopene, become more bioavailable.
Yes, it's possible to select meats and prepare them in a manner that gets very high protein figures. But the same applies to vegans, who can choose, for example, gluten, saitan, textured vegetable protein and products made from it, etc. No, your average meat dish doesn't have those kind of protein figures - just like your average vegan dish doesn't. And nor does the human body need such extreme protein levels. Your average meat dish will probably have in the ballpark of 30-35% protein. So will your average greens dish or your average legumes dish.
If restaurants are serving you tasteless textureless tofu, then yes, they suck at their job. As the veggie burgers prove, you can make tofu good - if you cook it to the desired texture (the longer you cook it the more it "toughens", to a more meaty texture - although if you cook it too long it can get too chewy or grainy) and season it right (it takes on the flavors of whatever it's cooked in - but they have to be strong enough).
That's simply not true. Please stop confusing B12 and protein.
How much more basic of a diet could you get than, say, rice and beans? Well, guess what? Those two amino acids that are supposedly "hard" for vegetarians to get, methionine and lysine? Rice is rich in methionine. Beans are rich in lysine. Most grains are rich in methionine. Most legumes are rich in lysine. If you have a vegan diet that contains relevant quantities of both, you're not at risk of deficiency. Which represents by far most vegan diets. More to the point, even if you don't "combine" them, most grains have enough lysine for a person to not be deficient, and most legumes enough methionine to likewise not cause deficiency.
Vegans do statistically have some risk of deficiencies. B12 is the most common one. Many statistically are also iron deficient, particularly vegan women. But protein deficiency is not statistically common among vegans.
You're only partially right. You CAN get all the protein you need from plants, but it's hard, and you need to eat a lot of plants, and you need to occasionally supplement with eggs or milk or otherwise consume processed plant material (like soy protein powder). It's not a 'natural' way of eating by any stretch of the imagination.
It's not "hard". At all. Period. Whole broad classes of vegetarian ingredients (legumes, greens, etc) have as high of a percentage of their calories from protein as things like hamburger patties, fried chicken and bacon. You don't need to "supplement with eggs and milk" for protein; you're confusing B12 with protein.
Also, it's wrong to overgeneralize about ancestral human diets; they varied greatly from society to society. The Masai didn't eat the same thing as the Aryans who didn't eat the same thing as the Inuit and so forth. Humans are omnivores and are adapted to diverse diets.
Apparently you don't know the meaning of the word "based". Heck, some vegatable-based foods (such as gluten, often used in Chinese cooking) are nearly pure protein. Most meat substitutes are based around things like TVP, which is overwhelmingly protein. Seitan is 80% protein.
Even common things like tofu have far more calories from protein than carbs (your standard). But really, that's the wrong standard: it's calories from protein vs. calories from "everything else". The majority common vegan ingredients are in the 20-50% protein range - your green leafies (lettuce? 36%; broccoli? 33%; spinach? 50%; collards? 38%; etc), legumes (peas? 33%; lentils? 31%; beans? ~25%; etc), some grains, etc, plus tons of secondary products) are in the 20-50% protein-calories range. While lean fish and skinless chicken cooked in non-fattening manners around 80%-ish percent of their calories from protein, most meats are much lower. A hamburger patty, 80% lean, 20% fat, broiled? 38% from protein. Batter-dipped fried chicken? also 38% protein. Bacon, fried? 27%. Etc. These are just the first "common" things that come to mind, do your own searches. Common meat dishes have the same sort of percent of their calories from protein as common vegetarian dishes.
Meanwhile, on Bizarro-Earth: "My Facebook is getting vlown up with stories about some of the Some-Christian-Country refugees refusing our pentagram-loaves because isn't good enough for them. Can you believe those ingrates?"
If only we had a seasonally appropriate story about middle-eastern people seeking refuge being turned away by the heartless...
Raw tofu is disgusting. Properly cooked tofu however takes on the flavor of what it's cooked with, provides no flavor of its own, and the texture can be controlled by how it's cooked.
Thank you! I'm tired of people using the word "protein" as a synonym of "meat". Some of the highest protein sources out there are vegetable-based. Growing protein at home doesn't take an insect farm, it just takes.... a farm.
If people want to criticize a vegan diet as lacking something, they should focus on B12, not protein. Plants on average contain plenty of protein per calorie (which is the measure that actually matters).
Okay, then I strongly recommend entirely skipping the "freezing it out" stage and just ejecting it as a gas. The physics works the same either way. Actually a bit better in the gas case because you're ejecting it from further from the planet's center and thus imparting more torque. The force transfer is indirect, but again, it works out the same either way.
I seem to recall having done the calculations at one point about what sort of velocity you'd have to impart to the atmosphere to inject it at a speed to reverse the planet's momentum and thought it absurdly unrealistically high. Regardless of the acceleration mechanism.
You don't need to "smelt" anything. It's meteoric nickel-iron - it's an excellent building material as-is. Native greenlanders used to make utensils out of it, from bits chipped off a couple large nickel-iron meteorites, and they were a stone-age people. It takes only heating and casting (or hammering, or stamping, or any number of other techniques). Space provides a nice convenient insulator for you, too. The "smelter" (really just "melter") would most likely be either solar thermal (reflector oven) or a liquid-core nuclear reactor, in a tungsten or ceramic crucible (or similar). Surely you can picture how much of a game changer a facility constantly churning out an endless supply of nickel-iron I-beams and sheet metal inside a weak gravity well could be for the needs of space exploration.
We're hardly ready, mind you - heck, we haven't even visited Psyche yet. But it is certainly a future possibility. It's a lot easier than most Lunar and Martian manufacturing proposals, at least. And if one did do actual smelting/refining to extract more valuable minerals from the bulk nickel-iron, there's a big market back on Earth, and only little kick needed to get materials off of the surface.
The average temperature on Venus is 462 degrees C!!!!! "Earthlike environment"???? You space nutters are crazy.
You apparently either don't know what "between 51 and 56km altitude" means, or you naively assume that the temperature in Venus's atmosphere is uniform all the way out to space.
I'll repeat: Venus's cloudtops, between 51 and 56km altitude, are the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside Earth. It's 0,3 to 0,85 atmospheres, 0-50 degrees celsius, and 0,9g gravity. You could stand outside in that - possibly in shirtsleeves with nothing more on than an oxygen mask with eye protection (possibly... the prolongued effect of the gases at that level on exposed skin is still not entirely clear). If it proves to not be harmful to skin, it'd feel very much like being on Earth (minus, of course, the need for a mask, and the fact that your view would be of sparklingly-bright foggy clouds and slightly tinted mists)
Besides, if your goal is terraforming, a solar shade doesn't really cut it - you have to get rid of the huge amounts of CO2. My favorite proposal is a solar chimney - basically a giant funnel-shaped greenhouse floating on Venus. The gas accelerates faster and faster the further it rises into the funnel - and due to the megascale-engineering scale, suffers (proportionally) almost no slowdown from the surface drag. Hence, if large enough, velocities of tens of thousands of meters per second could be reached - well beyond escape velocity and even potentially to intercept trajectories with other worlds (giving them Venus's CO2 for their own terraforming needs). A vortex-inducing funnel could centrifuge out the gases so that by shaping the exit nozzle one could preferably lose heavy gases and keep the lighter ones. The structure - being of insignificant mass compared to the mass of the rising gases - could be self-lofted, like a parachute in an updraft. Actuated vents could provide thrust for stationkeeping and aim. One could even build other such funnels elsewhere, such as on Jupiter to export hydrogen back to Venus for the Bosch reaction.
Still doesn't help with rotation, though.
Another possibility which would be very difficult, but not require megascale engineering, would be breeding bacteria to sequester carbon. This has sometimes been dismissed due to a lack of nutrients in the Venusian atmosphere, but this may be a bit shortsighted. In addition to carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water, and sulfur, there's small amounts of chlorine (in the form of hydrochloric acid) and phosphorus (in the form of phosphoric acid) in the cloudtops. Other nutrients can prove trickier to get, but there is a potential source: the Venera probes found what appears to be volcanic ash in the atmosphere, identifying for example the signature of iron during their descent.
While some of what they would need to function would be quite rare, technically everything that life needs appears likely to be able to be found in venus's clouds at temperatures that life can survive in. So perhaps one could engineer free-drifting longlived microorganisms that would use cloud droplets around ash condensation nuclei to breed - perhaps some sort of sporulating species.
You don't need a shroud to live on Venus, for loose definitions of "on". Venus at present bears the most Earthlike environment in the solar system outside of Earth: its cloudtops, between 51 and 56km altitude. The temperature to pressure ratio is a little on the high side compared to Earth norms but nothing too unusual by Earth standards. Gravity is 0,9G. Radiation shielding isn't as good as on Earth, but far better than on Mars. Specially adapted plants might be able to grow outdoors, if watered and fertilized (possibly, if well-adapted enough, just fertilized). Humans wouldn't need a pressure suit. In fact, while the sulfuric acid and carbon monoxide mandate eye production, the levels may not be damaging enough to mandate skin protection - it might be possible to walk outside with nothing more than a face mask on. Normal earth air is a lifting gas on Venus, so staying aloft is easy. The solar constant is higher than on Earth (let alone than on Mars), and due to the reflection from the cloud deck beneath you, downward-facing panels could produce almost as much electricity as upward-facing ones. And your habitat would be constantly in motion and maneuverable, allowing you to explore the whole planet rather than just your immediate surroundings. It's also an extremely poorly understood body that needs a lot more study, and shows signs for having very interesting minerals on its surface.
There's practical aspects too. The most practical way to explore (or, in the future, mine) the surface of Venus is with phase-change balloons** which dive, stay at the surface operating until their coolant reservoirs become too hot, and their batteries become too low, then returning to altitude to cool down/exchange coolant and recharge. The less delicate electrical and scientific equipment that they have to have onboard, the better. This all calls for aerial base stations for them to dock at, offload samples to, get power from, get fresh coolant from, etc. Due to their limited time on the surface per dive, latency would be critical for throughput, which means humans at Venus controlling them. The only issue is wind - the aerial stations would move significantly relative to the balloon probes while they're at the surface. Hence the probes would have to rise to higher altitudes with faster winds to catch back up.
** - Phase-change balloons are balloons that contain a gas which liquifies when it gets cold (aka high altitude), reducing its buoyancy, and gassifies when it gets warm (aka low altitude), increasing its buoyancy. By use of a pressure vessel to prevent the liquid from gassifying, a phase change balloon can dive to any depth and then return to altitude by releasing the pressure back into the envelope.
Indeed. A payload of a million fertilized eggs isn't exactly going to break your payload budget. The key required technological developments are the development of artificial wombs and automated childrearing systems - neither of which are exactly low-hanging fruit. And of course proof that you can cryopreserve fertilized eggs for that long, and have all of your electrical/mechanical systems last that long.
Generation ships are certainly possible, but they (and the above as well) do impose some moral dilemas. Let's look at the ideal generation ship: as with everything in rocketry, particularly when you're pushing its limits, keeping the payload mass down is absolutely critical. So you're not exactly talking about a spacious luxury craft here - just the minimum needed to keep your people alive and not literally killing each other or themselves out of stress. Like all spacecraft, there would be a rather high risk of... well, everyone dying, potentially in a gruesome manner. To minimize the payload further, the crew would need to be all female, as small statured as possible, each fertile, with a stock of frozen sperm onboard - with X-bearing sperm from short-statured men set aside for use in-transit. Hypothetically you could just send one woman and have her rear one female child up until she can take care of herself, then commit suicide, with each generation expected to take the same path - but there's obviously tons of issues with that. In practice you need several women, staggered over different ages, not expected to "off themselves", and with the presence of multiples to account for those generations who choose not to bear children, disease, accidents, etc. The smallest number that could be determined statistically likely to make it all the way to the destination would define the minimum payload.
Now, obviously the ideal crew would be age staggered, all the way down to young children, rather than all starting off in the middle of their reproductive years. But you're never going to get approval to load a bunch of children, who may or may not even understand what's going on, let alone have the intellectual maturity to consent to such a permanent trip in conditions that would be challenging to say the least, give them little opportunity to move around or get away from people, and bear such a high risk of death. Yet, that same logic should surely apply to children born in-transit as part of the design principle - they too are not given a choice about "committing to the mission" - they're stuck living in cramped quarters in a degrading and ever-more-likely-to-break-and-kill them can drifting through deep space. Likewise concerning children born at the destination, while it's still an unstable, very-likely-to-kill-you environment. So why should the argument apply to children departing from Earth but not those born into that environment? And what about comparisons to Earth, where some children are born into confined, uncomfortable environments that they can't effectively escape from, while some are born into environments that bear a high risk of (possibly gruesome) death? Does it make a difference that on such a space mission that it's "by design"? Or that it's "for a greater purpose"?
If you're looking for bodies with trivial gravity to settle on, why not 16 Psyche (21% of Ceres' gravity)? Plenty of resources for building with (it's believed to be 90% metal, including numerous metals that are very rare on Earth), and potentially for export. Like Ceres, not enough gravity to keep people's bodies from degenerating, but at least enough (like Ceres) to stop objects from easily bouncing out into space / hold equipment to the surface.
Actually, I do try to follow all of the daily sorties, using both official/international reports and ground reports. The rate of coalition attacks in Syria had been really falling recently.
For one who wants to pay attention, this conflict has actually been fairly easy to follow because the regime and various rebel factions usually roughly agree on ground truths (roughly). There's not much "Baghdad Bobbing" here.
The fact that he's responsible for the lion's share of the deaths in this conflict, not due to his bombardment of densely populated areas with chemical weapons, but due to a non-stop campaign of dumping barrels of mining explosives onto cities (go to images.google.com and search for "Homs" to see what this results in), as well as being among the most brutal torturers operating a country on Earth today, with over 10k photo-documented cases of execution-by-torture in his intelligence centers since the conflict began?
Neither Assad nor Daesh should be running states. And there's the practical matter as well: Assad is only propped up by external forces. There is a local population who supports him, but it's a very small fraction of the total. Today most of the ground troops making up Assad's forces are Hezbollah (Lebanese), Iranian, and lesser from other countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. He runs a foreign force occupying his own country.
More specifically, we have Russia (nuclear) on the Assad side, along with Iran (nearly nuclear), while on the other side, we have the coalition (including nuclear powers US, UK and France), and then there are third parties, including Israel (who's started bombing Hezbollah weapons shipments within Syria - including bombing the Damascus airport the other day) and major rebel weapons supplier Saudi Arabia (not nuclear, but believed to have an agreement with Pakistan to be able to rapidly acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for having funded over half of their program). Everyone has the capability to reach all of their potential foes except Iran->US.
It's a nightmare scenario just waiting for an accident:P
A lot of it is from oil smuggling. They even have truck-mounted "mobile refineries" - you can buy them off of Alibaba - so they're not just selling crude, but refined gasoline and diesel ready for consumption. They load straight into tanker trucks which deliver straight to gas stations, yielding an estimated $2m per day in revenue.
You can make an awful lot of explosive vests and buy an awful lot of AK47s with a good chunk of a billion USD per year. The coalition keeps targeting them, but they just keep buying more and working to hide them better.
It's the latest trend. The US nailed one in Afghanistan recently, Russia's hit nearly half a dozen since they started bombing Syria... come on, why can't France get in on the game? You know France doesn't like falling behind on trends. Maybe they're trying to start a new trend with bombing football stadiums?
It's unfortunate, but "suddenly coming up with three dozen targets to strike in one day" when the whole coalition had just been bombing a few per day recently means striking targets that have a higher risk of civilian death that you had previously decided not to hit.
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I don't get your argument - do you think that vegans eat less total calories per day or something? Of course it's "per calorie" that matters, not "per 100 grams". You write things like "keyword: dried" as if water soaking into them when they cook is supposed to somehow change the nutritional picture - I mean, what the heck?
And since when are legumes low-calorie?
You think that the Masai eat the same thing as the Inuit?
Yes, the Inuit traditionally eat some plant foods, but the vast majority of their calories traditionally come from meat. While the Masai survive off of cattle and notably cattle blood - a meat diet, yet a very different one from the Inuit. Yet both of them are abnormally high in their meat percentage - 80-90% of calories, versus 10-40% among most hunter-gatherers. And some tribes consume little to no meat at all. It depends on the area and the tribe.
Again: humans are omnivores. We have adaptive digestive systems, which have helped us fill niches all over the world.
But that's just the issue... you're not actually producing the insects yourself in entirity, you're buying what the insects eat and simply converting that into insect biomass. When you garden, you're producing all of that biomass yourself.
I have no clue where you got this. Cooking and fermentation break down cell walls (cellulose). Raw soybeans are poisonous. Are you saying that there are people out there eating raw, unfermented soybeans and not getting protein as a consequence?
Cooking proteins is a mixed bag. Sometimes they become more bioavailable. But they can also break down via the Mailard reaction (bonding with sugars, a process similar to caramelization), or worse simply through pyrolysis where carbohydrates aren't available, leading to degradation products with adverse health effects. Other processes - including what's commonly used in soybeans, fermentation, but also things like germination and mere soaking - can also increase protein availability (and other benefits, such as breaking down chelators and enzyme inhibitors) without causing significant protein degradation.
All of this applies to both meats and vegetables.
In general, minerals become more available (sometimes significantly more available) in vegetables after cooking; in meats the effect isn't as pronounced. Vitamins and other phytochemicals are a mixed bag - some, like vitamin C, tend to be broken down by cooking, while others, like lycopene, become more bioavailable.
On the other hand, fried battered chicken is only 38% protein on a caloric basis. Same as broiled hamburger patties, and far better than bacon.
Yes, it's possible to select meats and prepare them in a manner that gets very high protein figures. But the same applies to vegans, who can choose, for example, gluten, saitan, textured vegetable protein and products made from it, etc. No, your average meat dish doesn't have those kind of protein figures - just like your average vegan dish doesn't. And nor does the human body need such extreme protein levels. Your average meat dish will probably have in the ballpark of 30-35% protein. So will your average greens dish or your average legumes dish.
If restaurants are serving you tasteless textureless tofu, then yes, they suck at their job. As the veggie burgers prove, you can make tofu good - if you cook it to the desired texture (the longer you cook it the more it "toughens", to a more meaty texture - although if you cook it too long it can get too chewy or grainy) and season it right (it takes on the flavors of whatever it's cooked in - but they have to be strong enough).
That's simply not true. Please stop confusing B12 and protein.
How much more basic of a diet could you get than, say, rice and beans? Well, guess what? Those two amino acids that are supposedly "hard" for vegetarians to get, methionine and lysine? Rice is rich in methionine. Beans are rich in lysine. Most grains are rich in methionine. Most legumes are rich in lysine. If you have a vegan diet that contains relevant quantities of both, you're not at risk of deficiency. Which represents by far most vegan diets. More to the point, even if you don't "combine" them, most grains have enough lysine for a person to not be deficient, and most legumes enough methionine to likewise not cause deficiency.
Vegans do statistically have some risk of deficiencies. B12 is the most common one. Many statistically are also iron deficient, particularly vegan women. But protein deficiency is not statistically common among vegans.
It's not "hard". At all. Period. Whole broad classes of vegetarian ingredients (legumes, greens, etc) have as high of a percentage of their calories from protein as things like hamburger patties, fried chicken and bacon. You don't need to "supplement with eggs and milk" for protein; you're confusing B12 with protein.
Also, it's wrong to overgeneralize about ancestral human diets; they varied greatly from society to society. The Masai didn't eat the same thing as the Aryans who didn't eat the same thing as the Inuit and so forth. Humans are omnivores and are adapted to diverse diets.
Apparently you don't know the meaning of the word "based". Heck, some vegatable-based foods (such as gluten, often used in Chinese cooking) are nearly pure protein. Most meat substitutes are based around things like TVP, which is overwhelmingly protein. Seitan is 80% protein.
Even common things like tofu have far more calories from protein than carbs (your standard). But really, that's the wrong standard: it's calories from protein vs. calories from "everything else". The majority common vegan ingredients are in the 20-50% protein range - your green leafies (lettuce? 36%; broccoli? 33%; spinach? 50%; collards? 38%; etc), legumes (peas? 33%; lentils? 31%; beans? ~25%; etc), some grains, etc, plus tons of secondary products) are in the 20-50% protein-calories range. While lean fish and skinless chicken cooked in non-fattening manners around 80%-ish percent of their calories from protein, most meats are much lower. A hamburger patty, 80% lean, 20% fat, broiled? 38% from protein. Batter-dipped fried chicken? also 38% protein. Bacon, fried? 27%. Etc. These are just the first "common" things that come to mind, do your own searches. Common meat dishes have the same sort of percent of their calories from protein as common vegetarian dishes.
Meanwhile, on Bizarro-Earth: "My Facebook is getting vlown up with stories about some of the Some-Christian-Country refugees refusing our pentagram-loaves because isn't good enough for them. Can you believe those ingrates?"
If only we had a seasonally appropriate story about middle-eastern people seeking refuge being turned away by the heartless...
Raw tofu is disgusting. Properly cooked tofu however takes on the flavor of what it's cooked with, provides no flavor of its own, and the texture can be controlled by how it's cooked.
Thank you! I'm tired of people using the word "protein" as a synonym of "meat". Some of the highest protein sources out there are vegetable-based. Growing protein at home doesn't take an insect farm, it just takes.... a farm.
If people want to criticize a vegan diet as lacking something, they should focus on B12, not protein. Plants on average contain plenty of protein per calorie (which is the measure that actually matters).
No. Underneath a greenhouse is a localized hotspot as it changes the radiative balance with space.
It's basically the planetary equivalent of a solar updraft tower.
Okay, then I strongly recommend entirely skipping the "freezing it out" stage and just ejecting it as a gas. The physics works the same either way. Actually a bit better in the gas case because you're ejecting it from further from the planet's center and thus imparting more torque. The force transfer is indirect, but again, it works out the same either way.
I seem to recall having done the calculations at one point about what sort of velocity you'd have to impart to the atmosphere to inject it at a speed to reverse the planet's momentum and thought it absurdly unrealistically high. Regardless of the acceleration mechanism.
You don't need to "smelt" anything. It's meteoric nickel-iron - it's an excellent building material as-is. Native greenlanders used to make utensils out of it, from bits chipped off a couple large nickel-iron meteorites, and they were a stone-age people. It takes only heating and casting (or hammering, or stamping, or any number of other techniques). Space provides a nice convenient insulator for you, too. The "smelter" (really just "melter") would most likely be either solar thermal (reflector oven) or a liquid-core nuclear reactor, in a tungsten or ceramic crucible (or similar). Surely you can picture how much of a game changer a facility constantly churning out an endless supply of nickel-iron I-beams and sheet metal inside a weak gravity well could be for the needs of space exploration.
We're hardly ready, mind you - heck, we haven't even visited Psyche yet. But it is certainly a future possibility. It's a lot easier than most Lunar and Martian manufacturing proposals, at least. And if one did do actual smelting/refining to extract more valuable minerals from the bulk nickel-iron, there's a big market back on Earth, and only little kick needed to get materials off of the surface.
You apparently either don't know what "between 51 and 56km altitude" means, or you naively assume that the temperature in Venus's atmosphere is uniform all the way out to space.
I'll repeat: Venus's cloudtops, between 51 and 56km altitude, are the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside Earth. It's 0,3 to 0,85 atmospheres, 0-50 degrees celsius, and 0,9g gravity. You could stand outside in that - possibly in shirtsleeves with nothing more on than an oxygen mask with eye protection (possibly... the prolongued effect of the gases at that level on exposed skin is still not entirely clear). If it proves to not be harmful to skin, it'd feel very much like being on Earth (minus, of course, the need for a mask, and the fact that your view would be of sparklingly-bright foggy clouds and slightly tinted mists)
Besides, if your goal is terraforming, a solar shade doesn't really cut it - you have to get rid of the huge amounts of CO2. My favorite proposal is a solar chimney - basically a giant funnel-shaped greenhouse floating on Venus. The gas accelerates faster and faster the further it rises into the funnel - and due to the megascale-engineering scale, suffers (proportionally) almost no slowdown from the surface drag. Hence, if large enough, velocities of tens of thousands of meters per second could be reached - well beyond escape velocity and even potentially to intercept trajectories with other worlds (giving them Venus's CO2 for their own terraforming needs). A vortex-inducing funnel could centrifuge out the gases so that by shaping the exit nozzle one could preferably lose heavy gases and keep the lighter ones. The structure - being of insignificant mass compared to the mass of the rising gases - could be self-lofted, like a parachute in an updraft. Actuated vents could provide thrust for stationkeeping and aim. One could even build other such funnels elsewhere, such as on Jupiter to export hydrogen back to Venus for the Bosch reaction.
Still doesn't help with rotation, though.
Another possibility which would be very difficult, but not require megascale engineering, would be breeding bacteria to sequester carbon. This has sometimes been dismissed due to a lack of nutrients in the Venusian atmosphere, but this may be a bit shortsighted. In addition to carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water, and sulfur, there's small amounts of chlorine (in the form of hydrochloric acid) and phosphorus (in the form of phosphoric acid) in the cloudtops. Other nutrients can prove trickier to get, but there is a potential source: the Venera probes found what appears to be volcanic ash in the atmosphere, identifying for example the signature of iron during their descent.
While some of what they would need to function would be quite rare, technically everything that life needs appears likely to be able to be found in venus's clouds at temperatures that life can survive in. So perhaps one could engineer free-drifting longlived microorganisms that would use cloud droplets around ash condensation nuclei to breed - perhaps some sort of sporulating species.
You don't need a shroud to live on Venus, for loose definitions of "on". Venus at present bears the most Earthlike environment in the solar system outside of Earth: its cloudtops, between 51 and 56km altitude. The temperature to pressure ratio is a little on the high side compared to Earth norms but nothing too unusual by Earth standards. Gravity is 0,9G. Radiation shielding isn't as good as on Earth, but far better than on Mars. Specially adapted plants might be able to grow outdoors, if watered and fertilized (possibly, if well-adapted enough, just fertilized). Humans wouldn't need a pressure suit. In fact, while the sulfuric acid and carbon monoxide mandate eye production, the levels may not be damaging enough to mandate skin protection - it might be possible to walk outside with nothing more than a face mask on. Normal earth air is a lifting gas on Venus, so staying aloft is easy. The solar constant is higher than on Earth (let alone than on Mars), and due to the reflection from the cloud deck beneath you, downward-facing panels could produce almost as much electricity as upward-facing ones. And your habitat would be constantly in motion and maneuverable, allowing you to explore the whole planet rather than just your immediate surroundings. It's also an extremely poorly understood body that needs a lot more study, and shows signs for having very interesting minerals on its surface.
There's practical aspects too. The most practical way to explore (or, in the future, mine) the surface of Venus is with phase-change balloons** which dive, stay at the surface operating until their coolant reservoirs become too hot, and their batteries become too low, then returning to altitude to cool down/exchange coolant and recharge. The less delicate electrical and scientific equipment that they have to have onboard, the better. This all calls for aerial base stations for them to dock at, offload samples to, get power from, get fresh coolant from, etc. Due to their limited time on the surface per dive, latency would be critical for throughput, which means humans at Venus controlling them. The only issue is wind - the aerial stations would move significantly relative to the balloon probes while they're at the surface. Hence the probes would have to rise to higher altitudes with faster winds to catch back up.
** - Phase-change balloons are balloons that contain a gas which liquifies when it gets cold (aka high altitude), reducing its buoyancy, and gassifies when it gets warm (aka low altitude), increasing its buoyancy. By use of a pressure vessel to prevent the liquid from gassifying, a phase change balloon can dive to any depth and then return to altitude by releasing the pressure back into the envelope.
Indeed. A payload of a million fertilized eggs isn't exactly going to break your payload budget. The key required technological developments are the development of artificial wombs and automated childrearing systems - neither of which are exactly low-hanging fruit. And of course proof that you can cryopreserve fertilized eggs for that long, and have all of your electrical/mechanical systems last that long.
Generation ships are certainly possible, but they (and the above as well) do impose some moral dilemas. Let's look at the ideal generation ship: as with everything in rocketry, particularly when you're pushing its limits, keeping the payload mass down is absolutely critical. So you're not exactly talking about a spacious luxury craft here - just the minimum needed to keep your people alive and not literally killing each other or themselves out of stress. Like all spacecraft, there would be a rather high risk of... well, everyone dying, potentially in a gruesome manner. To minimize the payload further, the crew would need to be all female, as small statured as possible, each fertile, with a stock of frozen sperm onboard - with X-bearing sperm from short-statured men set aside for use in-transit. Hypothetically you could just send one woman and have her rear one female child up until she can take care of herself, then commit suicide, with each generation expected to take the same path - but there's obviously tons of issues with that. In practice you need several women, staggered over different ages, not expected to "off themselves", and with the presence of multiples to account for those generations who choose not to bear children, disease, accidents, etc. The smallest number that could be determined statistically likely to make it all the way to the destination would define the minimum payload.
Now, obviously the ideal crew would be age staggered, all the way down to young children, rather than all starting off in the middle of their reproductive years. But you're never going to get approval to load a bunch of children, who may or may not even understand what's going on, let alone have the intellectual maturity to consent to such a permanent trip in conditions that would be challenging to say the least, give them little opportunity to move around or get away from people, and bear such a high risk of death. Yet, that same logic should surely apply to children born in-transit as part of the design principle - they too are not given a choice about "committing to the mission" - they're stuck living in cramped quarters in a degrading and ever-more-likely-to-break-and-kill them can drifting through deep space. Likewise concerning children born at the destination, while it's still an unstable, very-likely-to-kill-you environment. So why should the argument apply to children departing from Earth but not those born into that environment? And what about comparisons to Earth, where some children are born into confined, uncomfortable environments that they can't effectively escape from, while some are born into environments that bear a high risk of (possibly gruesome) death? Does it make a difference that on such a space mission that it's "by design"? Or that it's "for a greater purpose"?
If you're looking for bodies with trivial gravity to settle on, why not 16 Psyche (21% of Ceres' gravity)? Plenty of resources for building with (it's believed to be 90% metal, including numerous metals that are very rare on Earth), and potentially for export. Like Ceres, not enough gravity to keep people's bodies from degenerating, but at least enough (like Ceres) to stop objects from easily bouncing out into space / hold equipment to the surface.
Actually, I do try to follow all of the daily sorties, using both official/international reports and ground reports. The rate of coalition attacks in Syria had been really falling recently.
For one who wants to pay attention, this conflict has actually been fairly easy to follow because the regime and various rebel factions usually roughly agree on ground truths (roughly). There's not much "Baghdad Bobbing" here.
The fact that he's responsible for the lion's share of the deaths in this conflict, not due to his bombardment of densely populated areas with chemical weapons, but due to a non-stop campaign of dumping barrels of mining explosives onto cities (go to images.google.com and search for "Homs" to see what this results in), as well as being among the most brutal torturers operating a country on Earth today, with over 10k photo-documented cases of execution-by-torture in his intelligence centers since the conflict began?
Neither Assad nor Daesh should be running states. And there's the practical matter as well: Assad is only propped up by external forces. There is a local population who supports him, but it's a very small fraction of the total. Today most of the ground troops making up Assad's forces are Hezbollah (Lebanese), Iranian, and lesser from other countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. He runs a foreign force occupying his own country.
More specifically, we have Russia (nuclear) on the Assad side, along with Iran (nearly nuclear), while on the other side, we have the coalition (including nuclear powers US, UK and France), and then there are third parties, including Israel (who's started bombing Hezbollah weapons shipments within Syria - including bombing the Damascus airport the other day) and major rebel weapons supplier Saudi Arabia (not nuclear, but believed to have an agreement with Pakistan to be able to rapidly acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for having funded over half of their program). Everyone has the capability to reach all of their potential foes except Iran->US.
It's a nightmare scenario just waiting for an accident :P
A lot of it is from oil smuggling. They even have truck-mounted "mobile refineries" - you can buy them off of Alibaba - so they're not just selling crude, but refined gasoline and diesel ready for consumption. They load straight into tanker trucks which deliver straight to gas stations, yielding an estimated $2m per day in revenue.
You can make an awful lot of explosive vests and buy an awful lot of AK47s with a good chunk of a billion USD per year. The coalition keeps targeting them, but they just keep buying more and working to hide them better.
It's the latest trend. The US nailed one in Afghanistan recently, Russia's hit nearly half a dozen since they started bombing Syria... come on, why can't France get in on the game? You know France doesn't like falling behind on trends. Maybe they're trying to start a new trend with bombing football stadiums?
It's unfortunate, but "suddenly coming up with three dozen targets to strike in one day" when the whole coalition had just been bombing a few per day recently means striking targets that have a higher risk of civilian death that you had previously decided not to hit.