How come we only apply this to Musk? How long have we been hearing about the "imminent" Tesla-killers coming from the German automakers? I remember an article in the (hugely anti-Tesla) Daily Kanban in 2015 talking about how Porsche was getting ready to crush Tesla with the super-awesome-stupendulous Mission-E (along with a bunch of other no-show EVs), because the concept looks so double-plus awesome! Guess what? It's 2017 and it's still two years off. But wait, we finally got some spy shots of them finally testing - and guess what? After facing design reality, the concept now looks like nothing more than a glorified Panamera. Just wait for the disappointing stat/price point/production figures!
Anyone who has followed the history of concept cars over the years knew damned well that this was going to happen, because it always does. Concept cars are art pieces, not things that are actually practical from aero / production / functionality designpoints. But far too many people have trouble conceiving of anything but that the only reason Tesla is succeeding is that the big automakers have been "keeping their powder dry" all this time, can crush Tesla at any point in time, and are just about to do so, any day now. The fact that they aren't and can't is inconceivable to them.
(In case any is curious as to why they can't... link)
Beat me to it. Looks like it's going to be done well ahead of schedule. But hey, facts havenever stopped anyone before when trying to find reasons to bash Musk.
Facts like the fact that Musk never said he had approval from New York City - that he actually said, "verbal govt approval". Which he did - the government he was speaking of was the federal government (DOT, asked about it: "We have had promising conversations to date, are committed to transformative infrastructure projects, and believe our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector,""). But hey, let's leave that part out and pretend that Musk was just making things up.
Facts like, for example, that Model 3's production schedule had been moved forward to July (was originally supposed to start at the end of this year), with Musk stating at the time that the reason for the July deadline was because he knew some suppliers would inevitably fail to meet their deadline and he had to have a way to hold their feet to the fire with real penalties for failing to deliver. Of course, they actually did make the July deadline.
The Wall Street Journal will gripe about the fact that there are missing features in the (over-the-air-upgraded) software stack and that there's some manual labour / part changes in manufacture because automated assembly line isn't yet complete. Really, WSJ? Gee we all thought that the line was fully ready to produce tens of thousands of vehicles per month, but the schedule was only to produce a couple hundred for giggles. And of course, every Tesla short will whine about how there are customers acting as "beta", ignoring the fact that none of the above comes as any surprise to anyone with a deposit, particularly the earliest ones, and that they're thrilled to have the chance to get their vehicles early. I know one who, after having the car for just two weeks, already put down a deposit on a second one.
But hey, I guess someone has to try to recoup some of their losses in their ill-advised short position in TSLA.
Excepting one major case where the airship was poorly designed and only half reinforced, nothing from the weather itself. Running into the ground on the other hand....
Does it need to be mentioned that there is no ground to run into in Venus's middle cloud layer ~54km over the surface?
The "recommended videos" algorithm on YouTube is terrible; it's not a user's fault what comes up there. You watch a single news clip which mentions Trump in its title, and for the next week you'll be flooded with recommendations from channels with names like "RealTruthNews" and titles like "DONALD TRUMP is a LIZARD who is now ROUNDING UP DISSIDENTS!" Every time I watch something random, if I even want to try to minimize the amount of terrible garbage that shows up on the front page, I have to spend the next 5-10 minutes clicking to block channels. And for some reason it seems to forget the blocks over time, too. It's a bloody awful algorithm.
Neural nets, as they exist today, are nowhere near being able to "explain their thought processes". You can log what you fed to them, but you have no clue why they made the decision that they did, and there's no realistic way to trace it back. They're black boxes.
Self-driving systems are not "generalized AI"; they don't learn from the ground up. You might incorporate neural nets in specific image recognition tasks, but in general, self-driving algorithms will only ever do precisely what you tell them to do - and that's for good reason. Not just because of the limited capabilities of today's neural nets, but also the simple fact that if something goes wrong, you want to be able to say "Here's what went wrong" rather than "Oh, dang, this black box decided to drive this person off a cliff for some inexplicable reason. Oh well..."
According to Google (who's a big LIDAR proponent), it's still $7,5k per unit. It still messes up your aerodynamics and looks dorky. It still can't see in adverse weather conditions, meaning you have to have developed an optical / radar based world-modeling system anyway. And you have to have image processing regardless to read signs, road lines, identify objects, see brake lights, and so forth.
There's real hope for further improvements in LIDAR and its variants in the future, however. We'll see where it goes.
Also, as to answer the question of how humans do it with "two cameras": logic. We don't have "stitching errors" in how we build up a model of the world around us from visual data because our brain constantly processes everything around us through the prism of "does that make sense?" But whether something "makes sense" or not is an AI-hard problem.
Building up 3d models with photogrammetry is an inherently error-prone process because a computer doesn't know if something makes sense. The approach is "Oh hey, these patterns from the left and right camera matched up - there's an object there at X distance based on how far the patterns had to be shifted to align". But what if the patterns happen to be different things that just happened to match up in patterning? Or what if, due to lighting / texturing / obstruction / material issues, the same thing didn't look exactly the same from different angles? Uncovering these problems is, as mentioned, AI-hard. I doubt anyone is even trying at this point; there's enough to work on just to get things to follow road lines correctly and not go chasing old tire tracks or poorly erased construction lines.
Ranging systems like LIDAR help let you just simply ignore the issue by telling you flat out, "I sent out a beam in this precise direction and got a reflection in precisely this length of time." But LIDAR has a number of problems, as described above.
LIDAR: Formerly about $75k, now about $7,5k per unit, and requires a bubble dome on top of the vehicle. GM and Waymo use it, Tesla doesn't. In addition to looking weird and adding drag, the price is killer if you want to include something on every vehicle. Beyond this, LIDAR doesn't work in fog, heavy rain, snow, and other conditions that humans can drive in - meaning that you'd have to either prevent trips during these conditions, require humans to drive during them, find workarounds (not easy), or rely instead on other sensors. And you still need to understand the world around you visually - LIDAR will tell you that "something" is there, but it can't read signs, see road markings, see brake lights, tell if that thing in the road is a person or a paper bag, etc.
Tesla, for these reasons, ruled out LIDAR. They just simply use the "other sensors" - 1x radar, many cameras, many ultrasonic sensors - all the time. This way, all of their sensors can be put in all of their vehicles, and do double duty for both self driving and standard safety features (autobraking, etc), depending on what options the buyer has paid for. This however comes at a penality: when LIDAR works, it works really well. Photogrammetry with cameras is prone to stitching errors, and radar, while being able to see some things that humans can't, sees the world in very strange ways (for example, a piece of plywood is transparent, but an aluminum can glows like it's on fire). It's a much more challenging task if you leave LIDAR out of the loop. But, it gives you a more saleable product.
In the end, I expect a convergence to take hold. An interesting new technology for example is time-of-flight cameras - they function as normal cameras, but also can read the length of time it takes for a laser pulse to return on every pixel they record. So no dome, just your normal camera coverage and a few cheap, fixed lasers - in mass production, it might not cost much more than cameras alone. In such a case, I'd expect the LIDAR groups to simply replace their conventional LIDAR datastream with the time-of-flight datastreams, while I'd expect the non-LIDAR groups to replace their photogrammetry-and-radar built 3d models with time-of-flight 3d models. But both sides will still need image processing, so it's important to work on maturing that technology today.
That said, let me reiterate that I'm a pessimist regardless of what tech you use. There's just so much nuance in driving in hazardous conditions - understanding when, where and how much you have to slow down, what's safe to drive on and what's not, what things to the side of the road are hazardous and what aren't, when you should break rules (such as driving in the middle of the road when conditions are dangerous but oncoming traffic is rare), what are the consequences of a mistake in one location vs. another, etc, etc. On my gravel road, there's a canyon to one side with no guardrail, and varying amounts of ice and potholes in different places. You better well know how your traction is going to fare as you move across the potholes (vibrating the car and making it lose traction) or icing if you don't want to end up in an unrecoverable slide into a ravine.
Just to pick a random example among countless things that you have to take into account: how long do you think before any self-driving systems will have "sheep recognizing algorithms"? Because where I live, there's sheep. Group of sheep on one side of the road: probably safe. Group of sheep on both sides of the road: not as safe, but probably safe. Lamb on one side, ewe on the other? Very dangerous - the lamb will invariably run to its mother as you approach. Where's the ewe-lamb-running algorithm?
Nuclear-powered backhoes aren't exactly a dime a dozen, nor is hard-rock excavation easy to begin with. And if you're in a cave, you're also not getting light. And of course you're not in a cave when you're doing any work outside.
Venus's atmosphere is sufficient to shield humans against even major solar radiation events, even though it lacks an intrinsic magnetic field (only a weak induced one).
Unfortunately, not as much as the common conception; it's more like a bad smog / vog. Sulfuric acid is the most valuable resource to a Venus colony, being a readily scrubbed compound that represents the primary source of water.
Sure you can float some atmospheric habitats and use some resources but that's about it.
You've literally described a colony. And life on Earth (minus the "floating" part). Self-sustaining societies using local resources is the goal.
On Mars you can actually explore (dig, bore, etc), build,
Digging and boring is work, something you want to avoid having to do as much as possible. On Venus you can dredge the surface and get resources straight from the air. Mind you, you can also dig and bore - NASA has worked on drilling on Venus, and of course, explosives work everywhere - but that's activity that you don't want to have to do if you don't need to. And again, building / sustaining is the whole point of "using resources".
and there is a whole lot less risk (you have ground
Ground is a risk. If you don't believe so, look at the number of probes that have failed on landing for a wide range of reasons. On Venus, your "landing" ellipse is massive.
the atmosphere isn't acid, etc
1) Acid mists are, as have been mentioned many times, rather sparse on Venus - not even that much more concentrated than OSHA workplace standards. It would actually be easier if they were more concentrated.
2) Mars's atmosphere is hardly extant. A Venus habitat has only a bare minimum overpressure (~500 Pa). A Mars habitat has a 50-100 kPa overpressure. The latter is much more at risk in the event of failures.
3) The dust in Mars' environment is extremely hazardous - not just due to standard PM / silicosis risks, but also because of hexavalent chromium, arsenic, and enough perchlorates to burn your skin.
lso one of the major reasons for going to Mars is the search for past life (or perhaps even limited current life), there is virtually no chance that anything lives on Venus.
The possibility of life on Mars makes missions to (and especially from) Mars much more expensive. There's still the possibility of finding fossils on Venus, in some of the highland terrae - Venus once used to have Earthlike oceans, and before Earth did at that. But because it's judged to be unlikely to host life today, you don't have to perform such onerous sterilization efforts, both inbound and outbound.
And think about what you're saying. Do you think there's life on Mars today? So are you totally okay mass imports of bacteria hitching rides from Earth, and conversely back from Mars? Because that's an inevitable accompaniment to colonization. If you really think there's life on Mars, you should want to declare it a human-free zone.
Really? Living in a floating garden (so big you can skydive indoors) with transparent walls in a brightly mistscape, a veritable floating over hell, sounds like a boring place?
Don't get me wrong, Mars is not resource-free. For example, it seems to be a good place for large bolide mineral deposits (Sudbury / Norilsk style). But it's not exactly a mineral treasure trove in general, and most of the potential is covered in deep overburden. Plus, each habitat is constrained to the specific location it's in - but not all essential resources will be located in the same place.
I won't repeat what's been written elsewhere in this thread (or is covered extensively in the link), but Venus is an entirely different ballpark when it comes to resources. It's a natural environment for enrichment (and not just simple mineral enrichment, but isotopic as well - deuterium levels are over 2 orders of magnitude higher on Venus than on Earth) A Venus habitat is also infinitely mobile (and quite rapidly at that). Venus has little aeolian overburden and no fluvial overburden (at least not from water). The surface atmosphere is also so dense that you can dredge rather than having to shovel. But some of the most interesting resources aren't on the surface at all; they're precipitated out in various layers of the atmosphere, as Venus's hot, acidic atmosphere boils/erodes a lot of minerals out of the surface rocks.
"Making use of orbital dynamics" for what purpose?
Going elsewhere in the solar system - return trips to Earth, trips to the asteroid belt, to the outer planets, etc. Venus has a much stronger Oberth effect, more frequent launch windows, and can do Earth assists or multiple Earth/Venus assists when outbound, depending on the delta-V requirements. Mars isn't in a very good location from an orbital dynamics perspective. High-dV (fast) earthbound transfers in particular go much faster from Venus than from Mars.
We're not talking about Powerwalls. We're talking Powerpacks. Please at least get your technology right.
* Powerwalls are small, wall mounted devices for homes. Tesla is donating a couple hundred to Puerto Rico.
* Powerpacks are large, cabinet-sized systems for grids. These are what Tesla uses to rebuild / improve grids.
Powerpacks are $250/kWh (not counting the inverter modules; you generally pair multiple powerpack cabinets to individual inverter cabinets, the ratio depending on what sort of ratio of power to storage you want). Obviously they're always going to cost more than individual cells. And obviously, little home units like Powerwalls will cost more per kWh.
63kg of lithium carbonate equivalent, not 63kg of lithium. Historically, lithium carbonate prices are $5-10/kg, although due to the rapid scaleups in battery production taking the slack out of the market, they're currently averaging around $15/kg (aka, under $1k for the aforementioned 63kg-carbonate pack). Seawater lithium carbonate costs are estimated at $20-30/kg.
Note that we're not even considering the supply from recycling at this point.
That's not something that can be catalyzed. That's not to say that there's not terraforming possibilities - there are. But that's not one of them.:)
That said, the sulfuric acid is much more of a resource than a curse, at least for the foreseeable future. It's readily scrubbed and separated. Heating first separates out the water, then decomposes the H2SO4 to H2O + SO3. The SO3 can either be used as a conditioning agent to help nucleate free water vapour for further capture, or heated further over a vanadium oxide catalyst to yield SO2 + 0,5 O2.
It'd actually be easier to establish a colony on Venus if there was more of it, not less.
Slashdot Mirror
How come we only apply this to Musk? How long have we been hearing about the "imminent" Tesla-killers coming from the German automakers? I remember an article in the (hugely anti-Tesla) Daily Kanban in 2015 talking about how Porsche was getting ready to crush Tesla with the super-awesome-stupendulous Mission-E (along with a bunch of other no-show EVs), because the concept looks so double-plus awesome! Guess what? It's 2017 and it's still two years off. But wait, we finally got some spy shots of them finally testing - and guess what? After facing design reality, the concept now looks like nothing more than a glorified Panamera. Just wait for the disappointing stat/price point/production figures!
Anyone who has followed the history of concept cars over the years knew damned well that this was going to happen, because it always does. Concept cars are art pieces, not things that are actually practical from aero / production / functionality designpoints. But far too many people have trouble conceiving of anything but that the only reason Tesla is succeeding is that the big automakers have been "keeping their powder dry" all this time, can crush Tesla at any point in time, and are just about to do so, any day now. The fact that they aren't and can't is inconceivable to them.
(In case any is curious as to why they can't... link)
Beat me to it. Looks like it's going to be done well ahead of schedule. But hey, facts havenever stopped anyone before when trying to find reasons to bash Musk.
Facts like the fact that Musk never said he had approval from New York City - that he actually said, "verbal govt approval". Which he did - the government he was speaking of was the federal government (DOT, asked about it: "We have had promising conversations to date, are committed to transformative infrastructure projects, and believe our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector,""). But hey, let's leave that part out and pretend that Musk was just making things up.
Facts like, for example, that Model 3's production schedule had been moved forward to July (was originally supposed to start at the end of this year), with Musk stating at the time that the reason for the July deadline was because he knew some suppliers would inevitably fail to meet their deadline and he had to have a way to hold their feet to the fire with real penalties for failing to deliver. Of course, they actually did make the July deadline.
The Wall Street Journal will gripe about the fact that there are missing features in the (over-the-air-upgraded) software stack and that there's some manual labour / part changes in manufacture because automated assembly line isn't yet complete. Really, WSJ? Gee we all thought that the line was fully ready to produce tens of thousands of vehicles per month, but the schedule was only to produce a couple hundred for giggles. And of course, every Tesla short will whine about how there are customers acting as "beta", ignoring the fact that none of the above comes as any surprise to anyone with a deposit, particularly the earliest ones, and that they're thrilled to have the chance to get their vehicles early. I know one who, after having the car for just two weeks, already put down a deposit on a second one.
But hey, I guess someone has to try to recoup some of their losses in their ill-advised short position in TSLA.
Citizens in the Gulf Coast are waking up powerless.... is this somehow different than on any other day?
Excepting one major case where the airship was poorly designed and only half reinforced, nothing from the weather itself. Running into the ground on the other hand....
Does it need to be mentioned that there is no ground to run into in Venus's middle cloud layer ~54km over the surface?
The "recommended videos" algorithm on YouTube is terrible; it's not a user's fault what comes up there. You watch a single news clip which mentions Trump in its title, and for the next week you'll be flooded with recommendations from channels with names like "RealTruthNews" and titles like "DONALD TRUMP is a LIZARD who is now ROUNDING UP DISSIDENTS!" Every time I watch something random, if I even want to try to minimize the amount of terrible garbage that shows up on the front page, I have to spend the next 5-10 minutes clicking to block channels. And for some reason it seems to forget the blocks over time, too. It's a bloody awful algorithm.
Neural nets, as they exist today, are nowhere near being able to "explain their thought processes". You can log what you fed to them, but you have no clue why they made the decision that they did, and there's no realistic way to trace it back. They're black boxes.
Yes, humans can see through fog; that's the reason that fog lights exist.
LIDAR is much more sensitive to obstruction by weather than human vision is.
Self-driving systems are not "generalized AI"; they don't learn from the ground up. You might incorporate neural nets in specific image recognition tasks, but in general, self-driving algorithms will only ever do precisely what you tell them to do - and that's for good reason. Not just because of the limited capabilities of today's neural nets, but also the simple fact that if something goes wrong, you want to be able to say "Here's what went wrong" rather than "Oh, dang, this black box decided to drive this person off a cliff for some inexplicable reason. Oh well..."
According to Google (who's a big LIDAR proponent), it's still $7,5k per unit. It still messes up your aerodynamics and looks dorky. It still can't see in adverse weather conditions, meaning you have to have developed an optical / radar based world-modeling system anyway. And you have to have image processing regardless to read signs, road lines, identify objects, see brake lights, and so forth.
There's real hope for further improvements in LIDAR and its variants in the future, however. We'll see where it goes.
Also, as to answer the question of how humans do it with "two cameras": logic. We don't have "stitching errors" in how we build up a model of the world around us from visual data because our brain constantly processes everything around us through the prism of "does that make sense?" But whether something "makes sense" or not is an AI-hard problem.
Building up 3d models with photogrammetry is an inherently error-prone process because a computer doesn't know if something makes sense. The approach is "Oh hey, these patterns from the left and right camera matched up - there's an object there at X distance based on how far the patterns had to be shifted to align". But what if the patterns happen to be different things that just happened to match up in patterning? Or what if, due to lighting / texturing / obstruction / material issues, the same thing didn't look exactly the same from different angles? Uncovering these problems is, as mentioned, AI-hard. I doubt anyone is even trying at this point; there's enough to work on just to get things to follow road lines correctly and not go chasing old tire tracks or poorly erased construction lines.
Ranging systems like LIDAR help let you just simply ignore the issue by telling you flat out, "I sent out a beam in this precise direction and got a reflection in precisely this length of time." But LIDAR has a number of problems, as described above.
But to clarify the difference:
LIDAR: Formerly about $75k, now about $7,5k per unit, and requires a bubble dome on top of the vehicle. GM and Waymo use it, Tesla doesn't. In addition to looking weird and adding drag, the price is killer if you want to include something on every vehicle. Beyond this, LIDAR doesn't work in fog, heavy rain, snow, and other conditions that humans can drive in - meaning that you'd have to either prevent trips during these conditions, require humans to drive during them, find workarounds (not easy), or rely instead on other sensors. And you still need to understand the world around you visually - LIDAR will tell you that "something" is there, but it can't read signs, see road markings, see brake lights, tell if that thing in the road is a person or a paper bag, etc.
Tesla, for these reasons, ruled out LIDAR. They just simply use the "other sensors" - 1x radar, many cameras, many ultrasonic sensors - all the time. This way, all of their sensors can be put in all of their vehicles, and do double duty for both self driving and standard safety features (autobraking, etc), depending on what options the buyer has paid for. This however comes at a penality: when LIDAR works, it works really well. Photogrammetry with cameras is prone to stitching errors, and radar, while being able to see some things that humans can't, sees the world in very strange ways (for example, a piece of plywood is transparent, but an aluminum can glows like it's on fire). It's a much more challenging task if you leave LIDAR out of the loop. But, it gives you a more saleable product.
In the end, I expect a convergence to take hold. An interesting new technology for example is time-of-flight cameras - they function as normal cameras, but also can read the length of time it takes for a laser pulse to return on every pixel they record. So no dome, just your normal camera coverage and a few cheap, fixed lasers - in mass production, it might not cost much more than cameras alone. In such a case, I'd expect the LIDAR groups to simply replace their conventional LIDAR datastream with the time-of-flight datastreams, while I'd expect the non-LIDAR groups to replace their photogrammetry-and-radar built 3d models with time-of-flight 3d models. But both sides will still need image processing, so it's important to work on maturing that technology today.
That said, let me reiterate that I'm a pessimist regardless of what tech you use. There's just so much nuance in driving in hazardous conditions - understanding when, where and how much you have to slow down, what's safe to drive on and what's not, what things to the side of the road are hazardous and what aren't, when you should break rules (such as driving in the middle of the road when conditions are dangerous but oncoming traffic is rare), what are the consequences of a mistake in one location vs. another, etc, etc. On my gravel road, there's a canyon to one side with no guardrail, and varying amounts of ice and potholes in different places. You better well know how your traction is going to fare as you move across the potholes (vibrating the car and making it lose traction) or icing if you don't want to end up in an unrecoverable slide into a ravine.
Just to pick a random example among countless things that you have to take into account: how long do you think before any self-driving systems will have "sheep recognizing algorithms"? Because where I live, there's sheep. Group of sheep on one side of the road: probably safe. Group of sheep on both sides of the road: not as safe, but probably safe. Lamb on one side, ewe on the other? Very dangerous - the lamb will invariably run to its mother as you approach. Where's the ewe-lamb-running algorithm?
Nuclear-powered backhoes aren't exactly a dime a dozen, nor is hard-rock excavation easy to begin with. And if you're in a cave, you're also not getting light. And of course you're not in a cave when you're doing any work outside.
Venus's atmosphere is sufficient to shield humans against even major solar radiation events, even though it lacks an intrinsic magnetic field (only a weak induced one).
Unfortunately, not as much as the common conception; it's more like a bad smog / vog. Sulfuric acid is the most valuable resource to a Venus colony, being a readily scrubbed compound that represents the primary source of water.
** Ed: "veritable heaven floating over hell" . Sigh....
Superior, really, in most regards.
You've literally described a colony. And life on Earth (minus the "floating" part). Self-sustaining societies using local resources is the goal.
Digging and boring is work, something you want to avoid having to do as much as possible. On Venus you can dredge the surface and get resources straight from the air. Mind you, you can also dig and bore - NASA has worked on drilling on Venus, and of course, explosives work everywhere - but that's activity that you don't want to have to do if you don't need to. And again, building / sustaining is the whole point of "using resources".
Ground is a risk. If you don't believe so, look at the number of probes that have failed on landing for a wide range of reasons. On Venus, your "landing" ellipse is massive.
1) Acid mists are, as have been mentioned many times, rather sparse on Venus - not even that much more concentrated than OSHA workplace standards. It would actually be easier if they were more concentrated.
2) Mars's atmosphere is hardly extant. A Venus habitat has only a bare minimum overpressure (~500 Pa). A Mars habitat has a 50-100 kPa overpressure. The latter is much more at risk in the event of failures.
3) The dust in Mars' environment is extremely hazardous - not just due to standard PM / silicosis risks, but also because of hexavalent chromium, arsenic, and enough perchlorates to burn your skin.
The possibility of life on Mars makes missions to (and especially from) Mars much more expensive. There's still the possibility of finding fossils on Venus, in some of the highland terrae - Venus once used to have Earthlike oceans, and before Earth did at that. But because it's judged to be unlikely to host life today, you don't have to perform such onerous sterilization efforts, both inbound and outbound.
And think about what you're saying. Do you think there's life on Mars today? So are you totally okay mass imports of bacteria hitching rides from Earth, and conversely back from Mars? Because that's an inevitable accompaniment to colonization. If you really think there's life on Mars, you should want to declare it a human-free zone.
Really? Living in a floating garden (so big you can skydive indoors) with transparent walls in a brightly mistscape, a veritable floating over hell, sounds like a boring place?
Don't get me wrong, Mars is not resource-free. For example, it seems to be a good place for large bolide mineral deposits (Sudbury / Norilsk style). But it's not exactly a mineral treasure trove in general, and most of the potential is covered in deep overburden. Plus, each habitat is constrained to the specific location it's in - but not all essential resources will be located in the same place.
I won't repeat what's been written elsewhere in this thread (or is covered extensively in the link), but Venus is an entirely different ballpark when it comes to resources. It's a natural environment for enrichment (and not just simple mineral enrichment, but isotopic as well - deuterium levels are over 2 orders of magnitude higher on Venus than on Earth) A Venus habitat is also infinitely mobile (and quite rapidly at that). Venus has little aeolian overburden and no fluvial overburden (at least not from water). The surface atmosphere is also so dense that you can dredge rather than having to shovel. But some of the most interesting resources aren't on the surface at all; they're precipitated out in various layers of the atmosphere, as Venus's hot, acidic atmosphere boils/erodes a lot of minerals out of the surface rocks.
Going elsewhere in the solar system - return trips to Earth, trips to the asteroid belt, to the outer planets, etc. Venus has a much stronger Oberth effect, more frequent launch windows, and can do Earth assists or multiple Earth/Venus assists when outbound, depending on the delta-V requirements. Mars isn't in a very good location from an orbital dynamics perspective. High-dV (fast) earthbound transfers in particular go much faster from Venus than from Mars.
Yes, like all of the solar panels that blew away at the San Fermín plant? Oh wait...
Solar plants, like all plants, survive what you engineer them to survive.
No, that pretty much matches up Tesla owners' experience in real-world driving.
We're not talking about Powerwalls. We're talking Powerpacks. Please at least get your technology right.
* Powerwalls are small, wall mounted devices for homes. Tesla is donating a couple hundred to Puerto Rico.
* Powerpacks are large, cabinet-sized systems for grids. These are what Tesla uses to rebuild / improve grids.
Powerpacks are $250/kWh (not counting the inverter modules; you generally pair multiple powerpack cabinets to individual inverter cabinets, the ratio depending on what sort of ratio of power to storage you want). Obviously they're always going to cost more than individual cells. And obviously, little home units like Powerwalls will cost more per kWh.
63kg of lithium carbonate equivalent, not 63kg of lithium. Historically, lithium carbonate prices are $5-10/kg, although due to the rapid scaleups in battery production taking the slack out of the market, they're currently averaging around $15/kg (aka, under $1k for the aforementioned 63kg-carbonate pack). Seawater lithium carbonate costs are estimated at $20-30/kg.
Note that we're not even considering the supply from recycling at this point.
Ed: deuterium concentration. I shuold relly strat porfraednig.
That's not something that can be catalyzed. That's not to say that there's not terraforming possibilities - there are. But that's not one of them. :)
That said, the sulfuric acid is much more of a resource than a curse, at least for the foreseeable future. It's readily scrubbed and separated. Heating first separates out the water, then decomposes the H2SO4 to H2O + SO3. The SO3 can either be used as a conditioning agent to help nucleate free water vapour for further capture, or heated further over a vanadium oxide catalyst to yield SO2 + 0,5 O2.
It'd actually be easier to establish a colony on Venus if there was more of it, not less.
I probably need to add: those temperature isolines are in kelvins (you seem to be working in Fahrenheit).
273,15K = 0C = 32F.
+10K = +10C = +18F.
Wait a minute... are you the same AC who wrote:
"and cloud city, deals with 800 degrees and sulphuric acid atmosphere how????
I'm thinking you don't realize that both pressure and temperature decline with altitude. So, here you go. Does that help clear things up?