New Mars Forums

Mexico news kept saying that it found a fallen satellite and I kept trying to correct them, explaining that it was just a shroud from an Ariane rocket launch, but of course, they kept repeating it over and over.

If you're floating in the clouds, you have real gravity.   That's the only advantage really to floating in the Venusian atmosphere.    Well, easy access to oxygen if you need more I suppose.

I also think sky hooks are silly.   They'd have to be fricken enormous and then the "hooking" and "unhooking" part would be dicey as hell.  If they ever fell to Earth, it would be cataclysmic and you'd still have to keep boosting the thing which would suck up huge amounts of offsetting energy.   I don't even know why they bother to research things things except that I would too if government gave me $millions to do it.

Space elevators are only slightly less fanciful, though you'd have to come up with a material that has essentially infinite tensile strength.  And even if you could, something in orbit is going to hit it one day, or a plane and all hell would break loose.

Far less fanciful perhaps (but still insanely expensive) would be a rail gun, perhaps built up the side of a very tall mountain, that could accelerate payloads to extreme speeds and then spit it out 4-6 miles above sea level where the air is a bit thinner.   

Keep in mind that, while we could float 50km above the surface in theory at be at 14PSI, the winds are faster than a Cat 5 hurricane.  So, that would potentially suck.  And it would be hard to stay where you wanted even if the winds were sufficiently static in direction. 

And then there's the potential problem of getting into space.  It would take about as much energy to get from 50km into orbit on Venus as it would to get from sea level to orbit on Earth, because you have to get out of the atmosphere and accelerate to about 15k-20k mph.   And do that without the benefit of a launching site.     In reality, once a balloon goes in, it's not likely coming out, and we can't even use scramjets at Venus, it would have to be rocket powered.

There are plenty of ways to minimize the danger of micrometeorites.   And if you use materials from Phobos, a space station can be as heavy and overbuilt as you want.   Robot labor.

But it won't be until after we're all dead so.......

Fortunately, the Constitution isn't about "what I prefer".  That's what makes it great.

The main issue with crewed missions is the cost, and I don't see any cost/benefit in doing it.   I think manned missions to Mars, Moon, Phobos, Ceres, Callisto, others have a lot  more value, though even then, robots still win the cost/benefit situation.  If we want to do anything with Venus, it's going to take a boatload of robotic drones sequestering carbon and sulphur but even then, what do you do with the O2 and almost no hydrogen?   Without terraforming, Venus might as well be a gas giant.    Except maybe as an orbital water extraction setup.  Dive in, pick up your water, slow transport to  the moon maybe.    Might be a little more efficient than blasting it off Earth.

The futility of sending unConstitutional aid meets the futility of unConstitutionally stopping immigration.

There's absolutely no reason to put people into the danger of a Venusian atmosphere.   Not sure why they would want to do that.  It's a good job for probes and balloons.  You wouldn't be able to see anything or do anything.

Nope.  The Feds were only ever concerned with citizenship rules, never immigration, until we decided the Chinese were strange and hard working.   Then Democrats made a special racist law against them.    The Founders believed delayed citizenship and voting was the only proper, ethical balance against too many immigrants fleeing their shit countries.  And besides, no State would ever give that level of sovereignty to a distant government, when they had just fought a war against stupid immigration laws from the King.   See Declaration of Independence.

I keep going back to the idea that any equipment for processing fuel should be built into unmanned BFS units that could set down, unload mining robots and water tankers that would go out, retrieve water, bring it back and then the ship would fill its internal tanks with methane and O2.    If the equipment could be made small enough, it could and should be standard issue on all of the BFS units so that they could go most anywhere in the solar system and make fuel to come back.  Ceres.  A trip Europa and back, just drop a straw with a heated tip.   On to Titan and Saturn's rings for some methane and/or H2, and O2.  Triton.  Pluto.  But even if not, they could be the processing and storage facility for future manned missions.

Your view of the Constitution is literal "creationism".   It's Flat Earth crap.   Mob rules.    Right out of the 1925 Nazi platform.    I'll stick with the Republican one from 1864 when people were more evolved -

8. Resolved, That foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.

Whereas this seems to suit you more -

4. Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.

5. Those who are not citizens must live in Germany as foreigners and must be subject to the law of aliens.

6. The right to choose the government and determine the laws of the State shall belong only to citizens. We therefore demand that no public office, of whatever nature, whether in the central government, the province, or the municipality, shall be held by anyone who is not a citizen.

We wage war against the corrupt parliamentary administration whereby men are appointed to posts by favor of the party without regard to character and fitness.

7. We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood. If it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens (non-citizens) must be expelled from the Reich.

8. Any further immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who have entered Germany since August 2, 1914, shall be compelled to leave the Reich immediately.

Again, only the Constitution makes something constitutional or not.  SCOTUS can agree with the Constitution or disagree with it, but it doesn't change what it says.  The 10th Amendment was clear then, it is clear now.     

You simply believe in mob rules, like any typical statist.   Your thinking is boring, trite and commonplace.

Saying something has been allowed by SCOTUS isn't the same as it being constitutional.    You guys don't logic well.    If a priest says it's okay to murder someone, that doesn't override the 10 Commandments.  Sheesh.