Since when has Sony cared about bad reviews? Even disappointed moviegoers are putting money in Sony's pockets.

Indeed, though antagonizing your opponents like that probably isn't going to help the cause.

The truth is that pretty much everyone inclined to running gun battles probably already has guns that they carry concealed - law be damned. Or signed up for a shiny blue shield that provides near-immunity from the law. Laws against concealed carry serve primarily to make sure that honest citizens make easy victims.

I absolutely agree, and strongly support human exploration in situations where those arms can actually leave their protective tin can to interact with the environment. But hands aren't much good for working with gasses, or in environments that would kill even a man in the best protective suit we can make that would still allow mobility. Deep-sea exploration gets a bit of a pass in my mind simply because it's so difficult communicating through large distances of water with any kind of bandwidth, and tethers introduce all sorts of issues of their own.

Sure, it's an expensive toy - far more than *I* would be willing to pay certainly - but it squirts plastic out of a nozzle to make weak, crude plastic "toys". Arguably useful, especially when you're $4k/pound away from the nearest general store, but not remotely in the same league as the professional-grade printers working in laser-cured resin, sintered titanium, high temperature ceramics, etc.

Sadly there are a lot of people who carry firearms because they believe that they need protection from some remote threat in civilized society and probably think they will be a John Wayne style hero. There are also individuals like myself who while having a permit to carry only does so only in remote areas where there is a real danger from wild animals. Since I can't have a loaded firearm if I am walking down a dirt road out there unless I have a permit to carry I decided to get one as I have had run-ins on the road. Over the years I have been 4 feet from a black bear, been stalked by wolves, have seen a mother bear and cubs at a distance of about 50 meters, saw a cougar at about 150 meters and just this year had a cougar walk right up to the tree my deer stand while I was in it.

*Lots* of stuff being done in space that couldn't plausibly be done by robots, micro-g research can't be done on Earth. Stuck in a tin can floating above Venus though, you've basically got all the disadvantages of being on Earth, and none of the advantages.

Mars and the Moon both have potential to host self-sustaining Earth colonies (especially Mars) by applying existing technology, so there's plenty of potential there, if probably not as short-term lucrative as the rape-pillage-and-plunder that has characterized most modern colonization efforts.

I'm not arguing against exploring Venus, it's just that all the usual specious arguments against human exploration of space actually *apply* there. You can't survive on the surface, no matter what protection you have. You can't even stick your hand out the window of your airship without it starting to dissolve. So long as humans are restricted to living within a sealed system isolated from the surrounding environment the only possible benefit of them being there at all are the advantages of a shorter distance - mainly time and energy costs for transferring signals and samples. And compared to the difficulties in creating a lighter-than-air station in a toxic, corrosive atmosphere, just boosting the samples to an orbital station built on tried-and-true technology is probably going to be a lot safer, easier, and cheaper. Someday our technology will no doubt enable us to walk around on the surface and perform real science and exploration in person - but until then there's nothing to be accomplished by getting humans any closer than orbit.

As for visiting the farthest reaches on Earth in person - that's always been mostly a vanity project. Not that there's anything wrong with that, provided you're footing the bill yourself, but after the initial survey the missions with serious funding have pretty much all had a clear idea of what they hoped to accomplish beforehand.

As I recall the toy-grade plastic-extruding 3D printer recently sent to the ISS is working just fine, despite the 0g. As was expected - the things were tested in all orientations, including upside down, here on Earth. If it works fine even when gravity is working against you, it will probably continue to work fine when gravity is "ignoring" you.

Basically the bonding forces between layers are strong enough that, even when the top layer is still liquid, that gravity doesn't play much of a roll. It's not like we're talking about ornamental water fountains here - the plastic is liquified, forced through an extrusion nozzle, and travels *maybe* 1mm before contacting a cool surface and rapidly solidifying again.

And then there's things like the arc-welding robot arm, which can act as a 3D printer capable of drawing free-standing 3D lines connected to a surface at only one end. I seriously doubt it would have any problems in freefall either.

Well, if you're flying to Venus presumably you're doing so via a big honking rocket. And presumably you plan to ride the same rocket home again. Maybe even a Falcon 9, if you weren't taking too much with you.

Not sure just how big the balloon would have to be, but lets see... Falcon 9 v1.1 takeoff mass: ~500 tonnes. Density of CO2 at STP: ~2g/L
500,000 kg / (0.002kg/L) = 250,000,000 L = 250,000m^3, or about 25% larger than the Hindenburg (assuming lift-gas density is negligible).

Umm, air pressure is only an issue if you open the door - which you wouldn't want to do on Venus anyway, unless you want to die of carbon dioxide poisioning.

Microgravity is a legitimate issue, but centripetal force can overcome that, and a rotating "tethered dumbbell" station is well within the limits of current material science.

Heat and cold extremes are only an issue if you can't average them out effectively, by, say having a thermally conductive hull. I recall no major issues on that front from the ISS, though the problem would admittedly grow worse as you get closer to the sun. Rotating would also go a long way to solving that problem as well.

Meanwhile the atmosphere offers plenty of CO2 and some nitrogen, but no hydrogen aside from the paltry amount in the 25ppm water vapor, and extracting that in the presence of the 150ppm sulfur dioxide is likely going to be a challenge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

And as far as "cloud mining" and gathering samples of potential microbial life are concerned, what's wrong with simply dropping a skyhook from your orbital station? It's not like you're trying to support the growth of an offworld colony, there's *way* more hospitable places in the solar system to do that. In fact most any large carbonaceous asteroid would likely qualify.

How do you figure we could get water? There's less than 25ppm water in Venus's atmosphere, versus 150ppm sulfur dioxide. Nor are there any other hydrogen-containing molecules from which it could be synthesized. Air could at least be be made from CO2 and nitrogen, with enough energy.

Also, anything that's flying below the clouds is down in that acidic atmosphere that has wreaked havoc with everything we've sent so far. Could be problematic.

Meanwhile on Mars we have:
- Free solar energy (less efficient than than on Earth, much less Venus, but still)
- 0.4 g. (Is 1g a magic number for some reason? Maybe, but so far all we know is weightlessness causes problems, a lot of which would probably be resolved by *any* significant gravity.)
- 24.7 hour days (within the narrow range that humans can be entrained to)
- radiation shielding (a few meters of sand is WAY more effective than some air and magnetic fields
- An atmosphere almost identical to Venus's except in density (and the absence of the caustic sulfur dioxide)
- fresh water in practically unlimited quantities in the ice caps, and possibly extractable from the soil as well
- The fact that with CO2, water, and nitrogen you can grow plants to produce air, food, and all manner of cellulose-based construction materials.
- the aforementioned sand - good for lots of things beyond radiation shielding, especially if we can develop a binding agent from local resources.
- solid ground to build upon, provide for recreational activities, and provide all manner of hands-on research opportunities.

Sure, it's cold - but heat is cheap. Especially if we took a nuclear reactor along instead of solar panels - a 25-50MWe modular reactor could be lifted to orbit by a single Falcon Heavy, would provide more electricity than a comparable mass of solar panels (even with current mass-rich designs), and would generate a comparable amount of heat as well, making it a much better investment.

Plus it's really only the ground that's cold - insulate the bottom of your boots and the rest of you is already essentially in a budget vacuum thermos. Shedding heat will likely be a bigger challenge than keeping warm, and thanks to that cold, cold ground that shouldn't prove too difficult.

Well, it's mostly CO2 (96.5%), some nitrogen (3.5%), and a lot of trace stuff - sulfur dioxide at 150ppm, Argon at ~75ppm, and some water, carbon monoxide, helium, and neon at 25ppm each.

So... not that much on it's own other than oxygen, unless you could cost-effectively extract the water. But import hydrogen and you've got the building blocks for food, cellulose-based building materials, and methane and other hydrocarbons (aka rocket fuel). Could make a good refueling depot if we were doing other projects in the inner system (building solar collection arrays?), but not much to recommend it as a colony destination.

>Basically, we're more versatile and agile.

I agree, and that's a great reason to send humans to the Moon, Mars, etc, where they can do interesting and adaptable things On Venus though pretty much everything would have to be suspended by balloon in the 200+mph winds of the upper atmosphere. Agility is of no benefit when you are restrained within a dirigible, and versatility is of limited use when you're basically limited to riding the wind where it takes you while trying desperately to maintain a reasonably constant altitude. How much science can be done on gas samples by humans that can't be done by robots?

Now, if we had surface probes we were controlling, then eliminating the time delay might be useful, but it would still probably be safer and cheaper to simply operate them from an orbital habitat. Then if you want to engage in versatile experimentation on solid samples you can simply boost them into orbit for collection

Actually, from what I can find dirigible is a largely obsolete synonym of the generic "airship", which were originally called dirigible balloons (from the French "dirigible", meaning steerable or navigable). An (admittedly brief) google search didn't find any cases of dirigible being used specifically for rigid airships.

The distinction you are making is more legitimately between the two sub-types of airships: "blimps" and "rigid airships" (the latter of which are frequently called zeppelins thanks to the fact that large rigid airships were pioneered by the German Zeppelin Company)

Actually, as I recall the upper atmosphere is almost entirely CO2. You'd still likely need some protection from incidental exposure, but nothing like you'd need deeper in the atmosphere where sulfuric acid becomes the dominant component. And the atmospheric probes we've sent suggest that wind turbulence is less than expected (though still extreme) - and that's really the only reason you would care that the ground you couldn't hope to reach anyway is passing at 200+mph.

And I see no reason why rocket launches would be substantially more difficult: just dangle your rocket below a floating "launch platform", start firing the rockets at less than local gravitational acceleration (so it doesn't start to climb), and cut it loose. It can then drop down while maneuvering to a safe distance from the platform, before beginning its climb. It would take a bit more fuel, but is nothing a Falcon 9 couldn't handle - except maybe the dangling part, the superstructure would probably have to be modified to safely support itself in tension as well as compression.

However, I don't see any reason to even consider such a floating habitat unless we discovered something *really* interesting on the planet, or need a fuel depot in the inner system - something that seems unlikely in the next few centuries considering the inhospitably warm nature of the inner solar system, and the lack of anything interesting beyond Venus and Mercury - neither of which seem to offer much of non-scientific interest, at least at our present level of technology. But hey, I guess it's nice to know that there will still be challenging frontiers awaiting us even after the Moon and Mars have thriving colonies of their own.

If there's such a tendency I suspect it's mainly because everything closer to the sun is extremely hostile to human life, and even human artifacts. Cold is easy to overcome, heat is a far more challenging problem. But I think it's probably mostly that you're conflating "outward = away from Earth" with "outward = away from Sun". Who hasn't heard of the various Venus probes?