Venus's middle cloud layer is the most Earthlike place in the solar system apart from Earth**, is energy-abundant, has favourable orbital dynamics, easy entry, and the simple act of storing electricity for the night via reversible fuel cells - if plumbed in a cascade - can enrich deuterium (2 1/2 orders of magnitude more abundant on Venus), a natural export commodity, if launch costs are sufficiently low. The atmosphere contains CHONP, S, Cl, F, noble gases, and even small amounts of iron. Pretty much everything you need to build a floating habitat, which can be lofted by normal Earth air, aka people can live inside the envelope. Aka, unlike on Mars, where you live in a tiny tin can pressure vessel where any access to the outside tracks in toxic electrostatic dust and you waste away from low gravity, on Venus you'd be in a massive, brightly lit hanging garden, where you could live half a kilometer from a crewmate if they really got on your nerves.
Most Earthlike? Yes. Temperature, pressure, gravity, etc all similar. Natural radiation shielding equivalent to half a dozen meters or so of water over your head. Even storms seem to be of an Earthlike distribution. The "sulfuric acid" is overblown; it's a sparse vog, with visibility of several kilometers; with a face mask, you could probably stand outside in shirtsleeves, feeling an alien wind on your skin, only risking dermatitis if you stayed outside for too long.
Indeed, it'd actually be useful if the sulfuric vog was more common (to be fair, it's still unclear whether precipitation happens, and if so, whether rains or snows; the Vega data is disputed). Why? Because it's your main source of hydrogen. Highly hygroscopic and easily electrostatically attracted, so readily scrubbed through your propulsion system. First releases free water vapour when heated, then decomposes to more water plus SO3, and if you want you can further decompose the SO3 over a vanadium pentoxide catalyst to O2 + SO2, or you can reinject it into the scrubber as a conditioning agent to seed more water vapour. Of course, if precipitation happens, collection possibilities are basically limitless.
The surface is certainly hostile, but even 1960s Soviet technology was landing on it (also, contrary to popular myth, there is no acid at the surface; it's unstable at those temperatures, the sulfur inventory is only SO2 there). But in many ways, the surface is very gentle. Mars eats probes with its hard landings, but one Venera probe outright lost its parachute during descent and still landed intact, as the dense atmosphere slows one's fall. It's been calculated that with the right trajectory, a simple hollow titanium sphere launched from Earth could arrive at Venus, enter, descend and land all intact. Simple thermal inertia (insulation + a phase change material) can keep an object cool for a couple hours; with heat pumps, indefinitely (and yes, heat pumps and power sources for the surface conditions have been designed). Even humans could walk there with insulated hard suits, like atmospheric diving suits. Indeed, some of the first space suits NASA designed for the moon (ultimately ditched for weight reasons, despite the superior mobility performance) were similarly jointed hard-shell suits.
On Venus's surface, a lander or explorer can literally fly, via a compressible metal bellows balloon. Small wings / fins can allow for long glide ratios. Loose surface material can be dredged rather than requiring physical excavation, potentially with the same fan used for propulsion. Reversible ascent back to altitude can be done with phase change balloons - that is, at altitude, a lifting gas condenses and is collected in a valved container, and the craft can descend; at the surface, when one desires to rise, the valve is opened and the gas re-lofts the lander.
On Mars, you're stuck in one location. The problem is that all minerals aren't found in the same spot; different processes concentrate different minerals. And you can't exactly just get on a train to some other spot on the planet; long-distance travel requires rockets, and all their consumables. But on Venus the atmosphere superrotates every several days (rate depending on altitude and latitude), while latitude shifts in a floating habitat or lander can be done with minimal motor requirements. So vast swaths of the planet are available to you. Furthermore, Venus is far more dramatic in terms of natural enrichment processes; wide ranges of minerals are sublimated or eaten out of rocks and then recondensed elsewhere. Temperatures and pressures vary greatly between the highlands and lowlands as well. There even appear to be outright semiconductor frosts on parts of the planet. Lava flows show signs of long cooling times, which promotes fractionalization and pegmatites. Volcanism is common, primarily basaltic but also potentially secondary rhyolitic sources. A variety of unusual flows with no earth analogies (or only rare ones) show signs of existing, including the longest "river" channel in the solar system (Baltis Vallis). While there's no global tectonic activity, there appear to be areas of intense local buckling between microplates. The surface conditions of the planet also appear to have been very different at many times in the past. It's all a perfect setup for having diverse mineral enrichment processes. Yet there's almost no overburden (unlike Mars, which is covered in thick overburden on most of the planet).
As mentioned before, Venus has significantly superior orbital dynamics to Mars, due to the Oberth effect. Venus-Mars transfers are almost as fast and almost as low energy as Earth-Mars transfers. Venus-Earth transits are super-fast, esp. with extra delta-V added. The asteroid belt is, contrary to intuition, much more accessible from Venus than from Mars. Also, gravity assists are much more common around Venus - when we want to launch probes to the outer solar system, we generally start with sending them first inwards toward Venus, then back between Venus and Earth and outwards from there.
From a long term perspective, both Venus and Mars have problems with terraforming, with some things you can do "relatively easy", and some that require megascale engineering on scales best left to fantasy. You can boil off Mars's polar caps, but the amount of CO2 there is still quite limited, and there's just not that much nitrogen inventory on the planet (it's been lost to space), which also matters to plant cultivation. You could probably engineer active radiation shielding from orbit, maybe direct more light to the surface, but you can't increase the gravity. Etc.
With Venus, one of the earliest ideas for terraforming it was from Carl Sagan, before the planet was known well; he proposed seeding it with engineered bacteria to convert CO2 to graphite and release oxygen. He later rejected his idea, on the grounds that a high temperature surface of graphite and oxygen would be a bomb. Later studies showed that the timescales for said conversion would be tens of thousands to millions of years. But in a way, that is actually a savior to his idea, in that Venus's rocks contain unoxidized minerals. In analogy to the Great Oxygen Catastrophe on Earth that created our banded iron formations, slowly exposed to oxygen, Venus's rocks would weather and sequester the oxygen and deposited carbon. Hot, high-pressure high-oxygen conditions would never have a chance to exist.
Various faster methods have been proposed. A common one is that of the soletta, a thin orbital sunshade. Another is building an "alternative surface", aka propagating floating colonies to the point that they are the new surface - and indeed, below that surface, they could exclude sunlight to the below atmosphere. Regardless of the method, the cooler the atmosphere gets, the lower its pressure gets, to the point that you can start outright precipitating out the atmosphere out as icecaps.
Just like Mars will never have high gravity and probably never much nitrogen, Venus would probably never be fully Earthlike. It would have enough nitrogen that, barring loss to weathering, people would have a constant mild nitrogen narcosis, like always being ever so slightly tipsy. It would remain a desert planet, barring massive influxes of ice (which present their own challenges and problems), or of hydrogen (pre-cooling). But then again, the very concept of terraforming anything has always required one to put on thick rose-coloured glasses
I don't say all this to diss on Mars. But our obsession with "surface conditions" has led us to ignore the fact that if you're going to the extremes of engineering an off-world habitat, having it be airborne is not that radical of an additional ask, esp. on a planet with such a big "fluffy" atmosphere as Venus. If Venus's atmosphere stopped at its Earthlike middle cloud layer, if there was a surface there, nobody would be talking about long-term habitation on Mars - the focus would have been entirely Venus. But we can still have habitats there. The habitat can, in whole or part, even potentially be its own reentry vehicle (ballute reentry), and certainly at least inflate and descend as a ballute (with a small supply of Earth-provided helium as a temporary lifting gas until an Earthlike atmosphere can be produced). Unlike with Mars entry, you're never going to be "off course", or "crash into something" because you got the location or altitude wrong.
(Getting back to orbit is certainly challenging from Venus - all that gravity that's good for your body has its downsides - but the TL/DR is, hybrid and/or air-augmented nuclear thermal rockets look by far to be the best option. Far less hydrogen needed than chemical rockets, far lighter relative to their deliverable payload, only a single stage needed, and in some designs have the ability to hover without consuming fuel. This is, of course, of great benefit for docking with a habitat, avoiding the need for descending rocket stages to deploy balloons and then to dock those to the habitat. The hydrogen and mass budgets involved are totally viable)
Titan's atmosphere is rather calm; not an issue. At the surface, the winds measured by Huygens were 0,3 m/s.
You actually can use solar power in extreme environments - even Venus's surface has been shown to be compatible with certain types solar, though you certainly get very poor power density. Dragonfly, as noted above, uses an RTG.
Planetary scientists frequently refer to moons that are large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium as planets in the literature. Examples, just from a quick search:
"Locally enhanced precipitation organized by planetary-scale waves on Titan"
"3.3. Relevance to Other Planets" (section on Titan)
"Superrotation in Planetary Atmospheres" (article covers Titan alongside three other planets)
"All planets with substantial atmospheres (e.g., Earth, Venus, Mars, and Titan) have ionospheres which expand above the exobase"
"Clouds on Titan result from the condensation of methane and ethane and, as on other planets, are primarily structured by circulation of the atmosphere"
"... of the planet. However, rather than being scarred by volcanic features, Titan's surface is largely shaped..."
"Spectrophotometry of the Jovian Planets and Titan at 300- to 1000-nm Wavelength: The Methane Spectrum" (okay, it's mainly referring to the Jovian satellites as planets, but same point)
"Superrotation indices for Solar System and extrasolar atmospheres" - contains a table whose first column is "Planet", and has Titan in the list, alongside other planets
Etc. This is not to be confused with the phrase "minor planet", which is used for asteroids, etc. In general there's a big distinction in how commonly you see the large moons in hydrostatic equilibrium referred to as "planets" and with "planetary" adjectives, vs. smaller bodies not in hydrostatic equilibrium.
Why?
NASA's obsession with Mars is weird, and it consumes the lion's share of their planetary exploration budget. We know vastly more about Mars than we know of everywhere else except Earth.
This news here is bittersweet for me. I *love* Titan - it and Venus are my two favourite worlds for further exploration, and dragonfly is a superb way to explore Titan. But there's some sadness in the fact that they're launching it to an equatorial site, so we don't get to see the fascinating hydrocarbon seas and the terrain sculpted by them near the poles. I REALLY wish they were going to the north pole instead
At least if it lasts for that long it'll have done a full transition between wet and dry cycles, which should last ~15 years. So maybe surface liquids will be common at certain points, rare in others.
Those costs sound quite high. Level 2 chargers are around $400 retail, and if Amazon bought 17,000 of them they presumably negotiated a much lower price, and 240 40 amp lines are routine. Typical delivery van routes are on average around 125 miles, which means that they could easily charge overnight (8 hours) on a 32 amp charger (e.g. a 40 amp circuit). Compared to industrial power usage, e.g. for a warehouse full of people, with lighting, HVAC, and industrial equipment to power, that's not a lot to ask for. And keep in mind that industrial power costs on average less than half as much as residential power. And by definition EV charging is time-shifted, so they can charge at off-peak times when the costs are lowest, which has the interest effect of not only saving Amazon money, but by driving the base load up and reducing the need for peaker plants, making electricity cost less for _everyone_.
And if you're adding up costs, add up the savings. EVs on average cost half as much to maintain, and a quarter as much per mile to fuel, as gas or diesel trucks. I suspect that the savings rapidly offset the costs of installing cheap AC chargers and powering them, heck, the savings when I've looked at it for fleets offset the purchase price of the trucks surprisingly quickly, maintenance and fuel for large fleets really adds up! .
Where did they get the idea that "Our societies have not previously tolerated spaces that are beyond the reach of law enforcement, where criminals can communicate safely"? One-time pads have been completely secure since they were invented in 1882. And, of course, people have always been able to go somewhere isolated and talk with each other face-to-face without any police around. The idea that police have a right to monitor all communications between anyone anywhere isn't reality-based. Are they going to require criminals to record all private conversations just in case police want to listen in?
And no matter what the police demand, criminals could just use end-to-end secure communications anyway, because there are many end-to-end encryption systems already, and nothing the police demand will change that, once software exists, it'll continue to exist. Heck, PGP exists, so criminals could just use that, and ignore whatever the police do to destroy global security, and the criminals would still be secure from the police, it'd just screw things up for everyone else using the insecure communications channels the police prefer, so they can destroy secure global commerce, but not impede the criminals at all.
For example, Biden's justice department manufacturing novel legal theories [nytimes.com] to imprison non-violent political protesters...
Unlike Farty Don, who merely wants to shoot them.
By the way, I've participated in a couple of studies about what it would take to replace Microsoft on both desktops and back office situations. There's a lot of costs, even if you use low cost/free Open Source products. Those include conversion from the MS product to the replacement, qualification/testing to make sure the replacement isn't worse than what you're replacing, engineering costs for designing and implementing the solution including the transition, retraining for both end users, security infrastructure/cyber staffs, systems administrators, etc.
The starting point is to replace Active Directory. It can be done, but it's Not Easy.
Gates is long gone from Microsoft. He set the corporate culture of "let the users debug our software", but the current security problems at Microsoft can't be blamed on Gates (or Ballmer.)
Me, I blame Congress for not passing legislation to make -all software vendors- legally liable for flaws in their products, including security holes. If you want secure software, you'll have to pay for it, and make the companies pay for the consequences of their failures.
No mod points for me today. Someone please mod parent up as (VERY) Insightful.
Don't trust a company with "spin" in their name.
Another lesson that is related to the above: cheapest in terms of currency (e.g., sticker price) is not necessarily (and is almost never in reality) the cheapest overall.
There are so many "hidden" costs that aren't reflected in the low currency price of many goods.
I mean consider all the "free" internet services... which cost us privacy and advertising bombardment...
Certain topics do not lend themselves very well to the scientific method.
It's kind of hard to set up 100 universes, say, and run them through a few billion years. You can't do the experiment part.
Sometimes a hypothesis has potentially observable implications, even if a mad scientist can't reproduce everything in their lab.
I think it has been decades since cosmologists believed the universe is expanding at a constant rate.
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