There is evidence that girls do want to enter CS but are being prevented. For example, the higher proportion of women in CS 20 years ago. When asked why they dropped out of CS courses they give us very specific reasons other than lack of interest.
This has all been covered before in great detail, just google it.
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)
If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.
How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.
Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.
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.
g++ supports it with __restrict__. And if you're writing high performance code but not having support for the features of modern compilers, you're an idiot. In appropriate situations, the performance difference for using restrict or not is huge. Array-heavy tasks like image processing often get a 2-fold or more benefit with using restrict. There's very few places in the coding word where a single keyword can raise your performance that much.
And examples of these which could plausibly be on Titan are....?
There's not much in nature that's that light.
So you think massive yachts, ridiculous-priced art/jewelry purchases, palatial estates, gold-plated toilets and the like are a better use of money?
Trust me, I'd have a LOT more fun with a giant rocket than I would with a gold toilet.
I'll begin by stating that I I don't support such a mission, as I prefer robotic exploration. But this proposal isn't as extreme as it may sound - it's probably a heck of a lot easier than landing on a planet and taking off. It's only 640 m/s from earth escape to Venus (3/5ths that of Mars). Transit time is less and launch windows a lot more frequent. Venus offers very easy aerocapture. You don't have to deal with the randomness of the surface - your "landing" is a lot more forgiving. Your habitat is probably simpler, not having to deal with a surface (although there's a few potential complications that need to be studied, such as storms, and I don know the radiation level at the desired altitude). Keeping it aloft is easy - even normal earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. Solar energy arriving at Venus is double that of Earth. Nearly earth's gravity eliminates a lot of the uncertanties about skeletal and muscular wasting.
One of the neat things is that a person could potentially step outside without any sort of special suit, just an oxygen mask. It's a "maybe", though, as there's a few complicating factors. It's 37C (100F) at the same sort of heights that it's about 600mb; for US analogies, it's Phoenix temperatures at Mount Whitney air pressures (lower or higher for both, depending on your exact altitude - you can choose). So it's not a perfect match - but probably tolerable. But there's two potential complicating gases: SO2/sulfuric acid and carbon monoxide. Breathing them is right out, but even long-term (hours at a time) skin exposure might be problematic at the given concentrations; it's not certain whether at these altitudes they'd be prohibitive. They would however make eye protection a must at the very least, the eyes are more sensitive to both CO and SO2 than the skin.
Manned or not, the main advantage of a Venus blimp would be the lower altitude it would provide to scientific equipment versus satellites. So you'll get a lot more information on the atmosphere, which could help answer questions about Venus's evolution (and how other worlds in other systems might be). You'll get higher resolution radar imaging of the surface. You simplify to some extent sample return missions from the surface, as each sample collection doesn't have to be a self contained return mission. Etc.
One thing on Venus I'd love to see studied more is the super-reflective radar surfaces. It's now believed to be due to a "galena snow", snow made of shiny, electrically conductive lead sulfide. I'd really love to know more about the surface minerology of Venus in general.
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?
Not exactly. Even Columbus had a fair idea of the diameter of the planet - where he got it wrong was estimating the width of Eurasia at almost double the actual value, which put the east coast roughly where he encountered the Americas. Considering that he made the estimates based on the log books of explorers who crossed extremely rough terrain and couldn't measure longitude*, being off by a factor of two is hardly a symptom of idiocy. Unless you have reason to believe that a substantially more accurate and trustworthy estimate of the width of Eurasia was well-known in Europe at the time?
* measuring longitude requires a clock that can be transported while keeping accurate time - the sort of thing that was *extremely* difficult at the time, especially on long rough journeys. The moon's position against the stars could also be used, but the accuracy is poor**, and the technique was apparently still just gaining recognition in the early to mid 1500s, well after Columbus's voyage. And even centuries later it was considered insufficiently accurate for seafaring purposes.
** the moon moves only 0.5 degrees per hour meaning an error of 1 degree in measuring lunar position translates to 2 hours of time inaccuracy, or 30 degrees of longitude - about 2,000 miles at the equator.
Not nearly as good an observation post as it would have in orbit. And as long as we're doing orbital observations there's not much reason to involve a planet at all, unless it's our own.
Not to mention that if you're studying something hundreds of millions of miles away from your sensors, there's not much point in having people standing next to the sensors unless they need to be repaired or modified. You could just as easily be sitting on Earth and have the information forwarded to you, it's not like you could send a warning any faster than you could send the raw data.
It would fracture the internet into two halves - the US and everywhere else. The take-down requests would be honoured by US servers only, and the US would probably find itself in front of the WTO for screwing with the domain names of other countries.
The trouble with a lot of self-made men is that they worship their creator.
