Electric Utilites were quite happy to make their regulated profits selling more, ever cheaper power. It was really only a combination of the oil crises of the 70's, de-nuclearisation and government incentives to cut energy use that turned that tide. People today like to make fun of the old idea of electricity "too cheap to meter" but remember, your local phone bill is that way (wasn't in the past), and your internet access and water used to be that way too, until certain forces reversed the tide of history.

Pretty sure those never actually got built.

How many nuclear weapons do you think the US has built in the last twenty years? Hint: It's zero.

I bet you're a TON of fun at a party...

Telescope? Bah. Use it to focus sunlight and bam! Interstellar death ray.

You're the third person to make this same reply to me. Take a look at the GP. That's not the scenario he was proposing. Even the aerostat colonies pose a much more significant problem: what good are they? They would be as hard or harder to build than space colonies, given that you could not extract local resources you end up trapped in a gravity well, and gravity will be turned "on" during construction, unlike rotating space habitats. Plus, what would they make? What would the trade economy be? A mars colony could grow lots of food in a shallow gravity well, a lunar colony could export processed silicon and aluminum, and asteroid colonies could provide heavy metals and other raw materials. There is simply little reason to build a "colony" on Venus, in the short or medium term. A research station, sure. a colony? Nah.

You're talking about an entirely different scenario than the one at hand. Re-read the GP. He's suggesting fixing most of the atmosphere of Venus and converting it to an earth like one.

Yes, and fixing that would be something that requires several orders of magnitude more space capability than we currently have. Dome cities could be done which would have a pretty decent effect, but in the very, very long term, we could bombard mars with water rich asteroids from the asteroid belt. While I concede that this is extremely unlikely today, it's certainly a hell of a lot more feasible than removing the Venusian atmosphere and making Venus spin faster.

Issues with removing the atmosphere aside:

1. I'm pretty sure that Venus doesn't have an appreciable magnetic field.

2. Even if it did, its day is about the same length in its year (e.g. about 250 earth days) so nobody could live in any fixed place on the planet without freezing or melting, even if we got rid of the thick atmosphere. You'd have to live in trucks rolling slowly around the planet in the ... pardon the pun ... twilight zone.

Mars on the other hand has normal days and could be warmed up with a greenhouse effect. Also, the thicker atmosphere would provide additional sheilding at the surface level. One could imagine the last few percentage points of shielding being made up with local magnetic field "bubbles" around settled areas, powered by fusion reactors, assuming we have that technology in the next century or so.

SpaceX has been profitable for several years AFAIK.

No, seriously. There is no food crisis. As a species we have a food distribution problem, and a food wastage problem and they're rather shocking at that, but we really have no issue with feeding the population of earth today without resorting to eating genetically modified photosynthetic aphids. Now, a long term lack of motor fuel, is a problem, but aphids don't really solve that either. Mind you, this is scientifically interesting, but there really is no need to tie every technically interesting scientific discovery to the end of the world. Believe it or not, some of us like science for science's own sake.

It doesn't work like this. When you change your name, you don't abandon all obligations. If that was the case, all GM would have had to do to get out of their financial problems was change the name on the corporate offices to "Specific Motors" and then say "Oh, well, GM is still a brand owned by us". Come on.

Am I the only one who doesn't see why suborbital point-to-point isn't a thing? Anywhere on the planet in 90 minutes, and less air resistance on the way.

I think you're both overestimating the costs of a manned mission and underestimating the costs of rovers. If we did a manned mission *right*, I would guess that the total cost would pay for something on the order of 50 rovers.

I'm sorry that I don't have mod points, but you should be ashamed of this post. You've totally ruined whatever argument you were trying to make by calling khallow "a big stupid poopy head".