Freedom is great and neglectable, until you very suddenly don't have it.

History has not ended. The world order that makes life nice and comfy for you is not a given into the future.

It's funny how we so strongly disagree further down in the comments, but I 100% agree with you here.

0,38g being largely fine for health is... I mean, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on it probably being true, but it's anything but guaranteed. There was a private project to test this, the Mars Gravity Biosatellite, but it ran out of funding; I'm not aware of any similar experiments that have been conducted. There've been a variety of attempts to simulate various gravity on Earth, such as having people lie on tilted beds or hanging them from cranes at an angle or whatnot, but they all have obvious weaknesses.

There's not just the question of adults who visit from Earth, but also children who grow up on 0,38g, and what impact that would have to their physiology.

Venus is hot, but it's not *that* hot... ;)

NASA is getting there

It most definitely is not. Are you being deliberately obtuse?

one can do for more than a few minutes before shit implodes and burns

You clearly didn't read anything I wrote, so why should I even bother responding? (A) Literally nobody was talking about settling the surface, and (B) It's been repeatedly pointed out that basically indefinite lifespans can be achieved for surface vehicles, as backed up by peer-reviewed research from NASA. And "christoban on Slashdot disagrees with peer-reviewed research from NASA" isn't exactly a compelling argument.

B) building floating cities, which would probably take another century of engineering and investment before we could do so reliably.

We were flying balloons on Venus almost 40 years before we flew a helicopter on Mars. We directly sampled Venus's atmosphere 4 years before we sampled Mars. We successfully landed and transmitted data either 1 or 6 years (depending on your definition) from the surface of Venus vs. Mars.

Your incredulity about levels of difficulty doesn't translate to actual levels of difficulty.

True but the more popular rules and legislation that the Supreme Court strikes down the sooner the Democrats are in a position to balance the courts. Thomas and Alito are both at retirement age and both very likely going to face criminal investigations for their obvious bribery scandals as soon as the election is over. If the Democrats are still in charge of the Senate and the White House then those two are likely to retire so that they can cash out and the Democrats will have a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court again with Roberts deciding. He's not exactly the most liberal judge but he tends to side with the liberals if they are the majority

Seriously fast food workers have non-compete clauses now and they have been used to bully workers into not changing jobs.

It doesn't have to be legally enforceable it just has to be a threat to someone who's in a weak position.

Tennessee is just as terrible about women's reproductive health as anything else. It's a problem for trans kids too and sure they only make up 1% of the population but when you've got several thousand employees you're going to have a few in there. That's just how math works.

I'm not exactly prime breeding age here but I wouldn't want my kid trying to set up a family in a red state with the way things are right now. Too much risk of criminal prosecution even for a miscarriage

It's the kind of thing Karl Marx predicted would happen but all anyone can remember about him is that a couple of tin pot dictators borrowed his books for rhetoric.

That book presented a nonstop stream of pseudoscience as if it were hard sci-fi, and it's unfortunate that it's spread so many myths as a result.

I think your confusion stems from analogy to baking clay or ceramics. But what's happening there is sintering. You have extremely fine grains, and you're leading certain crystals to soften and merge as a "glue" between grains, so that the grains stay together.

While sintering is important in the formation of some types of sedimentary rock, this has nothing whatsoever to do with igneous rock. It's already as "together" as it's ever going to be when it a lava flow solidifies. The only thing its grains can ever become is "less together".

And even ignoring that, by definition, you're not going to be sintering something that formed at Venus temperatures, by exposing them to Venus temperatures. The process of sintering requires a radical change in conditions.

We are not capable of building anything that can withstand the surface pressures and temperatures for very long

The Venera probes have likely still not experienced any sort of crushing. You seem to be confused about how pressure works. If you don't exert stress pass the yield point of a material, the length of time until something crushes is "infinite". Which is why, say, almost all rocks buried in Earth's crust are able to remain intact over millions to billions of years.

You build of a thickness that the yield point at the design temperature is well above the amount of pressure-induced stress. The Venera probes' pressure vessels - uninsulated - hit surface temperature quite quickly (indeed, mostly during the descent itself). This did not make them crush, because their engineers were not morons who didn't do the math first when determining the probes' required specs.

All probes are designed to their environment. There is nothing magical about the nominal 92 MPa / 464 C of Venus's mean surface (note: this is for the mean surface; the highlands are significantly lower pressure and significantly cooler) that makes it impossible while, say, designing a lander to operate in the cryogenic conditions of Titan or whatnot is easy. This is 1960s tech. Steel alloys usually melt at up to 1400 C or so. Titanium at 1670 C. Tungsten at 3422 C. Some ceramics don't decompose until nearly 4000C. And pressure increases melting points. Now, it's not just the melting point that matters - higher temperatures mean lower yield strengths, so you have to design with the high temperature yield strengths in mind, not room temperature ones. But the simple fact is that various alloys and compounds can operate fine at WAY above Venus surface temperatures. It's not even close. The pressure vessel needed for the Venera probes was just a thin skin.

And to repeat: if the stress doesn't don't go above the yield point, the time to crushing is infinite. Same as any other pressure vessel, from aerosol cans to propane tanks to spacecraft in space (-1 atm).

And I'll repeat: with the same trivially-simple 1960s-tech method as the Venera probes, you can get surface residence times of a couple hours. With heat pumps, indefinitely. And "Baron_Yam at Slashdot" isn't going to override the actual NASA researchers who have worked on this topic.

The rock of Venus is dry-baked to incredible strength

The fact that you think that rock can be "baked to incredible strength" is itself a boggling concept. Not even accounting for the fact that we can literally see sand and gravel in the Venera images, and the Venera probes literally took surface samples. We can see dunes from orbit on radar. Just the very concept that you think that if you heat rock to a couple hundred celsius that makes it super hard, when the rock formed from vastly-hotter lava. Heat makes rock softer, not harder. And subliming away compounds or chemically eroding rocks makes them weaker, not stronger.

From a bulk composition perspective, Venus's surface is mostly just basalt - though there's some probable rhyolitic flows in places, possibly some unusual flows rare or nonexistent on Earth, and there's speculation that some of the highlands may contain residual granitic continental crust. The specific details of said rocks can be quite interesting, but from a bulk perspective, it's like oceanic crust. We know this because we've literally sampled it..

Private health insurance just spends half a trillion dollars scaring our old people with death panel talk, even as they're running active death panels deciding who lives and who dies. They do keep pushing the retirement age up and they've pushed it above and beyond what it can reasonably be so it's possible that will eventually bite them in the ass because old people won't be able to kid themselves if they'll make it into Medicaid. But the real problem is you have to convince people over 55 that healthcare isn't a limited resource. We can just make more of it in the form of cheaper medication and training more doctors and nurses.

But I mean damn when somebody is literally going to spend half a trillion dollars lobbying against something that's hard to beat. And fun fact if you're an American and you're reading this now you paid for that half trillion dollars with your health insurance premiums.

It's texas. They moved from California to Texas so that they could get away from the regulations that required them to treat employees well when they fired them in Mass.

If they're moving to Tennessee it's probably just a tax Dodge. Texas has notoriously high taxes and they've probably started to shake down Oracle. The governor is spending literally billions of dollars showboating on the southern border and that money has to come from somewhere since it's not coming from the federal government... Seriously look it up they've spent something like 6 billion dollars mobilizing the national guard. You could take every single migrant for the next 20 years and pay him $50,000 a year to sit on their thumbs and you'd come out ahead

That's a lot of text to not mention the need to build floating cities and not die on the surface, which even NASA has not been able to do for more than a few minutes

In case you didn't notice, NASA also hasn't built cities on Mars either, despite spending two orders of magnitude more money on it in recent decades than Venus.

Anyway, we don't need the most Earthlike atmosphere, we need to survive in an environment where we actually know how to do that.

Which requires creating Earthlike conditions. Starting with reasonably Earthlike conditions certainly is a good start.

both sides want to use military spending to keep their flagging economies going. Eisenhower warned us about it, but if it's one thing we never do it's listen.