> Senate Launch System

Where can I contribute to put all the senators in a spaceship and yeet them into outer space?

> No. Let's first feed the homeless and struggling, and fix the crisis that are affecting ordinary people.

I may be wrong, but it's not money that's the problem; there's plenty of money. (I would also point out the NASA budget is a miniscule spec of dust compared to the total budget.)

It seems to me the problem is organization and politics - actually doing the right things to address these problems.

It's like, say, Microsoft. They can't run a successful project to save their lives. This is an organizational and cultural problem. Large organization, lots of politics, enough money that success or failure is not critical to survival.

> Governments should have been able to do that up until now. Instead the government has been shipping money overseas and spending it on foreigners for far too long.

In what ways?

Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution says that congress, in addition to having the power to raise taxes and borrow and regulating commerce, is charged "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." This is listed before their ability to declare war and fund the military. And listed before their ability to make law.

Art and science funding is listed before funding the military and law making as a responsibility of congress. That was written in that order intentionally.

The administration is cutting public services so they can say there’s enough of a budget surplus to cut taxes, especially on the top end. If you look at the current bill being assembled, the cuts are targeted at the kind of programs you’re talking about, cutting things like Medicaid and SNAP to lower taxes with most of the benefits going to the higher tax brackets.

https://thehill.com/newsletters/morning-report/5296716-house...

https://apnews.com/article/congress-tax-cuts-republicans-med...

the government that slashes your science budget is the same government that would never feed the homeless, unless it was -to the sharks.

Funding of arts is not why we have homelessness. This is a poor false dichotomy.

What is the Trump administration doing to feed the homeless and struggling?

Programs like SNAP benefits (a.k.a. food stamps) have always been top of the list of what Republicans want to cut.

Thanks! Fixed.

And no thanks to autocorrect.

The WH website switched from Drupal to WordPress in 2017.

Makes sense. You have a lot of gaseous outer planets, then a star who's compression needs to be so great that fusion can happen in it. That compression is going to drive up the density of the star.

"If Jupiter were a little bit bigger, we'd have a binary star system!"

<The Sun, massing 1000x what Jupiter does.>

Does intelligent life mean only human-level intelligence? If we found a bunch of chimp-like animals running around, would that count as intelligent life?

Spaceflight is not some law of the universe. Neither are ideas of human intelligence. Whales have bigger brains, they communicate, they have culture, they have traditions. Yet we write them off and relegate them with the rest of the animals below them and make no effort towards communication, pretending its impossible as we communicate with our dogs without thinking about it as such. We wouldn’t recognize intelligent life in the universe because we set the goalposts of intelligent life to be that of a science fiction readers expectation of what intelligent life ought to look like.

Galileo was observing Venus in 1610; his telescope was enough to see the phases of Venus but probably not high resolution or quality enough to see someone waving Semaphore flags or lighting a bonfire. Astronauts in Low Earth Orbit can't see the Great Wall of China with the naked eye.

What scale of 'device a way to signal back visually' could done with 1600's era manufacturing and technology?

One might ask how often they have a deer or a crow attempt to make contact with them. That is the expectation for other life out there, not that they’d be exactly like ourselves but perhaps more like most other life we have observed thus far.

Using Hohmann transfer, I believe the energy cost is the same both ways. Of course as you point out we have the Moon, "they" have none. So we'd have plenty of rocks to throw.

That said, we'd have to throw much bigger rocks to penetrate their atmosphere. And the likely (to me) actual plans would be:

Us: launch to the Moon, set up there, launch rocks from the Moon to Venus.

Venusians: launch and travel to the asteroid belt, launch an asteroid toward Earth.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that our plan would be the same as theirs: we'd both be heading for the asteroid belt, because nothing we could reasonably launch from the Moon would put a dent in Venus with that atmosphere.

And if we assume they actually can launch through that atmosphere, we're screwed: if they can do that, they're way ahead of us.

If the Venusians had the technology to lob rocks, they'd have the technology to do so from the asteroid belt. They don't need to mine them their own non-existent moon.

Then, move the MegaMaid into an orbit around Mars and go from suck to blow. Venus has too much atmosphere, Mars has too little. Win Win.

Something like a solar powered space elevator that just blows atmosphere into the sun

From your link:

> Lighter gases, including water vapour, are continuously blown away by the solar wind through the induced magnetotail.

There used to be a lot of water on Venus.

You'd have to shoot it out of the solar system, otherwise much of it would reaccrete onto Venus... or onto Earth!

There’s a book where they freeze the atmosphere then cover the ice with a thick layer of dirt. But I cannot recall which.

Water is not a driver of warming, it's an amplifier. If CO2 is removed, then the equilibrium water content will still allow Venus to be liveable.

Depending on a size, probably on the order of tens of thousand.

Comets in the Oort cloud take very little energy to put on a collision orbit, the Sun barely holds them gravitationally, orbital speeds in the Oort cloud are measured in _meters_ per second. So they require (relatively) little energy to put them into a required orbit. It might be doable with just regular thermonuclear charges.

It will then take these comets more than a thousand years to "fall" from the Oort cloud.

Haha, i totally feel that. Maybe people will have little personal balloons for emergencies like that :p

At the same time, do consider how you already count on conventionally supported structures like bridges, buildings, tunnels, etc. not to have any defects or design flaws. Or once-in-100-years storms or earthquakes.

This magnifies further if you've ever flown on a plane or sailed on a ship. It only takes the right series of failures to be plummeting to the bottom. Now imagine people who spend months or years counting on technology and redundancy to keep them alive in space, and might expect to do so indefinitely.

Exposure therapy, baby!

You won’t, but some people work for months on oil rigs in the middle of nowhere.

Oh it wouldn't be easier than a moon base or simple orbital habitats. And as for Venus being scifi, anything to do with space colonization period is scifi right now; humans haven't even stepped foot on another celestial body of any kind in over half a century.

Rather my meaning was that it's (a little shockingly) the best suited planet for humans in terms of most closely and reliably resembling conditions humans could survive in, which relates to the terraforming notions I was replying to.

It'd be overwhelmingly harder to make all of Venus Earthlike than to just use the existing relatively Earthlike regions of the upper atmosphere to our advantage along with their unique properties. Cool off Venus and you just get a big ocean of liquid or frozen co2 to have to deal with after a loooong time and a lot of construction. Keep it like it is and a fraction of the resources/effort will yield far more utility while we can still enjoy a segment of the atmosphere.

Scifi? Of course!

Cool? Without a doubt!

Isaac Arthur on YouTube makes videos on sci-fi ideas that we might be able to do within the laws of physics, albeit not with today's technology. He did a video on Colonizing Venus some years ago, and an updated one a few months ago, and some others around colonisation and teraforming of the planets in the Solar System:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=isaac+arthur+ve...

If we're spitballing, one could simply angle the impacts of asteroids to add momentum in the desired direction.

Why don't we simply vaporize Venus entirely and construct our own bespoke planet in its place, if it's so damn problematic

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Technobabble