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[mainiac]

The journals got themselves a nice niche back before the internet.  They are completely obsolete and useless.  They dont even curate.  If you want curation, you look at what an expert in the field is blogging about.

[Il Palazzo]

What do you meant by 'don't curate'?

[redwallzyl]

this is my personal favorite scientific paper http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf 

[mainiac]

What do you meant by 'don't curate'?

These journals are supposed to be providing a carefully selected group of articles.  It's supposed to be expert review to both ensure the scientific validity of what they publish and make sure you get the best stuff.  But they do a horrible job of selecting articles, redwallzyl provided an extreme example from a crap journal but even the most respected names are prone to biases towards fame, hot topics and especially p-value satisfying results.  Journals are failing to highlight the most important research and publishing all sorts of crap.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You see some strange shit when you have journal access. I once basically single-handedly assembled all modern knowledge on riparian zone repair after dam removal. The last publication I could find on the subject was in 2002, and my access was a pretty wide one.

Which is strange, because the efficacy of riparian zone repair is one of the primary benefits of tearing down dams.

[Max™]

If you're just going to set up in orbit, and you've already solved the issues of permanent orbital settlement such that you don't need to go to Venus, well, there's not nearly as much point in going to Venus at all.

I imagine that if you can transport enough mass to Venus to make a floating city, you can transport enough mass to not Venus to make an orbital city.

It would be easier to make it survivable. Easier to live in. Venus is closer than anything but periodic LEO visits. You get a leak in an orbital habitat, you run the risk of dying soon. You get a leak in an aerostat, you run the risk of eventually running out of oxygen unless you start up scrubbers, and have a bad smell to deal with until you find it. It really is the only other location which is close to habitable besides Earth.

But your entire city can fall to death if the buoyancy module fails... we have managed leaks for decades. Buoyancy is new.

The closest is blimps and Zeppelin's but those land.

Your living area IS the buoyancy module, oxygen is a lifting gas in a CO2 atmosphere.

If the buoyancy module fails you'll all be dead from CO2 poisoning long before you sink.

[LordBaal]

Question. Would you dare to live on a floating module on the atmosphere of Venus?
Or better said, would you rate to live on the atmosphere of Venus or in the surface of Mars?

[martinuzz]

Venus, definitly. The radiation shield provided by the atmosphere makes it 100x safer than the surface of Mars. Now if you would have said Mars, deep underground, I'd choose Mars.

[LordBaal]

I would choose Mars.  Radiationwise yes is safer
 But in Venus radiation would be the less of your problems. Also I'm noy talking about a perfectly safe and proven floating/surface habitat with years of in site testing and survival. I'm talking about being one of the people testing it the colony modules with current or foreseeable technology.

Radiation is something that I feel can shield myself better than sulfuric acid hurracans.

[Putnam]

Yeah, unless for some insane reason you're imagining a Mars settlement as unpressurized and unshielded Mars will obviously seem worse than Venus, but pressurization and shielding are far easier than dealing with making a buoyant living space in sulfuric acid clouds, as can be seen by every mission to space ever.

[Arx]

Why colonise Mars when we could colonise the Sahara?

[LordBaal]

A number of reasons from ecological to practical and philosophical ones.

In example I wouldn't be against colonies in the desert but the main reason for offworld colonies is no  only more living space/resources but spreading live and our race trough the solar system and eventually the galaxy, thus giving the human race and the only kind of life we know yet (earth life) a better chance to endure.

[mainiac]

Why colonise Mars when we could colonise the Sahara?

Lower gravity.

[Gentlefish]

Also ammonium perchlorate in the soil. That's fuel, fam.

[LordBaal]

Why colonise Mars when we could colonise the Sahara?

Lower gravity.

That too. With current materials and engineering we could build a space elevator on Mars and if we are lucky and can employ materials there to manufacture ships Mars could become a spaceshipyard of sorts to jump start colonization of more places in the solar system. Of course that's just jumping the gun a bit.