USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.

I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lower - the main problems are that they mistake low pressure for drought, and that's a response we can manipulate). So it makes much more sense to grow them in large, low-pressure structures with a mostly-CO2 / some O2 / no N2 atmosphere, rather than at human-comfortable pressure levels.

That said, you don't want human workers having to work in pressure suits, so ideally you'd use a sliding tray system (we use them on Earth to save space in greenhouses) or similar, except that you'd move the plants through an airlock into a human-comfortable area for any non-mechanized work. Obviously, mechanized systems can operate at any pressure level, and also obviously, some work would still need to be done in pressure suits every now and again (maintenance, cleaning, etc).

None of this applies to a floating Venus habitat, where in your typical Landis design your crew - and potentially agriculture - are just living in your lifting envelope, at normal pressures. The envelope is massive, so you have no shortage of space for agriculture, all well-illuminated from all angles if the envelope is transparent. The challenges there are different - how to support them, humidity management, water supply, falling debris, etc.

If only the US had some sort of aid program designed to try to make conditions more favourable in the sort of countries that economic migrants tend to flee from. Maybe the US could call it "US Aid" or something, and give it a decent budget rather than gutting it to save $23 per American.

But the main issue is that the proper solution is obviously to have a formal, controlled, actually viable work visa system for economic migrants, distinct from asylum. The US economy is immensely boosted by millions of (generally awful) jobs being done by illegal immigrants at substandard wages (which are still vastly more than they could get at home), making US goods far more competitive than they would otherwise be and pumping huge sums of money into the economy. Formalize it. Basic worker protections but not the minimum wages or benefits that citizens get. You drop off an application for a sponsoring company, and so long as you're employed with them and not causing problems, you can stay. Fired, laid off, or quit, and you go back to your country (where you can reapply for a different job). You can also promote maquiladoras, wherein immigrants are also working for your companies, but the labour is being done across the border (but the goods move freely without tariffs, so it's like having the work done in your country).

(I find it hilarious hearing people like Vance talking about how he'll bring housing costs down by kicking out immigrants, freeing up housing. Um, dude, exactly who do you think it is that builds the housing in much of the US?)

"Refugee papers" OMG I'm dying here...

Biosphere 2 was an attempt at fully closed loop self-regulation. That doesn't work, and is not what is under discussion. The discussion is of using systems to maintain environments.

Production of oxygen is not remotely difficult. Not by plants, but again, industrial systems. Systems to make O2 from CO2 and/or water are TRL10. They exist, you can just buy them off the shelf. Same with reusable CO2 scrubbers (it's a very simple chemical process: cool = absorb CO2, hot = release CO2; they just cycle between cold and hot and whether they're connected to the input or output)..

You seem to have the idea that the proposal is just to have plants and humans life in harmony with no technology. If that were the actual proposal, I would agree with you. But that's not the actual proposal.

Yeah. Because if Mars' gravity is insufficient, and you'd have to live in rotating habitats anyways, then what are you even doing there, instead of being located e.g. on an asteroid where it's much easier to make a rotating habitat, where your surface is much more resource-rich, and where delivery and return of goods is much easier?

Venus, by contrast, I think few people doubt that its gravity would be sufficient for human life. Mars, it's *probably* enough, but it's not well studied. Moon seems like a coin toss at this point.

It's not entirely clear, but it's quite possible, arguably probable, that at least part of Venus's highlands involve fragments of ancient crust (the highlands also have milder conditions for exploration). Venus was Earthlike before Earth was, with vast warm oceans. There's also some arguments for life in the atmosphere based on gases that have been found, although I don't buy them (in the same way that I don't buy the same arguments for current surface life on Mars).

That's IMHO really overplaying it. I don't want to downplay food production effort difficulty, but saying "because we've never done it we can't" is like saying "Because we've never built a 5-meter-tall statue of a puffin made of glued-together Elvis dolls, we can't". We absolutely can, it's just a question of whether one thinks the investment is worth it. And I'm not talking out my arse, I have a degree in horticulture with a specialty in greenhouse cultivation. So much of the "keep the plants alive" systems we already do on Earth - you just need to get them there in an affordable manner.

The primary consumables are water and fertilizer. Nobody seriously is proposing building a colony that can't produce its own water. As for fertilizer, that would start off as an import, but a much smaller import than the food mass. On Earth, open-loop fert systems are fairly common, but they're slowly losing ground to closed-loop where you just maintain the EC, filter the returning solution, and every now and then due a nutrient-level test on the solution and individually adjust whatever nutrient might be lacking vs. the others.

We can consume lots of growing medium, like disposable rock wool cubes and the like, but we can also not do that. For example, it's perfectly fine to grow plants in clean sand / fine gravel - just clean it and sterilize it between uses. Something like pumice is better, though it slowly breaks down between uses. But you don't have to use anything special.

If you do LED lights, you may get a decade or so out of them. You can reduce shipping mass for replacement by going with designs that let you replace just the light boards from them (Mechatronix has lights like this for example), no need to resend e.g. the heavy heat sink, etc.

There's a million random things you use or that can wear out, from cleaning solutions to solution pumps to climate computers and and on and on. But they're not a meaningful import-mass, at least compared to food. Really, the big thing is fert. But regenerating fertilizer from waste (plant waste, human waste) should not be - industrially - immensely complicated. For the metals, burn to oxides / hydroxides, dissolve in acid, fractionally crystallize. You'll always lose some from the system, but we're not talking large amounts. For nitrates, Haber-Bosch is nothing exotic to adapt, and you have easy feedstocks (mining is complex, sucking in gases isn't).

(To elaborate about PELs: Venus's middle cloud layer is ~1-10mg/m3, depending on altitude, latitude, and what study you trust (our existing data isn't great). OSHA PELs are 1mg/m3 for an 8-hour shift. NIOSH's RELs are also 1mg/m3 for a 10-hour shift, with IDLH of 15mg/m3. Now, this has the two aforementioned caveats. On the downside, Venus's aerosols are higher molarity - 75-85% concentrated vs. ~20% on Earth. On the upside, the vast majority of the PEL/REL/IDLH risk is from inhalation, which obviously, you can't be doing in any atmosphere in our solar system other than Earth. Dermatitis thresholds are far higher. So again, so long as there's not rain/snow/dew/frosts, and you're at the right altitude/latitude combination**, you could probably spend some time outside in shirtsleeves and a facemask, and feel an alien breeze against your skin.

** One also has to stress latitude, not just altitude, as it's cooler for a given altitude as you get closer to the poles. While Venus's middle cloud layer climate is "similar" to Earth's, it's a bit on the warmer side for a given pressure than Earth's - and because an aerostat rides "down" in the atmosphere vs. its internal pressure, esp. at night when it's no longer being heated by the sun, it amplifies the impact. So if you're going to be living in the envelope, you need to find the right balance between how far you want to go below 1atm and how hot you want to have it be outside. Shifting more poleward helps find a better balance between the two (at the cost of lower sunlight availability for solar power vs. the super-bright equatorial regions). It also shortens your effective day (faster superrotation period). You probably don't want to go fully to the poles, though, because of the polar vortices (though how turbulent they are is still an open question).

BS. There's no ozone and at the height these balloons would float the UV and assorted stuff from the sun would fry you in seconds.

They are, however, correct. Venus has no (innate) magnetic field, only a weak induced one (about 2x that of Mars's induced field), but it has a massive atmosphere. The mass of matter over your head at a reasonable habitat altitude/latitude combination is equivalent to that of about 5 meters of water. Way more shielding than is necessary for human life. Of course, having even more shielding would be even better, as it would of course be nice to have Earthlike protection levels. But you could survive even a Carrington Event on Venus. Getting 5 meters of water-mass-equivalent over a Mars habitat, while doable, is quite an undertaking, and means you're living basically in a bunker.

Wtf re you smoking? Archimedes principle holds on Venus just as on Earth. Lose your lifting gas and you sink and on Venus you'll soon start to cook.

Aerostat internal pressures are very similar to the pressure outside of them, and they hold a tremendous amount of gas. A 1 cm hole is basically irrelevant in an aerostat; it's just some extra work for your gas generators, vs. what it already has to overcome due to gas diffusion through the envelope. By contrast, a 1cm hole in a tin-can habitat on Mars will kill you in minutes.

Venus's middle cloud layer is quite similar in most properties to Earth's troposphere, with convection cells, wind speeds, etc seemingly having a similar distribution to that on Earth. There's also lighting, seemingly at roughly Earth levels (though a lot of uncertainty), although we know very little about it, including even where it occurs (incl. whether it's in the middle layer), and why. Because Mars hogs most of the planetary exploration budget :P

Aerostats generally deal better with turbulence than fixed wing aircraft. They interact with it sort of like a ship at sea, with long, slow undulations rather than sharp jerks.

Uhh,, are you crazy?? It's got an atmosphere with clouds of pure acid that snows lead sulfide on a surface that'll melt you face in 5 seconds.

So, this is not only wrong, but it'd actually be more convenient if it were true ;)

Venus's middle cloud layer (the one in question) is actually more like vog (volcanic fog) on Earth. It's not an acid bath, it's a sparse aerosol, with visibility measured in kilometers. The particulates are higher molar than on Earth, but otherwise, it's not a very aggressive environment, and if not for the molarity difference it would be on the order of standard worker PEL levels. You could be out in shirtsleeves for quite a while before you started getting dermatitis (but you would need face protection, both for breathing, and to protect your eyes - not just from the aerosols, but also e.g. carbon monoxide).

(Here I should add the caveat that we don't know if there's any precipitation or dew/frost in Venus's middle cloud layer; it's still a debated topic. We've put so damned little resources into studying Venus, unfortunately, and as a result there's still massive unanswered questions)

Lead sulfide has absolutely nothing to do with Venus's middle cloud layer. It is a (probable) surface phenomenon in Venus's highest regions. The fact that Venus's surface is a natural chemical vapor deposition lab (plus has some interesting volcanic fractionalization / selective thermal erosion possibilities) does, however, raise interesting resource possibilities. The surface, though hostile, was accessible even to Soviet tech developed in the 1960s; much of what we build for industry has to endure vastly more hostile conditions than Venus's surface. The air is so dense that it makes landing much easier than on Mars - it's been calculated that with the right trajectory, you could fire a hollow titanium sphere at Venus, have it enter the atmosphere, decelerate from orbital velocity, and land intact on the surface, without any entry/descent system whatsoever). One probe lost its parachute during descent and still landed intact. The atmosphere is dense enough that you can "dredge" loose material, and fly around with a small metal bellows balloon (controlling flight with small winglets), and return to altitude with a phase-change balloon.

(There is - probably - a metal in Venus's middle cloud layer, but it's small amounts of iron chloride, a soluble salt)

As for the comment I made earlier about how it would be easier if the middle cloud layer had more acid: sulfuric acid is a resource to a Venus habitat. While it's not needed for lift (lift on Venus can be done with just normal, breathable Earth air, with about half the lift of helium on Earth - you can live inside your envelope, with N2 straight from the atmosphere and O2 made from CO2), H2SO4 is your main source of *hydrogen*. Specifically, heating the aerosols first releases free water vapour. Further heating splits it into SO3 and more H2O. You can then further heat the SO3 over a vanadium pentoxide catalyst to split it to SO2 and O2, or you can inject the SO3 into the front of your scrubber to help extract more free water vapour (it's not all in the aerosols) .

Hydrogen is needed not just for your habitats's water needs (note: gases will always slowly permeate in and out of your envelope, it's not a closed system), but also for propulsion for ascent stages and for producing polymers (including the envelope itself). Ascent stages need lots of hydrogen, unless you go hydrogen-free (carbon monoxide, cyanogen, etc), but these have either poor ISP or big problems with things like toxicity, stability, and/or esp. combustion chamber temperature); even "low hydrogen" fuels like acetylene, diacetylene, H additives to hydrogen-free props, etc still need massive amounts of hydrogen to reach orbit. Chemical rockets would need to be at least two stages, be recovered by balloons, hang and be manipulated from the bottom of the envelope, and would take up the majority of your lift capacity. Far more realistic are nuclear thermal rockets - while they burn pure hydrogen, they're so efficient at it that they don't use that much, they give you SSTO capability, and a number of designs can allow for propellantless atmospheric flight / hover (for easier docking).

Your three limiting resources are hydrogen, fluorine (from HF in the atmosphere, but there's not that much HF in the atmosphere if you plan to use a lot of fluoropolymers), and "metals" - the latter being limited by how much you're dredging or digging the surface (with the exception of small amounts of iron from iron chloride).

BTW, hydrogen on Venus isn't the same as on Earth - it's over 2 orders of magnitude higher deuterium percentage (H+ was lost via the solar wind). Probably not high enough to be a health threat, but high enough to be a resource. If you store energy via reversible fual cells/electrolysis, you can wire them in a cascade to separate deuterium every time you charge and discharge. Fuel cells and electrolysis have quite high separation factors for deuterium. At about $1k per tonne, deuterium wouldn't be a viable export commodity at *current* launch pricing, but if launch costs get down enough, it certainly could become one. The other thing Venus has in abundance is power - both solar (though it depends on your latitude and altitude), and of particular note, wind between different altitudes. If you hang a winged wind turbine off a long cable from the main altitude, having it fly many km lower or higher than the habitat, you have a nonstop, quite intense wind differential to generate from.