>It’s worth being honest about what the device represents, because press coverage of quantum technology tends to overshoot.
>This is not a room-temperature quantum computer. Building a working quantum computer requires many entangled qubits, error correction, and a host of other engineering capabilities that are still largely confined to cryogenic systems. The Stanford device is a step toward room-temperature quantum communication — the part of the field concerned with transmitting information securely using quantum properties, not running calculations.
Great summaries. I also have a real affection for my last.fm discovery, and I think it had everything to do with "deep discovery" going deep into the related artists pages. It really shaped my relationship to music and my love of music discovery and I sometimes find I don't click with people whose idea of discovery is The Algorithm(TM).
I tried to import my music life into Google Music, uploading my lifetime of libraries there. When they wound that down I just lost trust in online services and now do it through Nextcloud, which honestly is pretty awesome imo. There's no algorithmic suggestion for better or worse, but none of the "who ordered that" style assumptions imposed on you by the system like those you outlined above.
Absolutely fantastic project! I completely understand you've got other things going on, but for me on Firefox mobile, I'm seeing a YouTube pop-up window for Black Sabbath and I don't see any obvious way to close it.
I think atmospheric extraction is very important and valuable but we'd be missing heavy metals and some critical elements. You do have carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, a little bit of hydrogen, a little bit of chlorine and flourine, and you can do a lot with those. Not as much hydrogen as you would want or need.
But potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, silica, iron oxides, nickel, titanium etc. are available on the surface.
My understanding is, insofar as we're talking about protection from radiation, Venus compensates for its lack of a magnetosphere with incredibly thick atmospheric cover that does the same work, in fact does it better than here on Earth. That's not to say we would say no to a magnetosphere if such a thing could ever be achievable.
Yes, but! It's very hard. But you are a million percent right that the Venusian surface has lots of fantastic metals, largely tied up in basalt and volcanic ash. The bad news to my understanding is that they're kind of pulverized and evenly spread out and requires lots of refining/processing, and not necessarily so much in the way of veins/ore deposits ripe for harvesting (though I could be mistaken).
But back to how hard it is. There's mid-atmosphere winds that are effectively persistent hurricanes. It's hotter than a pizza oven, and the thick co2 air might as well be an ocean, because it has that much crushing force.
In my opinion, people should get excited about the thick atmosphere, because it's also the secret superpower that unlocks all the near term possibilities. Floating in the upper atmosphere is more like being a ship in an ocean, and if we ever got materials strong enough (graphite-carbon composites?) we could do some really cool passive dragnet + air balloon lift kinds of things to recover surface resources and lift them to a hypothetical settlement.
The one need-to-have resource that, as far as I know, there's none of on Venus whatsoever, is iodine. So even in the best case you'd have to import that. Oh, and water. You can get some out of the sulfuric acid rain but probably not as much as you want.
Granted, these are all assuming technology advances and big time scales, but trying to practice a golden rule here and be as charitable to the exercise as possible and not bean soup the discussion to death, which is a pet peeve of mine.
It'd be interesting to try to imagine a Venusian colonization that's like two separated levels: an atmospheric area where most people live and where you grow food, and then a subterranean (yes, yes, sub... aphroditean?) where you mine and so forth, and there are brief, fraught transitions between the two layers but no actual habitation of the surface or lower atmosphere.
Right, the thing it reminds me of is the long-term impact of reading to your kids at a young age, it has measurable effects equivalent to expensive professional education choices you could make later on in life, although I forget the exact comparison.
But also it doesn't have to exactly reproduce the harms of smoking. It could be that the effects are primarily present tense and completely gone if you stop the habit, and nevertheless, amount to a cumulative social harm that makes it a worthy analogy to smoking. Social media also doesn't cause secondhand smoke or stained teeth, or unpleasurable odors on your person or home or furniture. It doesn't leave butts or debris on the ground. There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of either, but you can see how nitpicky that starts to feel.
I have no issue with people sharing their personal projects if they're relevant to the discussion.
If you've reading this and you have a personal project please proactively share it in the comments when it's relevant and on topic. I try to upvote and be supportive when I can to make sure they feel welcomed.
>It’s worth being honest about what the device represents, because press coverage of quantum technology tends to overshoot.
>This is not a room-temperature quantum computer. Building a working quantum computer requires many entangled qubits, error correction, and a host of other engineering capabilities that are still largely confined to cryogenic systems. The Stanford device is a step toward room-temperature quantum communication — the part of the field concerned with transmitting information securely using quantum properties, not running calculations.
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