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Last night I was talking to a mechanical engineer friend who worked at JPL and he didn't know about the Venera program! I like to bring up Venus whenever Mars
by 01100011 6y ago
Last night I was talking to a mechanical engineer friend who worked at JPL and he didn't know about the Venera program!
I like to bring up Venus whenever Mars is in the news. It's so much more interesting to me than the tiny, dark dust bowl we keep probing.
- basementcat 6y agoNot everyone at JPL knows about every single space mission anyone has ever launched. Not everyone at Apple has the OSX syscall table memorized. Not everyone at Exxon knows about every single oil field.
- Teever 6y agoI don't think that's the right way to look at it. It's more like Apple OS developers not knowing about real-time operating systems or Exxon employees not knowing about off-shore drilling rigs. There's stuff you should just know about if you're in a field even if you're not familiar with it or an expert in it.
- elihu 6y agoIn a sense, Mars is interesting just because it's boring. As in, compared to the other planets besides Earth it's perhaps the most benign environment for humans to possibly settle. Settling Venus is also possible, but it's less accessible due to the Earth-like gravity well, and it's easier to imagine humans living relatively comfortably and self-sufficiently in a Martian Hobbit hole than on giant zeppelins in the atmosphere of Venus. Venus is more mysterious simply because it's harder to see surface features under that atmosphere and the conditions on the surface are very strange and hard to imagine.