The Venusian Falcon

The third shipment of Legos for my Penny-Arcade Lego mosaic is on its way.  This is not the last, however, because this time there are three types of pieces that became unavailable for purchase between the time I planned the mosaic, and now.  I have to order them from the extended line.  Pain in the ass.  The likelihood of me turning this into a commercial venture is growing dimmer;  I can't set up a website or some kind of distribution agreement if the base materials take 3 weeks to get here and I can't even be certain the parts I need will be available.  So...I guess more on this subject near the end of March.

My parents continue to call every week.  Most of my free time is between 10pm and 2am.  So...there's that.

Some people discovered a new planet called GJ1214b that is similar to Earth and covered in water.  Actually, we knew about the planet already, and the discovery was merely the water.  I don't really care about those kinds of details.  What I do care about is Venus.  Why Venus?  Because a few days ago when I was reading about GJ1214b I got sidetracked by a wikipedia binge that mostly revolved around Venus.  More on that in a sec.  First, though, lets talk about GJ1214b.  What's interesting about it--or one thing, anyway--is that it is 40 light years away.  I was telling a girl about this and she asked how far away that was, like whether or not it was in our solar system.  I stared at her dumbfounded.  I haven't been that dumbstruck by a question since the time Hot Lego Girl asked if brussel sprouts were a vegetable.  I explained to her that light from the sun reaches pluto in 25 minutes, poor pluto that isn't even a planet, and by the way I am real mad at the dumbass astronomers who allegedly named two other planetary bodies after characters from a horrible, awful, blasphemous tv show called Xena Warrior Princess where girls run around in "armor" that shows cleavage.  Let me explain something to you:  armor that shows cleavage isn't armor.  If I can see the tops of your boobs, I can stick a knife through them into your heart.  So yeah, I told her this.  This might be why I am still single.  I think the war on ignorant costume armor designers is a another war that I have to give up.  It will be tough though.  I am deeply offended by the retarded, completely unrealistic, cleavage-showing femenine armor that always appears on tv, not because of some bullshit about sending the wrong message to girls (wearing less and playing with swords is something that I'd like all girls to learn about), but because it is so unrealistic as to be a parody, and it makes guys who like those shows pathetic chumps.  Watching a girl swing a sword against multiple opponents all while her boobs are popping out of some metal sequins is akin to watching a version of Fast and the Furious where a classic, unaltered Station Wagon outraces a Ferarri and a Lotus Elise in the quater mile.  Anyway.

I've known about Venus all my life--oh its that planet that is super hot because of the greenhouse effect (our coal plants are working tirelessly to bring us as close to that as is possible here on earth) and we've only managed to get probes there.  I always imagined this dark, hellish place with things glowing in reds and purples and dark greens, and I imagined every thing was murky and hazy and hard to see because of these "gasses."  Wrong.

The real venus, which I've only recently become aware of, is, in fact, beautiful.  At least, to me.  I want to go there.  First of all, if you were just hanging out in space and looking at the planet, you would see a giant ball of white, because it is completely covered in clouds, everywhere, 100% of the time.  And its fucking glowing.  Those clouds mean that when you are on the ground, you don't see the sun:  light is just coming from the entire fucking sky.  This stark wasteland is more alien and alluring that every "alien" planet that I've every seen in any science fiction show.  I mean, there are no surface features in the sky, at all.  Its just all white and probably glowing too bright for your eyes (really the least of your problems, btw).  The ground is mostly flat, like everywhere.  Kind of like a desert only completely different.  Based on images from the Russians, the air is clear and you can get great pictures.  Unfortunately, you can't go there.  That is to say, it is going to be very difficult for me to set up my evil lair.

First, the pressure on the surface is ridiculous.  Actually, lets back up.  First, the atmosphere is carbon dioxide.  Not bad right?  No, I'm pretty sure more than a few percent of C02 is lethal.  Then, those clouds?  Sulfur dioxide.  That's an acid.  Now we get to the pressure.  At the surface--what we would call sea level--it is 91 times the pressure on Earth at sea level.  That is equivalent to the crushing depths we experience at a kilo underwater, only you are not being crushed by cold water, you are being crushed by hot, poisonous, acidic air.  And I mean hot.  The atmo of Venus is hot enough to mealt lead.  Lead!  Lead is something I might expect to use as protective gear.  So if you went to venus you would be eaten by acid, poisoned, asphyxiated, crushed, and burned.  Also sunburned.  I just can't quite imagine a place like that.  Venus is so inhospitable that we have explored it by basically sending probes there to die.  This isn't like mars where a probe lands and fucks around long after it was expected to stop working;  the Venus probes transmit data in a matter of minutes before we never hear from them again, and half of them trasmitted nothing because they couldn't even get their lens caps off.  Again:  fuck mars.  Mars is for sissies and people with wimpy robots.  Venus is where the real shit goes down.  Was their ever life on Venus?  Maybe, but they all died when their oceans boiled.  A boiling ocean--that is another awesome image.  Seriously, try to imagine an ocean boiling.  Probably a great plot for a sci fi novel.

Some other weird stuff:  Venus would have been the perfect sister planet to discover (and start hooking up with) fellow humanoids (or at least fellow life) before we knew how much life on Venus sucked.  Its like right next to us.  Fuck mars.  Venus is way closer.  Sometime this year Venus is going to cross between us and the sun and you won't get another chance to see that shit before you're dead.

Also?  A venusian day is longer than a venusian year.  That is kind of hard to accept as a guy who measures years in days.  But no.  Venus days last a realllly long time, and it is spinning backwards anyway!

Here's the thing:  we can, possibly, live there.  We would just live in the atmosphere.   One of the keys to all this is how incredibly heavy the Venusian atmosphere is.  We can float a city high in the atmosphere, right around where the pressure is just like sea level on Earth.  What strange contraption will it take to float something at that height in Venus' atmosphere?  Hydrogen?  Helium?  No.  Air.  From Earth.  Like the kind we need to breath anyway.  Bring some air with you, and you get the boyancy you need to float about the dangerous, crushingly hot surface, for free.  Oh and the winds are like hundreds of kilometers per hour, so you'll get a free tour of the planet.  What's not to like??  And if James Bond types attack your secret lair there, you just throw them off and they fall to their deaths, getting crushed, melted, acid melted and poisoned before they even hit the surface.  That is the coolest lair ever.

So anyway, Venus is like the coolest planet ever.  In our solar system.  I kind of have a crush on it.

Speaking of crushes, I like Ellen Page.  I like her in Juno and Whip It.  I just tried to look up movies she has done and discovered Smart People which looks really good.  Guess what though.  Apparently, I'm not allowed to buy it?  Amazon says their licensing won't permit them to sell or rent it (instant) and netflix (instant) doesn't have it and I'm not even going to bother trying Hulu; I'm certain they don't have it.  Here I am, fuckrags, trying to purchase your fucking movie.  You're not letting me, so...now I am installing a bittorrent client.

So...actually thanks to Amazon and Hulu and Netflix I haven't needed to pirate anything for a really long time now.  It has been so long I don't even know which trackers are good--oh look!  According to this advertisement some girls that look exactly like paid models want to be my facebook friend!  How fortuitous!

...aaaand we're downloading.  Those pretty girls who wanted to be my facebook friend even though I'm not logged into facebook disappeared, but instead I just found out I am a possible winner of an ipod, mac, or ipad!!!  I haven't been a possible winner of an ipod, mac of ipad since that time I typed netflix's url incorrectly.

This movie is going to take forever to download.  Fuck you MPAA.  I could have been watching a funny movie.  Instead, I wrote in my blog about Venus and got back into torrenting.  Oh internet gutter, how I missed thee!

Anyway, if I die and remain as a ghost like dumb people who believe in Ghost Hunters think I will, expect to find me wandering the landscape of Venus for eternity.