Category: RéaltaCore

In his story “A Gift From Earth”, author Larry Niven envisioned his planet “Plateau” as a colonial world with a dense, hot, poisonous atmosphere much like second planet of the Sol star system, commonly known as Venus by the Sol 3 or “Earth” inhabitants, and is fictionally located by Niven within the real Tau Ceti star system(Chinese: 天倉五; pinyin: Tiān Cāng wǔ).

Niven imagines the planet with a single distinguishing feature, an immense mountain plateau named Mt. Lookitthat. It is a little more than half the size of the US state of California, rising over 40 kilometers into the atmosphere’s human habitable zone, and is crowned with dozens of smaller mesa and buttes of diverse height and width.

Our proposed Venarian colony named Plateauҳ (https://plateaux.world) is motivated by the opportunities made possible for creative, social, and economic innovation, as well as long-term scientific research best carried out by humans as opposed to the relatively primitive robotic probes in current use.

Instead of the prevailing common sense of using science to exert dominion over the environment of that world or any other, we seek to understand and adapt to nature, leveraging the very attributes so often viewed as negatives as instrumental for engendering our prosperity.

“The signal in the physical world is the foundation of design. We can understand how the human system works in order to design the most effective signals in a world full of distractions.”

― Dano Qualls

Plateauҳ Technology for Venerian Colonization

• Power Generation and Distribution
  • SBSP (Space-Based Solar Power)
    Collecting solar power in outer space and distributing it to Earth. Potential advantages of collecting solar energy in space include a higher collection rate and a longer collection period due to the lack of a diffusing atmosphere, and the possibility of placing a solar collector in an orbiting location where there is no night.
  • DTEC (Differential Thermal Energy Converters)
    Uses the temperature difference between the tremendous heat and surface pressure and the cool, low-pressure upper atmosphere to run a high-efficiency heat engine and produce useful work, in the form of electricity. DTEC can operate with a very high capacity factor and so can operate in base-load mode.

• Tssui Plateaux (Eugene Tssui)
  FabLabs and Automated Production Environments between 30 and 40 miles high, organically grown from a suite of nanites and engineered extremophiles using in situ Venerian elements, with power from DTEC at the based and SBSP in orbit. Aerostat Waystations (known to Americans as Staging Posts or Posting Stations, and Europeans as Posts or Relays) and Cloud Cities festoon a Low Tension Space Elevator like toroidal pearls on a necklace.

By Robert Reich

Uber just filed its first quarterly report as a publicly traded company. Although it lost $1bn, investors may still do well because the losses appear to be declining.

Read the full article here . . .