Inside the baloon you get a really nice habitat with the correct Temperature, pressure and gas composition for humans to live in.
Inside the baloon you get a really nice habitat with the correct Temperature, pressure and gas composition for humans to live in.
With Mars, you can mine building materials from the surface.
Attach hydrogen, you get rocket fuel. Or plastic. Bind in some nitrogen, you can have proteins. There is probably silane lower down; send down a balloon to collect it, for silicon. Or all the way to the surface, to collect rocks.
Nuke power is totally practical there; no shielding needed, or worry about leaks; you just hang it a mile below your living-space balloons.
I know that we know that zero-G is a negative, but do we have any idea if it's a threshold that needs to be reached, a linear response to G-force that scales from untenable to fine, etc?