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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> These results may help identify target areas where geologic instruments should be placed on future missions to Venus, such as Europe's EnVision that is scheduled to launch in 2032.

Russia has also been talking about renewing their famous Venera program for some time, which was the first human-made probe to land on another planet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera

>> Venera-D is a proposed mission to Venus that would include a highly capable orbiter and a lander. From the standpoint of total mass delivered to Venus, the best launch opportunities occur in 2026 and 2031 Venera-D could incorporate some NASA components, including balloons, a subsatellite for plasma measurements, or a long-lived (24 hours) surface station on the lander.

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Unfortunatelly, while looking quite promissing a few years back the Russian space program is currently yet again very cash strapped and has issues with covering its primary oblikations, let alone nice ambitious missions like that.

the year is 2289. Russia fully occupies Venus. USA controls most parts of Mars. China has an estimated ownership of 80% of all astroids in our planetary system. Europe is still not aligned on budgeting and long term planning.

You're very optimistic if you believe today's political structures will have anything to do with what we'll have in 250 years.

> the year is 2289. Gazprom fully occupies Venus. Walmart controls most parts of Mars. Cosco has an estimated ownership of 80% of all astroids in our planetary system. Volkswagen is still not aligned on budgeting and long term planning.

> spaceship software runs on Electron

A total of three hundred instances split over twenty Kubernetes clusters. A set of specifically trained A.I. monitors their output to derive action plans from their completely random and constant disagreement. It is the age of the congress class supercomputers.

It kinda does already. The displays in SpaceX capsule are chrome based...

Oh dear.

Welcome to Costco, I love you.

tbh asteroids are where the moneys at.

The larger planets have too much gravity to ship anything from/to. Asteroids on the other hand can facilitate interplanetary trade and mining with minimum energy expenditure.

Not such a wild guess, Today's structures have plenty to do with those from 250 years ago.

The year is 1770. The Qianlong Emperor rules the Qing dynasty China, roughly corresponding to its modern borders. The British Empire has just captured Bengal from the Mughal Empire. The United States has yet to become independent, and consists of thirteen colonies on the eastern coast. A future president is defending the accused in a police shooting case in Boston. Spain is still a world power. The Holy Roman Empire still exists; modern Germany does not. Russia is suffering from a pandemic.

Yet China, Russia, the UK and the Spanish world still all exist and are major players on the world stage.

The year is 2020. Emperor Xi of the communist dynasty rule China. After ruling a good chunk of the world the British have forgone their empire in favor of just being really good friends with the ones who have the most money and natural resources much to the same effect. The HRE has been replaced with a different conglomeration of peoples in the same general area. Russia is ruled by what's basically a czar/emperor and suffering a pandemic.

National borders and systems of government in mainland Europe have been somewhat unstable ever since 486AD. I don't see why the difference between the HRE and Germany matters. The point is there's a strong central European power. Other than a few upstarts being added to the list of "countries other countries have to take seriously" things have been pretty much the same.

> don't see why the difference between the HRE and Germany matters. The point is there's a strong central European power.

The HRE was neither a "strong power" by any means nor a (German-) nation state. The only ones that referred to the HRE as "The First Reich" were the Nazis for propaganda reasons.

In reality the so called "empire" was a decentralised, loose association of kingdoms and duchies struggling against each other for power. The was no nation state, no central government and no standing army.

The HRE had more in common with the Commonwealth of Nations than a single state.

You're technically correct but missing the point that there's a regionally dominant power. Whether it's headquartered in Berlin or Rome and the particulars doesn't really matter. Central Europe has been pretty politically unstable for last millennium and a half with various ethnic groups and regions joining and leaving various empires and nations. You've got Scandinavia, Switzerland and the low countries off doing their own thing, Spain, France, Russia and England as more or less defined entities but with their own varying levels of internal stability. Meanwhile everything from the Rhine to the Pripet is always a dumpster fire but there's always a dominant player (the HRE, Austria Hungary, Germany, etc). It would take like 10min to explain the current geopolitical situation to Napolean. That's how similar it is.

There were no nation states of the size and scope know today until industrialization because industrialization is required to support nation states as we currently know them. If you're trying to argue that things changed a lot then obviously you can win by cranking down the threshold of "a lot" but I think that with allowances for how what we think of as "empires" morphed into "nation states" things have remained pretty static.

Despite some players coming and going from the table and re-drawing of lines inside Europe things haven't changed that much. The big change was going from agrarian societies with supporting industry to industrialized societies with supporting agriculture.

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