Before Egerton

Here is NRSV, Mark 7 -

5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live[d] according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written [Isaiah 29:13],
 ‘This people honors me with their lips,
   but their hearts are far from me;
 7 in vain do they worship me,
   teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

This is in the so-called Bethsaida Section, Mark 6:53-8:21. It is famed for being (1) redundant and (2) reproduced in Matthew but not in Luke. (Luke also doesn't quote 6:45-52 or 8:22-6 which surround it, but waaay back in 1998 I mooted that Luke knew at least these or some form of these.) Mark 6:53-8:21 is also thought to be primitive since Jesus does some magical weirdness in here.

As I read Egerton's minutes about the King's Coin, I see that Jesus there too quotes the full Isaiah pericope. Jesus is irritated that the <lawyers> are flattering him with their lips as working wonders above the prophets - meaning Elijah and Elisha, given that he's about to heal a leper. But how about those precepts?

Original Mark or else a later Marcan editor, by contrast, quotes Isaiah's comment about human precepts in context of an actual Jewish Rabbinic precept.

I propose that this anecdote belongs to an ancient Christian catechesis, which the Apostles attributed to Jesus Himself. Egerton transposed the quote into his Royal Coin controversy - falsely. Mark or his editor restored it.

The men on the coins

I'm looking some more at Egerton's fragment 2r, that wild paraSynoptic account of the Coin Of The Realm. Egerton's page filibusters with an Isaiah quote until it breaks, so we don't read the coin, although all scholars agree that Jesus will draw it out in the text past the break. The coin might be Tiberian; it might be Herodian - Bell and Skitt don't take sides. I'm concentrating here on the leadup.

All four Gospels in question (I'll get to The Fifth Gospel, Thomas, anon) lead with the peoples' flattery, calling Jesus a "teacher" (didask-). The Gospels agree the questioners are insincere. For Egerton, they are subjecting Jesus to fitna (peirazein); for Mark 12:13f. et al., Jesus asks them, why peirazete him. Jesus is too wise for them; Egerton has Jesus putting himself in the place of Isaiah's God.

As to their differences: Mark's inquisitors are Pharisees and Herodians. Matthew, bearing his usual grudges, has the Pharisees putting on their best 4chan "happy merchant" face and sending the Herodians to do their dirty work. Luke and Egerton agree not to mention exactly who posed the question. Why is Luke eliding what Mark (and maybe Matthew too) told him? It could be that Luke, addressing a gentile audience, is abstracting away elements of the context. Perhaps.

Where Mark and Matthew only have their questioners "ensnare him by his words", Luke goes further: so they might deliver him (paradoûnai) unto the power and authority (tê_i archê_i) of the governor.

Egerton notes here the context of authority, he arche. In another Egerton story, first fragment, is a parallel to John 7:30 - the people's "archons" could not take Jesus, because his Hour Of Paradosis had not come.

Egerton's fragments do not record explicitly (is "explied" a word?) who was tempting Jesus - their base text may not ever have stated it. But Luke's parallels offer a hint. Egerton's first fragment addresses the lawyers, and goes on that the "archons of the people" were eager for the paradosis of Jesus. The second fragment's questioners would be too obvious if they were the archons themselves. That fragment likely followed the same parallel: the lawyers are the main villains, pushing Jesus afoul of the archons.

Mark, then, gathered the lawyers and archons to Jerusalem as Pharisees and Herodians, insisting on Caesar as the man on Provincial coin. Matthew, like Egerton, albeit possibly by way of an "Oral Gospel", had the former goad the latter - retaining Caesar from Mark. Luke knew Egerton directly and mined it for 20:20-4 (as far as we have Egerton).

If Egerton's second fragment is set in Jerusalem, here is a radical thought. Maybe Egerton involved two coins, as Ignatius hints in his letter to Magnesia. This, to set out a triptych like Thomas did. One coin had Caesar, another Herod. Jesus would say: give to Caesar what is his, give to "the king" what is his, and give to G-d what is His.

The Atlantis of stability

h/t sciencedaily: last Wednesday, the MA Institute of Technology reported some important new data on the Strong Fundamental Force at high energies and pressures. Well, okay, it was 1988-2012 data, from the now-decommissioned CLAS particle detector then running at MIT's Jefferson Laboratory; but newly recovered and mined. The thing is a thing that's a thing now.

Neutron stars are dense and faraway. Therefore we haven't a direct handle on what happens within them. We also hadn't developed - until recently - the instruments to test the fundamental forces at those temperatures and pressures. Instead the theoreticians had delivered a handwave over exotic (and untestable) "quark and gluon soup". G-d bless The King Over Soup!!

As far as I know, which isn't much, the "Strong" force exists to explain how electromagnetism (and the related "Weak" force) could be overcome in a nucleus. Why aren't neutrons drifting out of a nucleus, and why aren't protons pushing everything apart - in short, why isn't our whole universe a cloud of light hydrogen gas and occasional ions. Whatever's keeping nuclei together sure as f#$% isn't gravity.

Enter the Strong force: to attract protons and neutrons and, together, more protons. Also, said force explains why Hydrogen-2 (proton-neutron) is stable and next in line, Helium-3 (proton-proton-neutron); but not the bare double-protonic Helium-2. Elements with insufficient neutrons fall apart by fission - usually losing bundled proton-neutron coupled pairs, which squirt out as Helium-4 "alpha" ions. Hydrogen-4 and -up fall out of balance too, ejecting the new neutrons right back. Other atoms with too many neutrons undergo the Weak force which flips unprotected neutrons to protons in "beta" decay. Although here ... well, read on.

This model left us wondering about that delicate balance between the Electroweak and the Strong forces. Especially wherever we've added f#$%ing gravity, like in a pulsar. The neutrons don't decay there. Why not? And why aren't they collapsing further and raising up an event-horizon? Of course, some do, hence the black-holes; and Pauli Exclusion would stop collapse before that for some other borderline cases, but...

One possibility is that the "Strong" force isn't f#$%ing gravity. The force is more like electromagnetism: it can repel, also. Specifically, neutrons would repel each other. This is the "Argonne V18" model.

MIT have verified and constrained Argonne V18. It is hard to dispute 24 years of data. We're being told that protons repel each other as well, beyond what electromagnetic theory would explain.

I'm thinking this Argonne V18 understanding of neutron repulsion has implications for the massive transuranic atoms, notably unstable. Conjecture has Islands Of Stability out there whose isotopes aren't radioactive. I'm thinking these Islands don't exist.

The LBA Latin archipelago

University of Chicago (Medicine department) has a report about Sardinia genetics - h/t Jessica Saraceni. Specifically, the Chicagoans've sequenced Nurag[h]ic DNA. These are the islanders of Sardinia after the ocean rose to split Sardinia from Corsica 5000 BC, and before the Sea Peoples 1200 BC.

It was already projected that Nurag-DNA should look like Oetzi DNA. Oetzi was Chalcolithic south-European villager DNA, pretty much like [UPDATE 3/16 - 60% of] Sardinian DNA today except with (even) less R1a, R1b, X (for women) and other Yamnaya markers. One often finds a surprise with these things so, even if there weren't surprises this time, I'll grant the necessity to go look. Since the genetics are nailed down, I'm moving on to the language.

Sardinia speaks Latinate (if nonItalian) today - which demands an answer. The Euskara in 200 AD and the Rasna in 700 BC are each recorded as speaking entirely non Indo European tongues (mutually unrelated). The Basque base population was maternally "Helena", but now their menfolk are heavily R1b like me. The Etruscans switched to the Villanova culture which was culturally Urnfield / LepontoGaulish, so were presumably R1b as well. And plenty other "berber" languages survived in Spain and of course in North Africa. Where the languages did move to IndoEuropean, as in Britain, it was accompanied by what is politely termed "high population turnover". So where old pagan Europe let the women live, the women tended to win the war at home. But not in Sardinia.

To explain how Sardinia exchanged language and not genetics, I propose: that Sardinia had a longer experience with Italic languages, specifically with paraLatin languages, than is usually assumed. [UPDATE 3/17: Hoo boy, I really should have read moar...]

It starts with a look at the map and a thought to Mediterranean ship technology. Well into the Age Of Iron, ships were too unstable to support longlasting foreign colonies. It wasn't until, what, 800 BC when Tyrians could seed Carthage and Utica - and Olbia, in northwest Sardinia (later taken by Iolaus, an Attic Greek pirate). Also in the 800s is when a Villanovan - GalloEtruscan - colony is known off Sardinia's coast, at Tavolara. Before then, northern Italians were left alone for a millennium or more in the Corsican strait.

The next question is, which Italians.

The northeast coast of Sardinia is of course closest to Corsica; in our times the last Bourbons found northern Sardinia speaking Corsican and not Sardinian. Corsica was nigh to the southern reach of Etruria - as of 540 BC, when the Etruscan city Caere conquered that island. By the same token Corsica was also close to Rome and to old Faliscia.

This blog has proposed a model where Italic languages had broken from protoCeltic and got to the ankle of Italy (which Villanovans never did) even before the Avellino eruption 1700 BC - starting Inca-like from the hills. The heel might have been Messapic and Dorian-facing but Sardinia doesn't care. Whatever was spoken at the Calabrian toe as of 1700 BC, Sardinia also wouldn't have cared - it's far away across open ocean.

As of the 800s BC and maybe even as of 1300 BC the Latium-Faliscia region spoke its own languages, related to the Oscan of the hills east and south. As the Etruscans only got to Corsica in the 800s BC, so also they hadn't reached as far as Latium until around that time. Their kings ruling Rome didn't replace the Latin language except at temple.

I suggest that Latin / Faliscan languages were dominant in the "Tuscan" archipelago - particularly Elba - until the Villanovan invasion. The eastern coast of Corsica would by then have needed some Latinish pidgin to trade with the mainland. When the Rasna claimed those entrepots, they ruled them like they were ruling Rome. This meant maintaining the local trade-tongue, although some Rasna writing has been uncovered in Etruscan-era Corsican cities.

That island trade-tongue would by 400 AD not even have been a creole anymore; it was accented paraLatin. More: Corsica had nothing to stop paraLatin from capturing the main routes internal. Almost all Corsica was Latin-speaking, or near enough, full centuries before Rome asserted primacy over the Latin Speaking Peoples.

As for northeast Sardinia at this time: the bulk of the island's coastline came under "Punic" influence, and indeed UChM's paper finds Levantine DNA here succeeded by (North) African. No part of Sardinia ever saw reason to move to the Rasna language. The northeast of Sardinia, close to Etrusco(-Latin) Corsica, would then keep on keepin' on.

So by the time of the First Punic War, first the Rasna and then the Romans could already count on a Roman-like native population on at least the eastern shores of those islands. I would extend this reach as far as Sardinia's northeast coast. Think how the Normans found twelfth-century Dublin.

CONSTRAINT 3/16: For most of Sardinia, let's not underestimate that Punic takeover. The North Africans and, to a lesser extent, the Greeks were by far the most drastic event ever to hit the islanders. Thus making my comment "shifting language but not genetics" very, very wrong. Although this blogpost does still work for Corsica.

What if a supervolcano exploded and nobody cared?

It is official: Toba did NOT bottleneck the human species. We already had an inkling of this in Africa proper; no disruption there. The remaining questions were about Out Of Africa, genetically estimated around that time. Was OOA before the eruption, after, or both?

What's new here is that Toba's date has been agreed upon, and that there are Stone Age camps in India from before and after the eruption. The style of camp and technology persisted across the divide.

Peter Watson's The Great Divide argued that humans already out of Africa remembered the Toba blackout - meaning, they survived it. Score one for him.

Branch sunday, hay sunday, desert sunday, palm sunday

In the Evangelists’ Palm Sunday, John 12:12 is the one note in our known Gospels to describe the actual palms. (Luke 19:35-8 does not mention plants at all. We’ll get to th’others.) For John they are the βαΐα τῶν φοινίκων – the “Phoenician” plant being the Canaanite palm-tree. The question is whether John is indicative of Sukkot.

For the Tabernacles festival, the Jewish oral-torah has lulavim. Leviticus 23:40 transcribes the term KPT TMRYM. In Greek, Phoenician κάλλυνθρα, and branches ("clades") of other plants usually translated as “willow” and “osier”.

βαΐων had been waved for Simon the Hasmonaean 141 BC, per 1 Maccabees 13:51. Which branches, that book does not mention. Overall for this 1 Maccabees 13 does not use Sukkot language.

Mark 11:8 has the Jerushalmim strew their own clothes and also layers (στιβάδας) - not waves - of cutoffs from the field (κόψαντες ἐκ τῶν ἀγρῶν), on the road. Matthew 21:8 cuts “clade” branches, more like Leviticus, and strews them on the road.

NT scholars know elsewhere that Matthew and Luke both used Mark. Scholars are less sure of John’s relationship to any of these. Frankly we wouldn’t know it from the redaction-criticism of these parallels here.

It appears to me that branches are unideal for easing the passage of an entrance into a city. Cloaks, I can understand [UPDATE 2/27: got to cover up those camel turds]. Also hay and grasses and whatever soft weeds are found in fields.

In conclusion, Mark and Luke do not mark the date of Palm Sunday - at all. John waves branches of the same sort as in Maccabees; the type of branch is new, and more indicative of Sukkot. Matthew might even remember the waving of branches from other sources. If Luke had the same sources - Mark Goodacre would say, Luke had Matthew - Luke would have agreed with me both that branches are not going into the road, and that palms shouldn't be waved outside of Sukkot.

Score one for Simcha.

Head start

Up Mount Maxwell the air is 650s K, which is 380 °C; and at 4.7 MPa pressure. I've got a tower of liquid sulphur. Say I fill a cavern with that, and then drain it out without allowing more air in.

If we were keeping the sulphur at the same temperature, perhaps because the rock was poorly insulated, then such sulphur as hadn't drained will start boiling. West & Menzies, "The Vapor Pressures of Sulphur between 100° and 550° with related Thermal Data", The Journal of Physical Chemistry 33.12 (1928), 1880-92 peg a saturation of 380 °C sulphur gas at 268.5 mm of mercury. So: 35.8 kPA. Not much less than 1 bar.

I don't want a roomful of broiling corrosive gas - I can get that outside. Luckily I can assuredly react (or is it "reage"?) this vapour with some metallic dust and that will get me the pure vacuum for my upper server-room. Which is almost the first room I want.

For other chambers, I want air, just cooler air. First, obviously, I insulate such from the outside - not just airproof them.

As any fluid depressurises, its temperature drops. If we assume a phantasy sulfurlike substance solid only near absolute zero then the ratio P1/T1 = P2/T2 flips to T1/P1 = T2/P2. So 650/4700 = x/35.8, and the chamber is 4.95 K. LOL!

Sulphur will solidify long before that. Sulphur from 1 bar to 100 bar will freeze around 395 K. Specifically: into the "monoclinic" form. (The solid side of sulfur's phase diagram is like water's: complex.) Monoclinic sulphur is 1.957 g/cm3. However liquid sulphur on Earth isn't much less at 1.8. The liquid pressure that I've got at 395 K will be 2.86 MPa, to boot - ending up at near the same pressure in the end. If I fill a Venerean chamber with liquid sulphur and drain it out too fast, I risk a chamber full of solid sulphur. But cooler!!

So I suggest this: drain the sulphur back out slowly, or maybe in stages, allowing some air back in per stage. As the temperature cools it cools the new air with it. How much air depends on which chamber, in the end, but since this is the start of the colony I'm biased to keep the cooler inside air at the same pressure as the hellish outside or even higher.

I expect bedrock to be warmer than the outside. To keep the main chambers cool (and the vacuum room airless) we run the compressors. Cooling the low-atmo remains a challenge, absent liquid coolants. Venus air-pressures might allow for a wind coolant, especially on Maxwell's ecliptic east where I expect katabasis. Maybe compressed air can be exposed to the outdoor (5-6 MPa) wind and allowed back inside to expand to whatever. 700 K Carbon dioxide at 1 bar, according here, is 49.3 mW/(m K) but more like low 50s in the 50s bar range. Twice as good as Earth ambient nitrogen; a tenth as good as water.

Hartapu the Raider

h/t hbdchick, another inscription of Hartapu was found.

Hartapu ruled from Türkmen-Karahöyük in the southeastern Konya Plain, arid now. This was (probably) Tarhuntassa, the province of the Luwian stormgod, in the last years of the Hittite empire. Then follows the Dark Age, enlightened mainly by outsiders.

Hartapu's floruit was "late eighth century". In this region at that time, the Bible knows of a "Tubal" which was Tabal. Tabal enters the Assyrian annals 837 BC under a Tuwati and his son Kikki: Trevor Bryce, The World of the Neo-Hittite Kingdoms: A Political and Military History (Oxford, New York: 2012) 141-5, 306f. Assyria preferred to deal with Tabal's subject lordlings piecemeal, calling them "kings" so bypassing Tabal's palace. It happens that Tabal was prominent in the later eighth century to the point we know some kings: Hulli, and Ambaris son of Hulli. Somewhere floats also a Burutash. (A different Tuwati and Wasusarmas his son might date c. 900 BC.)

Ambaris overlapped Sargon II, 722-705 BC, and struck up an alliance. Apparently this alliance failed. Sargon invaded in 713 and unseated Ambaris... only to lose his own garrison in a rebellion the next year. Tabal then allied with the Cimmerians, an Iranian group related to the Scythians. At some point 722-710 Sargon raided Tabal's vassal city Shinuhtu, when Kiakki was Tabal's king. I take it that Kiakki was the immediate beneficiary of the rebellion and that this Assyrian victory - a kidnap raid - was the best Sargon could do. Sargon's grand-strategy, I think, was to cozy up to a rival empire Mushki, then controlling the region northwest of Tabal later known to Greeks as The Phrygia.

Sargon attacked Tabal one more time in 705. That proved... unwise.

There doesn't seem much room for two kingdoms in Tabal's area 750-700 BC. (Which already posed a problem for historians here, inspiring d'Alfonso to redate Hartapu to the Bronze Age - which we now can say was wrong.) So - assuming "late eighth century" - I'd put Hartapu no earlier than the last decade of the 700s. Maybe he was able to profit from the Shinuhtu affair.

The Cimmerians (Robert Howard aside) are chiefly famed for bringing down the Phrygian Empire - that is, Mushki controlled from Gordion. Over the 800s BC, Gordion had arisen from a sleepy little town into the capital of an empire. Hartapu's latest inscription takes credit for the attack himself, that he'd conquered Mushki and its kings. Meh. I do not hear of Anatolian languages subsequently spoken in the Phrygia. More likely it was a joint attack and Hartapu was pleased to let the Cimmerians go full El Guapo on the survivors.

Per Kealhofer, Grave, and Voigt doi 10.1017/RDC.2018.152, Gordion proper had burned down... in 800 BC, well before "the late eighth century". The "Middle Phrygians" 800-540 BC lost some ground to the Lydian Empire to their west. But did not suffer genocide, did not lose literacy in their own language, and may not have even lost their capital. They continued to use their own paraGreek alphabet, in Hellenistic times switching to the Greek alphabet proper. Others seem to have struck out east, into the Armenia, where the Persians would find them.

Maybe the Türkmen-Karahöyük have their century wrong (which explains why Assyria isn't noted). But then Hartapu doesn't claim to have destroyed Gordion, just to have subjected Mushki.

The innkeep

Earlier I'd proposed what Mark was doing concerning Simon, the leper. Matthew and Luke carried over the story, not caring about Simon himself - rather diluting the effect, by including a general da'wa. But there survives one more parallel. This is in the Egerton Papyrus, first fragment. Bell and Skeat proposed to read that fragment verso to recto; here, on the recto side.

These events occurred in the earlier half of their codex. The second half, I think, concerns the hour of Jesus' paradosis and crucifixion.

Egerton's first fragment does not place the events in time and space to the degree of its second. We don't have evidence that Egerton shared Mark's chiasmatic structure nor that one's will to frontload as much of Jesus' holiness into Galilee as possible. We don't know what Egerton thought of that famous Simon, the Rock. Egerton does have his anonymous leper delivering an autobiography: that he was a traveller who met with lepers at inns, and contracted their condition there.

Skeat and Bell pp. 19-20 do not see this anecdote as dependent on Mark or Luke. I say this presents the backstory from which Mark could construct his two anecdotes: the leper started that narrative as a traveler, and now he runs a safehouse in Bethany - a sort of inn.

It is safest to assume that Egerton intended this event too for the southern Jordan region. If Jordan proper, it immediately precedes the second fragment. If Bethany or Jerusalem, then immediately after.

The Egerton Gospel was short

Consider the Egerton Papyrus' second fragment (Bell-Skeat pdf). I'm trying to figure which side to read first.

Its recto, which is the front of a standalone page, runs from the top of the page to tell the debate over royal coin - although the page tears off after a quote from Isaiah, which Mark pulls back to chapter 7. Egerton Two Verso contains a miracle at the Jordan. We can assume that this doublesided sheet narrated events in some semblance of chronology. From that, we can suspect that the overall setting is not Galilee, where the body of water would be the big lake and not the valley south of it.

Given that the physical book is late second century (the Synoptics were already extant, as well as John), this is a codex. If a single-gospel text the quires might be folded down the middle, like in a modern tract. Papyrus 5 (which used to cover John 1-20) is verso-recto at the start, and recto-verso at the end.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus preaches at Jerusalem over chapters 11-12. Chapter 13 is an apocalypse. In chapter 14, Jesus anticipates his death and burial (Egerton may or may not bury Jesus at all). But Mark 14 is not discussing Jerusalem. Mark puts Jesus in Bethany, the lepercolony. This is two miles east of the city; four miles from the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, where the Jordan ends up.

Bell and Skeat p. 40 ponder if Mark 3:6 recalls a source in which the coin controversy occurred in Galilee, after which Mark transposed the story proper to Jerusalem. Egerton doesn't preserve mention of Caesar, only of "kings". Herod Antipas was not a king but did mint his own coinage (maybe or maybe not known as of 1934) and, it follows, collected his own taxes. Mark (infamously) mistook Herod for a king and had to be corrected; Egerton, even if it wasn't mistaken elsewhere, here was at least vague. Isaiah focused on Jerusalem in his day; but leper-healing is more an Elisha act, more Northern.

I incline here more to Jacobovici and Wilson that Jesus was dyotheletic in Jerusalem, challenging the temple and not Rome or the Herodians. Maybe the Herodians were planning a trap in Galilee but not this trap.

If the setting is Jerusalem then I with Bell-Skeat, 41 must ask: But did Jesus, after that, go out from Jerusalem all the way back to the Jordan? Mark doesn't say so. And it seems unlikely. So I read verso-recto. Just like the first fragment.

In this case the two stories fall into the first half of the codex. Let's allow that this doublesided page was in the middle of the book on account the text can actually be read, which most of this gospel cannot.

Still: this implies the whole recto-verso half - at least - of this MS was Jerushalmi. Unless the Jerusalem segment was inordinately large (which I won't rule out) it wouldn't leave much room for Jesus' deeds before entering Judaea. Further: there seems limited space in the lower half of the verso for the entry into Jerusalem. It may well sport palms, hosannas and that donkey but not much else.

UPDATE 4/6: Berlin 11710 started verso-recto on the leftside of the codex, too. Interesting that John's words are here placed in Nathaniel's mouth. Post-Johannine? Gospel of Peter?

The Eurasians before us all

Razib alerts us to Alan R. Rogers, Nathan S. Harris and Alan A. Achenbach: "Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors interbred with a distantly related hominin".

R-H-A get a little loose with some of their dates toward the end. Their conclusion collapses the main story to 700 thousand years ago. But they have the "Neander'sovan" ancestors breaking into its Neander and Denisovan tribes 735 BC. It could be that they are insecure about the precision of their dates; they did have to revise an earlier paper they'd submitted. So I'll try again here.

Para-humans about two million years back colonised Eurasia - probably from Africa. Another wave exited Africa ~750 thousand years ago. The group did not at first do well outside their home; their lineage shows a bottleneck of only about five hundred souls. They did however interbreed with these para-humans, adopting some hybrids for their own. That hybridisation seems to have helped, as the "Neander'sovans" expanded, becoming two groups: Neanders and Denisovans. By the "Marine Isotope Stage 13" interglacial 522-472 kBC, the Neanders at least numbered 16000, maintaining that level to 453 kBC.

The para-humans did not all die out at once; some survived out East, and interbred again with the Denisovans (I'm not clear on which Denisovans; they'd split too, famously). Meanwhile out west the Neander population dwindled to 3400 people.

Maybe less, from our perspective: R-H-A note (from Kay Prüfer et al. 2017) that a tribe in Vindija is the one which contributed to our DNA where another group at the Altai did not. The African exodus during the Eemian affected mainly Vindija. Chen, Wolf, Fu, Li, and Akey doi 10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.012 called this the "introgressing" subset, as opposed to the Altai Neanders who never touched us. But Vindija and the others seem not far apart at this time.

I don't know what hit the Neanders in the middle 400s kBC. They'd already survived some cold patches. Freakin' Yellowstone blew 630 kBC and that's not even on the map here (like Toba). Were the 400s kBC Neanders and Denisovans between them too successful - did they thin down too much of the accustomed game? But then we'd have to ask what was special about the 400s over the 600-500s.

Who shall be our martha?

"Martha" - marǝté - means "the Lady" in Hellenistic-era western Aramaic. Jacobovici and Wilson would allow "Mara" too given that Aramaics don't do unisex as did contemporary Greek and Latin. A monotheism doesn't allow for very many marthas.

J-W argue for a Christian feminism based on Martha Maryam of Magdala. Catholics today prefer Martha Maryam theotokos. J-W ostensibly argue only that Magdalenism used to exist (EVIDENCE 12/27 - the over(?)-reaction against it) but, let's face it, J-W aren't Catholic and they prefer that hypothetical early Christianity over the one what we got.

(At least Flanders and J-W can agree that the Prots are wrong. For a start marriage deserves to be a sacrament still. I can't even disagree with Flanders for once.)

Magdalenism, in J-W's world, is a Christianity of sexuality; Catholicism, a Christianity of childbirth. These are (literally intimately) related, but the Devil hides in the details. In history the Cult Of Mary [per Flanders - he means the Virgin-Mother] has been "orthodoxy" where Magdalenism has, at most, bubbled around the "heresies".

I admit, that argument is whiggish. But one man's (or woman's) Whig History is another man's Bayes.

The lesson on history is that, for all problems we may see in the Cult Of the Virgin-Mother, the Cult of Artemis Helios'-wife has led nowhere better. Jesus' marriage couldn't just be a sacrament; it had to be a sacred mystery and - ultimately - a secret, and abused and corrupted. Gnostic excesses tainted Christianity as a whole, as J-W do note; and very probably delayed wide acceptance of the religion. "But [X] just hasn't been tried properly!" is another argument which, I'd hope, history has disproven.

If we interrogate the process by which this classical-era Asheratism became a gnostic cult, we'll find that a society can withstand a veneration of new life without sexuality, but not the reverse. If two people want new life to come forth between them, they can have it. If they want infertility they can have that too. Guess which couple begets a legacy.

Here, then, is ONE heresy from which Our Mother protects us, and it is a doozy. And on "The Cult of the Singing Flame" : as the journalists say, I stand by my story.

The rich man's playground

The ostensible "Republicans" in Utah are pushing forward with two grand schemes: the anti-carbon bandwagon, and legal polygamy. H/t Drudge and Instapundit respectively.

I'll leave aside the problems of either. I'm interested in cui-bono.

A lot of money has swarmed into the Mountain States these last couple decades. Historically there hasn't been much here, except mining and tourism; farming is hard due to climate and water, and the valleys're not as accessible as the ocean coasts and the big eastern and northwestern rivers. Big Tech has made the place desirable. But also tech is insulated from other work, excepting energy.

As tech grows in profile, the place gets crowded, and water drops off. So the desire of those now up here, is to pull up the ladder behind them. That is done by Environmentalism - little new gets built, or maintained. Also, given that many newly here are rich, they do what rich men have always done which is to get greedy with the women.

Utah has the history that it was conquered from native Ute tribes by a religious sect, which practiced - demanded in fact - polygamy. There was a "revelation" to ban the practice but that was only to ease Utah's politicians into our Senate. Now that marriage has been un-defined at the Court level, the representatives are feeling their oats. (As it were.)

Utah will become a paradise, for those men who can afford it, and for those willing to suck up to those men. (As it were.)

Egerton's Palm Sunday

I'm still looking at Jacobovici-Wilson. One point, pp. 266f: what the Johannine Gospel implies as a Palm Sunday was not the first day of the Christian "Holy Week".

Palms and Hosannas, according to J-W, are for Sukkot, translated "Tabernacles". Nowadays it isn't just palms, but the Jews own no other holidays which use these. Speaking as one who has lived among palms, and had one as a weed outside his home: it is not easy to get those stiff sharp fronds off these trees. As J-W note.

Jesus (famously) was crucified during the Passover season, probably on Wednesday or Thursday. The Jewish Palm Day is associated with the Passover ... a few months afterward, mid-Exodus. Last year Tabernacles spanned 13-20 October.

J-W point out that the Synoptic Gospels have smoothed out Jesus' time in Jerusalem to a week. John, for its part, is more disjoint: Jesus enters among palms 12:12-13; but he is also in Jerusalem on earlier occasions.

The Egerton Papyrus preserved the leadup to "give to Caesar..." in a doublesided page whose other half involved the Jordan, between Jericho and Galilee. This saying is Jerushalmi in the Synoptics. I posed a theory 29 March 2002 - 1 Oct 2003 that Egerton, in nonpreserved parts of the MS, incorporated what John spreads out over 3:14+12:34. This predicts a crucifixion and, in John 12:34, is set in Jerusalem (the likeliest spot for a run-in with Rome proper). I think Egerton weighted its godspell of Jesus toward his time in Jerusalem.

Since all four preserved narrative Gospels include the Triumphal Sunday, it would be strange if Egerton - related to all of them - lacked it.

As for a motive: J-W note that John has a problem with "the Jews", and squeezing the events into one week raises up how fickle they are. Matthew and Luke depend on Mark; for Mark's motive, and for Matthew's, I defer to Evan Powell who pointed out that their desire is to excuse away Peter as fickle. [UPDATE 2/27: Matthew also has a problem with other Jews, which may explain why he has the crowd tossing underbrush at Jesus' way in.] Peter is just as fickle in John 1-20 (all Powell and Papyrus-5 allow to it), so that can apply there too.

That leaves a problem, for those hoping to vindicate J-W someday with a rediscovered text: if Egerton was as anti-Petrine as is John, we cannot count on Egerton (should that part of it be found) to deliver the appropriate span between Palm Sunday and Black Friday Thursday.

But J-W aren't hoping for that text, on account they think they already have enough in Aseneth.

What I'll also note is that the "Holy Week", by posing narrative problems for the Evangelists, looks to be papering over a real account of a real (failed) revolutionary. That hobbles the case for the Mythicists, if it needed hobbling.

John's other source

I've been coming around to seeing the mostly-lost Gospel preserved in the Egerton Papyrus as culminating in a Jerusalem Passion Narrative - to use his anticipatory phrase, the "Hour of His Paradosis". It very probably started on "Palm Sunday" (I'll get to what that means) and went up to the Crucifixion. Most of its events link to other Gospels' events which they set in Jerusalem during Jesus' last visit there - where it's his last week there, leading to Passover.

I've put quite a bit of weight on the Egerton fragments. But there remain some lengths to which I cannot stretch it. For a start, although its Jesus does do miracle, I do not find the hypothesised Seven Signs - in fact, there may not have been the space for them. I don't find how long was its "holy week" although I expect it was, despite itself, a week or part of a week. It predicts (I think) a Crucifixion, but no empty tomb; I cannot rule out a straight docetic Ascension as in the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians. Or, er, surat al-ma'ida.

J-W note already pp. 264-6 that the Gospels which we have attest, in effect, to two Jeshuae: one born to the kingdom of David, and the other to a kingdom not of this world but of the Temple. The former confronts the Pharisees; the latter, fatally, the Sadducees. The former is Galilean; the latter preaches in Jerusalem. The former works well with John's Revelation; the latter, with the post-Pauline tractate to the Hebrews. Only the former could forgive temporal debts himself; the latter instead, like Isaiah, could but petition the king, and as Egerton notes, Jesus in the end would not even do that.

Egerton gives us the Jerushalmi Jesus. I could stretch its narrative to the man's raid on the Temple. Relevant to Jacobivici and Wilson - I cannot find the Magdalene in it. Relevant to Powell I cannot find Peter. But it is difficult to imagine a politically-minded Gospel that lacked space for Jesus' most-prominent disciples, of whom Cephas is known to Paul.

As for Jesus before Jerusalem: perhaps John and Mark made use of other material.

Aseneth

I recently bought Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson, The Lost Gospel. This proposes that Joseph and Aseneth, commonly deemed a Jewish fanfiction from the last chapters of Genesis, is a coded Gospel.

Jacobovici is, unfortunately, a Da Vinci Code crank... as the counter-cranks at Answers in Genesis note. But remember: the Baghistan cares not if the author is a crank elsewhere as long as the premise of one particular thesis holds up. G-d knows I am guilty of a few questionable theories myself. I even believe that American liberals got men past the Van Allen Belts onto the barren Moon and back.

As I read Jacobovici-Wilson (I've only just started) I find myself not entirely interested in this thesis itself. Late-Antique students are more interested in what later readers made of it. The story found its home in Syriac Christianity. Here, is where I would ask if some readers did, indeed, read it as coded gospel.

The Copts in parallel were maintaining weird paraBiblical texts of their own - many of them buried at Nag Hammadi [mostly Sahidic] although not this particular one. And J-W make a fair case for J&A themes cropping up (for instance) in nonstandard Biblical-themed Palestinian shrines. If J-W's thesis had been published as two books, one focusing on the reception-history in Syrian Late Antiquity, that one would enjoy inherent value among SLA scholars.

The Syriac MS is bound up with a fifth-century Miaphysite (even Mono-) miscellany, featuring a chronicle by one Zacharias Rhetor - Miaphysitism having spawned from the two synods at Ephesus, never accepted over in Seleucia and subsequently retracted at Chalcedon (de facto). The MS also contains the story of the Sleepers of Ephesus. J-W propose that J&A reaches to Artemisian themes current (until the 380s) among pagans at Ephesus. Given the Ephesian character of the other texts in the MS, so far I agree. I would class the compiler of the MS as a dissident Christian based in Ephesus; a sixth century Ron Unz. UPDATE 7/5/2021 - There is also interest in Amida here.

J-W don't know that gnosticism (full blown) was yet a concern for J&A. There were several writings in early Christianity leaning in that direction, for instance the Gospel of Thomas - also parts of the Gospel of John. Certainly gnostics picked up on J&A's typology, like the Valentinians, although again these cults didn't translate our text into Coptic. J-W make a case that the Syriac theologians Aphrahat and Ephrem also accepted J&A. Although those two preceded Ephesus and were if anything Arian-leaning.

J-W are surely correct that J&A is closer to Christianity than to most Judaisms. They cite the Shepherd of Hermas, dear to Saint Irenaeus and accepted in Sinaiticus but subsequently dismissed as overly Donatist, as thematically closest. But I do wonder if J-W should have considered such early messianic Judaisms as have elevated other Genesis figures to a near-Divine rank. The Similitudes of Enoch and "Slavonic Enoch" are cases in point - early Jewish attempts to steal Jesus' thunder, abortive in Jewish literacy but copied in Christendom. Perhaps J&A is another. Although: Bauckham sees Pauline language in this text [ironic, given J-W's thoughts on Paul].

More toward my interests, as J-W note p. 140, the later reception-history of J&A themes point more to inlining the themes with the Gospel passion-narrative. Perhaps where the Gnostics didn't care about Jesus' cross, and where the Catholics don't care about Jesus' adolescence; the Arians cast about for a full biography of Our Lord which could take in his fullness. (I leave aside whether this project is possible or worth the bother.)

One can certainly fault J-W for sloppiness. They note that Aseneth, gentile who devotes herself to monotheism and to Joseph's God, doesn't follow all Torah. On its face, well... duh: Torah could not exist at a time before Sinai. Jews of the Hellenistic era did, however, believe that God had already ordained laws that would become Torah. Jubilees and the whole Aramaic Levi cycle (Amram, Qahat, Tobit etc) are full of Jewish laws anachronistically backdated into Genesis and early Exodus. By doing so such Israelites had made Torah itself superfluous, to the extent many sectarian authors bypassed Torah when they approached that time in history, as Gabriele Boccacini noted in the 1990s. J&A assumes Genesis and likely had access to Judges as well. But now I must circle back: J&A presents itself as an Israelitish love story, like Tobit and (better) Ruth. It allows to its protagonists only as much (pre)Torah as the story demands.

I agree at least to applaud J-W for giving this story another, closer look. But they overstated their case - or, at least, they demanded too much at once of their readers. They should have hit these themes as publons first: maybe in refereed journals, maybe as blog posts. maybe in some book collecting the arguments more granularly (if that be a word). THEN do the full book.

The Leper, and Simon at Bethany

Mark 1:38-9 sets Jesus and his new disciples (vv. 16-20) as traveling around Galilean towns. In Mark 1:40-45, a leper approaches Jesus and petitions him: "If you will, I shall be cleansed". Jesus quips back "I will, so be cleansed". (Mark had a sense of wit to him.) The next and last time Mark mentions a leper it is one Simon in Bethany, Mark 14 (> Matthew 26:6).

In those days healthy people shunned lepers, and Samaritans and Jews alike shared Scripture to support that. Jews at least were not wholly heartless and had allowed a colony close to Jerusalem, as close to G-d's Temple as Torah could permit. This colony was Bethany.

Early Christian tradition, whose greatest (and basically only) muhaddith was Papias, recalled that Mark told true stories but not in the correct order. For their part, Luke 5:12 sets the event right after Simon Peter is adopted; Matthew 8, after the Sermon on the Mount (Luke will postpone the sermon down from the Mount, for 6:12f.).

Scholars are aware of some slight narrative breaks in what is restored. For instance, between 10:46a: "Then they came to Jericho," and 10:46b: "As he was leaving Jericho..." which as Stephen Patterson points out has become a playground for spurious gospel - Roman era or otherwise. Bell and Skeat wonder about Mark 3:6 as well.

Evan Powell constructed his own argument about Mark (plus what's now John 21) on that foundation. First, that Mark was running a Galilean Gospel, in which Jerusalem is Divinely cursed. Second that Mark is chiastic: what the text begins on Quire One [verso], it would wrap up on the same side of the same page... where it would be the end of the codex. Where Mark 16 ends with Magdalene running from the Jerusalem tomb, Powell restores the overall chiasm by splicing proto John 21 to the end.

Matthew and Luke (and maybe Q before them) develop an evangelical message from the source events. NIV Matthew 11:5 / Luke 7:22 have this to be reported to John [baptising at the Jordan]: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.

One could imagine that Mark assumed Simon as some well-known figure in early Christian sainthood, and that the leper in that first chapter was some random townsman. But. Mark liked to set up loose ends and close them; Jesus doesn't bother healing Simon; "Simon the Leper" is otherwise (apparently) unintroduced in this text; we're lacking Patristic witness until the late-Roman commentaries. And a Simon early in the story might have been confused with Cephas; Luke's sequence as a juxtaposition absolutely would have. I conclude Mark in ch. 14 wants us to read "Simon - that leper [from the first chapter]".

And if Evan Powell is to be believed, which I think he is, another agenda of Mark was to rehabilitate Simon Peter from disgrace. Here was a Simon, a leper cleansed in Galilee; there is a Simon from Galilee, cleansed of sin.

Mark, thereby, implies that Simon had traveled from Bethany to Galilee, just to be healed. He then returns to Bethany as Jesus' agent and safehouse-keeper.

BACKDATE 2/23

On the eastern slope

Before bringing a nuclear reactor and setting up cooling towers, what can be done on Venus’ surface?

The [ecliptic] eastern slope of Maxwell should be good for wind power. As the wind blows from the west, it shoves the cooler air atop the plateau over east, where it slides downward. Antarctica has this same phenomenon: the “katabatic” wind.

Wind turbines will work here to provide electricity. Venus' winds provide I think power enough to keep out the air, by powering airlocks. [h/t Kindltot 2/23] Calculation work can be Babbagelike. Also, this level of power can run recharging-ports for visitors coming in on battery power; and some instruments to monitor Venus herself. I am pretty sure the cloud cities will have an interest in what the volcanoes down below are up to.

The "steampunk" computers will oversee lowering the pressure and temperature, and installing the vacuum server room. This is the least for visitors who can use a sheltered, low-atmo set of chambers for short-term visits, even if they’re hot. The visitors will be here to adjust the equipment.

The elaborate sequence of coolants comes later, when people come here full time.

BACKDATE 2/21. Actually a lot of the following is backdated.

Mom, I posted it again

Timothy Flanders is still at it; still posting emotive material to OnePeterFive. His latest now assumes "Protestants’ Assault on Mary". But I've already dealt with Flanders' mental fixation on violence and hate, and with his prose style and strategy. Within this latest piece, buried under all that externalised rage and frustration hides an argument. This argument, I deem worthy of extraction. I'll put it all in terms someone outside of his "cult" can engage.

(His words, man. I just blog here.)

Flanders argues for basic Christianity replacing the contest of wills between humans with a contest of humility. For the former, that archaic contest which The Hostage portrayed [and subtly undermined] in The Iliad, only one contestant may win the [laurel] crown. For the latter, everyone wins, in the sight of God: the tug-of-war becomes the hug-of-war. (So Shelby Silverstein put it, in his 1970s-era paraChristian fashion.)

This focus on humility (viewed from up here in AD 2020, and very possibly in AD 220) had its start with Mary's role as Christ's vessel and with Christ's own role as God come to relate to humanity. Christians are well familiar of the latter; and so is Flanders, citing it back to Paul's Philemon. Flanders would raise Mary's role to the same level.

Flanders further asserts that Mary's role served to inspire the Church herself as a hierarchy devoted to service, not to self-aggrandation. Why Mary in particular and not, say, Peter or even Jesus... he doesn't explain. By Late Antiquity this assertion does get made again and again but, never argued.

Those Christianities which raised Mary to the same level of Christ - but different - could, now, nuance that ancient baptismal formula. It wasn't quite that there was "no male nor female". But if not alike, man and woman were equal. Not for Christendom was the sarcastic comment that Gehenna housed mostly women, as in Muhammadanism. Not for Christians, the Jewish male prayer thanking G-d they were not made woman.

Where Christians have abandoned the Cult of Mary [I remind you - Flanders' words], this balance collapsed. As Flanders quotes Newman, Catholics who have honoured the Mother, still worship the Son, while Protestants, who now have ceased to confess the Son, began then by scoffing at the Mother.

Here we own an historical record of early Protestantism, and it is dire. Luther critiqued permanent celibacy - to which I am sympathetic. But Luther, either by cause or effect, demoted marriage as a sacrament. He proved unable, through sola scriptura, to resist even that barbarous relic polygamy. Men being physically stronger, in Germany this devolved into alpha male polygyny.

Carbon dioxide as coolant

We've got pressurised sulphur, cooling an industrial / mining region in the middle of the Maxwell Mountains. SO HOW LOW CAN WE GO

Carbon-dioxide has its triple-point well beneath our temperature and pressure: 216.55 K, 0.517 MPa. Its critical-point is 304.13 K, but this much at 7.38 MPa which isn't Ishtar Terra's problem. Whilst we're chilling the air, we may as well chilly down that bit further. And we won't even change the pressure!

The aim here is 250 K (-4° F) but maintaining 5-6 MPa pressure.

In the not-quite-human-and-computer-habitable tier, nitrogen (Venus has a lot of it, it's just swamped by CO₂) would get sucked in with new CO₂, as the old CO₂ condenses. Fairly soon this chamber hosts 5 MPa wintry nitrogen over a pool of CO₂. Those interested in the chemistry may read Goos, Riedel, Zhao, & Blum, "Phase diagrams of CO₂ and CO₂–N₂ gas mixtures and their application in compression processes", Energy Procedia 4 (2011), 3778-85.

Already this has given to the colony its server-room and ice-box. Neutral atmo and freezing cold... what's not to love?

If some adjacent room's oxygen level is boosted to 0.4% we should be able to breathe in it. Although I'd wear a mask to warm this air before it got into my lungs. And goggles to keep the freezing and pressurised air out of my eyes and ears. Then there's the issue that nuclear submarines in Earth's seas don't operate beyond 4.5 MPa and... Yeah the miners will mostly be robots.

The liquid 250 K CO₂ is the refrigerant in Venus' deep interior. More: the miners under Venus should just use that instead of water down-pit. Water is used - to widen cracks in the rock, as it freezes and expands.

Getting rid of CO₂ ponds on the bottom is hardly a problem: just shut off the A/C, open the airlocks, and get the miners to safety. After the surrounding rock boils the ponds and raises their gas - close the locks again and restart the A/C.

Sulphur as coolant

Yesterday I mused on how to chill a hot mine. Last night I got called on a magic endothermic process I hadn't figured out - Monsieur Sadi Carnot was noted [pawn /PveK5]. I spent some time looking up chemical reactions but came to the conclusion that if somebody had already figured out how not to erect huge hideous cooling-towers, they'd have patented that notion by now.

Venus can, also, use a coolingtower. Said tower would contain pure melted sulphur.

AOP suggested sodium on that thread but I dismissed that as too reactive, especially at Venereal pressures and temperatures. Unfortunately the allotropes of sulphur at the 400s-500s C - 700ish K - are also reactive. So we will need nonreactive containers all 'round. Aluminium (which oxidises at the surface) does pretty well at holding back those pressurised cans of acid we call "Coca Cola".

Sulphur will boil at 717.8 K, in room pressure; fortunately Maxwell lets us post the tower up to 10 km altitude. This is about 650 K, well within the substance's limit. Where it's still 47 bars. If I insisted on going to Ishtar's plateau at 5 km it would be at 690 K and maybe 65 bars - but I get the feeling I should start higher, for now.

If a colony was any lower it would need something else - lead, maybe. If that becomes a thing then when we've collected enough heavy metals up here, we can trickle them down there.

Now I've got my liquid coolant, I can do all sorts of things downstream. Spinning steam-turbines from a nuclear reactor, for a start. The temperatures will be mighty... but so will be the pressures, so the setup should bear some impressively low alpha.

With that energy I can also compress some air elsewhere (further). I run the coolant over it (lead would faster conduct that heat off). I let the air expand to ambient 65 bar. This room is now cooler. That sulphur steam joins the other pipes to the dynamo turbine, recapturing the waste heat.

Per "Rodrigo Borgia" this whole upper level'll use vacuum tubes instead of semiconductors. Store them in the room which is compressing the air; it'll be lower pressure than other rooms around here (if at 800+ K). Just don't get the metals wet.

If I've cooled a room to 400 K, I can run liquid sulphur thence as a coolant to elsewhere; and I can use it here for whatever other industries as well. Using low-temp 400 K sulphur isn't much worse than using high-temp 350 K water, as far as simple electronics go.

There are some processes for which we need temperatures lower than 400 K. Maybe I want to use a decent computer. Maybe I want out of my spacesuit. That's next.

Tsiolkovsky, that jerk

This blog has barely mentioned the name "Tsiolkovsky" - and then, mainly to poo-poo one of his followers. I am still trying to figure out where I even need him.

My world-building has been juggling all manner of other factors; which have clustered in maintenance. Once something is in L2, how do we keep it there. Ditto the various orbits. Ditto the Flotilla, and ditto the farms (though these deal in aerodynamics and buoyancy respectively, so aren't rocketry). How to get there in the first place, is where we talk delta-V - that is where Tsiolkovsky steps in.

Some of that is because I'm unfamiliar with Tsiolkovsky. But elsewhere ignorance hasn't stopped me from looking up the relevant equation, as with battery power and [10 Feb.] the lift/drag equations in aerofoils. I haven't yet grokked ramjet and magsail equations, I admit; mainly because I'm missing the details of the upper Venus atmosphere and the full nature of the coma, respectively.

Mainly what I did find of Tsiolkovsky is that he is a jerk. He demands I carry a lot of propellant, which takes up space I need for the actual, you know, payload; and he also removes the content of said propellant from wherever else I might need it, like for drinking water.

I'd rather not deal with him at all. That is why I prefer Pluto ramjets to get cargo off Venus, and magsails to float in her umbra. Their propellant is all around them. I did find a use for ion-drives as stabilisers at L2. Also scooping the onrushing ions.

Where it looks as if I may have to consult him despite myself: getting off one of the planetary librations, into some Hohmann transfer. My ship can at least pick up propellant at a depot.

High thrust will be where an Orion rocket might come in - also, the scramjet. I'm told (for the scramjet, and for the Pluto when that was still in testing) that our main limit is the specific-impulse. That's "just" energy, if we're on nukes... but those boring engineers need something to resist what energy ends up as, which is heat. So, ceramics by Coors Porcelain. I would reserve such "torchships" for shifting asteroidal ores to friendlier orbits. And yes the Kzinti Lesson applies, so do check in with the Space Force first.

If we're saving on fuel, those types of rocket are lower-thrust and now look to limits by power. From this angle, we're lowering our alpha - and yeah, real alpha, not "thermal energy" (we've just been over this in Venus, with my flying submarine, the one we're NOT able to fly most of the time). Since 2015 we're looking rather better for battery alpha, with chemical-cells and capacitors. If it's flying through space, that seems most practical for the inner system where, when the initial push is done, they switch to solar (also doing very-well-thank-you).

Cooling Maxwell

After I've inserted miners (even if they're only robo-miners) into a shaft in a Venus highland, how do I keep them productive? It's hot down there - more so for humans. This term is Climatic Hazard.

My region of Colorado quit digging after the Second World War. There remain observable deposits, almost on the surface: silver at Georgetown (I've seen the dragon-tears for myself), molybdenum at Crested Butte. Silver is cheap and will likely always be cheap, and Coloradans prefer to ski on the Butte rather than dig in it. As one ventures into less-populated and uglier regions, and digs for more-valuable mineral, one tends to chase the veins deeper. South Africa and deep Canada sport some of the deeper mines here. These are the elder kratons - which, geologically, may well be the best analogue for Venus' highland continents.

Underground is chilly - when you're not that far underground, and the machines are silent. As one digs deeper, the pressure rises and the "virgin rock" temperature rises too. It also becomes more difficult to run the air-pumps. At some point the miner isn't at 10 Celsius, he's at 70. (Also about the temperature of Venus' clouds at one-bar-pressure at the equator, which is why I've relocated Landis' farms to the 50s latitude-bands slightly higher.) 70 C doesn't boil water but it does boil monkeys.

I don't know the virgin-rock temperature of the inside of a Venerean highland but basic thermodynamics tell us that it starts at the temperature of the outside air, 700s K at a highland. So: the Venus mine needs airconditioning. It also needs to deal with the 50-70 bar pressure (high up Ishtar Terra), the lack of water, and the carbon-dioxide atmosphere... which all, as we shall see, cease to be problems once the A/C is on.

I would start near the surface. For Earth analogues, I look to regions already hot on the surface: South Africa and Australia. They use Bulk Air Cooling on surface-side (pdf), running that down with refrigeration-shafts. Below 2.5 km, they make water ice on the surface and ship that down (pdf). Local air-conditioning units are also used. Either way, the now-cooler air on the bottom displaces hot air back up, allowing some energy recapture at the surface by turbine.

Amin Kamyar et al. "Current Developments" (U Wallongong, 2016) summarises MJ Mcpherson, Subsurface ventilation and environmental engineering (New Delhi: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), thus:

The vapour compression cycle works via compressing the refrigerant vapour to a high pressure (and high temperature) before sending it to the condenser (a heat exchanger) where it reaches a liquid form. Condensation is done with the aid of cold water coming from cooling towers. High pressure liquid then flows into a receiver followed by an expansion valve. Upon passing through the valve, the liquid refrigerant experiences an abrupt drop in pressure (along with a dramatic drop in temperature) and sudden expansion (flash off) resulting in the evaporation of the liquid. The low-pressure liquid then flows to the surge drum which separates the liquid and gas phases to ensure only vapour is sent to the compressor. The liquid refrigerant passes through the evaporator (another heat exchanger) where it absorbs the heat from air or water and boils. The vaporized refrigerant then enters the compressor and the refrigeration cycle restarts.

If we were keeping pressures Earth-level, the compressor would just be "the outside", at Ishtar's 60s bar = 6 to 7 MPa. If.

The condensation portion should be done by some means other than water, since the mine is importing that from the clouds and can't afford to waste it. This applies to all hydrogen volatiles, like ammonia and Freon. UPDATE March 2020: Steep slopes like Maxwell can use katabasis, and Babbage-like steampunk architecture, for the very basics.

The two-year Venus scholarship

Venus' supernimbal altitude supports a longstanding 11 AM flotilla, and a permanent flotilla; but these are not the same. Let's consider the school where these equations are taught.

Over the 584 day Venus-Earth synodic, many aerofoils cluster at 11 AM a hundred days before the V-E Hohmann window, 160 prior to Conjunction. Sporadic takeoffs go out to the L5 libration halo. About seventy days into this flight-time, begins the E-V Hohmann and, on V: Carnivale.

Consider the Earth-based or at least Earth-bound university student on Venus. I assume they are thrifty so needs rely upon the Hohmann cycle, using one or the other school-type ship.

As of the VSL5-E Hohmann the student from Earth has resided in floating cities on Venus for at least 333 days (since E-L4), but most likely 430 days - and either way, with another 146 days of Hohmann transfer before that. The launch of the (semi)permanent fleet is the culmination of his academic year.

Earth drives this Student's Package, then:

• Hohmann Inbound: 146 days
• First Flotilla: 40ish days
• Venus: 390ish days
• Second Flotilla: 40ish days
• Carnivale: 29.18 days [the last of it spent getting onto the ship]
• Hohmann Outbound: 146 days

OFFSET 11/5: Hohmann Inbound is shortened as students push off later, tho' before Conjunction.

I've put the Flotilla spans in an okay place on account the Libration orbits are fuzzy. From the first Hohmann launch from Earth to the next Hohmann's dock at an Earth station, we can be more precise. For instance: 13 March 2231 to 12 April 2233. 2233.2821-2231.2035 = 2.0786‬ Earth years.

These dates don't always sync well with an Earth academic year; in 2231, one wonders what the student will do on Earth from December to early March. This tour works best for Master's candidates, and for the last two years of a Bachelor's. And for apprenticeships.

Since these are high-level students, each has taken a focus. So far I can think of: exo-medicine, carbon chemistry, phase-transitions, rocket physics and chemistry, closed-system agriculture. Applied mathematics. Fission physics. In transit, the aggies won't have much to do in the lab so they'll be sleeping through some of the trip.

(I don't include near-asthenosphere mining; miners, student or not, have nothing to do during the Hohmann span so don't waste time running it. If they are that good they just blast on over. On Brachistochrone, if the tech has aligned with the investment by then.)

Venus' orbit has a few specialties; it's not just aggies down here. SVL2 studies the ionic wind, and refuel-engineering. SVL5 has interplanetary and solar studies. Venus' direct orbit likely has something.

Some Earth students make the call to stay at Venus longer. But later will come Venus-raised students interested in a stint back on Earth.

METON 11/28/2020: As to cost: delta-V and travel-time follow a pattern. The costs recur eight Earth years minus two days; or, better, five synods. I use Don Mitchell's pentad. The time is longest where the delta-V is shortest, tightening and increasing (respectively) until reset five synods later. We absorb the delta-V hit to minimise strain on life support so: from A to E, take the D.

Ukraine as Slavic Palestine

The Saker has one of his posts about historic Ukraine, at Unz. This one is one of his more nuanced takes, and more interesting for it.

The Saker takes the position of an inherent Kiev-Moscow link. Thence, Kiev is more than just a "borderland" (the literal meaning of Ukraine). As for the schismatic state of Kiev today: the Saker deems the Lithuanian / Polish Republic an occupant force, until (famously) dismembered. The Jews and Poles and Papists are to blame for preventing the glorious reunion of all the Russias.

(Poland herself, it would follow, does not belong to Mother Russia - despite that Polish is a Russian(ish) language. Ditto Lithuania... ditto (most of) Latvia and Estonia. Some Russians see Poland as a Prussic race ruined beyond repair by the Teutonic Crusade. Some see Latvia and Estonia as East Slavic lands overrun by Lietuvans and Finns, respectively. Some Russians lay claim to common R1a ancestry for all Balts and Slavs, down to Serbia. And of course there survive Karelian outposts, and Finland herself. Now: I don't see The Saker in this extreme of pan-Balto-Slavic Muskovite / R1a nationalism. I just note that this extreme exists and does need seeing.)

Given what The Saker does believe of Kiev, it is fair to note analogies - to how Israelis and Zionists view the Palestinians.

Here were a rabble living on an imperial frontier, of no real interest to anybody, and too clannish to unite for their own interest beyond the occasional tax revolt. Along comes the land's "rightful" master. Now the locals unite, more or less; claiming their own identity. The land's new master cries foul. "The Ukrainian Delusion", the master scoffs.

One of the more unsightly parallels is that the local villeins-turned-nationalists latch on to full-on hatred of the Jewish people. I could understand it of Palestine; less so of Ukraine. I trust The Saker (channeling Solzhenitsyn) to explain why in the latter case - which is after all the main point of his essay.

Also true of both places: each local populace does own a history, and genetic continuity, independent of the history and ancestry of that nation now claiming their land. Kiev's history is more internally coherent than is that of Aramaeo-Arabic Palaestina Prima. The bad news for Russians laying claim to pre-Lithuanian Kiev is that its empire wasn't Ukrainian. Norsemen ruled it, likely with the aid of local Goths and, later, the English(!). The Slavs just worked there. Like Circassians.

Corona virus death rate

The Corona Virus is still making the news. Since I'd put down my marker on it not being that bad, a followup is in order. We've been talking about ratios here so, let's approach this one from a similar angle.

A "rate" depends on two variables: the amount affected, and the base population. For the mortality rate of a virus, the base population is those infected - we don't care about those who don't get sick in the first place. It turns out that we don't know this particular base population on account that China is an Animal Farm whose leaders rule by lying to everyone. That number can however be inferred - from another ratio: of those who go around meeting and greeting people, the infection rate. For Europeans this is 1/56.

Genetically the virus affects Asian men worst. We should guess about 200,000 are infected in Wuhan. Quite a bit more than the Chinese officials are allowing.

But also it doesn't help that the local (Wuhan) government has put in place measures to reduce the comfort of those afflicted - thereby, suppressing their immune-systems.

This still looks to me like little more than a bad cold... unless you are an Asian man living under a socialist tyranny.

UPDATE 2/8 - or Emperor Xi could be using this scare as cover to whack dissidents and others with low credit-scores. h/t Widespread Pepe at Ace.

Transfer ship-twins

For Venus/Earth, inbound overlaps outbound. So for any regular schedule between the two worlds there exist at least two ships which shuttle that sort of passenger from one planet to the other. Maybe ten. These come in twins, designed for the service provided.

Hohmann-arrived craft have nothing to do whilst their erstwhile passengers are on (or floating over) their respective planets. Some might be cyclers - running around their orbits aimlessly for another four synods. Some get repurposed. But for specialised ships, these need to be available later - so will likely stay in orbit. During that time (467 days either way; for Venus here, 7 August 2231 to 18 November 2232) the ships remain available for citizens of the orbit.

There is a gap when the transfer-ships are all in transfer. Those ships are not orbiting Venus nor Earth. The gap spans Conjunction. Each flying in the same direction - the ecliptic - they do not meet each other. Maybe they cross paths with an aimless cycler.

These ships are radiation-shielded as far as possible.

Over Venus each noncyclic arrival keeps to a high-altitude at least at apocytherion, holding back from the ion wind. This wind does push these vessels back some, but the vessels don't expect to stay here for too many orbits. [11/26] Likely 23 swings-'round. And apocytherion gets hotter later on. Although, since we intend to adjust the angle of this orbit for the return trip, we'll be skating atmo to circularise the orbit some at that point.

Besides blocking radiation, for most of the time keeping life-support online is too expensive for the bother (especially those cyclers!). Plus: why not kill some germs and spend some effort maintaining the place.

But sometimes a use can be found. For the student-transfer ships, now caught in a planet's orbit, since each is designed with lecture-halls: academic conferences. Or just filming a school movie.

UPDATE 8 Feb: pull back to a gap in the week.

WHERE 11/26: For Venus, positioning back to Earth, I aim at 29:1, from 11814 to 616290 km. For its main manifest between worlds, I load after and offload before it fires the thrusters.

The Great Wall of Egypt

The Pyramid Kingdom arose from the scorpion-kings of old Egypt; in time, this kingdom fell. Then came a newer kingdom. Last December [boy, a lot of things came out last December wot I misst], it turned up that this newer kingdom built a wall.

Nations build walls when they worry about invasions. Not invasions by fellow civilised folk; I don't know that Rome or Iran ever bothered setting up a secure wall between their empires. Nations build walls when they can't work out a treaty with the peoples on the other side. They build walls against savages.

(Note to politicians: if you claim a state and you can't control your subjects yourself, don't get upset if I call them savages. Civilise them! or suck it up, savage.)

The newer kingdom in Egypt set up their wall up the Nile at its Second Cataract. They figured the Nubians as Beyond The Pale, in their day.

Now for the punchline. Egyptologists today don't call this newer kingdom The New Kingdom - they call it the Middle Kingdom. That is because this kingdom failed, before rising again under an Upper Egyptian dynasty. The Nubians up the Nile weren't those who toppled this empire; it was the Shepherd Kings, the hyksos from Asia.

Events, dear boy. Events.

(As for the Nubians post-1500 BC: they have maintained viable nationstates well into our own Middle Ages - "The Mahdi" notwithstanding. It helped that they were living alongside a river in one of this world's worst deserts. Their era of savagery is decidedly shorter than that of, say, the Scots'.)

The true aborigines

Currently a clade (distantly) related to the Siberian inhabitants of the Denis Cave make up quite a bit of the genome opposite the Sunda Strait in "Sahul" - now New Guinea. My ancestors, despite being Southeast Asian on (apparently) either side, hadn't taken on much of that.

Solution: these Dennies were the true aboriginal population of New Guinea / Australia. They were subsequently swamped in the Pama–Nyungan blast.

... excepting maybe across that last, almost southernmost strait. (Before that southernmost continent. Good luck with that!)

Few Tasmanians bred true with Europeans, by the time the latter first got to Van Diemen's (and believe me, in The Savage Coast, it wasn't for lack of effort). The Tasmanians might not have bred true even with mainland "Abos", by then.

As it happens: the Pama–Nyungan Speaking Peoples weren't abo's. Not to Southeast Australia.

Maybe George Martin had some true insight. The people of our "Sothoryos" were human but... speciated humans.

Sundaland Noah

Out Of Africa was a phenomenon of the 70s and 60s kBC. Some went north, didn't mix with Neanders, and became "Basal Eurasians". Others went east, mixing with the Neanders and Denisovans they found there. Some of the latter stayed along the Indian Ocean coast, where the climate stayed not unlike their African homeland; of these, some reached the southwestern bulge now named Sundaland. Here they thrived.

Sundaland was a low-lying area. In the Eemian, much of it had been submerged, leaving behind islands like Borneo and Java. It is submerged today, also.

Around 50 kBC, when the coasts weren't unduly watery, came a backsurge. Pille Halast last December posted to bioArxiv: male lineages extant today are all Sundaland in origin. (h/t hbdchick.)

If you're R1a, R1b, or Q - IndoEuropean, Chadic(!), or American - you're in the "K-M9" group for this purpose and, thereby, southeast Asian through the male line. The IJK group, likewise. That pretty much does it for Europe.

COMMENT 5:45 PM MST - I forgot, the people who washed back from Sunda hadn't mixed with Denisova in the meantime. Denisova was too far north.

More interesting is the modern-human front-surge, over to Sahul - likely contemporary. Here is where we find paraDenisova . . .

The Days Inn versus the Trump Hotel

I was earlier discussing how to calculate (or at least to constrain) satellite time in orbit. Such benchmarks matter where satellites need to mark time for position relative to L2 and the Umbra. (To L1, too.) Such also give the general optimum for ships in dock, where those ships hope to bounce ahead to L4 or behind to L5. That is: such matter for anyone needing to arrive or leave at the planet; if she's docking with a satellite in transit, before reaching the destination.

L2 is best as a momentum-bank attached to a swingin' tether. That means, cost-conscious passengers from/to Venus don't stay there.

Many outbound passengers are returnees who hope to board the same ships (or type thereof) they got here on, which should still be in orbit. Even for them, though, maintenance emergencies happen. People are going to need to wait out the time somewhere else, somewhere comfy. Let's look at satellites passing through a planetary umbra, with period synced up regularly with Hohmann Transfer windows for other destinations - with those timespans which allow the cheapest routes thereto. These satellites' orbits are eccentric, to direct ships taking that way out.

Start with Venus, Earth-facing. Note we are constrained - not by Hill a.k.a. "where L1/L2 at??", both which is a cool million; but by Sphere Of Influence. If my orbit takes me out of that, it is no longer an orbit but a trajectory, at best a solar orbit. Hop David's capture-radius numbers range 600000 km to 610238 km over surface = 616290 km with Wiki on the high-end 616000 km. But that's capture. Venus' orbiters need to stay under 536412 km.

As a maximum - for as long a "month" as I can get - I am making this circular as possible, so that orbit is semimajor. By Kepler here: 40.66 days on the true, sidereal track. The trajectory will, on a natural angle, pass through umbra once per its solar-synodic "orbit", 49.64447 days. That's 11.762 runs per the Venus/Earth synod so, let's bump that to 12:1 for 48.66 solar-synodic days. Its true, sidereal orbit at 1/(1/m+1/y): near exact forty Earth days. Semimajor 530567 km, 782 m/s - depending on when.

Hop David recommends five of these each on its own (slight) ellipse and angle. I'd consider a couple more. The flight to Earth is, I assume, Oberth.

Those who missed their flight to Earth can, on the next swing 'round, get to L4 in time to get aligned for the L4/Earth transfer. Although the outgoing liners do shake you down for the added fuel cost.

Of course anyone is welcome to stay here overnight for a trip up to L2 and its amenities. But L2 is exorbitant. The main transfer ship is zipping along at 29:1 where we left it (mostly) below us, rocking from 219335 to 536412 km. But only crew are staying there.

Below a certain level, I'd worry about flying the satellite through the walls of that magnetosheath cone. I do assume magnetic shielding against the sun on dayside, and against Venus' ions at nightside. Between the two, thrusters shouldn't be needed to maintain this period, just the magsail.

Ecliptic-retrograde serves emigrants off to L5, and stations with a need for more frequent passes through Umbra (though not spent in it). Some orbit more in line with the Venus-Mars synod. Most vital may be to send emergency supplies to incoming Hohmann; some of those should be in Venus-Earth.

RECALC 11/30, 12/9: tighten the constraint. ADD 3/13/21: Two more cyclers.

Fun with Kepler

Kepler's Third Law is for satellites around a central point. For them it asserts a ratio, (Y*Y) / (a*a*a), where Y is the time for orbit and a is the semimajor axis. Being a ratio - if you know the values for one satellite, you can bootstrap this for all the other satellites and you give nary a thought about the value of the ratio itself. And then... there's Venus, currently satelliteless.

Let's start by doing this for Earth, in days and kilometers.

For Earth, we have the Moon. So plug in the sidereal(!) month squared and the moon's semimajor. 746.473159798921‬‬ / 5.67997922950732e+16‬. Earth's Kepler is then 1.314218115307562e-14‬.

For Venus, multiply that by Venus' weight in Earth masses: 1.071087763975663E-14.

Let's discuss a Venuslike with an arbitrarily-large Sphere Of Influence. Grant it a satellite running at 949928 km semimajor. It should make its circuit in 95.8 days.

Again, this is the satellite's sidereal month. Where the sun hits at any given point depends on its synodic month, just like here. If this is an ecliptic-prograde satellite, that month takes quite a bit longer than that. Specifically, 1/(1/m - 1/y): where y is the Venus year and m is our satellite's month. 1/y is 0.0044513687959047 so a 95.8 day orbit returns to its Venerean spot in 167 days. Where the "month" and year are at "retrograde" (prograde to Venus herself), I'd add these bottom numbers: 67.16 days.

(This far down the System, and with Venus' gravity extending the range it has, we can get a lower month/year ratio than you'd expect over on Earth. Depends how far from the planet you're willing to go. Sphere Of Influence is a... thing. Past that we're at L1/L2, where Lagrange takes over from Kepler, and the month is the year.)

Now, this was all a thought-experiment, for benchmarks. I don't see the magic of this particular semimajor (much less period), for Venus' satellites. (Wait for it . . .) Farms, though, might go for a semimajor like it, timing their pericytheria for the Umbra and maximising their sunlight outbound.

Bottlenecks

I've plotted out enough sites of interest in the Venerean orbital tier that it is productive to identify and collect which of these are strategic. These are such places as are useful, and not shareable.

As counterexamples: The 50s° latitude band in ecliptic-north is assuredly useful; but this band can support many cities. Or, consider the south pole: there's only one of that, but nobody is clamouring to float a city in a permanent tornado. (The north might have more use.)

Between any two planets, flies a fleet of Hohmann transfer ships, which start and stop in the same times and places. Some of these are built to support passengers who must start work on their way. Hop David would have Venus' moving Hohmann stations be permanent cyclers, or near-enough; he counts five inbound and another five outbound.

In any orbit the libration-points are strategic - to varying degrees. L1 and (on the other side of the Sun) L3 can't support much of a halo each, but their value is limited; for Venus' tier, I think the whole Solar System will be pleased to let sunwatchers keep these two. By contrast the L4 and (for Venus) L5 points offer wide space for kidneybean orbits: here, I'd imagine a king-of-the-hill contest over the most-centred bean, or for Hohmann supply and scavenging. For the Venus region proper, its L2 is the greatest prize. And there's 12 degrees behind STL5, for that last run between Hohmann paths.

The Venus umbra offers some extra room in the lower altitudes but here, the 500000ish km altitudes cost less delta-V for the highest passing satellites and, from that height, float closest to L2. Since narrower, this pseudoörbit is more jealously sought.

All large-ish planets have a Hill Sphere between L1 and L2 as can kick pass-through craft to higher speeds. In true orbit, over Venus as over Earth, the low-altitude shell has less volume and is better-shielded. Venus' in particular is a popular aerobrake for the rest of the System. Even if nobody runs a permanent station here, stationary-bandits will want to charge rents hereabout. As for those permanent stations: I did maths on the highest-altitude Earth-facer. 12:1 synodic resonance, 48.66 synodic, 530567 km - there may be more, further down. They serve Hohmann traffic out to Earth bypassing L2.

The Flotilla over the clouds will not (I now think) run over the whole 584 day synod but, when it does run, it's clustered in one spot - 11 AM dayside.

Down on Venus itself, whatever mines are drilled into the uplands, the capital-outlay to do so will be so exorbitant that any such mine is strategic for claimjumpers. As more mines are opened in any given hotspot the focus will shift more to the ladder leading up to the clouds. Likewise clusters of floating bubbles will prize the water-bearing torus above them. But here we're getting into artificial MacGuffins, not forced by geography and astro-aerophysics.

Floating in Venus' shadow

For a permanent darkside platform over Venus, I present to you Jeff Greason's Plasma Magnet Drive which builds upon John Slough 10.1063/1.1867244. It provides a counteracting force wherever there is an ionic wind, which Greason intended for interplanetary transit. I'm stealing that here, for statites, buoyed upon the ions blasting back from atmo.

If staying within Venus' true umbra at 949928 km, we lose solar power - all of it. Photovoltaic panels won't be taking direct sunlight here, although maybe L2 or (more directly) the polar orbiters can spare some reflected sunlight. To compensate we get a chill fit for a superconductor.

In near-vacuum and shade, the best measure isn't blackbody Kelvin. We measure the ambient "plasma" - the ions themselves. The relevant units would be speed, density, and energetic excitation. If "density" is measured in the number of ions rather than in their mass, we'll need composition of plasma as well.

On to what it takes to keep statites in the shadow. We're like SVL2 orbiting the Sun - not Venus. Obviously, Venus' orbits will circle out of the shade. Since we're not orbiting, we need to counteract Venus' gravity force. At the edge of Venus' umbra, that gravity is almost at the planet's L2 edge: [6.673 * 4.867 / ‭9.02363205184]e-4, that is 0.00036 ms^-2. (Not much less than what Earth's would be at that height.) At this altitude we needs add the Sun's gravity at the planet's umbral pinpoint too, at 109.157928 gigameters - 0.01114, so 0.0115 total. Further down, the planet's gravity is stronger (at this SV line, V orbits start 536412 km on down), and it gets warmer... but the planet's induced magnetosphere is stronger too, and we don't bake the magnets. Not until we're in the atmosphere proper.

A star gives off heat and that heat excites ions. Within a solar-system, especially habitable-zone or inward, a craft can capture this outgoing force by a physical sail or by a magnetic shield. Best of all would be to capture these ions. The craft would want force in terms of flat pressure, newtons per square meter; if using a magnet-field, that area will be much larger than whatever area taken by the body of the craft itself but then we might not get to do capture.

Jeff Greason for his drive - using only the solar wind, and at Earth I might add - was touting 2 ms^-2 acceleration. Remember that too far down Venus' light umbra, Venus' bulk starts casting an ion umbra as well. I think, though, that 949928 km offers some room to float in, before dropping into the full ionopause.

Since I am no expert in the contents of Venus' trail I've got a number of variables here but even so, I think there's ions enough to fight a 0.0115-0.02 ms^-2 pull in those higher altitudes of the umbra. So much more, that I expect to use the rest of the force to turn turbines against the darkside magnetosphere (potential-difference of ten volts, I hear) and generate power for whatever robots need it. I don't know that a permanent human colony lives in this frosty environment but, it may not have to.

Venus' statites in this long and narrow cone will store volatiles and perhaps capture its own hydrogen, dumping it downwell for orbital stations to harvest as they fly by. That delta-V will be easier where the stations are in the higher altitudes and the statites, lower.

This is also where Venus-based astronomers do coldweather astronomy. The astro crew live on L2 and communicate thence.