Gazetteer Topics

[Sirrocco]

Okay, Valles... clarify for me, because I'm not really getting it. Why is it cheaper for Venus to construct oil than it is for Earth? My understanding is that oil is really pretty nontrivial to create, and the only reason we use the stuff is that we can pump it out of the ground. There will still be oil pumping out of the ground throughout the time we're covering here, and I utterly fail to see how any process to *create* the stuff can hope to compete on price. You could probably make an efficient LNG run the other way. You could pick up CO2 from Venus, freeze it down into blocks, drag it off to Jupiter and mix it right with hydrogen - forming natural gas and water. You use the water for whatever you need water for locally, liquify the natural gas and ship it back home. Unfortunately for Venus, his is eight hydrogen in for every carbon out, and that's really just not efficient. If you're saying that the great efficiencies come from use of handwavium - well, there are earthbound users of wavetech - Australia if nowhere else - and they've got pretty much *all* of their resources local. So what's Venus got in the complex hydrocarbon trade that Earth don't got?