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