Mars and Venus?

 Wonderful Images!

The new Mars lander and helicopter are returning some wonderful images of the red planet, while Russia has allowed its Venera films to be digitized showing an alien landscape with sound and lightning!

But there is more to come in relation to Venus a probe on the way to the Sun has seen cloud breaks at night, seeing into the mountains and some surfaces that are not volcanic, meanwhile the Mars probe is cleaning up its landing site of debris and possible use of it at a later stage?

Many of the features on Mars seen by this rover are very clear and some stones look as if they were cut by hand, as in masonry, others show that they are pummas in origin from a volcano? 

But new science discoveries from Russia may be changing the long held origin of crater's from impact, to the idea that many were created by underground gas mounds that rise and push the ground up into giant mole hills before they explode throwing material several hundred meter's! 

They have also discovered that sink type holes in Northern Siberia contain compressed materials, that may also be on Mars too, and that they contain materials that are more rare and invaluable than all the oil in the Persian gulf and gas in Siberia?

Cranes. Part-One.

Ancient to Present.

The crane has been around as long as man has been on the Earth, Stone Henge in the United Kingdom, the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great wall of China could not have been constructed without some form of crane or pulling device.

Slaves and animals too played an essential part, because the people who designed and built these monuments where part of high society and part of powerful empires. Today we take the crane and various lifters for granted, not high rise can be built without them being built into the structure of the towers in New York, Dubai and London.

Today there are a variety of types available to do different types of lifting, some of this being the recovery of heavy loads or the moving over structures into confined spaces. This is were the telescopic cranes have come into their own right.

Construction Vehicles.

Something we can never do without.

Every part of the building industry today relies on some form of vehicles to help. From roads to rails, from housing to skyscrapers. The Bulldozer and the JCB are probaly the most well known types, then (steam) rollers and various digger types, as well as tippers.

There is a longer history to construction of any thing, that meets the eye. Even in ancient history wheeled waggons, towers and carts, as well as cranes and pullys were employed in building. The Egyptian and Aztec Pyramids and many Celtic monuments such as Stone Henge and New Grange were constructed using slave labour and hundreds of animals to pull and heave blocks.

The future seems to be going down the road of Robotic automation and the use of more computer technologies. 

I think the idea here is perhaps saftey, but in the long term it will mean less and less human involvement and the loss of employment sadly.