Terraforming Venus

[exchemist]

Very impressive. Could get a novel out of this, in the Hal Clement mould, perhaps. 

[TomKalbfus]

The important thing is to get the idea out there. if it is out on the internet and gets passed around, then someday, someone might build something like it. I figure the circular street grid is appropriate for a city at the bottom of a balloon. It took me a while to write the names of some of the streets, as I had to orient the words in the direction of the streets and had to draw each letter with my mouse. the streets are named after the angle of the circle the city forms. I suppose the city will need propellers to hold its position and orientation to the Sun. Other cities not in the polar regions will need some artificial illumination or suffer from 100-hour days, which is the period of the super-rotating atmosphere around Venus. There are some advantages and disadvantages. The inhabitants will probably spend most of their time in the cities, the surface of the planet will be a place for disposable unmanned drones, they will get baked a lot by going down there, if they are tough they may last for a few trips. One of the advantages is the radiation is a lot less than on the surface of the Moon and on Mars, people living in those later two places will probably want to live underground to avoid accumulating too much radiation. Living underground is not really an option on Venus, not in the condition it currently is in. the Balloons have an immediate payoff compared to terraforming the planet. you can have some real estate right away. Venus is easy to get to compared to Mars, the transit time is shorter, and the radiation exposure is correspondingly less. getting out of Venus' atmosphere and back into orbit requires something comparable to what SpaceX is developing now. A two-stage fully reusable rocket. One needs to get both stages into Earth orbit, then use a low thrust option to move both of those stages into Venus orbit, those stages need to be properly shielded and use retro-burns to get into Venus' atmosphere and then need someplace to land or dock to. To get back into orbit, we need to manufacture rocket fuel from the atmosphere of Venus, there is plenty of Solar Power to do this. The composition of Venus' atmosphere is much the same as Mars although there is much more carbon-dioxide! there is hydrogen in the Sulfuric acid clouds, from that we can make methane and oxygen to power the rocket, the bottom stage gives the initial boost and the upper stage completes the journey into orbit. the Bottom stage reenters the atmosphere in the vicinity of a balloon which picks it up and recycles it for another launch. the upper stage also reenters the atmosphere and a balloon picks it up recycles that so the rocket can make another trip to orbit.

[Vmedvil]

Well, honestly I don't think we should terraform Venus that would be a major undertaking. The Atomsphere of Venus is basically sulfuric acid nothing carbon based could survive on Venus for long, but Venus would be a great source for mining Sulfuric acid for batteries you could make a nearly infinite supply of batteries from Venus's atmosphere. 

 

I would suggest a biological solution for Sulfuric acid but there is no organic creatures that really metabolize sulfuric acid it usually kills organic life. Your best bet would be Silicon based Nanomachines for a terraform of Venus, this planet is a lost hope for terraform unless you remove a vast amount of the H₂SO₄ atmosphere, but I don't think much technological or biological would last long in Venus's atmosphere. 

Edited October 11, 2017 by Vmedvil

[TomKalbfus]

It wouldn't take much to block the sunlight from reaching Venus. The mass of the sunshade would be dwarfed by the mass of Venus itself! Venus is essentially the most Earthlike planet in the Solar System next to the Earth itself, we don't have another such planet. Mars and Mercury have one third gravity, Venus has nine tenths Earth gravity, so all we have to do is block the Sunlight and illuminate the planet as we see fit, and then add back the hydrogen to make Venus' oceans. Their is enough oxygen in Venus's atmosphere to cover 80% of the planet's surface with water. Once Venus cools down the Sulfur will be reabsorbed by the planet's crust, the carbon can form limestone, we would have 6 atmospheres of nitrogen, which can be combined with the soil and rocks to make nitrates. Once terraformed, Venus will stay that way if we can keep on shading the planet, the geology will recycle the crust. Venus could be another Earth. The best Mars could ever be is a weird alien world with one third gravity.

[exchemist]

Well, honestly I don't think we should terraform Venus that would be a major undertaking. The Atomsphere of Venus is basically sulfuric acid nothing carbon based could survive on Venus for long, but Venus would be a great source for mining Sulfuric acid for batteries you could make a nearly infinite supply of batteries from Venus's atmosphere. 

 

 

 

I would suggest a biological solution for Sulfuric acid but there is no organic creatures that really metabolize sulfuric acid it usually kills organic life. Your best bet would be Silicon based Nanomachines for a terraform of Venus, this planet is a lost hope for terraform unless you remove a vast amount of the H₂SO₄ atmosphere, but I don't think much technological or biological would last long in Venus's atmosphere. 

 

I'm not sure that's right. Sulphate-reducing bacteria are well-known on Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate-reducing_bacteria

 

And as there is nitrogen in the atmosphere, you can get ammonia, and then convert some sulphuric acid to ammonium sulphate to get rid of the acidity.  

Edited October 11, 2017 by exchemist

[TomKalbfus]

The thing is terraforming Mars and Venus are large scale projects, it is much easier to learn how to deal with the environments that are there now, and learn how to survive in them, that to change a whole planet. the main problem with Venus is that it gets too much light, the reason why it is the way it is, is because it is too close to the Sun, but rather than trying to move the planet further away, we can place something between it and the Sun to block the light from reaching Venus, that would take a lot less resources, and the rest is chemistry. Venus lost a lot of hydrogen into space over the last several billion years, so what we would have to do is replace that hydrogen. Uranus has the lowest escape velocity of all the gas giants in the Solar System, and it easily has more than enough hydrogen to remake Venus' oceans. Venus has all the oxygen it needs in the form of carbon-dioxide.