Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

chat · 2004-03-30 11:19:55

Robert,

I agree that bacteria is the way to go on Venus.
Since Venus has everything we need to make a viable world other than water it is the best candidate.

I also agree that trying to speed up the spin of Venus is a monumental task, but if we need some water comets to help on Venus then we may as well use them to nudge a bit

Probably a better way to speed up Venus is to use those colossal winds that blow near the surface to speed up the ground rotation.
Use the waste energy that already exists.

To much of a good thing on Venus is far better than not enough on mars.

Also i think mars is going to resist all attempts to teraform it, it's just to small to and to far to stay warm.

Venus on the other hand is similar in so many respects to earth that once the bacteria gets going we will be pretty familiar on how it will act.

It seems the heat is enemy #1 on Venus, once you get that under control enough to let the bacteria live in any part on Venus, from surface to the top of the clouds they will become an integral part of the planet.

And the easiest way to cool Venus to get it comfie for the bacteria is to block a good % sunlight for many years.
The only way i can think to do that is to collide things above Venus.

The bacteria should be able to start doing most of the work to steer things into the right direction.
And as you point out the bacteria will grow very fast on Venus.

Venus is going to need water ASAP, and probably better to get it there before you release the bacteria.

A good question is how much water would it need?
1- 1km snowball? many 1km snowballs? 100's of 1km snowballs? Or 1 100km snowball?

And don't forget that if we release bacteria on a alien world, when we get there we would be aliens.
In a very short time the bacteria will mutate to very hostile forms.
We could see Venus go from fire to ice in a very short period of time if the bacteria proliferate.

Don't forget to bring a parka for the cold nights *lol*

kippy · 2004-03-30 11:23:39

I agree that bacteria is the way to go on Venus.
Since Venus has everything we need to make a viable world other than water it is the best candidate.

You've touched on the solution and the problem in one stroke. Since Venus has no water, the bacteria would have no medium in which to grow and process the air. We would also have to seed it with an airborne species which I don't think yet exists. Perhaps you could start it with an ice comet crash but once they use up all the hydrogen from the water, they'll die off.

At least that's the gospel according to Zubrin.

SBird · 2004-03-30 12:10:59

Yeah Mars is easier to do.
But easy is for wimps *lol*

Well, heck! I propose that we terraform the SUN! Lots of available real estate and NO problem about where to get energy!

RobertDyck · 2004-03-30 13:37:21

Yes, Venus would need one or more ice objects to deliver water. I don't think it'll need a sunshade other than controlled atmosphere. And there isn't any organism on Earth today that can simply be transplanted to terraform Venus; we will have to genetically engineer one. We could start with transgenics; transferring genes from organism to another so we can collect all the attributes we need in a single organism. I would go further and engineer a much more efficient photosynthesis process, but design it so the waste product of photosynthesis itself is the solid material to sequester CO2. That would mean any evolutionary change to the biological process that creates this waste would cause the organism to die. We don't want a mutant strain to become so efficient it would out-compete normal Earth bacteria. Such an open-cycle photosynthesis system is common with archaea, not prokaryotes. Furthermore these engineered bacteria should be poisoned by oxygen, so the second step would be to seed Venus with cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). That would kill the genetically engineered terraforming bacteria, stop the process that sequesters CO2, and generate an oxygen atmosphere for us to breathe.

chat · 2004-03-30 13:56:19

sbird,

*lol*

Yeah no need to worry about an energy crisis there, and all sorts of material for reworking

Even very small solar pannels will yeild large quantities of energy

No need for a parka though.

kippy · 2004-03-30 14:06:02

If you use carbon fixers that produce oxygen you will end up with over 90 bars of oxygen. That will kill the greenhouse effect but any lifeform in that environment would burst into flames of their own accord. I suppose you could crash an iron asteroid to consume some of the O2 (making it another red planet) but that might take a lot of asteroids.

Of course dumping hydrogen into an oxygen rich atmosphere would generate a lot of water. That will make things hot since it's exothermic. Plus there's the problem of getting something like 1.0x10^19 kg of hydrogen to Venus. Uranus looks like the place to get it (ha ha) but it would still be a big undertaking as we’ve already discussed.

RobertDyck · 2004-03-30 14:12:42

I said start with anaerobic bacteria that sequesters CO2 into a solid. The sink I thought of in 1980 was C3O6. My chemist friend is sceptical about its stability, and recommended plastic. You don't want a hydrocarbon since there isn't any hydrogen available to sequester, but various carbon based polymers are possible. There's even a little sulphur in the atmosphere that can be used.

Cyanobacteria would only be used once the mass of atmosphere is close to the desired end point. Converting the last bit of CO2 into oxygen is preparation for multi-cellular life forms.

SBird · 2004-03-30 14:37:21

If you're using anaerobic bacteria, you can't have C3O6. No oxygen. Also C3O6 isn't a stable molecule. I can't think of any large sulfur-carbon molecules either. The only thing I can think of is fully reduced carbon soot. No living organisms can produce graphene or diamonoid material. The reduction potential is just too great to occur in an aqueous environment.

The lack of water, the presence of lots of H2SO4 and the temperature all make life on Venus impossible. It might be possible to do some sort of nanotech/biotech combo but that's at least 50+ years off. Even nanotech can't functio well at Venutian temperatures - the random thermal kinetic energy is just too high for stable molecular structures like the one found in living organisms.

chat · 2004-03-30 14:48:44

Robert,

What would you make an educated guess for amount of water you would need to keep the bacteria going long enough to fix most of the co2?
And how much more than that to make eneough water for at least puddles for the algae and the occasional rain?

I bet if we drilled down a little deeper than current mines go right now, that we would find all sorts of weird and wonderful bacteria that are pretty well suited to Venus.
Some of the thermal vents on the ocean floor are prime for the job of bacteria applicants.

Or at least we get bacteria that is well suited to living in dry/wet and hot environments, and a little engineering is all that is needed.

Just curious if we hit Venus with a 100km snowball, the short term outcome would be a heating of the planet or a cooling of it?

Without question it would make for a wetter place even if it is only steam to start with.

I bet the venusians have never seen a snowball either, so we get a free thow with no reprisal

I still like the idea of smashing two snowballs together in orbit, it gets the water to venus and makes an immediate cooler place by blocking the sunlight.

Smashing things directly into venus seems counter productive to cooling it down.
In the short term yes, but in the long term no.
Last thing venus needs is more co2 from impacts.

All a question of what to hit with what, and when to release the bacteria to settle the place down.

Dito on the bacteria stop growing ideas, but bacteria on a foreign world is going to do the unexpected almost guaranteed.
Since a wet venus would be a bacterias eden, we might discover that we have a very tough time controlling it.
Bacteria on venus would multiply and mutate very fast, and in no time be doing it's own thing.

But at least you can't make venus any more hostile than it is now, even if it went all wrong, eventually it would settle into a different ballance.

chat · 2004-03-30 14:52:06

kippy,
I will appologise first then comment

It's only a rumor.
I dont have anywhere near enough hydrogen there *lol*

kippy · 2004-03-30 15:48:45

As far as crashing comets go here are my thoughts:

If you send it hitting the surface at like 1% C, you're probably going to add heat. However, if you are able to park the think in L2 , chip of bits and send them toward the planet at such a speed that they'll melt before they hit you will probably have a net cooling effect. It might not be much. Something like letting an ice cube melt in a hot room. I could be off about this. I'm no good at thermodynamics.

In the interest of spinning the planet faster, you would probably want to strike the planet in the direction of rotation. Again, probably won't have a huge effect but every bit helps.

Does anyone know how many comets this will entail? Crashing comets into Mars isn't necessarily all about adding water. Venus however is much bigger and almost devoid of water so comets or hydrogen is the only option of getting it there. It seems to me like it would take millions to provide a sizable fraction of the water we have on Earth.

I'm still rooting for Hydrogen from Uranus

RobertDyck · 2004-03-30 16:28:40

If you're using anaerobic bacteria, you can't have C3O6. No oxygen. Also C3O6 isn't a stable molecule. I can't think of any large sulfur-carbon molecules either. The only thing I can think of is fully reduced carbon soot. No living organisms can produce graphene or diamonoid material. The reduction potential is just too great to occur in an aqueous environment.
The lack of water, the presence of lots of H2SO4 and the temperature all make life on Venus impossible. It might be possible to do some sort of nanotech/biotech combo but that's at least 50+ years off. Even nanotech can't functio well at Venutian temperatures - the random thermal kinetic energy is just too high for stable molecular structures like the one found in living organisms.

I tried a molecular model of C3O6; a ring containing 3 carbon and 3 oxygen atoms alternating, then a double bond between each carbon atom and a free oxygen. It appears stable on its own, but my little program doesn't model interactions.

You do have to sequester both the carbon and oxygen from CO2. Carl Segan later estimated that if you converted all 92 bars of CO2 into graphite and oxygen, you would have 86 bars of pure oxygen. That would spontaneously combust back into CO2. Is original idea of using unmodified algae worked when science thought the surface pressure was only 6 bars. So the chemical to sequester CO2 must eliminate both C and O2, and might take a little S with it. There is plenty of nitrogen, but you'll need that for the biosphere.

There are plenty of anaerobic bacteria that love sulphuric acid and an atmosphere with no oxygen. The air temperature and pressure in the clouds of Venus are the same as Earth surface, you just can't grow anything on the surface of Venus.

Please don't say things like "that's at least 50+ years off". Everything is just a matter of someone coming up with the idea, and putting in the effort to doing it. We have the genetic engineering technology now. Coming up with a chemical to sequester CO2 is just chemistry. Nanotech is completely unnecessary.

kippy · 2004-03-30 17:20:41

Please don't say things like "that's at least 50+ years off".

I will say this. You still need water to make any biological process affective.

SBird · 2004-03-30 17:29:22

Robert - I am a scientist that works on nanotech for a living. I am trained in chemistry and biology and have a formal training in molecular biology. Just throwing around statements like, "Everything is just a matter of someone coming up with the idea, and putting in the effort to doing it." is just plain wrong.

This not meant as a personal attack but that statement demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of science. Science does not progress through singular brilliant ideas anymore. It hasn't done that for a hundred years. This is especially true for things like biotechnology. The work is gradual and evolutionary, not revolutionary. If relatively simple things like curing cancer and stopping HIV could be solved by coming up with an idea, don't you think that the concerted efforts of thousands of very intelligent people and literally tens of billions in research funding would have solved the problem by now?

You talk about C3O6 as being a stable moelcule. It is not. Concatenated carbonyl bonds are highly unstable and immediately degrade into CO2. There are NO anaerobic bacteria that can surrvive concentrated sulfuric acid. Perhaps low levels can be tolerated but sulfuric acid spontaneously chemically dehydrates organic material. If you add sulfuric acid to sugar, you get a big, carbon foam mess. There is no adaptation or mutation that can prevent this. Unless you posit the formation of life that is based off completely different molecules than Earthly life, there is no way for this to happen.

There's no water. There is no source of phosphorous or iron. The altitudes that you are talking about would expose the bacteria to levels of UV radiation that would kill them.

We do not have the genetic engineering capability to do any of the things you talk about. We won't for at least several decades. Furthermore, nanotech is necessary for the things you talk about. It's the only way to get a life form that is capable of existing without significant water, trace nutrients and high levels of UV.

You say that sequestering CO2 is just chemistry. Fine, what chemistry? Unless you either have some sort of reducing agent or sequestering agent capable of soaking up 10^20 kg of CO2, it's not going to make a whit of difference. You're talking about a chemical reaction whose product is greater in mass than the entirety of the Earth's oceans! Presently, the entire Earth produces about 4*10^10 kg of sulfuric acid each year for industrial purposes. Sulfuric acid is by far and away the most commonly produced chemical in the world. Assuming we turned all the industries on Earth over to making a hypothetical chemical compound, ignoring supply problems, etc, it would take 2.5 billion years to make enough material.

I say things like 50+ years off because it's true. If you would sit down and actually look at the numbers in this problem, it's patently obvious that the laws of physics require that the time scale involved be gigantic. If anything 50+ years is a vast understatement. 50,000+ years is much more accurate.

Talking about terraforming Venus is fine as an intellectual exercise but to talk about it as if it's possible in a century or even 10 centuries is just foolish.

chat · 2004-03-30 18:03:22

kippy,

Getting a huge quantity of hydrogen to Venus seems a vast technical challenge.
Even if your eating like 200 servings of chile a day

But getting the water there isn't as big a one.

A few ways to address the problem...

I bet orbiting water asteroids above Venus would melt over a short time to form a small water moon.

Separate hydrogen from the water and send it down to the planet.
Use solar panels for the hydrogen separation machine, and use the oxygen as fuel to move the hydrogen to the surface.
Use the left over elements as containers for the deliver of hydrogen to venus.
Since your in orbit keep all the oxygen you create as fuel for moving more asteroids around in orbit, or to orbit.

Now for each hydrogen atom we get, Venus gets one water molecule and locks away 2 oxygen atoms.
That is a good recipe for atmosphere reduction and h20 production.

Also once its cool enough for robot machines on the surface, they can mine for elements to help lock more of the atmosphere away.

Add water on or near Venus
Cool the place with smashed asteroid shade or/and
Fill it with bacteria to remove most of the co2
Send in the machines to help speed things up
Stir and wait

I bet lots of chemical ways to lock atmosphere away are all there at Venus.
Any thoughts on what the machines could mine to help?
catalysts and such?

chat · 2004-03-30 18:19:00

Sbird,

I would have to say that science does progress in small steps with many people all chipping away at one rock until an answer is obtained.
But more often than not all those people are just working on one small rock on a big mountain.
The person that looks at the mountain usualy notices more, and the person that looks at the planet below the mountain more again.

The last decade or so seems to prove that science does progress from those people looking at what they arnt suppose to be looking at or working on.
And most of the time taking it on the chin when the group says your mad.

Science in my oppinion= invention.
And at no point should we ever think we know what we are talking about, we will always be wrong about everything because we can never know everything.
50 years from now they will smirk about what we knew, as we do about 50 years ago.

Just my thoughts

SBird · 2004-03-30 19:50:19

Unfortunately, brilliant insights don't do much these days. Remember that hundreds of thousands of the finest minds humanity has produced have been whittling away at the ourstanding problems we have. If the solution to a problem is easy, someone'd have noticed it by now except in very rare instances.

Take for example PCR - the polymerase chain reaction that they use to 'amplify' DNA. Kary Mullis got a rather underserved Nobel prize for 'inventing' the proceedure. He had a flash of insight where he imagined DNA polymerase being able to endlessly replicate a strand of DNA in an exponential manner. However, it turns out that he wan't the first person to think of this idea. Others had had the same flash of insight before but it hadn't gone anywhere. The reason is that PCR requires large amounts of temperature cycling. That destroys normal DNA polymerase. However, deep sea vent research had recently uncovered thermophiles from which a temperature resistant polymerase was recovered. Cetus, the company Mullis owrked for spent tens of thousands of worker hours laboriously hammering out the proceedure. Mullis didn't even participate because he got fired for poor attendance at work.

The point is that the flash if insight these days also requires massive amounts of work and research. The days of being able to tinker in a garage and make significant discovereis is all but vanished despite what Hollywood might try and tell you. The only place where significant discoveries are still occurring are in neglected areas of research such as 3rd world medicine and agriculture. Bill White forwarded a great link to me a few days back about new agricultural processes that turn formerly unusable rain forest soils into righ farming soil, removing the need for slash and burn agriculture. The technique? Burying organic matter in the dirt rather than burning it. A simple idea but it causes soil productivity to go up 4-fold without the use of fertilizers.

I've been trying to think ofa single major scientific advance with real-world impact that has occurred in the last 20 years that came from a single 'Eureka' moment that didn't subsequently require years worth of follow-up research. I can't think of a single one.

A better analogy is to compare science to building a giant scaffold into the sky. If you try and build any one portion too fast, it falls over. Every advance requires progress all around it to stay standing. A msall advance in one area of science gives new insights or makes better instruments possible that make another small advance elsewhere possible.

As for smirking about what people knew 50 years ago, that's simply not true. 50 years ago, we had just put the finishing touches on basic quantum physics, started spaceflight and begun to unravel the secrets of DNA. The scientists of the time knew the limitaitons of their knowledge and made inteligent predictions about where progress would lead. I seriously doubt that just about anything we have today would strike a 1950's scientist as being imposssible. Improbable or suprising, maybe but not impossible. The laws of physics as we knowthem haven't changed too much since then.

50 Years from now, most likely either quantum physics, relativity or both will have seen large amounts of change. We know this and it won't come as a big suprise. There will have been very significant advances in the understanding of non-linear dynamics which will enable dramatic advances in bioengineering, nanotech and fusion research. A better grasp of mathematics and nanotech will facilitate advances in high strength carbon materials like nanotubes and high temperature superconductors.

There is some possiblity that some rogue invention will completely suprise us and open up a new avenue of research but events like that will be the exception rather than the rule.

chat · 2004-03-30 20:53:42

sbird,

Only from brilliant insights does the work begin.

In the last 20 years, individuals put across the ideas that.
black holes evaporate.
the universe is expanding not slowing down.
a way to measure planets around other stars was found.
etc etc etc

All of those ideas seemed idiotic 50 years ago.

That seems to tear away any idea that science is a scaffold.
Since any of those ideas destroy most of the scaffold below it.

Science i believe is more like a Vegas hotel. build it with lots of creature comforts, but when next door builds something better, blow it up and rebuild.
If next door re furnishes its hotel, then you should also.

50 years was probably to short a time to give about exploring our understanding of science.
try thinking about 500 years ago and the beliefs then, and 500 years from now.

Its a comforting idea to belive we have a good grip on what is really happening from the smallest particle to the furthest star.
But in reality it is tough to say anything about the rest of the universe from our little section of it.
And who is to say our section of the universe isn't strange to begin with.

in 500 years they are sure to look back and say how quaint the thinking was.

Don't quote me on that though, i wont be here to debate *lol*

RobertDyck · 2004-03-30 22:14:28

SBird, it sounds like we have similar pet peeves. I consider myself to be a scientist as well. I have presented a paper on a life support system, but no one took it seriously. They don't even want to think along the lines I am talking about. The universal excuse is "look it up in the literature". I have looked up this topic in the science literature and found no one has done any research since 1981, and no one has attempted the experiment I propose. I've tried to look for lab space but the University and government National Research Council doesn't want to give me access. Right now one proposal is for the local chapter of the Mars Society to set up a new biolab. I get very short with people who say he/she is an expert and anyone else is not. The other aspect is the observation of just how little progress we have had in aerospace; NASA had intended to put humans on Mars in the early 1980s, and could have done it if Apollo and its follow-on projects weren't cancelled. I have several new ideas for new technologies, but the trouble is getting someone to take you seriously. Well, NASA did put me on their short list when I submitted a Notice Of Intent for the Next Generation Ion Engine, but they expected the Canadian Space Agency to pay for work done in Canada and I found they are more difficult to work with than NASA. That's one reason I'm presenting papers at CSA sponsored symposia.

Back to the points at hand. The concentration of sulphuric acid in hot smokers and hot springs is higher than you imply. Anaerobic archaea have been documented to survive in pH 2. There are species of extremophiles that survive in superheated water above +105ºC or very salty brine below -3ºC. Scientists didn't think that was possible until they saw it. The concentration of sulphuric acid in the clouds of Venus is not as high as that. It's more like acid rain clouds. The 30 miles of atmosphere above the surface doesn't even have sulphuric acid, it has carbonyl sulphide which is a stronger corrosive. There is no way life could survive in the +450ºC, 92 bars, and carbonyl sulphide; however the clouds have +100..0ºC, 1 bar give or take, and low concentrations of SO2 and H2SO4. The level of UV in the clouds is a bit higher than the surface of Earth, but more than Earth clouds. After all, once you get even a shallow distance inside the cloud you essentially have a floating fog bank filtering sunlight. Literature states conversion of SO2 to H2SO4 can only occur in the very top surface of clouds where UV is strong enough.

Problems with missing race elements? Well, yea. I'm surprised you haven't mentioned that every molecule of chlorophyll requires one atom of magnesium. That's why I suggested (years ago) engineering the terraforming bacteria to use retinal like halobacteria. Retinal is made only from hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Just engineer the new bacterium to use enzymes made from elements available. I know, "just" sounds like a big job. I'm saying it will take time to develop but we can start now. If we don't start we will never finish. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

The time scales you talk about are not reasonable. We could have a terraforming bacterium ready in less than 10 years. Once deployed it would take several decades, and that is for a reasonably fast terraforming bacterium. The time scale is the reason I now favour Mars. Venus cannot be colonized before you terraform, but Mars can be colonized now and terraformed later.

By the way, last year I talked to a graduate student who claimed that no one is able to engineer the proteome of an organism because it's too complicated. One enzyme requires a particular pH and temperature, while another has different requirements. But rather than saying "it can't be done", I say you just set out a spreadsheet of what enzymes require what environment, and if necessary create isolated spaces with different environments. For example, a thylokoid has a much higher H+ concentration that the stroma, and the intermembrane space has different conditions again. Cyanobacteria isolate enzymes that are damaged by the oxygen they produce. All chloroplasts have to deal with the fact that a high O2:CO2 ratio will cause RuDP carboxylase to oxidise RuDP into phosphogylcolate and 3-phosphoglycerate instead of carboxylation of RuDP into two molecules of 3-phosphoglycerate. This removes 3-phosphoglycerate from the Calvin-Benson cycle. So I'm saying rather than complain how hard it is, just work it out.

SBird · 2004-03-31 03:10:47

Robert -
Sorry to hear about the problems with getting funding. I've had to deal with those more than enough. That, along with the petty politics I keep seeing in academia have convinced me to jump to the private sector when I finish up with my committments at the university.

As for black smokers, the pH is predominantly 3.5-5.5 and the vast majority of the sulfur is in the form of H2S, not H2SO4. Furthermore, no living bacteria have ever been repeatably recovered from the hot portion of a smoker vent - the bacteria grow in the surrounding water, reducing the H2S. H2SO4 is an oxidizing agent and therefore useless for chemical fuel. As for extremophiles, noone was terribly suprised by the appearance of low temperature bacteria. High temperature bacteria came as a bit of a shock when they could survive above 100C. However, the highest recorded survival temp for a bacterium is 121C which isn't a terribly impressive temperature from a planetary viewpoint. Acid-resistant bacteria are common which isn't as suprising as one would expect, most acids are not terribly damaging to biological molecules. Some extremophiles have even been recovered from negative pH mineral acids in mines. High concentration H2So4, though, will destroy them all.

I'll conceed the Venus cloud acidity, I was under the impression that the H2SO4 clouds extended up to the tops of the cloud cover but that may be taken from now outdated data. However, this still fails to address how you plan to deal with the lack of water, iron or phosphorous as I mentioned above. The lack of water doesn't need much elaboration. To reach levels that will allow any level of significant bacterial growth, you'd have to have at least a few percent water vapor saturation which would mean the generation of exotons of water.
Iron is a necessary component of virtually all the redox and electron transfer proteins. There is no analog set of proteins for this. If you can't somehow get iron to the bacteria, they cannot grow. Period. How exactly do you propose that we generate a gassous iron compound for the bacteria to utilize?
Phosphorous is a necessary component of both DNA and the phospholipid cell membranes. Cells need significant amounts of this element. There are some volatile phosphorous compounds that exist. However, to get them at sufficient concentrations in the atmosphere for the bacteria to be able to utilize them, you'd have to produce gigatons of the material.

Finally, I cannot believe that you are calling my time estimates unrealistic and then saying that we could produce a terraforming bacterium in 10 years. That's just patently absurd. The fact that you seem to think that generating a custom proteome involves using a spreadsheet and a little elbow grease is just...just... I can't even find words for it without resorting to vulgarities. Do you have any concept how much work it takes to get a single protein expressed cross species? Even with modern bioengineering techniques and a simple case and lots of luck, you are looking at weeks of work. Ususally, the work takes a few months. A significant fraction of proteins (re: about 1/3) takes motnhs or years of concerted effort. Many just can't be moved. Most membrane proteins can't be transferred between species. How do you plan to deal with the differences in codon bias, RNA regulation, promoter control, post-translational modification, ribosome dynamics, cross-protein interactions, chaperonin differences, regulation networks, subcompartment fractionation among other things?

Do you have any inkling as to the difficulty in engineering a brand new metabolic system, much less an entire living organism? I'd like you to look at the complexity of the gene feedback loops of a T4 bacteriophage which still confound complete analysis today even after 50 years of intense study. This is an organism with fewer than 300 genes and no functional metabolism.

Right now, Craig Venter, one of the co-sequencers of the human genome is undertaking an artificial bacterium project. This project is aiming to create a barebones bacterium for genetic research. This is an organism that will require special laboratory conditions to survive. This project is expected to dwarf the human genome project in its scale of complexity and difficulty. What you are talking about is the de novo design of a bacterium that can survive in conditions that no earthly bacterium could survive in, producing chemical products that no earthly bacterium can produce and then thiving in sufficient quantities to change a planet's atmosphere content.

You are proposing that the secret tool to do this is a SPREADSHEET? Tell you what, you go and build a working antimatter spacecraft drive in 10 years and I'll make your terraforming bacteria. The difficulty level for both is about the same.

Byron · 2004-03-31 05:35:34

Since I'm not a scientist, there isn't much for me to add to this discussion...lol. I do have a question, however: Why would one even *want* to terraform Venus? Some places are meant to be left alone, and I would place Venus very near the top of the list.

I'll take that antimatter drive any day of the week

B

chat · 2004-03-31 05:47:47

Robert,

What is a brief description of your new ion drive?
I'm working on something similar, but using an accelerator for ions.

No disbelief in your troubles getting the idea going, i have hit brick walls on every turn.
I haven't written a paper and probably never will due to the costs for the project.
But i will say i did find a couple of individuals that shine in the crowd and listened along the way, even though it potentialy threatened funding for what they do:)

I don't think Venus will be a 10 year adventure, nor a 5000 year one.

Somewhere in the middle of that number seems more realistic.

Just getting the water to Venus is probably a 50 year or longer undertaking.
So we have at least 50 years to create a bacteria catered to Venus as soon as we start moving ice blocks.

I do think the bacteria on Venus will start altering things fast, but planetary fast is probably more like 50 or 100 years.

I think with mars we wont get much of a chance to alter it, it will be colonized well before we have plans to alter it.
The colonists will say "not a chance"
And to alter mars we need to smack it to wake up the frozen polar gas.
Phobos and deimos are ideal impactors for the job.:)

chat · 2004-03-31 05:53:40

Byron,

Like the mountain.
Because it's there

If it can be done, then why not?
That is probably a statement that makes for a lot of broken bones in mountain climbers also *lol*

RobertDyck · 2004-03-31 08:30:30

chat, your ion drive sounds similar to what I had in mind. I really don't want to publish my ideas on a public forum because I had submitted a Notice Of Intent to NASA. That was for the Next Generation Ion Engine. While preparing the formal bid I discovered the fine print that said NASA will not pay for any work done outside the U.S., despite the fact the notice said it is open to organizations foreign and domestic, to for-profit companies, space advocacy organizations, space agencies (such as NASA centres), and educational institutions. They expected the CSA to pay for work done in Canada; but the CSA is more difficult to get money from, and doesn't have much money. When I cancelled my NOI, NASA phoned me and said they were looking forward to my bid. I told NASA that my electrical engineer quit engineering after 9/11 in favour of community service (he now works for the Red Cross), and I wasn't able to find a replacement in time. That was true, but I also couldn't get funding from the CSA. When I asked NASA for assistance they had one of the lead engineers at the Glenn Research Center who developed the NSTAR ion engine call me directly. He gave me all published papers on the engine, and his direct phone# at work if I have any questions. NASA has practically bent over backward trying to help me, but when I called the CSA their response was literally "How did you get this phone number?" NASA is willing to accept that I am an entrepreneur and computer programmer with experience writing flight software and calibrating sensors for flight hardware; other skills for ion engine design are from my employees: an electrical engineer to design the power supply, a physicist with a Ph.D. in plasma physics to optimize ion optics, a professor of aerospace engineering at my alma mater to work on the propellant feed system. However, the CSA wants to see multiple degrees behind my name in the particular field of this project, at least a Ph.D. in engineering. And the Director of Technology said the CSA is not interested in propulsion. The new president of the CSA wants to send a Canadian led mission to Mars, but they still don't want to support in-space propulsion. How do they expect to get there without propulsion?

Anyway, for a few years I had a detailed hit counter on the local chapter web site. It wouldn't tell me exactly who looked at the web site, but how many people per day looked at each page, which search engine referred how many people per day to the web site, and which ISP. I noticed someone from boeing.com looked at my web site while the bids for Next Generation Ion Engine were being reviewed by NASA. Boeing bought Electron Dynamic Designs, the company that built the NSTAR ion engine for NASA. That's why Boeing Satellite Systems now has XIPS thrusters for their model 702 satellites. I don't want to give ideas to the competition.

chat · 2004-03-31 09:26:56

Robert,

I understand 100% why you wouldn't want to explain to much about your idea.

I expect that the Canadian agency expects to get to mars on toboggans, or modified snowmobiles.

I had a similar experience with NASA, lots of interest from some.
But no way for a Canadian to do anything to further the idea, and a 0% chance for any funding.

It sounds like your on a similar path with ion acceleration.

Would love to have a look at your paper.
I might have a few input ideas, and no fear of me trying to borrow anything, as i have no formal degree and no real interest in publishing anything.

Well not exactly, i would love to publish something on the seeming expansion speedup of the universe.
But that is another story
0 Degree=0 chance for that though.
But it doesn't take a degree to see the obvious about the speedup.

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