Terraforming Venus

Terraformer · 2007-11-16 08:01:33

Why don't we just stick a sun shade in orbit around Venus? If we could minimize the amount of heat reaching the surface the Enternal Night side would cool down and take heat from the Sometimes Day side.

nickname · 2007-11-16 08:21:23

Terraformer,

Just the sheer size of such a structure is the problem.
We can make it smaller closer to the sun, but then the problem of solar storms on that structure crops up, and fuel needed to keep it in place.

Better idea is to simply transport a few bars of native Venus atmosphere to the Venus geo point so it stays in stable orbit to form a shell of co2 gas.

Sunlight passing through that layer will be converted to a wavelength that the remaining Venus atmosphere will reject nearly 90%.
A greenhouse in reverse.

Simple use of the resources at hand and no grand building scheme needed.
Getting 2 to 5 bars to the geo point?

Terraformer · 2007-11-16 08:32:09

But... you need to have an installation on the surface freezing the C)2 and launching it.

nickname · 2007-11-16 17:08:07

Terraformer,

Once you get that first bar in geo the next 2 to 4 would be easier, and possibly from the surface.

That first bar is the problem one.
With big floating factories its possible to keep out of the danger zone in the atmosphere, collect c02 as the delivery product and co2 as a separation product into liquid oxygen as rocket fuel to make deliveries to geo and carbon as a building material.
Lots of free sunlight for power in that region of the atmosphere for production.

Not unrealistic that the waste Carbon be used as the delivery vessel and maybe most of the rocket components and tanks and factories.
No reason factory #1 can't create factory #2 etc etc.

If we can uniformly send up 1 bar of co2 to the geo we drop the surface temperature about 50% on Venus.
Machines would tolerate a surface Venus at 50% its current temperature.
They would still need to be built like tanks because of the surface pressure, so it might be easier to send up all you need from floating factories.

With very rough math each bar we send up is about 50% of the remaining temperature.

I figure somewhere around 4 bars sent into geo the surface temperature of Venus would be around 50c.

At that point getting water on Venus will go a long way to soaking up the bulk of the free co2.
Some big kbo's to get oceans going.
...
I've really got to get around to doing the math properly on the wavelength changes of c02 and reflective properties of co2 at that wavelength to get an exact amount needed in geo to do the job.

I think it's still quite a monumental task to move 4 bars of atmosphere into Venus geo from Venus.
Maybe 100 or a few 100's of years as a best guess, exponential factory building could drop that a lot.
Then a few more 100's of years to get the water to Venus as kbo's.

Venus is such a tough nut to crack, but i think I'm close on this idea.

Terraformer · 2007-11-17 06:57:45

How about directing a small km wide object into a bigger object to direct it into a bigger object until you've directed an icy body from the Oort cloud into Venus.

nickname · 2007-11-18 07:22:31

Terraformer,

Are you talking about a tethered sort of arrangement to get small things to move big things ?
Or very careful collisions or near misses to get things moving?

Most of the big objects out there are icy worlds so propulsive fuels aren't a problem to collect from the object you desire to move.

From the KB or Ort the force needed to get things moving isn't great either, so i don't think water for Venus is a big problem.
Just the times involved to get them to the destination, then again what is a hundred or so years if it means creating earth2.

In my opinion Venus is the only planet with real possibilities to terra form into something like earth.

Mars has potential but unless we find an asteroid/kbo with about 1/2 a bars worth nitrogen of or a simple way to import nitrogen, Mars will never be terra formed into anything like earth.

Warmed yes, terra formed no, the lack of an inert gas on Mars allowing oxygen and c02 to have a safe balance point is the problem.
5% co2 is the max number for life on land and 35% Oxygen before it self combusts, leaving us needing 60% as a minimum inert gas percent.
Realistically 70% of the atmosphere would be a good safe nitrogen count for Mars.

Tiny problem most Mars terra formers seem to overlook.

Terraformer · 2007-11-18 07:32:34

Ammonia and Nitrates are found in lots of asteroids. Direct them into the planet and have plants fix the Ammonia into Nitrogen. Also you have an excess of Nitrogen on Venus.

nickname · 2007-11-19 05:00:38

Terraformer,

Small traces of nitrogen are probably in lots of kbo's, but 1/2 a bar is a little more difficult to find.

Venus easily has 1/2 a bar of nitrogen to spare, but we would need a nearly terra formed Venus to get it.
Then transporting it from Venus to Mars even with a robust program would require 1,000/'s of years.

No chance of having any plants on mars convert ammonia into nitrates as the gas mix on Mars is incorrect for surface life.

If we warm Mars we can have life in the water without good gas mixes in the atmosphere, so we are limited to that until we bring in enough inert gas for land life.
We are pretty limited to what will live in the water also as the oxygen content will be very poor.

The most robust land life on earth can withstand no more than 6% co2 per weight of atmosphere.(other than bacteria)
Most of life on Earth requires 2% or less c02 content.

Titan is a possible to get nitrogen from for Mars, it's the only good place i could see to get nitrogen from.
It has a small escape velocity and lots of nitrogen.
Still around 1000 years to get 1/2 bar to Mars though, but at least we don't have to terra form it to begin moving nitrogen.
Titan has some other chemical goodies for Mars we can use to warm thing up and keep it warm, so it's a great destination for terra forming Mars.

1000 or more years to get nitrogen to Mars from Titan won't be much of a wait compared to decreasing the 40% or so c02 content of the final nitrogen rich oxygen poor Martian atmosphere.

Antius · 2007-11-20 03:36:24

Terraformer,
Small traces of nitrogen are probably in lots of kbo's, but 1/2 a bar is a little more difficult to find.
Venus easily has 1/2 a bar of nitrogen to spare, but we would need a nearly terra formed Venus to get it.
Then transporting it from Venus to Mars even with a robust program would require 1,000/'s of years.
No chance of having any plants on mars convert ammonia into nitrates as the gas mix on Mars is incorrect for surface life.
If we warm Mars we can have life in the water without good gas mixes in the atmosphere, so we are limited to that until we bring in enough inert gas for land life.
We are pretty limited to what will live in the water also as the oxygen content will be very poor.
The most robust land life on earth can withstand no more than 6% co2 per weight of atmosphere.(other than bacteria)
Most of life on Earth requires 2% or less c02 content.
Titan is a possible to get nitrogen from for Mars, it's the only good place i could see to get nitrogen from.
It has a small escape velocity and lots of nitrogen.
Still around 1000 years to get 1/2 bar to Mars though, but at least we don't have to terra form it to begin moving nitrogen.
Titan has some other chemical goodies for Mars we can use to warm thing up and keep it warm, so it's a great destination for terra forming Mars.
1000 or more years to get nitrogen to Mars from Titan won't be much of a wait compared to decreasing the 40% or so c02 content of the final nitrogen rich oxygen poor Martian atmosphere.

We simply do not need a lot of nitrogen. We do not need to breath it and plants consume nitrogen as nitrates. A few hundred parts per million in the atmosphere should be enough and Mars already has a lot of what we would need.

nickname · 2007-11-20 05:01:46

Antius,

If we plan to just colonize Mars then we don't need any nitrogen.
The quantity in the atmosphere will do just nicely filtered into enclosures, c02 can easily be converted into oxygen to breath.
The plants animals and people would be quite happy indoors.
We could make indoor enclosures very similar to the makeup of earths atmospheric content.

Outdoors is a totally different problem.
If we intend to terra form Mars we need a buffer gas just to take up atmospheric volume so the other two gasses can be a small enough percentage that they aren't lethal to life as c02 is, or self combustive like oxygen beyond 35%.
It doesn't have to be nitrogen as the inert gas, any inert gas will do as long as it is a stable gas, and we can get enough of it to represent about 70% of the Martian atmosphere.

No way to get a happy balance with just co2 or oxygen as the two gasses and little nitrogen in the atmosphere.

I think it's the biggest sticking point to really terra forming Mars.

Heating Mars is a relatively simple short term project using the dust from Phobos as polar projectiles.
Dust impacting from phobos on the poles of Mars would melt the poles, release huge quantities of c02, water vapor, heat from the impacts with carbon soot would create quite a bit of new c02 as the impact dust converts water ice, we are sure to get a substantial amount of methane in the process a wonderful greenhouse gas.

No matter how we warm Mars though we end up with a nearly 100% co2 atmosphere world.
Just importing 1/2 bar nitrogen from Titan gets that c02 content down to 20% - 30%.
Then we have a realistic goal to convert it to less than 5% with 20% -25%oxygen.

Then the math of converting say 150-200mb of c02 to oxygen on a world that wont support land life yet because the c02 levels are still well beyond lethal.
Took a very long time on Earth for that process, and Mars has nowhere near the light content Earth has.

We might get lucky on Mars and discover that the planet itself scrubs 100mb of co2 for us, but we will still have to deal with the rest 50-100 mb.

The math for Venus is far worse than this though
Even though i think I've found a way to cool Venus using 4 bars of its own atmosphere and we have 3 bars of nitrogen as inert gas on Venus.
We would still have 83 bars of c02 we would have to have a plan for.
I can't imagine any way to deal with it.

Commodore · 2007-11-21 22:36:58

How are you going to get the gas to stay in geo orbit at any bars?

nickname · 2007-11-22 07:38:35

Commodore,

Just the cohesion of the gas itself should keep it in place as it is charged with electrons.
Geo is a pretty stable place anyway.
Charged c02 would eventually try to form a ring, or even a gas moon over a long period of time.

A gas moon wouldn't be a bad way to deal with the other bars of c02, but the task of moving say another 70 -80 bars into place is so enormous as to be near impossible.

If its cool enough on the surface of Venus we could probably deal with a few bars of c02 made into long chain carbon and oxygen elements, but even doing that would be a project in itself.
Adding water to Venus as kbo's is sure to take up a few more Bars of c02.
Better than that would be to strip the oxygen from kbo's, dump it into geo and just deliver the hydrogen to the atmosphere.
Each bars worth of hydrogen reduces Venus atmosphere by 3 bars, so we need about 25 bars worth of hydrogen from Kbo's.
That is lots of big kbo's.

Did i mention this was a long term project ?

Terraformer · 2007-11-22 09:08:24

Is there an element that will displace the Carbon in CO2 and produce a *non-lethal* compound.

nickname · 2007-11-22 10:50:19

Terraformer,

I believe hydrogen is the best one of all for altering c02.
The bonds of oxygen and hydrogen are stronger than the bonds of Carbon and Oxygen.

Just the impact of hydrogen on the cooler atmosphere would break and reform the c02 bonds into h20 and free carbon.
I believe just delivering it to the atmosphere is all we would have to do.
On a 50c Venus both water and free carbon would try to get to the surface, that is a recipe for carbonated water. .

The beauty of hydrogen imports is we decrease the atmospheric weight and create water and free carbon.
If we did bring in 25 bars of hydrogen for Venus we decrease 75 bars of c02, and probably another 7 bars (guess) of co2 taken up in the oceans in rainfall.

Once we have a bit of water in the atmosphere or on the surface from importing hydrogen, we might get some help from engineered bacteria that form stable carbon/oxygen compounds to use up a few more bars.

Any and every idea to use up c02 would be a good thing.

Terraformer · 2007-11-24 09:52:58

Being closer to the sun Venus would get more UV radiation. How feasible would it be to expose water to the UV light to split it. The oxygen could be transformed into ozone to import. Would it be possible to build a big ball of frozen hydrogen to crash into the planet?

nickname · 2007-11-24 16:22:18

Terraformer,

Lots of UV and lots of sunlight for photo cells in that region of space to break water into its parts.

A giant bag with solar cells on it to contain the kb and simple h20 electrolysis might be all you need.
When we have separated the two gasses we could eject the oxygen at pressure to de orbit the bag 2/3 full of hydrogen.

It still requires lots of 1 km kbo's though to tame all that c02 on Venus.

Terraformer · 2007-11-24 16:32:36

Wouldn't it be more efficient to use the UV light to turn water directly into H2 and O2 instead of turning the light to electricty to H2 and O2? Solar cells are notoriusly inefficient.

Commodore · 2007-11-24 21:51:20

Whats to keep solar wind from blasting all the gas away.

nickname · 2007-11-25 06:50:45

Commodore,

Charged particles/electrons from the sun should impart an electric charge to the c02 gas in geo.

If anything the gas will try to clump together in a ring in geo over time and create it's own small magnetic field.
If we added very fine iron dust to that we could create quite a strong magnetic field.

Similar reason the fine smoke sized particles at Saturn's rings stay in place.

Venus is much closer to the sun than Saturn so more effected by solar storms, but the same principal should work.

If we loose a percentage of c02 to space at Venus we can continually add to replace it.

Sounds like a simple plan for Venus but 4 bars of c02 is quite a bit to move even just to geo.

nickname · 2007-11-25 06:59:50

Terraformer,

The Uv is quite strong so no reason you couldnt use just UV to do the work.

All you need is a big clear bag that allows UV in.
Then use the pressure oxygen dump to move it to the atmosphere and leave the oxygen behind when its ready.

Terraformer · 2007-11-25 07:02:49

Hello, anyone there? Why wouldn't it be more efficient to use the UV light directly to convert water into Hydrogen and Oxygen? Unfurl some kind of sheeting that water would be pumped through and exposed to UV light. Electrodes would atract the H2 and O2 to them where it could be collected. A similar scheme could be used at Mars with the water also being used as a magnifying glass to focus the Suns heat.

nickname · 2007-11-26 15:36:08

Terraformer,

Guess you missed the post.
Yep no problem with using UV, even worked out a way to deliver it to the atmosphere with no extra power needed.

I would hate to hazzard a guess to the number of Kbo's you would need and the time scales involved to move them and seperate the hydrogen from them in orbit.
But i bet they are all pretty long term projects.

Terraformer · 2007-11-27 08:26:25

But once you have got the bag full of H2 to the atmosphere would it pop. You won't be able to slam it into the atmosphere.

And we'd have to get all the carbon off planet. The H2O breaking up, the hydrogen being lost, and Carbon Dioxide/Monoxide? being produced made Venus the hell hole it is today. Using the Carbon in orbit to proce a magnetic field's an interesting idea.

nickname · 2007-11-28 04:50:28

Terraformer,

I think just the de orbit speed of the bag of hydrogen and that impact speed would do the trick.

You are correct in the next problem on a cooled Venus with hydrogen deliveries, the accumulation of carbon on the ground.

We would have to make carbon everything to keep up with the supply.
The water would take up most of it as a layer on the bottom of ponds and oceans.

It would be an amazing place of furious growth for cyanobacteria with warm water, high concentrations of carbon and dissolved c02 with 3 bars of nitrogen in the atmosphere with sunlight at nearly 2x what earth has.

I think the magnetic field idea will be a more and more important thing as we get close to an earthlike place.
Carbon would work better than c02 alone in geo, so moving some carbon to orbit is a good way to get rid of it and make a stronger magnet.
Carbon is a pretty good sun block,co2 a good wavelength changer, so the combination of the two would be ideal.

I've always wondered if we couldn't do the same sort of magnetic ring thing at Mars but with fine iron dust alone.
Mars wont need to block or convert any sunlight like Venus, but Mars would need a strong magnetic field for protection.

Terraformer · 2007-11-28 07:35:37

Carbon Nanotubes Anyone? Welcome to Venus, the only planet with a Space Elevator as a byproduct of its Terraforming.

I suppose, juding by what you've been saying, that 4 Hydrogen atoms are equal to 1 carbon atom.

2 H2+CO2=C+2 H2O?

Carbon can be used for: Nanotubes; Spacecraft Parts; Carbon Fibre; Superconducters?; Hydrocarbon Manufacture; Etc.

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#1 2007-11-16 08:01:33

Re: Terraforming Venus

#2 2007-11-16 08:21:23

Re: Terraforming Venus

#3 2007-11-16 08:32:09

Re: Terraforming Venus

#4 2007-11-16 17:08:07

Re: Terraforming Venus

#5 2007-11-17 06:57:45

Re: Terraforming Venus

#6 2007-11-18 07:22:31

Re: Terraforming Venus

#7 2007-11-18 07:32:34

Re: Terraforming Venus

#8 2007-11-19 05:00:38

Re: Terraforming Venus

#9 2007-11-20 03:36:24

Re: Terraforming Venus

#10 2007-11-20 05:01:46

Re: Terraforming Venus

#11 2007-11-21 22:36:58

Re: Terraforming Venus

#12 2007-11-22 07:38:35

Re: Terraforming Venus

#13 2007-11-22 09:08:24

Re: Terraforming Venus

#14 2007-11-22 10:50:19

Re: Terraforming Venus

#15 2007-11-24 09:52:58

Re: Terraforming Venus

#16 2007-11-24 16:22:18

Re: Terraforming Venus

#17 2007-11-24 16:32:36

Re: Terraforming Venus

#18 2007-11-24 21:51:20

Re: Terraforming Venus

#19 2007-11-25 06:50:45

Re: Terraforming Venus

#20 2007-11-25 06:59:50

Re: Terraforming Venus

#21 2007-11-25 07:02:49

Re: Terraforming Venus

#22 2007-11-26 15:36:08

Re: Terraforming Venus

#23 2007-11-27 08:26:25

Re: Terraforming Venus

#24 2007-11-28 04:50:28

Re: Terraforming Venus

#25 2007-11-28 07:35:37

Re: Terraforming Venus

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