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Does this suggest a way to terraform Venus? Reflecting light on Mars to warm it up is one thing, but blocking light to Venus is easier, it is the one thing that is easier about terraforming Venus that Mars. For one thing the Venus-Sun L1 point is closer than the Mars-Sun L1 point, and all you have to do to block light is put something in between Venus and the Sun. So if one were to park a large comet in between Venus and the Sun at the L1 point, it will boil away its atmosphere for quite some time before it loses all of its voltiles, and I think an asteroid in the outer belt would be a comet if it was brought to the Venus-Sun L1 point, especially one with a lot of water ice in it. I here Ceres is about 20% water ice for example, it would boil away for quite some time if it were brought that close to the Sun, a smaller asteroid would have to do, as I don't think we are going to move Ceres anytime in the near future.
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I have said before, and will say again: it's a lot easier to block sunlight with clouds than any sort of soleta or sun-sunshade. "Reflecting light on Mars"? Forget it. Mars is in a different orbit than Venus, with different orbital period. There are times they're on opposite sides of the Sun. And Earth is in an orbit between them. Earth is usually not directly between them; that's the nature of orbits, each planet orbits separately.
Last edited by RobertDyck (2014-10-10 16:29:33)
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A terraformed Venus may well be stable. I recall research suggesting a permanent cloud system would form at the subsolar point on slowly rotating worlds, blocking much of the sunlight and allowing a closer habitable zone.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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I have said before, and will say again: it's a lot easier to block sunlight with clouds than any sort of soleta or sun-sunshade. "Reflecting light on Mars"? Forget it. Mars is in a different orbit than Venus, with different orbital period. There are times they're on opposite sides of the Sun. And Earth is in an orbit between them. Earth is usually not directly between them; that's the nature of orbits, each planet orbits separately.
That is what a comet coma is, a cloud of gas surrounding the comet nucleous, also if a comet is placed between Venus and the Sun, much of the stuff in the comet's tail will end up in Venus' atmosphere, lots of volatiles like water vapor and so forth. Venus is a bit dry and so could use it. Maybe the comet can last long enough to substantially cool Venus, and if not, we get another comet to replace it. I don't see what reflecting light on Mars has to do with the position of Venus, what you would do then is place a soletta in the Mars-Sun L1 point and focus sunlight more on Mars, now making a soletta involves manufacturing, simply placing a comet between Venus and the Sun, does not so much, you basically have o move the comet, a few fly bys of the inner planets to slow it down plus an ion drive to position it at the L1 point between Venus and the Sun. A sun shade might be deployed to shade the comet until its in the right position and then it is removed to let it grow a tail and block light from reaching Venus, much like a cloudy atmosphere would.
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A terraformed Venus may well be stable. I recall research suggesting a permanent cloud system would form at the subsolar point on slowly rotating worlds, blocking much of the sunlight and allowing a closer habitable zone.
Venus is stable now. I'm sure if life was possible on Venus, it would have developed much as it has on Earth. Venus is a little too close to the Sun and the result is what we have now. Some of that light needs to be blocked. The clouds of Venus act as a thermostat, the only problem is that thermostat is set to high, the surface of Venus has to be really hot for that perpetual cloud cover to develop also if the Earth had a 95 bar atmosphere, it would probably have a perpetual cloud cover too. Much of Venus' atmosphere would have to become ocean.
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