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Tom Kalbfus

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Registered: 2006-08-16

Posts: 4,401

Terraforming Venus without altering its appearance from Space

Suppose we terraformed Venus and when we were done, it looked like this?

Of course if we examined it with a spectoscope those clouds would now be water clouds, or at least some of it would be water, these clouds basically shelter the planet from getting too much sunshine and overheating back to its previous state.
Under those clouds it would look like this:

I am assuming no change in the rotation and two levels of clouds, one is the normal clouds where it rains out of and the high clouds are more like cirrus clouds like these:

Only they would fill the whole sky, and block half the light from reaching the lower cloud level. I think we'd have to make these clouds out of something other than water-ice crystals. Any thoughts?

karov

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Registered: 2004-06-03

Posts: 953

Re: Terraforming Venus without altering its appearance from Space

Hall Weather Machine.

Terraformer

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From: Ceres

Registered: 2007-08-27

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Re: Terraforming Venus without altering its appearance from Space

Given Venus' slow rotation, a permanent cloud should form at the subsolar point, shielding the planet. I wonder what the temperature would be if Venus didn't have 90 bars of CO2. I think it would be stable for quite some time, even without any other change, if that CO2 was locked away.

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"I'm gonna die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy." - If this forum was a Mars Colony

Tom Kalbfus

Banned

Registered: 2006-08-16

Posts: 4,401

Re: Terraforming Venus without altering its appearance from Space

the clouds prevent light from being absorbed by the ground and reradiated as heat, it is heat that gets trapped by the greenhouse effect, the cloud tops just reflect light back out into space, which is why Venus is the brightest object in the night sky after the Sun and the Moon. Venus's carbon dioxide atmosphere doesn't hold onto light, only heat. There were times when the Earth was cooled by temporary clouds in the sky, such as the dust cloud that was kicked up by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I think we need a smart cloud, one that acts as a thermostat, when the planet gets too hot the clouds billow out to block sunlight, or else the cloud particles detect and excess amount of sunlight and expand to block that light, if they fall below the cloud layers they become invisible again. There is a lot of invisible dust in the air we breath, now imagine that dust was nanotech particles which could expand and block sunlight when it got too bright.

Utility fog

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Visualization of foglet with arms retracted and extended

Diagram of a 100-micrometer foglet
Utility fog (coined by Dr. John Storrs Hall in 1993[1]) is a hypothetical collection of tiny robots that can replicate a physical structure.[2][3][4][5] As such, it is a form of self-reconfiguring modular robotics.

Contents  [hide]
1 Conception
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

Conception[edit]

Hall thought of it as a nanotechnological replacement for car seatbelts. The robots would be microscopic, with extending arms reaching in several different directions, and could perform three-dimensional lattice reconfiguration. Grabbers at the ends of the arms would allow the robots (or foglets) to mechanically link to one another and share both information and energy, enabling them to act as a continuous substance with mechanical and optical properties that could be varied over a wide range. Each foglet would have substantial computing power, and would be able to communicate with its neighbors.

In the original application as a replacement for seatbelts, the swarm of robots would be widely spread-out, and the arms loose, allowing air flow between them. In the event of a collision the arms would lock into their current position, as if the air around the passengers had abruptly frozen solid. The result would be to spread any impact over the entire surface of the passenger's body.

While the foglets would be micro-scale, construction of the foglets would require full molecular nanotechnology. Hall suggests that each bot may be in the shape of a dodecahedron with 12 arms extending outwards. Each arm would have four degrees of freedom. The foglets' bodies would be made of aluminum oxide rather than combustible diamond to avoid creating a fuel air explosive.[5]

Hall and his correspondents soon realised that utility fog could be manufactured en masse to occupy the entire atmosphere of a planet and replace any physical instrumentality necessary to human life. By foglets exerting concerted force an object or human could be carried from location to location. Virtual buildings could be constructed and dismantled within moments, enabling the replacement of existing cities and roads with farms and gardens. While molecular nanotech might also replace the need for biological bodies, utility fog would remain a useful peripheral with which to perform physical engineering and maintenance tasks.