Paraterraforming Pluto

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-07-19 19:22:54

Pluto is a small body, it would not hold on to an Earthlike atmosphere if it was raised to an Earthlike temperature, but would could put a roof around it to contain its atmosphere if we heated it up. Turns out a significant portion of its surface is covered with frozen atmosphere, so lets say we put a balloon around Pluto and heated it up with either natural or artificial sunlight, what do you think we would get? Pluto's crust that s not gas would be water, so it would be a water world, but around it would be a lot of atmosphere. I'm not sure how much atmosphere this would be, but if we contained enough atmosphere so that the atmospheric pressure was 1 bar at its watery surface, that atmosphere could extend outward for quite a distance without thinning out very much. Towards the outer boundary of that atmosphere the gravity would be pretty close to nonexistent. If you go out to twice the radius of Pluto, the gravity would be at 0.015g, at the surface it is at 0.06g. Possiblky air currents would be sufficient to keep an human aloft, by flapping his arms he could fly or basically swim through the atmosphere.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2015-07-19 19:28:53)

karov · 2015-07-20 02:19:42

The "roof" can be complex Hall Weather Machine. Or combination of HWM with "utility fog" - the HWMachinelets can be zipped together active/reactivelly. Atmosphere contained in such 4D tessellated multi-layer-ed bubble with diameter of several times the solid-state planetary one shall focus/manage enough solar radiation to create remotely earth-like conditions.

The temperature of the atmosphere can be regulated to be under zero Celsius. Say minus 30-40 C. Thus the water-ice lithosphere won't melt down and the natural beauty shall be preserved.

Enriching the atmosphere with O2 will expose all these burnables to fire, so they've got to be sequestered. Perhaps underground. Or in self-replicating micro-tanks.

Liquid hydrosphere component should be "plumbed" - into biosphetic tube-age.

The biosphere could be "warm-blooded" plants. Indeed we have literally infinite variety of possible and even available organisms to mish-mash-up a working ecosystem with.

Terraformer · 2015-07-20 10:06:46

Why would the entire atmosphere be raised to a habitable temperature? You only need the parts near the ground to be close to zero Celsius; the atmosphere above a few kilometres can be allowed to be as cold as possible. Since you're going to be separating those two layers anyway, in order to oxygenate the habitable area, the temperature difference shouldn't be a problem.

The rotation period of Pluto, at least according to Wikipedia, is 6.39 days, it's surface gravity is 0.620m/s^2, it's escape velocity is 1.212km/s, and it's equatorial rotation velocity is 13.1m/s. Sunlight is not strong enough for thermal escape to be significant, and neither can the solar wind be effective. A cold nitrogen atmosphere would end far below the the Hades-sychronous point, so we don't have to worry about the atmospheric sprinkling that's a problem for Ceres.

The point is, Pluto can easily hold on to a dense nitrogen atmosphere, it's just far too cold for it to be an atmosphere. Maybe trace amounts of ultrapowerful greenhouse gases could work. Below that, a few kilometres off from the surface, construct a worldhouse that is much warmer and oxygenated, with lights built into the worldhouse roof - the atmosphere should smear out the light, so you just have a blue sky with no visible point light source. This design is also a lot easier to maintain, and can be expanded in a cellular way.

If you can paraterraform Pluto, you can paraterraform most worlds out there I think. Which is great for a SciFi setting.

Terraformer · 2015-07-20 10:51:35

http://figshare.com/articles/Extending_ … o_/1031243

So perhaps it will be feasible to give Pluto a cold nitrogen atmosphere.

karov · 2015-07-20 12:02:14

Yeah, I think the scarce photonic resources from capturing aperture of 10-ish thousands of miles could be used so pinpoint oases to be maintained sprinkled like global archipelago while the atmosphere around them and above few km to be kept almost cryonic.

N2 partial titan-forming would be also huge leap ahead.

Antius · 2015-07-20 13:31:47

The sun is so weak as to be all but useless as source of energy. With this in mind, energy must be provided by some synthetic means, probably fission. To conserve heat, the most practical habitat would be spherical. The Plutonians will build their cities as spherical pressure vessels of ice, insulated and decked on the inside to provide the most possible living space for the minimum exposed surface area.

karov · 2015-07-20 15:16:22

Antius wrote:

The sun is so weak as to be all but useless as source of energy.

No it's not. Pluto is on average 40 times further then Earth from Sun.
Hence for Earth level in-solation with natural light you need concentrator of 40-ish times the diameter of Pluto.
Which is easily achievable by converting a modest asteroid/ cometary nuclei mass into concentrator soleta hardware.
BUT, for mostly cold minus-Celsius desert bespred with oases Earth-level irradiation is very very much excessive.
With IR output control, greenhouse W-machinelets blanketing and tuning the incoming and outgoing radiation perhaps we'll need dozens of times less total photonic energy flux.
I.e. roughly the diameter of Earth. Enough. As shown above on the comparison picture.

Antius wrote:

... The Plutonians will build their cities as spherical pressure vessels of ice, insulated and decked on the inside to provide the most possible living space for the minimum exposed surface area.

You're right. In 6% gees really really massive "igloos" can be water-ice built. Or printed.
This solves the problem with the "oases" too. Cause oases could be thus domed/roofed/indoor spaces.
Which will further decrease the illumination needs.

Visualize the "terraformed" Plutonian "outback" as (quote from Alan Stern from 2004)::

The surface is bright and covered in a fresh, pinkish snow. People commonly think that it would be dark on Pluto because it is so far from the sun, but it is actually about as bright as dusk here on Earth, with enough light for you to very easily read a book and see what's going on around you.

but with illumination multiplied by (say) 10.

The surface covered by/the bottom of/... (say) 0.15b O2 + 0.1N2 = 0.25 Bars total, atmosphere. With average temperature of (say) minus 50-70 Celsius (200-220K).

Dry, cold, very clear.

Warm clothes would suffice.

The liquid hydrosphere cycle - plumbed into warmblooded biosphere.

Beautiful. As much of original Pluto as possible.

Do not forget that rotating and supramundane habitats are by far superior in any imaginable parameter from ANY planet - natural or artificial / terraformed or not.

Hence, terraforming will be more an art, like monumental architecture and sculpture.

Antius · 2015-07-20 18:49:03

karov wrote:

Antius wrote:
The sun is so weak as to be all but useless as source of energy.
No it's not. Pluto is on average 40 times further then Earth from Sun.
Hence for Earth level in-solation with natural light you need concentrator of 40-ish times the diameter of Pluto.
Which is easily achievable by converting a modest asteroid/ cometary nuclei mass into concentrator soleta hardware.
BUT, for mostly cold minus-Celsius desert bespred with oases Earth-level irradiation is very very much excessive.
With IR output control, greenhouse W-machinelets blanketing and tuning the incoming and outgoing radiation perhaps we'll need dozens of times less total photonic energy flux.
I.e. roughly the diameter of Earth. Enough. As shown above on the comparison picture.
Antius wrote:
... The Plutonians will build their cities as spherical pressure vessels of ice, insulated and decked on the inside to provide the most possible living space for the minimum exposed surface area.
You're right. In 6% gees really really massive "igloos" can be water-ice built. Or printed.
This solves the problem with the "oases" too. Cause oases could be thus domed/roofed/indoor spaces.
Which will further decrease the illumination needs.
Visualize the "terraformed" Plutonian "outback" as (quote from Alan Stern from 2004)::
The surface is bright and covered in a fresh, pinkish snow. People commonly think that it would be dark on Pluto because it is so far from the sun, but it is actually about as bright as dusk here on Earth, with enough light for you to very easily read a book and see what's going on around you.
but with illumination multiplied by (say) 10.
The surface covered by/the bottom of/... (say) 0.15b O2 + 0.1N2 = 0.25 Bars total, atmosphere. With average temperature of (say) minus 50-70 Celsius (200-220K).
Dry, cold, very clear.
Warm clothes would suffice.
The liquid hydrosphere cycle - plumbed into warmblooded biosphere.
Beautiful. As much of original Pluto as possible.
Do not forget that rotating and supramundane habitats are by far superior in any imaginable parameter from ANY planet - natural or artificial / terraformed or not.
Hence, terraforming will be more an art, like monumental architecture and sculpture.

That pesky thing called economics always scuppers our grandest and most artististic visions. Everything on this board is fantasy, but some bits are more fantasy than others. Put yourself in the position of a group of colonists arriving at Pluto with modest resources. Will they build a world house surrounded by a Neptune sized mirror or a modest city powered by a nuclear reactor?

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-07-20 20:47:18

Antius wrote:

The sun is so weak as to be all but useless as source of energy. With this in mind, energy must be provided by some synthetic means, probably fission. To conserve heat, the most practical habitat would be spherical. The Plutonians will build their cities as spherical pressure vessels of ice, insulated and decked on the inside to provide the most possible living space for the minimum exposed surface area.

Fusion would be a better source of energy, just not coming from the Sun. Pluto has lots of fusion fuel on its surface. Some of the methane molecules might contain deuterium, ice certainly has it. A fusion reaction under the ice will tend to melt the ice around it, the water will also block this radiation past a certain distance, but the heat would be carried further, providing liquid water for lifes processes and of course as a rocket propellant as needed.

Terraformer · 2015-07-21 04:26:45

Well, how expensive would it be to Titanform Pluto, in 2300 credits?

Antius · 2015-07-21 06:27:47

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

Antius wrote:
The sun is so weak as to be all but useless as source of energy. With this in mind, energy must be provided by some synthetic means, probably fission. To conserve heat, the most practical habitat would be spherical. The Plutonians will build their cities as spherical pressure vessels of ice, insulated and decked on the inside to provide the most possible living space for the minimum exposed surface area.
Fusion would be a better source of energy, just not coming from the Sun. Pluto has lots of fusion fuel on its surface. Some of the methane molecules might contain deuterium, ice certainly has it. A fusion reaction under the ice will tend to melt the ice around it, the water will also block this radiation past a certain distance, but the heat would be carried further, providing liquid water for lifes processes and of course as a rocket propellant as needed.

Controlled fusion would certainly appear to be a prerequisite for any sort of mass colonisation of the outer solar system. There just isn't enough Uranium/Thorium available to power a civilisation on geologic timescales. A hybrid approach may work well in the short term, but it scales up much more easily than it scales down.

Low gravity and free vacuum would certainly make magnetic confinement easier. What little I know about fusion suggests that the technical difficulties appear to decline with increasing scale. With a big enough containment vessel, neutrons will contribute to plasma heating, making it much easier to achieve sustained burn.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-07-21 10:48:02

Terraformer wrote:

Well, how expensive would it be to Titanform Pluto, in 2300 credits?

There would be little point to making Pluto like Titan. Titan would be even harder to survive on that Pluto. Titan's atmosphere would draw heat away from your space suit, but the vacuum of space would act as an insulator, heat loss would mostly occur at the point of contact with Pluto's surface. If you gave it an Earth like atmosphere, you would need a constant energy supply to prevent that atmosphere from freezing on the surface, would also need to contain that atmosphere because Pluto's gravity at room temperature would be insufficient. Pluto's gravity would be sufficient to hold it together as a ball or water with some rock in the center if an atmospheric envelope surrounded it to hold in its atmosphere. The size of the atmosphere would depend on how much frozen gases Pluto has. The entire atmosphere once terraformed would probably by breathable all they way to its containment membrane, it would get thinner very little with altitude. at 1/20th of Earth's gravity, to get to the equivalent of the altitude at the top of mount Everest you would need to go to an altitude 100 miles, probably further than that because Pluto's gravity would diminish as you traveled further out! At 100 miles above Pluto's surface, you might as well place the containment envelope there, as it would not make sense to have more atmosphere that people can't breathe.

Antius · 2015-07-22 02:52:49

I ran a few calcs on the potential size of the fissile fuel resource of a Kuiper belt object, based upon data provided here: http://www.knowledgedoor.com/2/elements … licon.html

In bulk solar system material, there are 0.009 uranium atoms and 0.0335 thorium atoms per million silicon atoms. Kuiper belt objects are 50% rock by mass. As most of this is silicon dioxide, I have taken silicon to be 23% of the mass of a KBO.

Running the numbers, I found that 1 tonne (1m3) of KBO material contains on average 2.1x10E20 atoms of uranium and thorium. One fission yields 3.1E-11 joules of energy. So 1m3 of KBO material contains 6.6GJ of potential fission energy.

A 100km diameter KBO would therefore contain 3.45E15 GJ of fission potential energy, or 9.6E8 TWh. If converted to electricity at an efficiency of 33%, this would yield ~300million TWh of electric power. The human race uses ~15,000TWh of electricity per year for a 7billion population. The UK uses ~350TWh per year to support a 60 million population. If outer solar system denizens used 10 times more electric power per capita than the UK, then a 100km diameter KBO would sustain a population of 1 billion for 5100 years.

So fission could provide the main energy source in the initial stages of KBO colonisation, but would ultimately need to be replaced by fusion.

karov · 2015-07-22 06:17:40

Antius wrote:

I ran a few calcs on the potential size of the fissile fuel resource of a Kuiper belt object, based upon data provided here: http://www.knowledgedoor.com/2/elements … licon.html
In bulk solar system material, there are 0.009 uranium atoms and 0.0335 thorium atoms per million silicon atoms. Kuiper belt objects are 50% rock by mass. As most of this is silicon dioxide, I have taken silicon to be 23% of the mass of a KBO.
Running the numbers, I found that 1 tonne (1m3) of KBO material contains on average 2.1x10E20 atoms of uranium and thorium. One fission yields 3.1E-11 joules of energy. So 1m3 of KBO material contains 6.6GJ of potential fission energy.
A 100km diameter KBO would therefore contain 3.45E15 GJ of fission potential energy, or 9.6E8 TWh. If converted to electricity at an efficiency of 33%, this would yield ~300million TWh of electric power. The human race uses ~15,000TWh of electricity per year for a 7billion population. The UK uses ~350TWh per year to support a 60 million population. If outer solar system denizens used 10 times more electric power per capita than the UK, then a 100km diameter KBO would sustain a population of 1 billion for 5100 years.
So fission could provide the main energy source in the initial stages of KBO colonisation, but would ultimately need to be replaced by fusion.

Thanks, Antius. I was JUST to mention that - without the more detailed calculations, giving comparison with Earth volcanic rocks.

The (averaged) KBO material thus will have energy density of roughly 1/4 of (standardized, idealized, generalized) coal.

Hence - practically UNLIMITED resources in fission energy.

Fissi-bles and H/He/Li - lighter fuse-ables simultaneous occurrence/abundance gives pretty good incentive/prospect for another sort of 1940-1950es nuke-tech -- bombs.

They have literally a zillion energy and propulsion and engineering apps.

BUT I still insist/defend/argue that SOLAR and GRAVITATIONAL are simpler/better/cheaper/higher grade thermodinamically ... etc., 'cause Pluto is pretty much an INNER SolSys planet (planemo) enjoying quite abundant solar irradiation.

Tom Kalbfus · 2015-07-22 15:37:47

karov wrote:

Antius wrote:
I ran a few calcs on the potential size of the fissile fuel resource of a Kuiper belt object, based upon data provided here: http://www.knowledgedoor.com/2/elements … licon.html
In bulk solar system material, there are 0.009 uranium atoms and 0.0335 thorium atoms per million silicon atoms. Kuiper belt objects are 50% rock by mass. As most of this is silicon dioxide, I have taken silicon to be 23% of the mass of a KBO.
Running the numbers, I found that 1 tonne (1m3) of KBO material contains on average 2.1x10E20 atoms of uranium and thorium. One fission yields 3.1E-11 joules of energy. So 1m3 of KBO material contains 6.6GJ of potential fission energy.
A 100km diameter KBO would therefore contain 3.45E15 GJ of fission potential energy, or 9.6E8 TWh. If converted to electricity at an efficiency of 33%, this would yield ~300million TWh of electric power. The human race uses ~15,000TWh of electricity per year for a 7billion population. The UK uses ~350TWh per year to support a 60 million population. If outer solar system denizens used 10 times more electric power per capita than the UK, then a 100km diameter KBO would sustain a population of 1 billion for 5100 years.
So fission could provide the main energy source in the initial stages of KBO colonisation, but would ultimately need to be replaced by fusion.
Thanks, Antius. I was JUST to mention that - without the more detailed calculations, giving comparison with Earth volcanic rocks.
The (averaged) KBO material thus will have energy density of roughly 1/4 of (standardized, idealized, generalized) coal.
Hence - practically UNLIMITED resources in fission energy.
Fissi-bles and H/He/Li - lighter fuse-ables simultaneous occurrence/abundance gives pretty good incentive/prospect for another sort of 1940-1950es nuke-tech -- bombs.
They have literally a zillion energy and propulsion and engineering apps.
BUT I still insist/defend/argue that SOLAR and GRAVITATIONAL are simpler/better/cheaper/higher grade thermodinamically ... etc., 'cause Pluto is pretty much an INNER SolSys planet (planemo) enjoying quite abundant solar irradiation.

Pluto receives about 1/1600th the Solar Radiation we receive on Earth, and it is getting worse as Pluto pulls away from the Sun, Seems easier to have a fusion reactor than a giant solar mirror with 1600+ times the surface area you want to illuminate at Earth normal levels. I guess Pluto works out to receiving just under 1 watt per square meter of sunlight. Imagine a dim 1 watt bulb illuminating a square meter and that is what Pluto gets. How many square meters of photovoltaics on Pluto does it take to operate a toaster?

Antius · 2015-07-23 06:13:59

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

Pluto receives about 1/1600th the Solar Radiation we receive on Earth, and it is getting worse as Pluto pulls away from the Sun, Seems easier to have a fusion reactor than a giant solar mirror with 1600+ times the surface area you want to illuminate at Earth normal levels. I guess Pluto works out to receiving just under 1 watt per square meter of sunlight. Imagine a dim 1 watt bulb illuminating a square meter and that is what Pluto gets. How many square meters of photovoltaics on Pluto does it take to operate a toaster?

Indeed. Solar power cannot provide cheap electricity in most parts of the Earth. Do we honestly expect that it will do so on a planet where the sun is 1000 times fainter? Contrast this with nuclear reactors, which actually become more efficient as external temperatures decline. A gas cooled fast reactor using methane as its power cycle fluid and a cold source at 100K, could generate power at 70% efficiency.

Outer solar system colonists will need cheap electricity in abundance, as they will need it to produce food. The average human being consumes 10MJ per day of food energy. If this comes from electrically lit green houses and algae tanks with a conversion efficiency of 3%, then the average person would need 1GJ of energy for food production every 3 days. That’s a lot of power.

When other energy consuming activities are thrown in, an outer solar system civilisation would need something like 10 times as much electricity per capita as an average European today for comparable living standards. If GDP per capita is $50,000 each and energy accounts for 10% of GDP, then the cost of electric power can be no more than $0.089 per kWh in modern US money. Big nuclear reactors can do this, solar panels cannot.

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Paraterraforming Pluto

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