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This becomes a shell world where the suns energies are blocked and harnessed to teraform the world below...
Each shell ring of seperation is used to help in changing the atmoshpere to what we need at the planets surface....
Each layer is then taylored to block the suns harmful rays once we are ready to adjust the shading of the planet below eventually using some natural sunlight to the surface in time.
Did I get it right Tom...its the revers of the dyson sphere if I am looking at it right....
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Well yes it is the opposite of a Dyson Sphere in that you live and stand on the outside of each sphere instead of the inside. The energy comes from the Sun, but it is used to cool the planet, and to provide artificial illumination. The underside of each sphere is an artificial sky, you can create an image of the Sun or Moon, or whatever you want, have it rise and set and appear just the way it does on Earth or otherwise. It is just too much trouble and takes too much energy to alter the spin of Venus, so instead we provide artificial illumination. So in effect, we would be turning Venus into three habitable planets.
It probably is the easiest way to terraform Venus, as it doesn't involve changing the rotation or the orbit of Venus. Venus stays right where it is. The shells block the Sunlight, the undersides of each produce artificial sunlight, I also noticed that Venus has about 3 times as much nitrogen in its atmosphere as the Earth does, that is why there are three shells. Building this thing would probably involve nanotechnology. I think the excess carbon-dioxide above the outermost shell would be used as a refrigerant, that is carbon dioxide obeys the gas laws, meaning that if you compress carbon-dioxide or any other gas, it becomes hot, if you decompress carbon-dioxide or any other gas it gets cold.
Much of the energy hitting the outer shell would be used to expand and compress the carbon-dioxide within pipes. Basically the carbon-dioxide decompresses within pipes to make the pipes cold. The cold pipes then absorb the heat from the breathable atmosphere underneath, cooling it, the carbon dioxide then flows upwards into the radiators where it is compressed and it becomes very hot, the excess heat is radiated into space by the radiator, having lost that heat, the compressed carbon-dioxide then flows back underneath the shell and it is decompressed and gets cold again to absorb more heat. Similar mechanisms draw heat from the two inner shells and from the atmosphere above the actual surface of Venus.
Venus may need some additional energy besides what it normally receives from the Sun, as it receives twice as much sunlight as the Earth, but with these three nested spheres it needs three times the solar energy the Earth receives. Venus would have to radiate more energy than it receives from the Sun, and than energy either comes from Solar concentrators, or perhaps from a fusion power plant. the radiators would glow, as you need to produce more heat to power the refrigeration process above the nested spheres inside. With climate control inside and artificial illumination, we can have whatever climate we desire, we can have a 24 hour day and a 365 day year. The poles don't have to be cold, and the equator doesn't have to be hot. the whole planet is air conditioned.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2016-04-26 00:03:58)
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Not sure how to go about calculating the number of spheres but they are most likely logrithmic in demensioning in that the outer to next is the largest but with the least internal pressure and with each new boundary crossing the zone between gets small with only a slightly higher pressure as the chemical composition of what is between changes.
The back side or side not facing the sun is a natural location for radiation of the heat from within and that is true for each layer as we move closer toward the planet. Of course some radiators would be located on the surface and in the polar areas in order to create that just ideal climate.
The spheres would be an ideal trial for 3 D printing from supplied materials to start the outer shell creating the first set of panels and or shading for the planet below. We will need to place station keeping thrusters on this first shell and keep them active while the first is completed. The first will have an opening for large vehicle entry into the sphere an will start the process for send down equipment as the surface cools.
It may be even possible to creat multiple solar chimney on the sunside that attach to this ceiling to create atmpheric flow from lower levels. As the atmosphere rises we can capture some pumping it into an outer shell as well as seperate what we wanted to make use of for the lower atmosphere.
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We would begin construction of the first shell within Venus' existing atmosphere, at an altitude of 55 km, where atmospheric pressure is the same as in Earth at sea level, and we would also need something like nanotechnology as described by Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation. It would need to be the strong nanotechnology with the universal assemblers. the first shell would at first be supported by natural buoyancy, it would float in the atmosphere of Venus and clump together until it completely surrounds the planet. Some other nanotechnology would be working around Saturn to extract the needed hydrogen for export to Venus, perhaps by transforming Saturn's rings and building space elevators into its atmosphere.
Nanotechnology in the Atmosphere of Venus would use the existing hydrocarbons in the atmosphere to build copies of itself and then break apart the carbon dioxide, using the carbon to hard the shell, and make evacuated tunnels within the shell so particles can be accelerated within them to create centrifugal force. When the centrifugal force within the shell exceeds the shells weight, pumping mechanisms would separate out the carbon-dioxide from the molecular nitrogen, the CO2 and excess N2 would be pumped above the first shell, while leaving behind a 1 bar atmosphere at the bottom consisting of Nitrogen, Oxygen and water vapor with just trace amounts of carbon dioxide for the plants.
After most of the atmosphere has been pumped above the first shell, construction of the second shell would begin about 50 km above the first and the process repeated leaving another 1 bar Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere above the first shell. After the second shell has been completed, we then push the carbon dioxide above that along with remaining oxygen, and we construct the third shell about 50 km above the second for a total height of above 155 km above the surface of Venus. The outermost shell is then hardened and the remaining unbreathable atmosphere is pushed above that, nanotechnology then gets to work on the heat pumps, solar collectors radiators and other things to keep all three inhabitable surfaces cool and under sunshine.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2016-04-26 13:31:17)
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I see working outward from the initial floating platforms if we are able to sustain one at that altitude. I know that we have talked about floating cities and the means to enter the Atmospher of venus and have worked out how for man to do so with the ability to return....
So how do we get there from here using SLS and Commercial to achieve this goal is what we would need to plan out next....We may have part of it in the other topics which I have meantioned.....
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The nanotechnology part of it will evolve separately. When dealing with it, we first have to consider what is physically possible to do, the engineering is beyond us on how to make it happen at the moment. To make a floating platform launch able using the SLS, we first have to get something to Venus, and NASA has a plan for that, its called HAVOC.
https://www.themittani.com/features/hav … nopaging=1
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Thanks just gave the mission to venus a bump with these last few posts....
Being down at the 55 km altitude will definetly mean some creative thinking on how to stay aloft and the balloon does solve that problem... But what can we havest from the atmosphere that will allow us to build these spheres or at least to start with the most critical one. Can this be a plastic with a mylar aluminum reflective coating to the surface of it?
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One primary component of carbon dioxide is carbon, in certain forms, such as diamond, carbon can be a very strong material. A shell would have to be tethered to the ground at a number of locations so it doesn't drift off center. Like the Dyson Sphere, gravity cancels out at all points of the shell, assuming the mass is evenly distributed. Probably to stay rigid, we will need evacuated pathways within the shell to circulate material to provide outward centrifugal force to cancel out some of the weight of the shell, not sure that the compressive strength of even diamond would be enough to hold the shell rigid all by itself, never might what we may place on top of it. So the shell would have a grid work of crisscrossing tubes with bands spinning around the planet inside in order to provide support for the shell, between those tubes, you can have openings to allow passage through each shell, you can pump gases up through the shell. Separating out carbon-dioxide is done through refrigeration, extracting oxygen from it may be done through heating or some chemical process, If you take the carbon out of carbon dioxide, you also free up the oxygen - which is why we need to import hydrogen from Saturn, can't have too much oxygen after all, and Venus needs water besides.
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There is enough hydrogen locked up in the acids to make water from the excess oxygen but its the temperature that will make the water acid keep going....
I am thinking that we should start from both poles; as the greatest temperature drop will occur there, as we try to enclose the planets atmosphere. The carbon would darken any plastics that could be made to start the shading process....
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Building the shell would be much easier if you could cool the planet down first allowing most of the CO2 to liquefy at the surface. As the surface cooled and contracted, fissures would appear allowing the CO2 to drain into the interior. You can then use surface materials to construct a shell that would hold back the residual atmosphere. Most likely this would be done in sections, covering a few square miles at a time until ultimately, the whole planet is covered.
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Saturn is such a distant world that we can only achieve such goals with the help of nuclear power as the amount of solar is to low....
As for Venus we need to be able to make it a best we can from insitu sources either in part or in full as the spheres are built.
For Venus the energy is the Sun, For Saturn, the energy comes from itself, we just need to build fusion reactors to do the Sun's job. In either case, we don't need to worry about the planet's rotation, we create an artificial day and night on the ceiling. The holes are to allow for the planet to expand. Introducing 1400 watts per square meter will cause Saturn's atmosphere to expand, which is to say Saturn itself will expand since it is mostly atmosphere. Pressure won't increase however as the atmosphere rises.
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Self-replicating nanites. That is one scary thought - rather like the Stargate replicators. With truly self replicating machines you really would have infinite power. But what happens if they get away from you? I guess it is doable with tech like that, but your shell machines would need to replicate using just a handfull of elements.
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I you have not noticed that the topic got a bit of a trim....as saturn requires a different means to its goals so its got its own topic while venus was the start of this one....
With a bit of materials brought to aid in the harvest of venus to create the dome shells we would start to creat the most cause and effect by coaling the poles while building the most inner or outer depending on how we would want to start the process.
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Self-replicating nanites. That is one scary thought - rather like the Stargate replicators. With truly self replicating machines you really would have infinite power. But what happens if they get away from you? I guess it is doable with tech like that, but your shell machines would need to replicate using just a handfull of elements.
Well its hard to terraform any planet without something that self-replicates, whether it be plants, microbes, or nanites. Saturn is such an alien planet, that I think we will have to create our own life forms that can survive and replicate in that environment. Some people have limited imagination of what can be done with them, such as wiping out the human race. I think the first wave will be the onset of strong AI, machines that are equal to or superior to human intelligence, when that happens we'll have to give them tasks that are worthy of them, like terraform planets. I think we can terraform the other gas giants as well. Jupiter would make an area equal to 318 Earths under 1 Earth gravity, Saturn has 95 Earths worth of Surface area. Uranus has 14, Neptune 17. As you might have guessed the 1-G sphere around each planet has a surface area proportional to the planet's mass in Earth masses. With Jupiter you follow the same procedure as with Saturn, except when you harden the shell, and spin up the belts, the sphere and belts stretch and expand to 1.59 time its current radius to put its surface within Jupiter's 1-G sphere. Some tethers will hang down into Jupiter's atmosphere, and belt will run down the tether and absorb hydrogen, the hydrogen is then transported up the tether along the belt and then fed into one of many thermonuclear reactors on the top shell, and this powers the sunlight on the inner habitable surface.
I think creating nanotech and AIs would be similar to humans making first contact with an alien civilization of superior intelligence and technology, only in this case we get to create the aliens that contact us, so hopefully we create good ones that don't want to wipe us out! I'd say use them to build shells around planets that we can inhabit, then get them out of our way, so we can colonize those planets.
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For Venus we will need to process gasses from wiyhin the clouds or from even near orbital distanes to creat the shell using the preprogrammed processing stream set to harvest the atmosphere and to spit out the plastics to start the process...
We would leverage many of the same methods to get what we would want for venus as we would try to implement for Mars in many ways...
http://www.marshome.org/files2/MarsHome … sPlant.ppt
This also holds true for making the plastics from insitu resources once processed.
http://www.marshome.org/files2/MarsHome … lymers.ppt
So we willneed to look at the draw in mass gain and the output levels to make sure that we stay afloat and in orbit not crashing to the ground as we do constuct the spheres....
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Anything that makes clouds could probably be made into a solid. I don't know what use Sulfur could have.
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Yup good question....Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are the primary causes of acid rain so we want to reduce these so that the water that will form will be less acrid...which would aid the natural cycle of water for venus to continue to remove more of the atmosphere that we can not make use of. So how do we make plastics from the atmosphere...
POLYMERIC SULFUR-, PHOSPHORUS-, CARBON NITROGEN - COMPOUNDS
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For Venus we will need to process gasses from wiyhin the clouds or from even near orbital distanes to creat the shell using the preprogrammed processing stream set to harvest the atmosphere and to spit out the plastics to start the process...
We would leverage many of the same methods to get what we would want for venus as we would try to implement for Mars in many ways...
http://www.marshome.org/files2/MarsHome … sPlant.ppt
This also holds true for making the plastics from insitu resources once processed.
http://www.marshome.org/files2/MarsHome … lymers.pptSo we willneed to look at the draw in mass gain and the output levels to make sure that we stay afloat and in orbit not crashing to the ground as we do constuct the spheres....
You don't need to rely on cloud gases for constructional materials if the surface is accessible to you. This can be achieved relatively easily (relative to the difficulty of building world sized habitable surfaces).
Build an aluminium mirror about the same size as Venus (a few microns thick) and place it interior to Venus' orbit around the sun. Sunlight pressure can be used to balance the weight of the mirror against the suns gravity, such that it follows Venus as it transits the sun, blocking out the sunlight. Ballast the mirror sufficiently and control its attitude by tilting sections of the mirror relative to the sun. The whole thing would weigh a few billion tonnes. Expensive, but within the realms of achievability given foreseeable human capabilities in the next few centuries.
After a few decades, the surface will cool off and most of the atmosphere will liquefy into seas on the surface. You can then build cities in relatively high altitude areas above the 'sea level' and use surface materials to construct masonry domes. As liquid CO2 drains into the interior of the planet, extend the domes to cover more and more of the planet and eventually - Hey Presto! You have built a shell world. Start small and work incrementally towards the final goal.
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There is nothing in space near Venus to build such a mirror out of, and by the way, it doesn't have to reflect light, it merely has to block it.
Problem 1 is if you block light from reaching Venus, how do you later let some light in to power life processes? And if you did, and orbital arrangement to illuminate Venus' surface would have some problems. Venus for one, rotates very slowly, so even if you could reduce day light to Earth levels, you'd still have a problem with Venus' slow rotation. You could have a mirror in a Polar orbit reflecting light onto Venus, but the problem is, Venus is not tidally locked either, it does rotate slowly. the reflecting mirror would have to constantly change the plane of its orbit in order to be in a position to reflect light onto Venus, and along two dimensions it would have to be bigger than Venus in order to do this. I am not sure a single solar sail this big would be able to maneuver, the light pressure might tear it apart. You might need a fleet of smaller solar sails, and it would have to rely on Sunlight pressure both to maintain its position, and the angle of the reflected sunlight would also have to hit Venus, otherwise what is the point? So what we end up with is a solar sail or solar sails that are in a halo orbit orbiting in a circle that is behind Venus, the Sunlight pressure would be constantly changing its orbit, this means at a certain location the Sun would not set, the sail would be in a 24-hour orbit and would stay above the horizon until the planet turned some more and the sail reflector would dip below the horizon, days would grow more normal at the equator, and then the reflectors would stay below the horizon and we get perpetual night.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus
All the planets in the Solar System orbit the Sun in an anti-clockwise direction as viewed from above Earth's north pole. Most planets also rotate on their axes in an anti-clockwise direction, but Venus rotates clockwise in retrograde rotation once every 243 Earth days—the slowest rotation of any planet. Because its rotation is so slow, Venus is very close to spherical.[94] A Venusian sidereal day thus lasts longer than a Venusian year (243 versus 224.7 Earth days). Venus's equator rotates at 6.5 km/h (4.0 mph), whereas Earth's is approximately 1,670 km/h (1,040 mph).[95] Venus's rotation has slowed down by 6.5 min per Venusian sidereal day in the 16 years between the Magellan spacecraft and Venus Express visits.[96] Because of the retrograde rotation, the length of a solar day on Venus is significantly shorter than the sidereal day, at 116.75 Earth days (making the Venusian solar day shorter than Mercury's 176 Earth days).[97] One Venusian year is about 1.92 Venusian solar days.[98] To an observer on the surface of Venus, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east,[98] although Venus's opaque clouds prevent observing the Sun from the planet's surface.[99]
So basically a reflector orbiting in a polar orbit would turn a 116.75 Earth day long Solar Day into a 116.75 day long year, this would mean there would be 29.1875 days for each season or about a month The Venusian calendar would have four months, the month of "Winter", the month of "Spring", the month of "Summer", and the month of "Fall" or alternately we could use the names January, April, July, and October all the other months of the year would get thrown out. the entire planet would experience these seasons except for the polar regions which would be tropical. this is kind of troublesome as most of the land would be around the equator. I don't think we want to terraform an entire planet so we could live in the Polar Tropics, that seems like such a waste of real estate, and what kind of plants can we grow with a two month growing season? Seems much simpler actually to cover Venus with a roof and provide solar powered artificial daylight and night of whatever duration we desire, that way we don't have to adapt life to a strange terraformed Venusian environment and it would be an artificial environment at that seeded with genetically engineered plants and animal life adapted to eat those plants, it might end up as a very green but utterly alien sort of world.
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Antius is suggesting the venus sun L1 location for the sun shade to which we would use the L1 equation on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point to determine the location for it to rest. It would since its size need some sort of station keeping to make it stay put. I got thinking about this issue and thought since the single plane item would want to move towards venus how do we counter that motion. Thinking of a veticle windmill blade system that spins that still covers the needed area would require an odd number of blades to make it rotate at the L1 location.
That said depending on the rotational speed we could make some blades clear and some opaque such that we create an artificial day night cycle on the sunny side of the planet.
Now at the L2 side of venus we could make some blades reflective and some not so that we can sychronize the day night cycles for both side of the planet.
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Antius is suggesting the venus sun L1 location for the sun shade to which we would use the L1 equation on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point to determine the location for it to rest. It would since its size need some sort of station keeping to make it stay put. I got thinking about this issue and thought since the single plane item would want to move towards venus how do we counter that motion. Thinking of a veticle windmill blade system that spins that still covers the needed area would require an odd number of blades to make it rotate at the L1 location.
That said depending on the rotational speed we could make some blades clear and some opaque such that we create an artificial day night cycle on the sunny side of the planet.
Now at the L2 side of venus we could make some blades reflective and some not so that we can sychronize the day night cycles for both side of the planet.
or we could generate artificial sunlight using lasers and prisms as I detailed in the life support section, this could be used for individual space colonies or in terraforming worlds where mirror geometries would be inconvenient, such as Titan. Venus has more sunlight than it needs, lasers are less than 100% efficient, and the L1 light shade would have to be larger than Venus to block all the light that would otherwise go the planet, therefore it would intercept more sunlight than Venus would receive in order to cast a shadow that would cover all of Venus. We could fire lasers from this parasol to various reflectors orbiting Venus, surrounding Venus at the 24-hour orbit would be arrays of prisms than combine the lasers into white light, by reversing the light paths of the beam splitting prism, so the entry point of white light is now the exit point of outgoing white light. We know that prisms bend light by the same amount regardless of which direct the light is traveling in, and it bends light differently according to its wavelength.
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Antius is suggesting the venus sun L1 location for the sun shade to which we would use the L1 equation on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point to determine the location for it to rest. It would since its size need some sort of station keeping to make it stay put. I got thinking about this issue and thought since the single plane item would want to move towards venus how do we counter that motion. Thinking of a veticle windmill blade system that spins that still covers the needed area would require an odd number of blades to make it rotate at the L1 location.
That said depending on the rotational speed we could make some blades clear and some opaque such that we create an artificial day night cycle on the sunny side of the planet.
Now at the L2 side of venus we could make some blades reflective and some not so that we can sychronize the day night cycles for both side of the planet.
I think the mirror (or mirrors) would need to be interior of Venus-Sun L1 and matching the orbital speed of Venus. In this location the mirror(s) would experience a net weight in the sun's gravitational field as its orbital speed would be too low. Sunlight pressure would ballance the net weight if the mirror were appropriately ballasted. Tidal forces from Mercury and Earth would need to be accounted for periodic adjustments would need to be made to keep the mirror in the correct position.
In terms of materials, the Apollo asteroids have orbits that place them in the correct vicinity. Asteroid Icarus weighs just shy of 3bn tonnes, making it a possible source of materials in about the right orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1566_Icarus. Once constructed, sunlight pressure can be used to circularise the orbits of the mirror(s). Multiple smaller mirrors would provide a more robust system, would allow periodic commissioining and incremental replacement.
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SpaceNut wrote:Antius is suggesting the venus sun L1 location for the sun shade to which we would use the L1 equation on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point to determine the location for it to rest. It would since its size need some sort of station keeping to make it stay put. I got thinking about this issue and thought since the single plane item would want to move towards venus how do we counter that motion. Thinking of a veticle windmill blade system that spins that still covers the needed area would require an odd number of blades to make it rotate at the L1 location.
That said depending on the rotational speed we could make some blades clear and some opaque such that we create an artificial day night cycle on the sunny side of the planet.
Now at the L2 side of venus we could make some blades reflective and some not so that we can sychronize the day night cycles for both side of the planet.I think the mirror (or mirrors) would need to be interior of Venus-Sun L1 and matching the orbital speed of Venus. In this location the mirror(s) would experience a net weight in the sun's gravitational field as its orbital speed would be too low. Sunlight pressure would ballance the net weight if the mirror were appropriately ballasted. Tidal forces from Mercury and Earth would need to be accounted for periodic adjustments would need to be made to keep the mirror in the correct position.
In terms of materials, the Apollo asteroids have orbits that place them in the correct vicinity. Asteroid Icarus weighs just shy of 3bn tonnes, making it a possible source of materials in about the right orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1566_Icarus. Once constructed, sunlight pressure can be used to circularise the orbits of the mirror(s). Multiple smaller mirrors would provide a more robust system, would allow periodic commissioining and incremental replacement.
You need to take orbital mechanics into consideration, and the gravity fields of all the planets and adjust the mirrors accordingly. However up you just put up a planetary dome, you don't need those consideration. Even with dynamic pressure to hold the dome up, you just need tethers to keep it centered on the planet. A sphere centered on a planet has the same center of mass as the planet itself - assuming the sphere's mass is more or less evenly distributed. So when Jupiter or Earth tug on the sphere they also tug on Venus by the same amount, you just have to keep the sphere centered, and that's easy to do. The gravity of Venus, no matter how the sphere is position, even if its off center, pulls on all parts of the sphere equally, it is only external gravity fields you need to be concerned about, because an off center sphere does not have the same center of mass as the planet does, but a centered one does!
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