Plant shell-world Venus

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-07 20:48:45

What if we put a shell around Venus that was made of genetically engineered plant leaf, that is, the leaf absorbs carbon dioxide and through photosynthesis releases oxygen on top, it also allows a certain amount of nitrogen to pass through its membrane and accumulate on top, it also transpires water vapor on top from below?

As the oxygen increases above the plant shell, annual deliveries of hydrogen are dropped into the atmosphere and combusted, creating more water, this saturates the water in the atmosphere above until it rains, rain accumulates on the leave membrane until the depth reaches a meter or so, and then some water is passed through the leaf and drips into the lower carbon dioxide atmosphere. The giant planet girdling leaf absorbs carbon dioxide from below producing more oxygen, and as the oxygen exceeds a certain level it is absorbed by interplanetary hydrogen deliveries to create more water, and then the excess water is passed through the leaf shell onto the planet below, this process repeats until the carbon dioxide atmosphere below is reduce and the hot ocean below increases absorbing all the excess oxygen created by the photosynthesizing leaf shell, the leaf closes all holes created by meteorites and other punctures, bits of the leaf rain down on the planet below to become carbonized and embedded in the soil, and as the atmosphere is reduces the leaf shell shrinks and lowers toward the ground finally settling on the ground and oceans and disintegrating into topsoil. Terraforming complete! What do you think of that?

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2013-11-07 20:49:50)

JoshNH4H · 2013-11-08 01:00:08

It would probably take an immense amount of time and would also require the large expense of genetically engineering a leaf that could grow to planet size.

I've always been more of a fan of oxalic acid for Venus: Compared to fixing CO2 to organic molecules and Water, it uses much less Hydrogen (2 mol hydrogen per mol of CO2 vs. 6 mol) and is already produced by some organisms.

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-08 06:41:26

it provides an inhabitable environment while waiting for the terrafoming process to be complete, the shell could be provided by a form of nanotechnology, any shell we place around the planet will have to be self-healing to repair any holes produced by meteorites. The leaf of course would not be derived from any existant Earth life, it would be a completely artificial life form designed for one purpose, to provide a surface on which people can live and also to seperate the breathable and unbreathable parts of the atmosphere, that is to seperate the carbon dioxide and keep it out of the way.

JoshNH4H · 2013-11-08 16:36:52

The technology to create organisms from nothing isn't even remotely close to existing right now. It's much easier to splice genes together from a few different organisms. I think that my oxalic acid idea is a pretty good place to start re: reforming the venusian atmosphere if we decide at some point that that is a worthwhile course of action, which we probably won't.

Let's say it costs 1 billion dollars to do the modification, and 2,000 years to transform Venus to a more habitable planet. At 5% ROI per year, the value of the planet Venus, once terraformed, would have to exceed $3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for the payoff to be worth it. Given that over timescales that large your investors are going to want more like 10%, you're looking at something more like $60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. For comparison, the world's annual economic output is $70,000,000,000,000. Looks pretty meager in comparison, doesn't it?

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-09 22:50:11

Your problem comes with a very simple solution, the investors get into a spaceship, and freeze themselves for later revival, the ship rockets off into a 2000 year long elliptical orbit that intersects the predicted position of Venus in 2000 years, it would be just like an interstellar journey to the nearest star with an average velocity of around 0.0022 times the speed of light, a ship traveling at that velocity will arrive at the Alpha Centauri System in 2000 years, now if we spot any particular planets orbiting those stars that can be terraformed, then what we do is send a fast ship over at 0.44 of the speed of light which will arrive in 10 years with the self-replicating terraforming equipment, followed by a larger spaceship filled with frozen colonists traveling at 0.0022 times the speed of light and it will arrive there 1990 years after the fast ship has arrived and mostly terraformed the target planet, and it turns out its much easier to enter a 2000 year orbit around our own Sun that to achieve 0.0022 of the speed of light. I think the effort to terraform a planet is comparable to the effort to travel to distant stars, and so long as all of the investors are the ones traveling in the ship, the rate of return is measured from their own perceived passage of time, from their point of view, they are simply aging the Universe 2000 years in order to make something happen quicker from their perspective. What we need are some reliable AIs to do the terraforming so when the flesh and blood humans arrive on the scene the planet will be ready for them.

JoshNH4H · 2013-11-09 23:27:10

But why would they do that? And how does that change the nature of compound interest, e.g. why couldn't they invest in something more secure and then freeze themselves for 2,000 years and become obscenely rich?

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-10 09:37:47

The greater the risk, the greater the reward, maybe! If you push for larger rates of returns you increase the risk of losing your principle So if you invest in something that will give you a 10% rate or return and wait 2000 years, you may end up with nothing. I think we can terraform a Venus like planet orbiting another star more securely than terraforming Venus itself and returning 2000 years later when it is done. The problem is there are other humans in this system who may have other ideas about what to do with it in the meantime. Around another star the changes of human intervention in the meantime is reduced. So if we talk about terraforming Venus, consider it shorthand for terraforming another planet that is like Venus but orbiting another star, a star that is light years away, we need two spaceships, a fast one and a slow one, the slow one carries the human passengers and the fast one carries the terraforming equipment and robots A spaceship that carries just robots and software can be small, one that carries humans has to be large to support those humans.

A lot of human history occurs in 2000 years, what we don't want is that human history happening to Venus while we're terraforming it, because we can't guarantee that humans won't do something stupid like blow it up over various ideologies they've concocted in the meantime. What we want is just robots doing what their supposed to do to terraform the planet and nothing else. We don't want or need any "Karl Marx" Robots or "Adolf Hitler" Robots doing all things destructive to our purposes.

JoshNH4H · 2013-11-10 15:11:36

But there's just about no way to stop human history from happening. If you can send your terraforming robots there within 10 years, you could send something there 200 times over over the course of terraforming. Who knows what will happen? Anywhere you try to do the terraforming is automatically accessible. Even if at first we can only send a small craft there at .4 c, who's to say that within 100 years we won't be able to send crafts of an arbitrarily large size there using the same, or even better methods. I certainly wouldn't make that bet. Any principal put into terraforming Venus would really have to produce an extraordinarily high rate of return compared to other kinds of investment given the volatility of human history. 2000 years ago, after all, was Pax Romana. In the meantime we've gone through wars associated with the fall, Pax Catholica, Pax Frankia, Pax Germania, Pax Mongolia, Pax Hispania, Pax Frankia (again), Pax Britannia, and Pax Americana, Even just in Europe and skipping many smaller epochs. The rate of change is only accelerating.

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-10 17:04:40

The other side of the ledger is that in 2000 years humanity might get wiped out, but the people frozen inside the spaceship wouldn't be a part of that. All this change is very unpredictable and might lead to a disaster which wipes out the human race. So there might not be any additional spaceships following after the terraforming ship but before the colonizing ship. Why is the Universe "silent" there might be a good reason for it, and it could be that 2000 years from now the Earth could be "silent" too, just like the rest of the Universe. I think its best if various pieces of the human race should be isolated from each other, so if humanity decides to have its final war, they might not include various pieces of it floating between the stars. So we should plan the mission based on the assumption that between the launch of the mission and 2000 years later the human race is going to wipe itself out, perhaps due to runaway changes in technology, and at the end, there is going to be a silent uninhabited Earth, so we'd best bring our terraforming equipment with us to terraform the new world where humanity gets its second start. The question is whether we go back to Earth to find out what wiped us out, and whether whatever did is still there or not.

JoshNH4H · 2013-11-10 18:21:43

Well, terraforming other worlds around distant stars may turn out to be practical. But then, why terraform when one could build habitats for less money, and in less time? Especially if we have artificial intelligence/human uploading?

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-10 20:37:20

Planets are more natural objects than hollow spinning cylinders, its possible to live a much lower tech existance on a planet that's been terraformed than in a hollow cylinder that will need high tech maintenance, You give you an example, if you terraformed Venus, and kept the planet properly shaded and illuminated, you need not every touch Venus again, with life on its surface, Venus will maintain itself, if soil washes into the sea, the volcanoe will create new land, mountains will rise up while ocean floors will sink. Venus has an active geology just like the Earth does, so long as you maintain the shades around it, Venus itself will require no maintenance, if place in a proper orbit and spun up slowly, it won't even need that. A Venus that is 0.9 AU from the Sun instead of 0.7 AU will be within the habitable zone and will come no closer to Earth than 15,000,000 km. The Universe has lots of planets, it is probably easier to modify a planet than to build a cylinder that is as big as one. A cylinder that is 12,800 km in diameter would be very difficult to make, for 1 Earth gravity, it would have to spin at Low Earth orbit orbital velocity, which would mean the cylinder would rotate about once every 90 minutes. To hold such a cylinder together would require carbon nanotubes and some magnetic butressing, say ring suspended inside by magnetic fields that aren't rotating and holding the cylinder together by taking the load from the rotating portion. A nonrotating ring within a hollow circular cavity between the floor and outer hull and inside the walls will add its tensile strength to the cylinder without adding its weight since its not rotating with the cylinder. The magnetic fields need to be maintained and if struck by a meteor repairs need to be made. A planet that is struck by a meteor doesn't not need repair as gravity holds onto its atmosphere, not a wall or floor.

As for less money, I dare say a rotating cylinder will require more money over billions of years per unit area of living space to maintain than a planet. Also you have to build a cylinder, they don't exist in nature, however planets do. Building a cylinder as big as a planet would cost more than modifying an already existing planet to support humans.

Terraformer · 2013-11-11 04:49:24

Who said anything about building a cylinder as big as a planet?

But your terraformed Venus wouldn't allow for a lower tech existence anyway, given the requirement to maintain a big space mirror. If you want that, pluck for somewhere like Mars, where continuous maintenance activities could be done without any space access at all.

karov · 2013-11-12 11:19:47

"lower tech existence" is impossible anywhere -- even on Earth.
Ask the dinosaurs.

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-12 13:45:58

Terraformer wrote:

Who said anything about building a cylinder as big as a planet?
But your terraformed Venus wouldn't allow for a lower tech existence anyway, given the requirement to maintain a big space mirror. If you want that, pluck for somewhere like Mars, where continuous maintenance activities could be done without any space access at all.

The tech for maintaining the mirrors can exist only in space, it need not exist on the surface of Venus, and the inhabitants of Venus can remain totally ignorant in the tech that maintains the mirrors that shades the planet and gives is night and day as well as a 365 day four-season cycle. By varying the intensity of sunshine reaching alternately the northern and southern hemispheres of Venus, we can create an artificial Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. Plants can detect the lower light levels so they "know" when to lose their leaves and enter a dormant stage for autumn and winter. The planet does what it needs to do, it builds mountains and creates continents, so long as the mirrors are maintained around it in space, no one on the planet's surface need be concerned about them.

JoshNH4H · 2013-11-13 01:48:16

But it doesn't really do the sustainability argument much good if someone has to have the high technology levels to maintain the mirror

Terraformer · 2013-11-13 03:13:28

You can maintain a lower tech existence in an O'neill cylinder, in that case. Just make sure you're ignorant of the people who are working behind the scenes to maintain it...

Hey, isn't that a common SF trope?

karov · 2013-11-13 09:29:43

To prefer planets before rotating or shell habitats is so much intuitive, as perhaps the notion of some hypothetical neanderthals that the future people would prefer to puncture mountains like swiss cheese instead of building thin-walled high buildings.

Again, talking about mirrors: Look Storrs Hall Weather Machine. It is alive. It could be even "sentient" ( it is millions to billions of tonnes nano-computronium with plenty of solar power and imbuilt Li-Fi comm. system of Tbytes of bandwidth ... ). The same is valid for the space based optics ... I think there is no reason to assume that all these megastructures should be bulk and dumb, instead of smart and cellular...

And spinning cylinders and supramundane shells are MUCH MUCH bigger then planets with billions ot times better aerial density efficiency. A dynamic structure founded onto powerfull enough energy flux is much stiffer and more robust then passive structure. ( Which is stronger - stone and bricks cathedral OR space fountain ? )

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-14 06:06:30

Terraformer wrote:

You can maintain a lower tech existence in an O'neill cylinder, in that case. Just make sure you're ignorant of the people who are working behind the scenes to maintain it...
Hey, isn't that a common SF trope?

Ignorant people could dig or drill a hole through the walls or floor of the cylinder with much less technology that that which it took to build and maintain it. If there was a 19th century civilization living on the inside of the cylinder, it could mine the cylinder walls for metal, and if it mines too far, it punctures a hole in the cylinder and the atmosphere leaks out into space. That same 19th century society could dig to its heart's content on a terraformed Venus, and still it would not disturb the mirrors in space, they couldn't reach the mirrors in space, the technology to maintain them would be out in space and those on the planet with 19th century technology couldn't reach them!

Terraformer · 2013-11-14 06:26:04

They couldn't if the cylinder walls were a kilometer of basalt...

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-14 06:31:48

karov wrote:

To prefer planets before rotating or shell habitats is so much intuitive, as perhaps the notion of some hypothetical neanderthals that the future people would prefer to puncture mountains like swiss cheese instead of building thin-walled high buildings.
Again, talking about mirrors: Look Storrs Hall Weather Machine. It is alive. It could be even "sentient" ( it is millions to billions of tonnes nano-computronium with plenty of solar power and imbuilt Li-Fi comm. system of Tbytes of bandwidth ... ). The same is valid for the space based optics ... I think there is no reason to assume that all these megastructures should be bulk and dumb, instead of smart and cellular...
And spinning cylinders and supramundane shells are MUCH MUCH bigger then planets with billions ot times better aerial density efficiency. A dynamic structure founded onto powerfull enough energy flux is much stiffer and more robust then passive structure. ( Which is stronger - stone and bricks cathedral OR space fountain ? )

The idea is that there are people who would like to "become" high tech, that is they would become no longer human, in fact there would be no way they could deal with nanotechnology and keep up with its advancements without becoming inhuman electronic beings, now some people may not like to go in this direction, they wish to remain human, maybe adopt some biological fixes to reverse aging, and have 100% tissue regeneration so they don't have to deal with paralysis, blindness, cancer, lost limbs etc, but they'd with to be fixable biological human beings, and wish to go no further than that. Those people need suitable Earthlike environments to live on, the closer it is to Earth the better, that is why terraforming is important. So the high tech electronic beings live in the Solar Collectors/mirrors surrounding the planet, gathering the excess solar energy to run themselves, the remainder serves to illuminate Venus and provide night and day below and seasons. The folks living on Venus would like to contribute to their society, that means no high tech on the planet which out competes them and is so much smarter than they are that it would be hopeless for any biological being to do anything to support his own existence that a higher tech machine could not do better, so ban the high tech machines from the planet's surface and keep them in space. Consider the terraformed Venus to be a technological preserve with a maximum tech level allowed on the planet, it could be the same tech level were living now, there might be 1 billion biological human beings living on that planet's surface carefully maintaining their population, using solar power and renewable energy resources at a tech level slightly above our own, to us it would look futuristic, to the rest of society in the Solar System it would be hopeless backwards and Luddite, but there is value in that, ask anyone who wants to preserve a wildlife park or nature preserve. Some people like to preserve what's old to remind them of the past, Venus and other terraformed planets would be places to preserve the old way of existence, on the planet people would contribute their own labor, living in a lifestyle similar to our own society, they'd be a bit wiser about managing a planet's resources and careful to preserve its ecology, which would include them. If they wish to travel to other similar Luddite terraformed planets, they'd rely on higher technology and beings to get them there, and once there they'd resume their Luddite existence. There are a lot of Earth-like planets that could possibly be terraformed, the higher tech society would spread outwards to terraform them for the lower tech relations, they'd terraform them to a state where their hands on involvement is no longer required to maintain them, at which point the power tech Luddite humans can settle them, this way each gets what he or she wants, the high tech guys can go their own way and upload to an electronic existence while the low tech humans can continue having children and eating, repairing their biological bodies and resetting their biological clocks so they can stay perpetually youthful until some physical accident eventually takes them, Population surpluses would be exported to newly terraformed planets and so humanity would continue.

I believe there are a lot of rogue planets between the stars which could be terraformed, in those cases instead of building circular mirror arrays, as distant natural light sources are too far away, you build a circular source of artificial illumination powered by fusion reactors, otherwise everything on the planet would be the about same as I described on terraformed Venus.

Terraformer · 2013-11-14 08:14:15

What makes you think the baselines will *want* to be reliant on a load of posthumans?

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-14 09:22:56

They need the posthumans to terraform more Earth-like Worlds and transport them there so they can live on them. You see post humans are basically information running on computers, so they can replicate a lot faster than biological humans can through having children. So the idea is for those post humans to replicate and spread across the galaxy terraforming Earth-like worlds as the go and reserving them for biologicals to live on, then providing the transportation for them so they can get there, meanwhile the post-humans transform all the stuff that isn't Earth-like worlds and make them into computers so they can live in them. We all like our parks and wildlife preserves, so should they, that way humans and post humans can live side by side, just as more primitive animals can share the same world we inhabit. This seems like a logical outcome to exploring and colonizing space, don't you think?

Here is a good analogy, when you go to a park, don't they have signs that say, "Don't feed the bears"? Aside from the danger involved in feeding the bears, those bears need to hunt and fish for themselves, and if you feed them donuts and creampuffs all the time they don't learn to do that. So basically post humans would build planetary biological preserves for humans to live on where they can go about their business as if the post humans are not there.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2013-11-14 09:27:28)

karov · 2013-11-14 12:40:36

Terraformer wrote:

They couldn't if the cylinder walls were a kilometer of basalt...

They could only IF the cylinder walls LET them to...

I do not see possibility in which the habitat mass is not smart, alive, immortal matter...

Last edited by karov (2013-11-15 05:37:58)

karov · 2013-11-14 12:46:48

Well,

Guys, you opened million topics at once, but:

1. I do not think that retro-style life could be held without super-tech.
2. It is a delusion that OUR own planet could be inhabited by lo-techs for long time. If one stays stupid and weak long enough he/she gets killed by the planet/environment.
3. It is utterly possible and almost unavoidable, a planet to not only look, but indeed to be totally "pristine", and simultaneously saturated down to Planck level with "embedded" hyper-realities. Indeed, if we listen Hans Moravec even nowaday our timeline Earth IS SO, we only do not know the language and the codes to see it in its other incarnations.

...

You see post humans are basically information running on computers,

Aren't we so, too? or you mean more info on better computers..?

so they can replicate a lot faster than biological humans can through having children. So the idea is for those post humans to replicate and spread across the galaxy terraforming Earth-like worlds as the go and reserving them for biologicals to live on, then providing the transportation for them so they can get there, meanwhile the post-humans transform all the stuff that isn't Earth-like worlds and make them into computers so they can live in them.

Both are not in conflict. Indeed my favorite explanation of Silentium Universi is that there is billions of times more linear room and time and power goin' inwards then going outwards. The Inner space is really really huge compared with the cold, slow, dumb Outer space... And goin' Inwards one ends into other levels of inner infinities, perhaps? It needs only an idea better computronium ccompactification in order to have simultaneeously a wild "pristine" planet - COMPLETELY natural, and ALL its mass and energy used by another non-crossing with this protocol ...

http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project. … Ex.98.html

We all like our parks and wildlife preserves, so should they, that way humans and post humans can live side by side, just as more primitive animals can share the same world we inhabit. This seems like a logical outcome to exploring and colonizing space, don't you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkwelt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt

Last edited by karov (2013-11-14 12:57:23)

Tom Kalbfus · 2013-11-14 17:20:45

I think the post humans would want to keep some humans around just in case their's happens to be an evolutionary dead end for the human race, they'll need some archaic humans around to try again, the principle of not keeping all one's eggs in the same basket would be a familiar one to you. I just think since electronic people can replicate so much faster than biologicals, the former should outnumber the later by a great amount. Electronic people also have some advantages that biologicals don't have such as:

1) they don't need to eat
2) they are never unemployed
If there is no work for an e-person because of a bad economy, they can shut down their awareness until economic conditions are better, biologicals can't do that, they need to eat whether there is employment or not.
3) e-people can travel at the speed of light, though transfering from one place to another takes some time in addition to the light speed delay.

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#1 2013-11-07 20:48:45

Plant shell-world Venus

#2 2013-11-08 01:00:08

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#3 2013-11-08 06:41:26

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#4 2013-11-08 16:36:52

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#5 2013-11-09 22:50:11

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#6 2013-11-09 23:27:10

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#7 2013-11-10 09:37:47

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#8 2013-11-10 15:11:36

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#9 2013-11-10 17:04:40

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#10 2013-11-10 18:21:43

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#11 2013-11-10 20:37:20

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#12 2013-11-11 04:49:24

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#13 2013-11-12 11:19:47

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#14 2013-11-12 13:45:58

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#15 2013-11-13 01:48:16

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#16 2013-11-13 03:13:28

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#17 2013-11-13 09:29:43

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#18 2013-11-14 06:06:30

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#19 2013-11-14 06:26:04

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#20 2013-11-14 06:31:48

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#21 2013-11-14 08:14:15

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#22 2013-11-14 09:22:56

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#23 2013-11-14 12:40:36

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#24 2013-11-14 12:46:48

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

#25 2013-11-14 17:20:45

Re: Plant shell-world Venus

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