Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

chat · 2004-04-16 10:59:49

Kippy,

I think Reb is about right, 1 or 2 years to cool Venus with a total sun block.
Maybe less than that, maybe only a few months.

I guess if you can find a location distant from Venus, but always in front of Venus.
Then a sunshade of much smaller dimensions might do the trick.

The solar wind is still going to be trouble for any man made one though.
One solar flare and its big trouble.
The pressure from the wind without a solar flare will be trouble alone.

I still like the idea of small impacts in orbit to block sunlight.
It lasts for ages and requires little other input from us.
Also the smog producing satellites could help.

We humans are great at producing smog, so that one should be easy for us

RobertDyck · 2004-04-18 15:40:51

The clouds are a good idea, but the same old problem arises.
How do you get the initial machines or bacteria to help the process with the surface temperature on Venus. ... Even the Russian Venus lander that resembled a tank only lasted 58 minutes or so on the surface.

As I said, the initial removal of CO2 is done by micro-organisms in the clouds, not on the surface. Clouds on Venus have pressures and temperatures equivalent to the surface of Earth. Genetically engineering a micro-organism to use a lot less trace elements is a challenge, but can be done. The basic material of protein, lipids and DNA is carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. Those four elements all exist in abundance in the clouds of Venus. Photosynthesis is necessary as an energy source, but chlorophyll is not the only photocollector available; retinal is used by halobacteria. Chlorophyll includes one magnesium atom per molecule, retinal only uses C, N, O, and H. Engineering a terraforming micro-organism for Venus involves going through the entire proteome and re-engineering it to not use elements that aren't available in the target environment. It is a non-trivial project, but do-able.

This leads me to the conclusion that too much time has passed since Apollo. I was born in 1962 so I was very young during the space race. I don't remember any of the Gemini missions, although my mother tells me we watched them together. I do remember all of Apollo, starting with the tragedy of Apollo 1. Anyone born after 1969 doesn't have an appreciation of how much can be done in 8 years (1961-1969). The American can-do attitude has been lost. (Canada lost it after the Avro Arrow was cancelled in 1959.) I think we all need a significant success to get us all moving again.

Earthfirst · 2004-04-19 11:17:35

You could never turn all the co2 into O2 because beside the popular thoer of the planet burning it up back to co2. I think there is something you over look. Venus never had water or O2 for very ong at its surface mose the metals on it has have not been oxidized. The mountain top are covered in metalic snow!. Any ways once there is free O2 lots of will be lock up by oxizing metals, and minreals. This happaned on earth when it strated to oxygenate its atmosphere, it toke billions of years because iron other metal ate up any free O2. There are rock on earth thousads of feet thick of hemitight. So you would not have free O2 on venus for a long time. That plus the scrubing nature of water would get rid of lots of co2.
You people think to narrowly when changing a planet you have to consider all of the process that go on there. Looking at just turning co2 to O2 is just one of the many chemical process that will go on there. Think on a planet scale not just simple chemical reactions. I though you people are supposed to be smart not just Lame men.

RobertDyck · 2004-04-19 11:40:06

No, again I said you cannot turn all that CO2 into O2. The terraforming microbes (probably genetically engineered archaea) would convert CO2 into some sort of solid that remains stable in Venus surface conditions, and would remain stable after Venus is terraformed. It would also have to be non-toxic in soil since there would be so much of it. My first attempt was a ring molecule, C3O6, which is a hexagonal ring that alternates between C and O, with the remaining 3 O atoms double bonded to C. This leaves a planar molecule with O on the outside. Its stability would probably have to be tested experimentally. Chemists claim the C would bind valence electrons so strongly it would take away from O, destabilizing the bond. However, feldspar is a crystalline structure with S surrounded by a tetrahedron of O. Benzene is a ring of 6 C atoms with a single H on the outside of each C; the same stability argument would claim benzene is not stable, but it is. But C3O6 may not be the final material to sequester CO2; professional chemists may come up with something better.

The advantage of micro-organisms is that you just genetically engineer it, seed the atmosphere, then it propagates exponentially. You don't need to directly convert an entire planet's atmosphere; that would take too much work. Starting a process that expands exponentially would leverage your effort to something of a scale sufficient to affect an entire planet.

kippy · 2004-04-19 15:25:00

tarraforming bacteria are very sexy in the "seed it and forget it" sense but you still run into the water problem. This was the crux of Sagan's error in his terraforming scheme. Even if you are able to engineer a critter that can live in that heat and radiation, it will still need to live in some kind of water to get by. At least every lifeform we know of does.

You can crash comets for a while but you still have a long way to go if you want oceans. Also, you have to deal with the water loss due to solar wind. I think a cooling period and some kind of magnetosphere will be the first things needed. without them, any water imported via comets or hydrogen will heat up the place even more and escape.

RobertDyck · 2004-04-19 20:26:49

This is getting to be quite an argument. Since this is the Mars Society, let me assure people that rapid terraforming of Venus would still take multiple decades. Surface conditions on Venus are such that you can't colonize until AFTER you terraform. With Mars you can colonize now and terraform later. With all the water discovered by Odyssey's neutron spectrometer, and Mars Express's ground penetrating radar, we have all we need to colonize Mars now.

But, the criticism of Carl Segan's proposal was that algae would convert CO2 into O2, and algae that fell too low into the atmosphere would be burned-up into carbon. That idea was fine when science thought Venus had a 6 bar atmosphere, but 92 bars require something more sophisticated. The clouds of Venus only have radiation on their very top surface. Anything deeper is shielded by water of the clouds themselves. The temperature in the clouds ranges from freezing to boiling; freezing on top, boiling on the bottom. Archaea can already handle radiation of that intensity, and temperatures that extreme. That's why they're called extremophiles.

The clouds contain a lot of water. After all, it is enough to completely blanket an entire planet. Dropping comets into it would provide more water, so a greater biomass in the clouds to sequester CO2 more quickly. A planetary magentosphere would ensure extant water is not lost, and start the process of accumulating water via hydrogen from solar wind. Terraforming Venus would require both sources of water.

I think it can be done, but it would be a long time before an ocean would form. Bodies of water would be an end stage to terraforming. Venus may never have enough water for an ocean, just lakes and rivers. That would provide more land area than Earth.

chat · 2004-04-20 06:20:15

Earthfirst,

No problem with understanding how Venus would lock a large percent of its atmosphere away itself.
The big problem is how to start that happening with such a hot surface.

Little to no permanent chemistry happens on the surface.
If you can figure a way to start the initial process please let us know.

kippy,
I have virtually the same thoughts as your last post.

RobertDyck,

If the argument is this good then we must be on to something, or a little cranky.

I agree that bacteria would go a long way on Venus to altering things.
The trouble i have with bacteria on the current Venus is the products the bacteria make.

Either they sink to the surface, or float above the protective zone of the atmosphere and are broken down.

Heat on one side, and radiation on the other will make it very tough to create a dead bacteria or bacteria products that stay stable after its work is done.

As you say Venus does already have a lot of water.
If you could make the surface 99c or less, it would probably rain to the surface.
I would love to see a computer program cool Venus just below the 100c surface temperature to see what happens.

As soon as that first rain on Venus we have a home for the bacteria, with no breakdown of the dead bacteria or products they make.

The rain would also cause quite a bit of the atmosphere to be scrubbed clean, cooling the planet more .
I would guess that you would end up with sulphur laced water pools on the ground.
A perfect home for the bacteria.

In the long term i think Venus is a better place to work with.
I agree that some form of teraforming needs to happen before we can be there.

But that amount of teraforming might be much less that we expect.
Decreasing to much of a good thing is always better that trying to add.
Adding at mars will be very hard to do, but decreasing at Venus maybe not so hard.
Mars might only ever be a colony, and the colonists a thorn to doing more.
Or it is just to much work to warm it and thicken the atmosphere.
We humans have been trying to warm ours for 100 years with little impact.

But venus wont have any colonists to argue, and no reason not to try something new.

Tough to make a 50 watt bulb shine at 200 watts.
But easy to make a 200 watt be 50 watts.

kippy · 2004-04-20 07:35:53

The clouds contain a lot of water. After all, it is enough to completely blanket an entire planet.

Hold the phone. Are we talking about the same Venus? According to [http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/fa … sfact.html]NASA Venus only has 20 ppm of H2O. It has more argon than water! Unless my math is terribly off, that's not enough to blanket the planet in anything more than desert conditions. We were talking before in the group about Venus having something like 10%-12% of the water of Earth but that's only after converting all of the CO2 into water and graphite via hydrogen importation.

I could be wrong. Is 20ppm a significant amount? Are the clouds really made of water? Am I looking at outdated information?

kippy · 2004-04-20 07:47:14

I did some quick crack-head math and 20ppm of water works out to about 1/131,000th the amount of water on Earth. Can someone correct me if I'm wrong?

Earthfirst · 2004-04-20 09:31:24

The clouds of venus are made from sulferic acid, and they reflict a lot of sun light, thats why venus is the brighest planet in the night sky. One problem om the night side they prevent the heat from exsacping into space. Stoping the winds the drive the clouds around would be hard, winds are very vast in the upper atmosphere 200 mph.
Burning all the clouds off might let the heat esacpe but they would just form again when venus cools agian. So you have too syop the sunlight before it gets to the atmosphere or the clouds. Ballons would be hard because thestrong wind would push them to the night side, maybe if there were weather ballons filled with H2. If they were high enough they could exsacpe the winds and just reflict light on the dayside in stead of traping heat on the night side like the clouds do.

The Fed Man · 2004-04-20 17:11:53

Is it possible to bomb some of the atmosphere off? Like dropping large boms into the upper atmosphere where they would explode and expel clouds and gases into space. Could this work?

chat · 2004-04-20 17:59:48

kippy,

Even though that math is as bad as mine
It still works out to covering the entire planet a few feet deep in water.
On a warm Venus that would be one nasty rain cycle, probably rain 2310 ish hrs a day or 24 on earth

I would expect everything other than co2 would be scrubbed, from the cloud tops down to the surface in a very short time with near permanent rain.
Quite a bit of the c02 will also begin to be fixed by the planet with a wet surface.
Maybe as little as 10 years for the atmosphere, longer for the co2 fixing.

Then the only problem to deal with on Venus is the co2.
Back to adding hydrogen, and bacteria with the new wet home we have created for them.
Magnets at the poles will help at some point.

The Fed Man,

Venus needs hydrogen to convert that thick atmosphere into water.
Even if you could blast it with a giant bomb (comet impact) the disruption on the planet would be immense.
If the explosion is big enough to blast the atmosphere, it is also big enough to turn Venus into a magma planet for eons.

Earthfirst,

I think your in the same boat as most of us in the planet cooling idea.
To get it going we need a cooler Venus.
Seems inevitable.

MarsDog · 2004-04-21 15:28:30

Cooling Venus down by spinning it up into a disk to reduce the sunlit area takes too long.
-
Teardrop shaped balloons, resistant to sulfuric acid clouds would reflect sunlight, while allowing heat radiation to escape, but would be a flight controllers challenge.
-
Space based solar panels could collect energy for other projects while shielding Venus.
-
The combination of the last 2 methods could work.

chat · 2004-04-21 18:56:35

MarsDog,

I think the solar panels are a good idea to power the magnets at the poles, or maybe just charging the atmosphere at the poles would have a similar effect as large magnets powered by nuclear reactors.

Venus is virtually as big as earth, so using solar panels to block sunlight of any significant % would be quite a building project.

Same for the balloons, the idea is good until you think about trying to cover all the sky of Florida with balloons.
Every balloon ever created probably wouldn't do the trick to cover even the sky of Florida.

If we did assemble all the balloons ever created and covered the sky of Florida, would it have much of an impact on earth?

I think we need to think on planetary scales, less human input, and the less things we have to create will work better on such scales.

If the planet itself cant help, then we have no hope of changing it.

Maybe a better solution for the bacteria, is for them to create pollution that blocks the sun.
The second set of bacteria fix co2.

If we can make small things do lots of work, then big things will happen.

I have a feeling a real attempt at teraforming Venus will begin with some form of sun block or shade.

A cooler Venus begins to rework itself.
A cooler Venus allows us to place magnets at the poles to collect hydrogen from the solar wind, and alter the radiation Venus receives.
A cooler Venus might allow for rain, a safe home for bacteria, and place for co2 to be naturally locked away.
A cooler Venus could be colonized before any other real teraform processes happen.

Would love to hear anyones ideas on cooling Venus.

Best I've had so far is distant orbit small asteroid collisions, and smog or dust producing satellites in distant orbit.

The impacts in orbit have the added benefit of becoming a moon at some distant point, when the mess finally comes back together.

Earthfirst · 2004-04-23 21:58:07

Good point chat by smahing astroids toteghter they would make a good sun blocker. Better yet they would come back together to from a moon or a ring system. Since the sun screen will only be needed for a short time it is a good that it disappears with no work needed, unlike a man made one. A good source for an impactor is mercury, if it hit venus at the right angle you could get a moon woth nearly the same gravity as mars that would have an atmosphere, magnetic flied. Venus it self would get a faster spin, mag flied. Water for both new world would have to be imported from ort cloud objects like sedno a big ice ball. I think that the big collesion is the best way to create two new worlds even three, that are geoglolical stable like the earth moon system are.
I came up with this thoery a while back, to make an earth 2 you need a moon or moons system. Heavy handed but it would work, true that it would take milion years to cool, but in geo time it is short period. Sun screens around both new world would speed up their cooling.

atitarev · 2004-04-25 20:31:53

...Heavy handed but it would work, true that it would take milion years to cool, but in geo time it is short period...

In the same way you could say - let mother nature fix everything and we'll come when everything is ready. I don't want to wait a million years, I want it now
We should do something to see some progress in our lifetime, or at least hope to see some results or leave this pleasure to our children or grandchildren. Just getting rid of the excess soup of the atmosphere will cool Venus enough, so that people are able to stand on it - at least on the night side.

chat · 2004-04-27 05:22:45

Earthfirst,

Thanks for Kudos on the asteroid impacts in orbit.
It does have a negative side to it also.
It makes for a not so friendly planet to land spaceships after the collisions though.

Moving mercury to become an impactor of Venus probably would form an earthlike looking system.

Moving planets is for very distant technologies though.
With such a technology i bet they would also solve the problems of stray impactors in the inner solar system from such a collision

It would take quite some time for both bodies to settle down, and the product worlds in the end might still be worse than the originals.

I would think with the best of todays technology we could move a few 1 or 2 km asteroids to Venus and collide them together in orbit to form a sun shade.
We could also divert a few 1 to 10 km comets to impact Venus to help the h20 problem.
We could easily add bacteria to the planet to help with the co2 problem.
Setting up magnets on the poles, to deflect charged particles and collect more hydrogen from the solar wind will have to wait until the planet is safe enough for machines on the surface.

All of the ideas above get the planet doing most of the work to change itself with little more help from us.

Once it is teraformed will it be earth 2?
Probably not, but do we need an earth clone or a totally new livable alien world?
Bet the alien world would be different yet familiar.

atitarev,

Longer than human has been human to settle back down

Shaun Barrett · 2004-04-28 01:41:39

The notion of adding bacteria to the Venusian atmosphere to "help with the co2 problem" may not work.
Back in early 2003, there was a bit of a buzz about the dark bands in the atmosphere of Venus, which only show up in UV light. This means there must be a chemical in the bands which absorbs UV light.
Nobody could figure out what the chemical might be, unless it's of bacterial origin.

If Venus already has bacteria in its atmosphere, those bacteria haven't done a very good job of reducing the levels of CO2 so far!

chat · 2004-04-28 04:51:15

Shaun,

Strange to think that such a hostile place might already have life on it isn't it?

I've looked at a few of the ideas about the bands of Venus, and you are right that no chemical seems to fit the bill for it.

Seems the more we look, the more places might have a life form, and if Venus could have one then pretty much any planet is a possible for life.

If it does turn out to be a bacteria or other strange life form it will make teraforming Venus a much more troublesome task.

We shouldn't expect imported bacteria to do all the co2 fixing anyway, just a helper and tool in the arsenal.

I'm also of the opinion that once we release any bacteria on a wet Venus it will mutate rapidly, and start to do things we don't expect in short times.
All it takes is one mutated bacteria for us to become spectators in a planetary alteration.

REB · 2004-04-28 05:56:07

Talk about life causing the dark bands that only show up in UV light has been around for a while. I forget which probe discover it. I have seen it mentioned in a couple of science fiction books. I didn’t know it was still being discussed last year. I guess they still have not found a satisfactory non-biological explanation.

If there microbes in the upper atmosphere, how did they get there. Did Venus once have a watery past? I read an Astronomy Article years ago that said Venus briefly had oceans of water way back in its past. Could they have evolved back then and survived all these years?

Could they have come from rocks blasted off the Earth by imp actors? Such meteors might burst in Venus’ upper atmosphere, scattering any bacteria that was in it. Could bacteria survive such a journey?

kippy · 2004-04-28 09:38:47

ok, new idea.

If we're assuming we can push comets around why not just park them at the sun/venus L1 point? they will act as sunblocks and the comet's tail will increase the affect. All the stuff blown off of it will land in the atmosphere so we can add water without crashing it directly.

so we get the water, we get a partial sunshade and we don't have to damage the crust in the process.

thoughts? anyone know how big a comet's tail would get that close to the sun?

Earthfirst · 2004-04-28 11:04:29

If you made a sunscreen from dust around venus, it would work then when venus is cool enough add water. The dust would settle out into a ring system, that make venus even brighter than today. You would have to remake the dust screen if venus was not as cool as you wanted. But as a added bonus depending on where you make the screen ,the ring could condense into a moon. A good source of materal might be mercury, since there is only enough mass in the astoride belt to make one small moon. Better if you reserve that stuff for mars to make a moon.
1 vesta bening like 40 to 30 percent of the mass. In the ort cloud there are thousand of pluto sized things, but they would not make good moon for the inner solar system because they would turn into big comets and evaporate away, there are a good source of water and gases like NH3, Co, and others. For mars and venus terraforming efforts.

kippy · 2004-04-28 16:11:26

By the way, I saw a neat tool for looking at a water covered venus. I'm not sure how much water this assumes but it's a nice balance of land and sea.
http://www.hn-krukan.ac/lgh2103/terrafo … html]water covered Venus

chat · 2004-04-28 18:12:28

REB,

Or the original bacteria came from Venus to earth, or mars to earth, or mars to Venus, or etc.

Those bands on Venus still seem to be a problem for those chemists.

I think bacteria traveling from world to world seems quite possible.

A close brush with an atmosphere then an impact on another world seems the best way to transfers the little critters.
But i bet ejected material would also hold bacteria that could survive in dormant state for an indefinite time period, and survive a re entry.

As we are finding out those little critters are tough

Earthfirst,

Getting material needed for Venus that is as close as possible is a must.
Since mercury is a hospitable place on the night side, machines could probably mine from it.
The escape velocity is also small, so what is mined is pretty easily sent to Venus.
But what to mine for Venus?
I bet abundant dust is waiting at mercury, and quite a bit of hydrogen locked in the surface rock.

Kippy,

Even moving those 1km asteroids will be a feat.
I think we could do that with current technology though.
1-10km comets trajectory being altered is probably less technically challenging for Venus and us.

If comets are generally heading toward Venus, then small changes 20 years away wont require big brute force to get them to Venus orbit.

I bet we could get away with 20 or so 100 meter asteroid collisions in Venus orbit to achieve a good sun block.
Moving a 100 meter asteroid is something we could do for sure.

Love the idea of heading those bigger comets to the L1 orbit.
Sunshade and no smashing impacts and water when it gets there.

Also the water from the comet tail in that orbit would be an awesome sunlight bouncer, almost like a big mirror.

If i had 3 thumbs i would put them all up on that idea kip .

kippy · 2004-04-29 13:39:31

I just did a bit more reading on comets and I think the comet at L1 idea might be better than I thought. aparently the tail of a comet can have a diameter of thousands of kilometers. That sounds like it's big enough to cover most if not all of the sun-facing side of venus. so there's a cheap sun-shade.

I also read that one component of a comet's tail is a hydrogen jet! The UV rays break up the water as it boils off and the hydrogen blows away from the oxygen. So the comet will blast hydrogen at the atmosphere with no help from us. That would react to start making water and graphite and by the time the comet was gone, Venus might have enough surface water to start reflecting a lot of sunlight on it's own.

by the way, will a sunshade be needed if venus had earth's atmosphere? Will the shade just be a temporary thing while the atmosphere is cooled and processed? If not, it just seems like a matter of dragging a few comets in front of venus, waiting and pushing off the rocky cores when we're done.

Rock! :band:

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#126 2004-04-16 10:59:49

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#127 2004-04-18 15:40:51

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#128 2004-04-19 11:17:35

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#129 2004-04-19 11:40:06

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#130 2004-04-19 15:25:00

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#131 2004-04-19 20:26:49

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#132 2004-04-20 06:20:15

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

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Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#134 2004-04-20 07:47:14

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#135 2004-04-20 09:31:24

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#136 2004-04-20 17:11:53

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#137 2004-04-20 17:59:48

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#138 2004-04-21 15:28:30

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#139 2004-04-21 18:56:35

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#140 2004-04-23 21:58:07

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#141 2004-04-25 20:31:53

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#142 2004-04-27 05:22:45

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#143 2004-04-28 01:41:39

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#144 2004-04-28 04:51:15

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#145 2004-04-28 05:56:07

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

#146 2004-04-28 09:38:47

Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

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Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

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Re: Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

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