Venus Terraforamation - Can we colonize the death furnace?

Planet@lien · 2005-04-08 23:47:36

Any suggestions??

chat · 2005-04-09 04:27:32

Planet@lien,

Seems silly but the best way to teraform Venus is to turn up the heat a bit more.

Venus is already close to the escape velocity of co2, so a few100c more will allow that to happen.

This can be done on a local scale with particle beams, mirrors or lenses in space.

You wont end up with an earth like place afterwards, but could end up with a place machines could survive on the surface to mine and continue the teraform.

Ice asteroids and super carbon fixing bacteria to finish up the teraform.
Then sit back and enjoy the long days and nights as trying to alter them is beyond a tech solution.

Planet@lien · 2005-04-09 12:20:48

Ok here's my terraformation:

We start by putting a huge mirror or shade in orbit. The temperature will lower to at least 500F.

Even though 500F. may be very hot, the extreme pressure on the planet would condense the C02.

The weigth of the liquid C02 will trigger earthquakes (venusquakes) and the holes will suck up the liquid C02.

With the atmosphere raining on to the surface the pressure and the heat will drop. Some of the liquid C02 will freeze into dry ice. This could be a problem. Nanomachines could be planted on the surface designed to break apart carbon dioxide molecules, the result would be oxygen and carbon. The carbon could be used for other purposes and the oxygen could be breathed! This takes care of the artificial plants needed to change the carbon dioxide to oxygen.

The atmosphere will stilll be thinning out.

Ahh... nanomachines again. Well the sulfur in the atmosphere could be broken apart with the nanos too, and the small amounts of carbon monoxide.

Now we need to get rid of the excess nitrogen in the atmosphere. We have 5 bars and we only need .77 Well i dont't really have an answer to this. maybe future humans would have to live in 5.23 bars of pressure. I'm not even sure if that is possible i'll have to do a little research.

Now.... we still have a 233 day long day. Easily fixed with spaceships placed in orbit magnetically bonded to Venus's core. The orbit of the ships would be slightly angled so we could have seasons. The faster orbit will trigger a van allen belt.ere we go.

So far we have: A breatheable atmosphere (with exception of 4 extra bars of pressure).
A 24 hour long day.
A van allen belt for solar storm protection.
A comfortable temperature range.

So we need an ozone layer and water.

The water problem can be solved easily, nanomachines again
using nanomachines, dig the hydrates out of the ground and turn them into water molecules. The remaining water that nanos couldn't provide would be gotten from a classical resource. Use a few very close comets or one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. We don't want to lose any of the atmosphere into space. So we break off chunks of the comet/asteroid and let a little loose at a time. Then we now have 70% water on Venus's surface.

we now have a very cold planet. We need to take a large piece off the solar mirror/shade so the temperature range is normal.

Now we need an ozone layer, now we use...... You guess? and assemble the long chain ozone molecule and realease it. A large ozone layer would begin to form. Note: I do not know how the ozone layer works or if my theory would work.

Now we have a habitable Venus!!

Hope you liked it!

This has been a report from The 11 year old astronomany buff!

chat · 2005-04-09 16:50:34

Planet@lien,

Its a pretty good plan with a few problems to solve.

The sunshade needed to cool Venus enough would be massive, so massive that 1 solar flare would destroy it.
It would also be a gigantic cost to build such a shade, and to set up the infrastructure to get it started.

A better shade for Venus would be to collide small asteroids at Venus geo orbit (into each other).

A planet sized sun reflecting shade that lasts a very long time can be made this way with just a few asteroids.

The second problem is that trying to convert the co2 at Venus with plants will take a very very long time.

Even with super carbon fixing engineered bacteria it would take a few million years.

Then you would end up with a 02 atmosphere that can self combust and return it all to the way it was before you started.

The nitrogen problem can be fixed simply by extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere and converted into liquid nitrogen for export to mars.
Or make a range of nitrogen based products on Venus.

Over many hundreds of years the transport of nitrogen will help mars and help Venus.

Venus would be a much better place with 50% of what it has now, at least at 50% machines can survive on the surface and start the teraform.

As for the 233 day day, close the shades when you get bored of daytime, and lights when you want day at night.
Very low tech but very effective.

Planet@lien · 2005-04-11 16:21:36

Thats a good idea chat!

This solar shade could be more than just used for more porposes than just lowering the temperature. Maybe we could add solar panels on the shade. If we could somehow harden the shade to protect it from solar flares, that would be great.

Meanwhile, taking the nitrogen from Venus and shipping it all the way to Mars, for its terraformation would be way too expensive, but we could shoot a laser on the Martian religoth to break out the nitrates. But maybe if thats the only way to get rid of the nitrogen, it just might have to work.

The magnetically bonded ships is too far in the future, maybe sometime in the distant future it will happen

Finally I still don't know if just adding more ozone to the atmosphere will give it an ozone layer........

Thank!

Planet@lien · 2005-04-11 16:23:22

why would the atmosphere combust...

Earth has a resonible amount of O2 and it doesn't go up in flames?? explain?

chat · 2005-04-12 04:58:49

Planet@lien,

Thank you

The asteroid sun shield has its set of problems also.
Once you start smashing asteroids together in geo orbit at Venus, it becomes a much tougher place to land on Venus with all the orbital debris.

If you could convert the co2 to o2 at Venus.
Once you get to about 40% o2 any spark will ignite the atmosphere itself.

o2 above about 40% becomes a combustible gas.

Venus is such a catch 22 planet for teraforming.

If you cool it you have to deal with the 62 bar atmosphere before the cooling process wears out.

If you heat the atmosphere locally to escape velocity of co2 it will require an enormous infrastructure of lenses or mirrors.

Adding water or ice asteroids to the current Venus just makes it a hotter place.

In my opinion to teraform Venus it will require an atmosphere dump to about 20 bars.
At that point a small ice asteroid to add water to Venus.
Followed quickly by geo asteroid collisions to decrease the temperature.
A release of super co2 fixing bacteria and surface machines working as fast as they can to fix co2 and release hydrogen from the surface before the sun sheild starts to wear out.

Planet@lien · 2005-04-13 15:12:38

Yep, but you said the shade could be used to make an ordinary day... But what about the night side of the planet, how could you bring light to that side of the world?? So basically the light side of the world would have ordinary says while the darkside would have the ordinary 233day long nights?

Answers please ???

chat · 2005-04-14 05:24:07

Planet@lien,

Same as the far north on earth.
At night turn the lights on for 12 hrs.

On earth 182 day and 182 night exists in the far north, so i don't see it as such a big problem on a teraformed Venus.

Plant Venus with plants from this region that are already adapted to higher UV levels and long days and nights.

MarsDog · 2005-04-16 21:54:01

If you could slow the rotation of Venus, tidelocking to the Sun,
so that the same side is always faced the Sun;

The hot spot could be inhabited by balloon dwellers,
looking after solar electric arrays, chimneys and towers.

Easier would be the dark side,
where the downdraft could also generate large amounts of electrical energy.

===

Hot air is less dense, so the balloon on the hot side would tend to sink towards the heat. On the cold side, the downdraft would pull the balloon towards the downdraft.

===

Extending the extremes in temperature would lower the overall, since radiation is proportional to T^4. In addition the generated electricity could be turned into microwaves, and radiated off into space.

mars2015 · 2005-05-16 13:37:17

Assuming available technology:

Build a solar shade in the lagrange point between Venus and the Sun. At first, it will block 100% of incoming sunlight. This will take a few centuries but will turn Venus into an iceball of dry ice and a Nitrogen atmosphere. Induce chemical reactions to break apart the CO2 into Carbon (which could be retained for building-on Venus graphite would be the new wood) and Oxygen, which then will be combined with Hydrogen for Water and the rest for breathing. Once that gets started then the water and rocks can make the rest of the CO2 into carbonates. Add more water with an ice asteroid or two from the Oort cloud. If feasible, hit the planet just right to increase the spin to something earthlike.

If we can either increase the rotation or use solettas to simulate a day and night close to Earth's, we get a Venus with 80% water and no seasons (no axial tilt and nearly circular orbit) that has a planetwide climate ranging from hot tropical at the equator to something like Mexico City at the poles (like a high elevation in Earth's tropics) and probably lots of rainfall. We'd keep the solar shade in place but restructure it to let in about 50%-70% of incoming light to keep temperatures reasonable.

Even if we could adapt plants and animals to a 4 month long day-night cycle, I would think that having 2 months of sunshine would still heat things up way too much and 2 months night way too cold.

noosfractal · 2005-10-09 14:06:27

Any suggestions??

Here is a suggestion from Landis ...

Although the surface of Venus is an extremely hostile environment, at about 50 kilometers above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is the most earthlike environment (other than Earth itself) in the solar system. It is proposed here that in the near term, human exploration of Venus could take place from aerostat vehicles in the atmosphere, and that in the long term, permanent settlements could be made in the form of cities designed to float at about fifty kilometer altitude in the atmosphere of Venus.

http://powerweb.grc.nasa.gov/pvsee/publ … TAIF03.pdf

No terraforming required.

karov · 2005-10-11 00:52:23

The logical extreme of this tendency is the clusters of aerostat-habitats to cover the whole Venus joining each other providing about one earth`s surface of habitable shirt-sleeve environment on this 50 km hight.

see: www.paulbirch.net

noosfractal · 2005-10-11 01:26:39

Floating cities with limitless thermal energy. Almost perfect. Now I just need wings 8)

snelson5871 · 2005-12-16 02:03:06

More Nitrogen is great because nitrogen needs to be present in the soil in order for plants to grow therefore peanuts are great plants for venus because when penuts grow they fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil. Now as for removing the atmosphere why not just blow it off not with nukes because we dont want that radiation but with things like MOAB's and anhydrous ammonia. did you know that a tank of anhydrous ammonia commonly found in the midwest has the explosive power of a hydrogen bomb. not only that but anhydrous ammonia bombs would react with the many kilometer thick cloud of sulfuric acid on venus resulting in a large amount of salt with water sulfuric acid is N2SO4. But with massive explosions all over the upper atmoshere you could accelerate the CO2 to escape velocity in no time.

Austin Stanley · 2005-12-16 04:42:12

More Nitrogen is great because nitrogen needs to be present in the soil in order for plants to grow therefore peanuts are great plants for venus because when penuts grow they fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil. Now as for removing the atmosphere why not just blow it off not with nukes because we dont want that radiation but with things like MOAB's and anhydrous ammonia. did you know that a tank of anhydrous ammonia commonly found in the midwest has the explosive power of a hydrogen bomb. not only that but anhydrous ammonia bombs would react with the many kilometer thick cloud of sulfuric acid on venus resulting in a large amount of salt with water sulfuric acid is N2SO4. But with massive explosions all over the upper atmoshere you could accelerate the CO2 to escape velocity in no time.

The problem with this is that even a massive deployment of nuclear weapons of woudl not posess enough energy to remove a signifigant quantity of Venus's atmosphere. Indeed the explosion of a nuclear-warhead, say 100MT would be childs play in comparision to the amount of solar energy Venus recives every secound.

Venus has a radius of ~6200km giving it a reflective area of ~113 million kilometers. It's solar irradiance is about 2600 w/m^2 meaning that every secound, about 300 BILLION megajoules of energy irradiate the surface. A modest 10 megaton nuke only puts out about 40 billion megajoules, so Venus is receiving about 8 times as much energy every secound. Since the Suns energy is not enough to drive off Venus's atmosphere (though it comes pretty close) even mass deployment of large devices is unlikely to affect it. No, if you want to blast off Venus's atmosphere, you have to think bigger, like large fast moving asteriod impact bigger.

Chemical explosives fare even worse. Even Hydrogen and Oxygen, one of the most potent explosive combinations possible, has an energy density of only ~13MJ/kg. This is about 3 times greater than TNT, but several orders of magnitude worse than nuclear weapons. Indeed, chemical explosives probably don't contain enough energy in them to overcome Venus's gravity at all, so you would be adding to the already thick atmosphere, not reducing it.

Of all the ideas talked about here (on this form I mean) I like the concept of driving off the atmosphere with a large lense/mirror and the asteriod impact concept the best. Maybe if they were used in concurt we could actualy achive somethign.

SpaceNut · 2005-12-16 07:05:01

Blocking the suns solar energy does not need to be over the entire side facing the sun it can be just some lots of smaller pockets to destablize and to create weather patterns to occur.

As for the shields which can be used to create solar power one must also create a means to us this energy as well and hopefully be something that would work towards the teraforming process.

There are other Venus teraforming threads which could give addition thoughts as to how to go about it here at Newmars.

Grypd · 2005-12-16 08:30:27

One wee bit far out way to increase the reflectiveness of Venus so cooling the planet down is to deploy Shiny particles of metal in a ring around the planet. The Particles would block the sun under the ring but also reflect enough light elsewhere to reduce tempatures. If we can also use genetically engineered microbes and algae to lock some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere this would further reduce tempatures.

But what Venus truly needs is water and no matter what we do unless we can increase the water on the planet it will still stay hot as only plant life will be able to transform venus

callmeishmael · 2005-12-17 00:07:55

How about roofing over the planet?

As previous posts have pointed out, 50km up is a fairly livable environment in terms of temperature and pressure. So, why don't we seed Venus's upper atmosphere with self-replicating aerostats? The outer envelopes could be made from thin films of carbon nanotubules, made from carbon that is extracted from the abundant CO2 in the atmosphere. The excess O2 left over could be stored in the upper half of the aerostat to be used as a lifting gas. The lower half (or third or quarter) could be filled with an oxynitrogen mix and would be habitable.

The aerostats could also extract sulfer from the clouds and use it to coat the tops of the aerostats. This would serve two purposes: the light yellow color of the sulfer would reflect light out into space better than the black or greyish color of the carbon film of the aerostat envelopes and it would also reduce the amount of sulpheric acid in the clouds.

Over the course of a few centuries or decades or possibly years, the aerostats would multiply until the formed a continuous roof over the whole planet. Once they reached this point, the surface will start to cool down, partly because the roof will reflect most of the incoming heat and light, but also because the atmosphere will be slightly thinned out by the removal of so much carbon. Additional carbon could be removed by dropping carbon nanotube strings down to the surface, partly to anchor the roof into place, but mostly to remove more carbon from the atmosphere. Eventually these strings could be shortened and thickened into supporting columns.

Once we reach this point, we have two things that we need to address: what to do with all the extra oxygen we are generating and where to get hydrogen. Now, I'm going to presume that our technology will have progressed to the point where we can use the abundant solar energy available to our Venusian colonists to simply generate hydrogen - I must admit that I slept through my inorganic chemistry class at University, so maybe someone else can comment on the theoretical possibility or impossiblity of generating hydrogen from energy! The Oxygen and Hydrogen will combine to form oceans of surface water.

Utimately we will end up with roof in the venusian stratosphere (the areostats will automically descend as the atmosphere thins), all of the carbon sequestered in the roof or in the strings/supporting columns, an atmoshere composed of residual nitrogen and oxyen and oceans formed from the generated hydrogen and the native oxygen. Temperature could be controlled by adjusting the albedo of the roof.

The advantages of this idea are that the aerostats will form a planet sized liveable environment almost immediately and that the planetary cooling will not be dependant on an extraplanetary shield.

callmeishmael · 2005-12-17 01:50:09

Two more advantages of the floating roof concept: electical currents run through superconducting cables strung between the aerostats could form a protective magnetic field to keep out those pesky cosmic rays and could also be used to to transfer heat and light from the dayside to the nightside. You would end up with a 1400 hour day on the dayside and 58.5 24 hour days on the nightside. Essentially a two month hot season without nights and a two month cool season with earth cycle days and nights.

snelson5871 · 2005-12-17 13:12:11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus-crossing_asteroid

Well if you wanna smash an asteroid into venus here's a list of asteroids nearby.

MarsDog · 2006-01-02 06:11:10

Instead of colliding, use the asteroid as material to build floating cities.
Always in the sunlight, the city could block incoming radiation, while allowing heat to escape.

The escaping heat from the planet could run heat engines.
Radiators would have conical construction, flat at the top.
Top facing the sun, sides radiating to cold space.

Might need to block more than half the sunlight to lower to Earth temperatures.

snelson5871 · 2006-01-02 13:48:07

only thing wrong with that is if anything goes wrong then an entire city of people will fall into venus and die of various horrible causes.

Josh Cryer · 2006-01-02 14:41:08

Hey, the floating city thing was MY idea! Just teasing. I'm sure people have come up with the same idea many times.

I don't think floating cities would be that suceptable to failure, they'd be really redundant, and I think that evacuation would obviously be planned and well rehersed just in case anything happened.

As far as safety is concerned I think it would be no more riskier than living in a bubble on Mars or in a space station in L4.

MarsDog · 2006-01-02 15:03:15

Bacteria floating in the colder upper atmosphere was postulated.
Maybe we will discover giant baloon jellyfish floating around on Venus or Jupiter.
Why not float greenhouses, factories, cities ?

You cold make it modular construction.
If one module failed, then it would be decoupled.
An escape baloon would be the equivalent of the lifeboat.

Once the planet cooled, surface mining could take place.
High temperature tolerant robots would load baloons with materials for the floating cities.
All the elements are there, with easy access to energy.

Will get more details with 2.3 µm near-infrared images
http://solarsystem.dlr.de/TP/VIRTIS_en.shtml
3 times the wavelength of red light
http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~avery/course/3 … ectrum.gif
Interesting about the electromagnetic windows is the possibility of directly radiating to space. This could be used to get around the greenhouse effect of CO2.

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Re: Venus Terraforamation - Can we colonize the death furnace?

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