Terrform Venus

nickname · 2006-09-05 15:53:37

Tom Kalbfus,

Not a direct impact with a large asteroid, just a glancing blow to dump material into geo orbit.

I agree that making a molten Venus is not a good step forward either, but adding a natural sunshade that takes no upkeep is.

I don't think to many people will be living on asteroids in the kb, the temperatures are to say the least cold.
When you open a bottle of liquid nitrogen it wont boil, but might freeze.

If people did live on them we could just pick another, or ask if they would like to be part of Venus new sunshade. *lol*

Cooling Venus i think is a must to start any method of atmospheric reduction on Venus.
Cooling it enough to make carbon chains stable on the surface is all we need to start, then carbon assembling micro clones can reduce the atmosphere with simple copies of themselves using ample sunlight as a power source.
As they fault they simply fall to the surface, but already have made many clones of themselves.

This will only take you so far though as the O2 levels will rise and need to bond with something, preferably hydrogen to form water.
If the O2 levels get to high it will self combust.

Works well for hydrogen importation for many millennia though, and same delivery can remove compressed co2 to Mars.
Or simple sun focused hydrogen importation, or magnetic collection from solar storms.

atitarev · 2006-09-05 19:05:37

I didn't suggest landing or crashing the asteroids into Venus but let them orbit Venus, provide huge and long pipes and suck the gases
from the planet into the hollowed out asteroids.

It's a massive but no superman job, IMHO.

3 bar atmosphere with the right structure (almost no CO2) may be OK on Venus. Don't forget the partial sunshade!

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-06 00:20:43

I didn't suggest landing or crashing the asteroids into Venus but let them orbit Venus, provide huge and long pipes and suck the gases
from the planet into the hollowed out asteroids.
It's a massive but no superman job, IMHO.
3 bar atmosphere with the right structure (almost no CO2) may be OK on Venus. Don't forget the partial sunshade!

Why 3 bars? I figure if you go from 90 bars to 3, why not go the full distance and remove two more bars of atmosphere?

atitarev · 2006-09-06 01:25:14

I didn't suggest landing or crashing the asteroids into Venus but let them orbit Venus, provide huge and long pipes and suck the gases
from the planet into the hollowed out asteroids.
It's a massive but no superman job, IMHO.
3 bar atmosphere with the right structure (almost no CO2) may be OK on Venus. Don't forget the partial sunshade!
Why 3 bars? I figure if you go from 90 bars to 3, why not go the full distance and remove two more bars of atmosphere?

1 bar is good on Earth but it's hard to estimate what would be ideal for planets with different conditions. I think Venus needs a thicker than Earth atmosphere but much thinner as it is now.

This would soften the effect of too long nights and days and reduce radiation the Sun is 90% stronger on Venus - a thick layer of nitrogen/oxygen would give more protection. 3 bars is my estimate of maximum people/animals can get used to but this is an arguable point.

A thicker atmosphere with proper winds will spread the temperatures more equally on the surface, at the same time protecting the surface from excessive light.

--
On the hollowed out asteroids (it's not my idea but I embraced it): alternatively, we could consider a permanent satellite made out of a hollowed out astreoid, which could take all the excessive gases from Venus because shipping to other planets may be still expensive. The job of getting an asteroid onto Venusian orbit is difficult but possible with modern technology.

--
Magnetic fields were discussed may times on Mars terraformation topics. I think, they are feasible, Venus would need a much more massive one.

--
I am against permanent huge mirrors but all for permanent partial shade, which would block some of the light in the hottest areas. Spinning a large planet is not feasible, it's easier to adjust to new enviornment and create a better climate by a proper mix of gases; use of sunshades and artificial magnetic fields.

--

The key to cooling Venus is getting rid of the excessive CO2 (not spinning the planet or shifting further from the Sun - these ideas are unrealistic). Venus with no atmosphere will be heaps colder than it is now! Earthlike atmosphere on Venus with a sunshade may produce amazing results, I want to see some calcs on that. I know someone experimented with that.

nickname · 2006-09-06 05:16:21

atitarev,

I agree with almost everything you said in your last post.
The only part that is questionable is the hollowed out asteroid being sent to Venus.
If we were to go to all that trouble to make one then park it very carefully in a Venus low orbit.
I think it would be very technically challenging to do that.

If we need to remove carbon from Venus, then assembling a moon made from carbon right at Venus might be an easier task, we could also use it to alter the spin of the planet to some degree.

We could make the moon as big as we like and take whatever time we liked constructing it, all the while removing carbon from Venus.
We have around 30 bars of carbon as building material, so it would be a substantial sized moon at completion.
The waste O2 from carbon separation makes excellent rocket fuel, and the sun as a source of power for CO2 separation and collection.
As the moon size increases it becomes a launch point for hydrogen collection and a point to add carbon soot in orbit to shade Venus.

With a little luck when the moon is big enough it will begin to tidally effect Venus and maybe start a magnetic field.

This sort of multiple win win no waste plan i think is what we need to alter Venus.

atitarev · 2006-09-06 05:26:44

I like the idea of constructing a moon, Nickname. One thing I can't agree - I don't think you can ever spin Venus faster.

nickname · 2006-09-06 06:04:30

atitarev,

Thank you

I'm also in the doubtful group about making any substantial change in the spin of Venus.

If we could double the spin speed over many thousands of years i think that is the best we could hope for.

We probably don't need to alter the spin rate anyway to alter Venus, curtains make wonderful day night.
All depends on the planetary heat transfer of a 3 bar Venus, might or might not be a problem.

I also agree that around 3 bars of mostly nitrogen will keep the radiation at the surface to respectable levels.

I think 3 bars with .9 G would be adaptable for most things.
That should equate to 2.7 bars of earth pressure at ground level.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-06 07:20:47

Ah, thicker atmosphere means more greenhouse effect, doesn't it?, By that logic, Mars should have a thin atmosphere so that more sunlingt reaches the ground to warm the planet up. You know the most potent greenhouse gas is water vapor, a 3 bar atmosphere can hold more of it, hence more greenhouse effect, right in the place that it doesn't need it.

I don't know where your going to get the magnetic field from if you don't spin the planet. If Venus spun, it would have a magnetic field just like Earth. One possible solution is just to build a false surface over the real surface of Venus and spin that.

atitarev · 2006-09-06 08:22:05

Ah, thicker atmosphere means more greenhouse effect, doesn't it?, By that logic, Mars should have a thin atmosphere so that more sunlingt reaches the ground to warm the planet up. You know the most potent greenhouse gas is water vapor, a 3 bar atmosphere can hold more of it, hence more greenhouse effect, right in the place that it doesn't need it.
I don't know where your going to get the magnetic field from if you don't spin the planet. If Venus spun, it would have a magnetic field just like Earth. One possible solution is just to build a false surface over the real surface of Venus and spin that.

Water is practically absent on Venus. It can get it only if we give it some and we won't give more than it needs to reach the balance. Besides, the planet is pretty flat on average. The oceans may get only half a km maximum.

Venus with an earth-like atmosphere would have an average annual temperature of about 20-25 C (4C on Earth). I hope these estimations are correct, otherwise the sunshade should be much bigger and cover not just the hottest equatorial areas. But that's average, it could become really hot during a long 2-month day. Thicker atmosphere will somewhat increase the greenhouse effect, which we need for circulation and we need a better than we have on Earth and that will reduce day and night temperature difference. Nitrogen won't have the same effect as CO2, which we want to bring down to minimum. I suggest 95% - 5% ratio (nitrogen vs oxygen) vs 70% - 30% on Earth. Without the sunshades days would become too hot and a runaway would begin.

Mars, hm, I think may not need a thicker or thinner atmosphere than Earth but we want more gases with the greenhouse effect, so the atmosphere structure must be different there (I don't want to digress).

Magnetic fields can be constructed without changing rotation speed of a planet, IMHO. It would require a lot of energy, though. There's abundance of sunlight on Venus, which can be used to produce electricty and it would require a lot of initial work.

Final atmosphere structure - volume and constituents, the size of water surface and depth of the global ocean, the size and postioning of the shade(s), artificial fields will all require thorough simulations.

Venus receive 1.9 of the solar energy and is just outside the livable zone, if not on the edge or inside it.

I agree that Venus is much more challenging to terraform than Mars but there should be more attempts and investigations in this area. I think, if people start doing it, it will eventully become clearer, which path is correct and which method is more efficient.

--
I like these pages from a Canadian terraformers's site. They also have pages on Venusian terraforming.

http://society.terraformers.ca/

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-06 09:21:30

What if we instead gave Venus a global ocean, turn Venus into a water planet where even the highest mountains are submerged beneath a continuous unbroken ocean, then Venus's rotation rate won't matter so much, the water will transfer heat from day to might, and perhaps a deep enough ocean can be made to super-rotate over the planet's surface, producing a day and night for the ocean's surface that is shorter than Venus's actual rotation. People would then live on the ocean's surface. A rotating salty ocean would also produce a magnetic field.

nickname · 2006-09-06 20:08:49

Tom Kalbfus,

Good idea but how would you implement such a thing?
As you point out as the water vapor on Venus increases so does the temperature, 1% water as steam equates to around an additional 15% temperature .

To create a water world you will need to import around 60 bars of hydrogen to convert the CO2 into C and H2O.

With an all out space effort to transport hydrogen from everywhere possible, i think we could do that in about 50,000 years.(maybe 50% of GNP spending from every country on earth on the effort to move hydrogen for 50,000 years)

You would also need to have Venus sun shaded to the point below the boiling point of water and the additional heat created from the water creation reaction itself before you start importing hydrogen, then wait until the temperature is below 112c at the equator.

On a total water world i would guess you would need to be around 1/2 bar pressure to avoid a runaway, as evaporation would be at least twice that of earth, or twice the temperature retention of earth if sunlight conditions are similar.
You will also need to convert 2/3 of the nitrogen into nitrate or something useful.
Twice the temperature of Earth equator high would be near 100c, on a 1/2 bar world water will boil at around 95c.

You would also have to address the surface radiation problems, but a few meters of water depth works as a good shield.
Anything in the top 10 meters or so of ocean will be sterilized.

So many catch 22s on trying to teraform Venus its a wonder anyone has any good ideas on it

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-06 23:10:45

I don't think terraforming Venus is possible without a permanent sunshade dimming the Sun. While much of Venus problem is due to the green house effect, the main problem is that Venus is just too close to the Sun to begin with. Figure on having a permanent sunshade parked between Venus and the Sun at a minimum. A world with total water coverage would have 142% more exposed water surface that the Earth, and it doesn't matter how much deeper you make the oceans after that, because it is the water surface that is exposed to the air that matters. I don't see how this doubles the evaporation rate if you assume a similar light level, provided artificially, to that on Earth. You can make the oceans as deep as you want by importing water from the outer Solar System. I think once a certain dept is reached, the oceans will start forming a layer of dense ice over the ocean bottom due to the tremendous water pressure, I believe this is called ice II or ice III, I'm not sure, I'm not sure that we'd want this, their are plusses an minuses.

The basic idea is to get Venus' ocean to rotate faster and independently of the planet itself, then you can build platforms that float on the oceans surface with plants and animal life growing on it. Some dissolved minerals in the ocean is desirable, but if the ocean bottom is covered with a layer of ice, then the Venusian crust will be isolated from the ocean above, and the more water we add to Venus, the fresher the water will become, even up to the point where one can drink it. However the more water we pile on Venus, the more the upper ocean layer can super-rotate. Venus's atmosphere already does this. If you are floating in Venus's upper atmosphere, you would experience a 48 hour "day" because that is how long it takes the wind to blow you around the planet. Another great thing is that a rotating water ocean would also produce a magnetic field, even if Venus's core did not. Now the problem of rotating the ocean is significantly less that rotating the entire planet, the mass involved with just the upper layer of the ocean is alot less, and it will probably rotate some all by itself, and it may even be a function of how deep the ocean is. Now once we have a Water world Venus, living on the surface of this perpetual ocean is really a small proble for would be terraformers who are used to manipulated masses on a planetary scale. Artificial islands shoud not be beyond them. You probably want these artificial Islands to maintain their positions on the globe relative to each other. You might even be able to recreate the shapes of the Earth's continents floating on this ocean. Not so sure about mountain ranges, these floating continents must be light enough to float on the surface of the ocean, so I guess the landscape will be flat.

nickname · 2006-09-07 05:22:23

Tom Kalbfus,

I don't want to put you off the idea that a water world isn't the way we should approach Venus.

Karov had some very good ideas about importing hydrogen directly from the sun, so importation might not be as big a problem as i perceive it.

I'm probably being a bit generous with the two times heat retention for Venus.
On earth the ocean temperature is quite a low average.

On a newly terra formed Venus it will certainly be twice and probably many times the earths ocean temperatures for a very long period of time.
With the additional radiations on the water at Venus this would probably settle into twice the earth ocean temperature even though we shade.
The slow spin rate is also an unknown factor, it might cause little problem at all or simply overheat on the day side, or cause massive hurricanes on a planetary scale as warm moves to cold.

I agree that a sun shaded Venus is a much better target to terra form, but shielding it to a useful percentage is a massive effort itself.

That 1/2 bar experiment shows how close Venus is to a runaway on any terra formed Venus we have, if the bar pressure goes up so does the temperature, if the bar pressure decreases so does the boil point.
Nitrogen is quite a poor greenhouse gas so we can probably keep all of it without much of a temperature difference.

On earth we have about 50c lea way to a runaway, on a terra formed Venus maybe 20c if everything is perfect.

Venus can be terra formed, its just a question of what steps and for how long.
No expert exists on terra forming Venus, so right now all ideas are good until they are picked apart, Venus chemistry is very good at doing that.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-07 08:06:30

One can always shade Venus so that it receives less sunlight than the Earth does, such as giving it Mars levels of light for instance, that should give it time to cool and when it does you give it more light. If you give it only half a bar of atmosphere, then you are not going to get the other half back when you need it, besides that will make the summit of Maxwell Montes completely uninhabitable. Anyway the planet does not rotate fast enough, my idea with the ocean was to give it a surface that does. You see water reduces the friction between the upper surface and the bottom. Each layer of water would move slowly in relation to the layer below it, but with a deep enough ocean, all these velocity additions add up. So a ship sitting on the Ocean would experience a shorter day than one sitting on the ocean floor, assuming for the moment that sunlight can penetrate all the way down which it can't.

So take you pick, you can have a very long Venusian day with short seasons Day/Summer and Night/Winter, or you can have a more normal day but just no surface to stand on.

Doing tricks with sunshades and mirrors will give you an apparent sun that rises in the North and sets in the south, but of course Venus still rotates under that arc and the mirrors will have to be sun synchronous in order to have light to reflect down to Venus and the Mirrors will have to be huge and in a 24-hour orbit in order to produce an image of the sun that rises and sets according to a 24 hour schedule. Probably would be best to live on the Polar Continent of Istar, at least you get days and nights of regular length all the time, but the sun would rise and set all over the place. Aphrodite would have problems because it is on the equator, at times it will be on the apparent North Pole and at times it will be on the Apparent equator.

The other alternative is to have a sun shade and also have an "artificial sun" that orbits Venus in a 24 hour orbit closer to Venus than the Sunshade. This "artificial sun" would not be a mirror reflecting sun light, but would instead be something else, it would have to be something that glows as bright as the sun, and produces an apparent sunlike disk and it would have to illuminate half the planet at a time.

samy · 2006-09-16 07:38:00

Anyway the planet does not rotate fast enough, my idea with the ocean was to give it a surface that does. You see water reduces the friction between the upper surface and the bottom. Each layer of water would move slowly in relation to the layer below it, but with a deep enough ocean, all these velocity additions add up.

Wouldn't that take immense amounts of energy and huge infrastructure to impart velocity onto the water? You'd need turbines at regular intervals throughout the planet, different powered turbines at different depths...sounds unfeasible to me?

What are the problems with: constructing a long tube with one end in the atmosphere, and one end in the vacuum of space. With a lower pressure at one end, it should automatically start sucking gas out of the atmosphere and vent it into space. If the power/speed is insufficient, we could install additional solar powered compressors at the venting end of the tube that would add to the sucking power. This would seem like a long-term project that would be fairly self-sustaining.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-16 18:58:08

Generally you use vaccum to suck air, is the straw where halk in the atmosphere and half out, the force of vaccum would be counteracted by the force of Venus's gravity that holds the air onto it surface in the first place.

samy · 2006-09-16 20:43:23

You could still use solar powered pumps to suck harder on the air!

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-17 07:54:40

You could still use solar powered pumps to suck harder on the air!

The hardest vacuum you can have is one with nothing in it. If you want to such harder than the vaccum of space, you need to have less than nothing. I'm not sure a vacuum filled with exotic matter would suck more than a vacuum that was merely empty.

samy · 2006-09-17 08:06:52

Then the pumps could be at the bottom pushing instead of on top sucking!

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-17 08:18:13

Tom Kalbfus,
Good idea but how would you implement such a thing?
As you point out as the water vapor on Venus increases so does the temperature, 1% water as steam equates to around an additional 15% temperature .
To create a water world you will need to import around 60 bars of hydrogen to convert the CO2 into C and H2O.
With an all out space effort to transport hydrogen from everywhere possible, i think we could do that in about 50,000 years.(maybe 50% of GNP spending from every country on earth on the effort to move hydrogen for 50,000 years)

Where do you get that figure of 50,000 years anyway? When you look to the Outer Solar System, there are some very large bodies that are made mostly of hydrogen. What if you got all the hydrogen you need and formed it into a single large ball and pushed it on a collision course with Venus. There are two possible sources of hydrogen, the gas giants or the large balls of ice in the outer Solar System. Pluto, as you know has a methane atmosphere, that is 1 carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. As Pluto moves outward, its atmosphere freezes on its surface. You could scoop that up and fling it into space using Mass Drivers, then you can collect the methane and process it into hydrogen gas, and use the carbon to make the walls of large liquid hydrogen tanks. You can accumulate all they hydrogen you need in ornit around Pluto, or even better Sedna, which likely has a methane crust on its surface. Since these bodies are way out, their orbital velocity around the Sun isn't that great, and it becomes very easy to halt that forward velocity and set these giant hydrogen tanks on a collision course with Venus, it might take a couple centuries, but this is way better than 50,000 years, and all they hydrogen you need would collide with Venus all at once, all 60 bars of it! or course you want the hydrogen gas to remain liquid, or perhaps you don't. There is nothing that say you can deliver the hydrogen as a gas. What happened if you release the hydrogen as a gas immediately prior to collision with Venus? It will expand outward to fill the vacuum, but what if it hit venus just as it expands to fill a volume equal to Venus. Most of that hydrogen would smack right on top of the atmosphere at a velocity almost that of the local Solar escape velocity. I think that would generate alot of heat spread out over the top of half a hemisphere of the planet. I don't think a gas-on-gas collision would create any craters, but a layer of hydrogen would sit atop of the atmosphere for some time. the question is, how quicly that could be made into water vapor and carbon, what is the leakage rate of hydrogen into space and whether you can create enough water to absorb most of the oxygen from carbon dioxide before the free hydrogen completely escapes the planet.

SpaceNut · 2006-09-18 19:21:16

I was wondering if anyone has put forth a upper air platform that is tethered to high orbiting satelites by cabon nano tubes. This would be very much winged shaped to create lift to counter the drag resistance to the atmosphere.

nickname · 2006-09-19 19:53:47

Tom Kalbfus,

1,000,000 trips with the largest possible drawing board tanker at 12 years per trip.
If we have 1 or 2 thousand tankers operating at the same time then 50,000 years or so, that is collecting 60 bars from Jupiter the closest possible place.

Jupiter has a more massive gravity well than earth and not pure hydrogen, so you might want to add a year or two on each 12 year trip back and forth from Venus to Jupiter, fuel for transport is almost as massive a problem.

The idea of collecting hydrogen at sedna might not be a bad one, if we dismantled it and used it for collection, processing and transport then the few century single trip is possible.

Collision with Venus, might alter the spin and change most of Venus into h20, but the impact of gas on gas will still leave a molten Venus.

The shell could be used as a sunshade, and the contents simply left in low unstable orbit to distribute themselves to the surface.
...

samy,

Why pump all the way from the surface?
If you have a couple km long pipe, one end in space the other in very thin atmosphere it will self pump towards space.

Will it self pump at escape velocity though?
If not gravity will simply pull co2 back.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-27 11:38:12

There's no reason we can't transport hydrogen as a gas in a big balloon? hydrogen's mass doesn't change when its frozen. Just get a bunch of tugs and push the hydrogen baloon on a collision course with Venus. If venus is molten, well so what? Its already almost molten. Maybe we could then form some custom designed continents.

nickname · 2006-09-28 14:48:09

Tom Kalbfus,

No reason we can't use giant balloons to transport, c02 to mars, pick up hydrogen at Jupiter, then return to Venus.
May as well make the trip a multi planet changer.

You could even make the balloons and rocket fuel at Venus, with ample sunlight for chemical reactions needed to produce C for material and O for fuel.

Still the 12-15 year trips are the killer for the idea, at best you still need to collect 20-30 bars of hydrogen, even if we use up 1 bar for fuel and balloons and dump a few bars of C02 on Mars and 20-30 bars dumped on a moon of Jupiter to terra form it.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-28 15:40:48

When you terraform planets, nothing is going to happen in your lifetime anyway, unless there is a means of artificially extending it. Generally I like the idea of biostasis, putting people in starships in a state of suspended animation and taking a slow starship to a planet that's light years away on a journey lasting thousands of years, and then spending thousands of more years terraforming a local planet, maybe bringing some people out of suspended animation to direct the process and then rotating them back in replacing them with others, and then when the majority of colonists are brought out of suspended animation, their is a terraformed planet awaiting them.

One of the problems with terraforming planets in our own solar system is that history intervenes, there is society and billions of humans who have ideas that keep on changing, they may have evolved into something completely different.

The human population explosion has slowed down. Projected into the future, it may come to a complete halt. There are about 100 billion stars in this galaxy and billions more in galaxies beyond. If colonists travel far enough beyond the Solar System, it maybe possible to conduct terraforming with colonists waiting in suspended animation for thousands of years.. I think if the human population stabilizes at 12 billion, then at most we could colonize 12 billion stars.

I think terraforming planets and travelling to the stars both operate on similar time scales, so why not marry both operations together. I doubt any planet other than Earth will support human life right off the bat anyway, even if it does have life on it.

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