New Mars Forums

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

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,

I did see an idea on this forum about a year ago.
It involved giant carbon balloons made at Venus filled with co2.
After sending a couple to mars no real destination was left for the other 999,998 of them.

Continuing on the asteroid idea, a large asteroid with a glancing blow on Venus deposits a lot of material as a sun shade that lasts for a long time.
This might be step 1 in teraforming Venus.

As you point out though even a 2 or 3 bar Venus would still have lots of troubles.
I wouldn't want to hazard a guess but even on that teraformed Venus near the equator, temperatures would probably boil water and begin a runaway.

Changing the spin of Venus is probably possible with impacts from water ice asteroids, but changing it to more than about twice its spin is doubtful.

Even on a terformed Venus we will still have to deal with the lack of magnetic field to solve the radiation problems.
That can be fixed with a massive ground or space based field generator, but either are massive engineering jobs.

SpaceNut,
Hi

Geesh i didn't even know Venus was hairy

I can't believe a table of disassociation temperatures doesn't exist somewhere.

While looking for a table i did stumble across a very interesting idea that involved simple carbon machines that self replicated and grew exceptionally.

It looked very promising as a way to soak up carbon from Venus, but still the initial ground temperatures were an issue as the carbon copies failed.

Virus engineering also offered a similar approach to remove carbon.

Karov,

Thank you for the escape speed.
~10 km/s
A lot higher than i thought.

No need to figure out the Kelvin temperature to reach escape velocity for c02 as c02 bonds should disassociate long before that temperature.

I can't find any paper or information about c02 disassociating in heat.
O escape velocities are much lower, so we need to  know what temperature it will escape at, and will it be lower than the super greenhouse gas disassociating, and will it be a respectable escape temperature for O.
Starting to feel like a chemical experiment with many locked variables dependant on each other for a result.

I think realistically we could double the temperature of Venus for the short term to chemically alter it, but beyond that it would require more input than a realistic amount of super greenhouse gas could contribute.

We probably don't need to remove all the c02 from Venus, as soon as Carbon can accumulate on the surface with lowering temperatures we have a place to work chemically or with machines.

Overheating Venus is easy, doing anything useful with a hotter Venus not so easy.

karov,

I think Venus is a question of making stable carbon chains.
Once Venus is cool enough for any carbon products to survive on the surface it's possible to teraform.

I cant think of a possible importation right now that would lower the temperature of Venus to any degree to allow any stable carbon chemistry.

Other than hydrogen and its beyond practical importation quantities for the current Venus.

Belinda,

The episodal model of Venus.

Trapped heat at Venus should make for a more active core, yet Venus has no magnetic field.

This could simply be the spin rate, or Venus didn't get a late large hit to stir it up.

Two planets being so similar ending up so differently just goes to show how small differences can make worlds of difference.

Venus might be the typical earth like planet in the universe.
Without late collisions and correct compositions all earth like places in the universe probably end up like it, or as frozen ice balls.   

It doesn't take much for a runaway greenhouse or runaway freeze on any earth like planet.

I think the moon is much more important than we give credit for.

SRAM,

Why wouldn't god go ahead and make molten planets?
Makes as much sense to create them that way.

If god is the creator then he could do whatever he wanted, not for us to decide what he did, just for us to understand the process.

Belinda,

I wouldn't go as far as to say all kb binary objects are the product of capture only.

Some binary objects in the kb are probably the result of collision also.
In fact Pluto charon and its second moon make even the collision scenario tough to explain.
Two moons circling a small planet is tough to explain with any one mechanism.

In a belt of objects traveling at similar speeds it is much easier for one body to capture another and impacts a regular occurrence.

If we remove all the red giant stars, tiny red stars, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, hot blue stars, radiation spewing stars, multiple stars , stars younger than 1 billion years and unstable yellow stars, we are left with maybe 1 in 50 to 1 in 100 pretty stable yellow stars with good habitable zones.

I personally believe that if an earth like place exists its 100% chance of life, bacteria and virus.
I also believe that 99.99% of those earth 2s 3s etc will be just that, bacteria and virus and slime, even the lucky ones with nice moons.
I also believe that with all the chance happenings for earth/moon and the range of stars in our galaxy only a handful of other earths will exist in each galaxy, and only a handful of intelligent life forms will exist at one time in all the universe.

LOL as kirk says (no intelligent life here...beam me up scottie)

Agreed, Earth 2 was good and bad, kind of like earth 1.

Actually the Lava one was for SRAM, but you did an excellent job of explaining how lava gets to the surface past the crust.

Makes sense to me that if the earth is mostly molten then the heaviest objects Led Gold Iron etc migrate to the center to form a molten core, if not your Lava explanation might need a total rework.

Just a wild guess at finding another earth moon type system

Chance of earth sized planet at right stellar place 1/10 ... systems
Chance that said planet is a water world 1/10 ...wet
Chance of planetary crash that forms large moon 1/1,000,000 ... crashes
Chance that end product is earthlike 1/10 ... atmospheric remains of crash, spin composition etc

1 in a billion stars.
Might be a long look for earth 2

karov,

Very interesting ideas on  altering the Venus chemistry.

Cooling Venus is a must for anything useful to happen with its chemistry, so your idea of a cooling process as the chemistry happens is very interesting.

I can see a problem with the beaming of hydrogen  as the thermal temperatures increase, it will be very difficult to avoid steam with the production of h20.

Also we are talking about beaming 30 or so bars of hydrogen, not impossible but long term.

Some additional cooling process might be required as liquid water starts to accumulate in the atmosphere.
If not the steam effect on Venus will start to become a bigger and bigger problem with heating as co2 is converted in greater quantities of h20 and C.

Maybe instead of common h20 we can produce heavy water? and instead of free C we produce Carbon monoxide?
Both of them will alter the heating process and both soak up more bar pressure.
Both would lead to additional steps for Venus though.

neilzero,

Many thousands or millions of years to make an earth like place.

Venus probably got the way it is when its oceans boiled into its atmosphere, free hydrogen without a good magnetic field was lost to space, then the carbon was liberated from the crust as the temperature rose and bonded with the free O.

ALA co2 atmosphere.

Adding hydrogen to Venus now will produce water, but water on Venus just produces steam, a very powerful greenhouse gas.

Adding iron asteroids has its potential, but enough to alter that much co2 is a doubtful project, and still you need to break the co2 bonds so the iron has free oxygen to bond with.
Even if all the C on Venus boned to something it produces a 75mb Oxygen atmosphere so something even more plentiful will also need to bond to it.

Cooling Venus just produces vast quantities of co2 ice, maybe 200 miles thick planet wide.

Even if we could find a solution to all that ice we would still require a few million years for a natural plant cycle to produce an earthlike place.

Maybe something as simple as altering the co2 into carbon monoxide is the solution Venus needs to get things started.
carbon monoxide and free oxygen will occupy a much larger volume than co2, i doubt if Venus can hold an atmosphere much bigger than its current size.
At best though even a simple solution like it will leave you 50 times the volume of earths atmosphere or more.

Carbon monoxide bonds more readily with metal than co2 so lots of it at that point might reduce the atmosphere further.
Carbon monoxide (smog) is great at reflecting light, and nowhere near as good a greenhouse gas.

Unless we do something radical with Venus it will be a very long term stepped project. IMHO

No additional carbon on Venus vs earth, just in a bad form as co2.
The two worlds have very similar amounts of carbon.

The black hole idea is rather non thinkable, but the radiation input has some possibilities.

Creating a constant radiation disaster on Venus or in orbit might be a promising way to lock co2 away or break the co2 bonds or create new heat resistant carbon chains.

With pretty high constant radiation in any spectrum we choose and a  free source of power in the sun we should be able to alter the chemistry of Venus atmosphere.?

Ideas?