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What do you think of this idea. We mine the top layers of ice on the ice covered Galilean Moons, we then split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, we send the hydrogen to Venus to make water and oceans for that planet and we just release the left over oxygen to form oxygen atmosphere around Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. the oxygen atmospheres woul provide protection from radiation for the inner ice moons, the oxygen would be too cold to breath, but it would alleviate the need for pressure suits. People could wear thermally insulated and heated suits instead with heated filter masks to heat up the outside oxygen so it could be breathed by humans. I think since we need 60 bars of oxygen to make oceans for Venus, we may want to warm up those oxygen atmospheres so excess oxygen escapes into space. A cold pure oxygen atmosphere could last for a long time at these temperatures after all.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2014-05-11 15:20:51)
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If you have that much energy available, why not make super greenhouse gases whilst you're at it and terraform them completely...?
If you want hydrogen, just collect hydrogen. Whether it comes from Uranus or Sol, it's going to be a lot cheaper.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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It takes energy to split water molecules, perhaps the waste energy from that process can be used to heat the Moons while it goes on. Some other source of energy will be required to power it, maybe fusion would be convenient, as there is a lot of hydrogen and deuterium in the ice of these moons. Separate out the Deuterium, make some tritium, fuse it for energy generate electricity to split the water molecules, extract they hydrogen, separate out the Deuterium, the fusion process will make more tritium, more fusion occurs, more water is split, the hydrogen is collected, and stored in water ice tanks under pressure, when each tank is filled it is accelerated by a mass driver on an intercept course to Venus, or course each trajectory is different. Meanwhile the oxygen is released. Each Galilean Moon retains the oxygen, and the process covers the entire moon's surface to extract they hydrogen as quickly as technically possible as powered by the fusion process while maintaining a room temperature environment through waste heat. Eventually when Venus receives enough hydrogen to make it ocean this process stops and the moons cool down.
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Isn't it cheaper to mine the Sun for ready H?
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Isn't it cheaper to mine the Sun for ready H?
Hard to build equipment that could withstand the heat! The hydrogen in water ice is cold and easy to separate, also the Sun has a much deeper gravitational well than Ganymede.
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I've always thought the best this we can do with Venus is to freeze it. Drop a numerous airships into the atmosphere, designed to mine the atmosphere for, among other things, carbon, and using it to build connections to neighboring airships, and networking them together with lighter than air reflective panels, eventually creating huge shade over the planet. Without heat from the Sun, the temperature and pressure will drop to far more manageable levels.
Last edited by Excelsior (2014-05-12 18:50:53)
The Former Commodore
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karov wrote:Isn't it cheaper to mine the Sun for ready H?
Hard to build equipment that could withstand the heat! The hydrogen in water ice is cold and easy to separate, also the Sun has a much deeper gravitational well than Ganymede.
Well, my view is for using almost 100% plasmic hardware.
See:
https://www.google.com/search?q=jupiter … B499%3B276
A solar prominence or solar mass coronar ejection is nothing else but such structure. These fountains loop from solar surface spot to solar surface spot going up millions of km.s.
Make the millions dozens of millions and one could shortcut Sun and Venus electromagnetically, putting Venus in respect to Sun the same way Jupiter interacts with its moon Io, so the hyper-prominence looping via Venus.
Electromagnetically also one could tune up the plasma fluxes for different elemental species, thus channeling in Hydrogen.
Electromagnetically also at the Venusian end one could use electromagnetic effects cooling in order to import on Venus cryonically cooled down H ( readily recombined in neutral H2 molecules ) -- the Sun-Venus artificial flux tube ( hyper-prominense ) would possess enormous "radiator area", and its nature of electric current, makes it perfect for Zeebeck-Peltier system.
This solar mining operation is self-funding in respect of energy/momentum/mass, hence the higher solar escape velocity is no issue at all ( ref.: the solar particle wind ).
The Sun-Venus flux tube could also excert/exchange momentum - keeping the orbit of the planet and EVEN inputting faster rotation ( although I like the terraformed Venus with 2 months long days and nights more ).
The excess materials from Venus would be exported by the same mechanism. The 1% astronomical metals mined along/via the tube so, will be electromagnetically separated on the go, and this would comprise astronomical quantities of the whole Periodic Table -- ...
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I read a post from Terraformer that meantioned such a Carrington-class CME narrowly misses Earth
The close shave happened almost two years ago. On July 23, 2012, a plasma cloud or "CME" rocketed away from the sun as fast as 3000 km/s, more than four times faster than a typical eruption. The storm tore through Earth orbit, but fortunately Earth wasn't there. "If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,"
Roughly 15 minutes wow and even less to venus. With so much force to be beyond our capability to redirect it towards venus to be useful....
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Easier to drop comets on Venus. My proposal would technically be a hollow comet than contains hydrogen.
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Plasmoids could be "coherent"-ed.
I.e. the captured by the Sun-Venus flux tube cloud - the content of artificially induced or amplified or catalized "mass coronar ejection", safely confined within/along the magnetic lines, could be manipulated so the plasma particles in it to "dance" with modulated directions/vectors, phase, etc. - THUS extracting the energy in usefull electric form ( which to be transmitted/used by the self-replicating machinery which to sequester/separate the Venusian atmosphere, to cool down and to sculpture the terrain ), and to cool down the H2 before introduction on-planet.
Thus Venus could be terraformed "hi-end" way in mere decades.
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Using hollow-ed comets to deliver liquid or solid frozen hydrogen would take centuries to deploy the machinery, to power it ( with energy from where - the Sun, again? ) ... ... and yet it'll only deliver hydrogen, it won't do the rest of the job.
Delivering zillions of tonnes of liquid hydrogen in super-tankers crashed into Venus? - won't this only hissssss it back out in space?
Any imported stuff must be safely sequestrated on Venus, and the best proven way is to keep it down there in safe 2-3 and more atom molecular configurations.
Then only the tropopause and the exobase has to be tickled in order to achieve multi-billion years stability and prevent losses, although it won't be so crucial, given the super-abundant replenishment source.
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Why not drop 3 million metric tons of Cows while we are at it? Hope for the methane to impact the area and create a greenhouse effect?
Just as practical as everything else you have outlined here.
Masturbation takes many forms. All of them result in blindness.
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Venus doesn't need any more greenhouse effect, it is quite warm enough!
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