Terraforming Venus - methods anyone?

chat · 2004-05-01 07:17:40

kippy,

Use the leftover comet core to make a moon.

Each rocky core that is left over will slowly contribute to a moon.
With a small moon in L1 orbit, a chance exists to speed the spin of Venus with a little creative orbit change as we move them from L1 to a closer orbit.

Or you could smash those rocky cores together to help with blocking more sunlight.

I believe Venus at 1 earth atmosphere would still need a sunshade to keep it from getting to hot, or making 80% of the world unlivable.

At 1 earth atmosphere it gets to about 70c - 90c on the equator on Venus with no sun block and similar earth co2 levels.

Think we are stuck with a permanent sunshade of sorts, or decreasing the atmosphere further than 1 earth atmosphere.
All depends on how much c02 can be fixed, and how often it rains on Venus.

All the data I've looked at for teraforming Venus seems to point to near permanent rain as soon as the surface temperature gets below 100c.
With rain you also get a lot of co2 fixing, helping things cool faster.

With it raining all the time on Venus, a 1 earthlike atmosphere might no longer need a sun block at all.

chat · 2004-05-01 07:32:07

Earthfirst,

I've been thinking about what mercury could contribute to a Venus teraform.

Import iron dust from mercury.
Mercury is the easiest place to mine it in our solar system.

Iron dust will oxidize on Venus locking away o2 and decreasing the atmosphere.
Iron will also help the bacteria.

Rusty planet 2

kippy · 2004-05-01 10:03:44

It might be easier to get an iron astroid from the belt and push it toward venus. if you mine from mercury, you have to launch it out of a .38G gravity well. Plus you're going away from the sun so that's tough. a little push of a big iron ball might be a lot easier.

What else can we find in the belt that will oxidize? My preference is hydrogen but that has to come from the ort cloud or the giants.

~Eternal~ · 2004-05-01 10:13:31

When glucose mixes with Sulfuric Acid you get 6 Carbon atoms and 6 H2O Molecules.

H2SO4 + C6H12O6 -> 6C + 6H2O & H2SO4

Water of course is necessary, and the Carbon would be used to construct a "ring-around-the-world" that is 36,785,450,405,345,177.90 kilometers in circumference.

The ring would slowly speed up Venus's orbit.

You could pump up CO2 to Cargo Ships which could hold(I'm guessing) .5 bars at a time making 235 day voyages to Mars, Callisto, and back using VASMIR engines.

Cargo Ship :

So I'd say a healthy 122.33 year minimum using one cargo ship.

After that we'd be down to about 4 Bars of CO2, Nitrogen, & Water and Sulfuric Acid.

Scoop away the Sulfuric Acids to whatever and whererver they're needed for, reduce the atmosphere down to 391 mb CO2, 809 bars of nitrogen, You have your water, thus you can add your plants.

atitarev · 2004-05-02 04:49:40

When glucose mixes with Sulfuric Acid you get 6 Carbon atoms and 6 H2O Molecules.
H2SO4 + C6H12O6 -> 6C + 6H2O & H2SO4
Water of course is necessary, and the Carbon would be used to construct a "ring-around-the-world" that is 36,785,450,405,345,177.90 kilometers in circumference.
The ring would slowly speed up Venus's orbit.
You could pump up CO2 to Cargo Ships which could hold(I'm guessing) .5 bars at a time making 235 day voyages to Mars, Callisto, and back using VASMIR engines.
So I'd say a healthy 122.33 year minimum using one cargo ship.
After that we'd be down to about 4 Bars of CO2, Nitrogen, & Water and Sulfuric Acid.
Scoop away the Sulfuric Acids to whatever and whererver they're needed for, reduce the atmosphere down to 391 mb CO2, 809 bars of nitrogen, You have your water, thus you can add your plants.

Good work, Eternal!

I think the pressure on Venus doesn't have to be as low as on Earth - from 2 to 4 or 5 bars might be OK (?) but the percentage of CO2 when the terraformation is complete should be lower.

There is no limit in how many cargo ships could go, so if the number of them and the capacity is higher, we could get rid of the excess atmosphere sooner.

I didn't get how the ring would work to speed up the rotation.

~Eternal~ · 2004-05-02 11:33:58

Other members were more descripitive of the such a ring in earlier post.

chat · 2004-05-02 19:43:38

kippy,

I couldn't think of anything else to get from mercury

Dumping iron dust on Venus would help things a lot, but i agree the benefit from getting it from mercury to Venus is probably not worthwhile.

But as i was thinking about the iron from mercury, i thought about all that iron inside Venus already.

I wonder if simply mining iron from below the surface and creating a fine iron powder could help.

If the dust is fine enough you should be able to send it into high altitude and spread it over all of Venus pretty easy.

Might be another low tech tool for the teraform.

Eternal,

1 good sized comet impact on mars would be much simpler to teraform mars.

On the current Venus it does have a huge atmosphere, but also has all the ingredients needed to teraform it.

Who knows what chemistry would happen to Venus if it began to teraform, we might need everything it has and more.
Only on the current Venus is co2 a big problem.
On a Venus with a permanent sun block, will co2 be the big teraform stopper or will a cooler wet Venus use up its own co2?

The glucose is a great idea to decrease the sulfuric acid, and a tool for teraforming for sure.

atitarev,

I agree, it all depends on the co2 in the atmosphere and not so much on the amount of atmosphere.

As long as people in space suits can walk on the surface until a teraform is complete, it is only a time thing.

Long time for full teraform or short time.

chat · 2004-05-03 04:51:19

Just wondering if fine iron dust would react directly with co2?

If it does strip the o2 away with a direct reaction with co2, then iron dust might be a very good teraform tool.
Iron will be in abundance at Venus already.

I think fine iron dust in the high atmosphere would also reflect quite a bit of sunlight?.

Two small iron asteroids colliding together in low Venus orbit might be the easiest way to get the iron dust to Venus?.

Wish Kippy would hurry up and get that darn comet to the L1 orbit so we can start mining

Rxke · 2004-05-03 05:00:36

:up: Great posts, people!

I always thought terraforming Venus was too hard to even begin contemplating the idea, but you guys make it seem... simple!

(heh)

Great ideas, some sheer genius, esp. the comet-tail sunscreen: brilliant!

kippy · 2004-05-03 07:55:24

Eternal,

You posted that:

H2SO4 + C6H12O6 -> 6C + 6H2O & H2SO4

Does that mean that the acid is on both sides of the equation and just acts as a catalyst? In any case, you would have to ship trillions of tons of carbon and oxygen that you could already find on Venus. Also, that's a lot of sugar for Earth to supply. I don't think all the bees in history could produce enough. Why not just ship the hydrogen? You get a 9:1 return of water to hydrogen. I'm no chemist so please correct me if I'm wrong. Also would this add heat or suck it up?

Would a ring around the world do anything to speed up it's rotation? I can't see how it would. Same thing with a moon. A moon might try to get it into tidal lock but unless it's very massive, that would take a long time.

I'm against shipping gasses interplanetary except in the cases where you have no alternative (nitrogen to mars) or hydrogen because of the aforementioned high yield of useful stuff like water.

chat,

I love the idea of using the burnt out comet cores to build a moon system. Again, I don't think they'll be of any use as a world spinner but if you built huge mylar sails on them, they would act as decent sun shades and full moons for the night side. Not perfect shades but on a wet Venus a full shade might not be needed. If you had about 10 of them in orbit it wouldn't matter that they would be moving around the planet rather than at L1. Besides, I don't think an L1 moon would be doable because L1 objects have to be constantly adjusted to make sure they don't land on Venus or the sun.

===

Here's my latest crazy plan. I'm still all about hydrogen bombardment of venus to clear the air and make oceans. The bottleneck is getting that much hydrogen from the gas giants. My first plan was to use tanker ships that dove into the atmosphere to scoop up the gas and go back to Venus. It might be a bit tricky to make ships that big that can handle that kind of stress.

So what about a space elevator in orbit of a gas giant? It wouldn't have to be long enough to touch the surface, just skim the atmosphere. It also wouldn't need to be in geosynchronous orbit. You would pump or ship gas up to a space station at the top of the elevator and tankers could pick it up at the top and cart it off. Here's the best part: you could mine He3 in the process both to fund the effort, make a profit and provide energy for the pumping/shipping and the tanker ships.

This of course assumes carbon nanotubes, monster tanker ships and second generation fusion but it's a nice way to mine hydrogen. Hey, I think I may have invented http://www.starwars.com/databank/locati … html]Cloud City

I'm working on getting that comet heading to the Venus/Sun L1 point.

kippy · 2004-05-03 12:55:57

Just wondering if fine iron dust would react directly with co2?

Well I did a quick check and it seems that molten iron will react with CO2 to form rust and CO. So you fix a lot of oxygen that way but you end up with a lot of CO which is toxic. I don't know if it's a greenhouse gas.

I guess you could take care of the CO with some hydrogen but if you've got a supply of hydrogen, you would probably want to just react it with the CO2 to maximize your water output. Anything react with CO in a nice way?

I don't know. I'm not too keen on the idea of locking away a potentailly useful substance like oxygen. breaking it off of the iron again would be a pain in the butt.

~Eternal~ · 2004-05-03 15:37:52

Yeah the Sufluric Acid would simply breakdown the Glucose into to Carbon and Water but wouldn't chemically change itself ;b.

kippy · 2004-05-03 16:38:23

The SO2 in the atmosphere would be a bitch to deal with. The more I look into this, the more terraforming Venus looks like large scale chemestry.

I found a way to get a sulfur snow http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCESoft/CC … 1.HTM]here. If you sprinkle calcium oxide CaO into the SO2 clouds. It's a 1:1 reaction but the SO2 would precipitate out of it's gas form and fall down to the ground. Of course the temperature, moisture and wind could mess up the whiole reaction but it seems like sulfur fixing wouldn't be overly complicated.

Earthfirst · 2004-05-03 17:31:09

Great ideas! I have hread of plans to use metals to react with the atmosphere to reduce it. Like sodium, iron, calium. These metals in there pure forms are very reactive and would reduce the co2. Srouces can be mercury, or iron astorodes.
Air braking a big rock would work, or smashing two together. The dust would block the sun, and slowly rain down over time, killing two birds with one stone.

chat · 2004-05-03 20:49:25

Rxke,

Thanks

Its great fun to go from a technical nightmare teraform, to a easy 4 step teraform plan.

I'm starting to think that Venus might be easier to teraform than mars.
More practical anyway.

kippy,

co seems to be a poor greenhouse gas.
Its quite toxic to most life forms, but does drop
the atmosphere from 92 bars to around 60 bars or less.
It will also remove most of the greenhouse gas co2 from Venus.

I wonder how much the temperature would drop just from converting all the co2 to co and decreasing the
atmosphere to around 60 bars?
Could we see 99c surface temperatures and rain just from that?

An added benefit is when you add hydrogen to co it fixes 2 co molecules and not 1 for co2.

So adding 30 bars of hydrogen would just about fix all of the atmosphere into h20 and C.

Each L1 comet would probably produce a few bars of hydrogen, maybe all 30 from 1?

The free oxygen that gets to Venus from the comet will be fixed with the iron, so the hydrogen is free to react with only the co.

It does decrease the potential h20 on the planet by 50%, but how much water does Venus really need?
We would end up with the equivalent of 30 bars of water fixing co, that is a lot.

I agree that the leftover comet cores wont help much to speed up the spin at Venus, even with a well de orbited core you would probably only speed up Venus spin by a small % of a day.

I guess if we moved them from L1 to a close orbit in an elliptical orbit, we might get a bit more Venus spin from doing that.
It wont be a gigantic effect though, but its free, and with each elliptical pass a little more Venus spin.
I would hate to be the guy that worked out how to do that though *lol*

I think your right that it might be better to smash them together at a closer orbit, or use them as a base to erect reflectors to block sunlight.

Earthfirst,
Seems like the more we look at Venus the more it becomes a best chemical solution.
That L1 comet would really start the teraform rolling.

I think your right about smashing those iron asteroids together in orbit.
Block the sun and let the dust fall where it may.

Seems like the iron asteroids collisions go first, then a bit later the L1 comet gets parked.
As soon as it rains on Venus, seed the bacteria to speed it up.
Large magnets on the poles to correct the solar wind
and radiation problem.
Algae to balance the mix.
Then one really long Venus type weekend party

I think we could actually do this in the near future, now with good planning.

dicktice · 2004-05-04 08:26:25

All right: let's say that Venus has been terrformed, somehow, to Earthlike surface conditions. As a mind problem, how different would it be to vacation on such a planet for a year?

kippy · 2004-05-04 10:18:43

All right: let's say that Venus has been terrformed, somehow, to Earthlike surface conditions. As a mind problem, how different would it be to vacation on such a planet for a year?

Well if it's a prefect replica of Earth, the only differences would be geography and the fact that the year would be shorter. The differences would all be tied to how different it would be from Earth. Day length is probably going to be different for a few thousand years at least.

I guess it all depends on what you would call Earthlike conditions. Earth itself is pretty varied remember. Venus could have people living on 25C polar regions with everything in the tropical and subtropical zones well above the boiling point of water. That's still a few thousand square kilometers of Earthlike condiitions.

chat · 2004-05-04 11:01:31

dicktice,

In my thoughts Venus would feel similar but totaly different.

Probably 19 days of nice weather as the sun comes up,19 days of a very big hot sun (take shelter on day 9-15 as it will be quite hot, and 19 more days of nice weather as the sun sets.

At night it will get quite cool and you might see snow near the poles at mid night cycle.
The stars would be awesome on Venus with a very dark night, but the clouds wont offer any viewing of them except on rare occasions.

The equator is going to have to stay below 100c or its going to start a steam cycle at Venus, starting that runaway greenhouse again.
A day or two above 100c on the equator is ok, but for the most part a steam cycle is real bad.

The inhabitants at Venus will throw all the resources into making it a cooler world, and claiming more land towards the equator is it cools.
The main work on Venus will be cooling engineer, iron mining, space technologist, biologist or chemical engineer.
Get a degree in one of them if your going to Venus and want the big venudollars.

I forsee a lot of rain on Venus, most of the time if not all the time, the water cycle will be much more robust on Venus.
Expect some pretty nasty thunderstorms and very few days without rain

Since Venus has quite a bit of sulphur in the atmosphere you might want a gas mask all the time. *lol*
With all that sulphur, a orange or pinkish sky depending on what else is left in the atmosphere.

Very alien but very familiar as you go fishing in the bath water temperature rusty colored lakes in the northern regions, filled with warm tolerant fish and very thick algae.

chat · 2004-05-04 11:13:48

Kippy,

Just thinking out loud here.
If we did convert a lot of the Venus atmosphere into h20.
With such a robust water cycle on Venus wouldn't the cloud get so thick that 0% sunlight reaches the ground?

Weird to think that it might freeze Venus at the surface.

chat · 2004-05-05 04:53:15

Kippy,

I did a little more math on the teraform and a real probability of a freeze exists.

With 2 iron asteroid impacts in orbit of 250 meters each, enough iron falls to Venus as dust to convert all of the atmosphere to co.
The debris left in orbit also reflect about 50% of the sunlight getting to Venus.

So much fine iron dust stays in the high atmosphere that it reflects nearly 75% of the light at Venus.
And the co also reduces the planets original temperature by about the same amount.

With that much cooling on Venus, on the night side it should rain or snow causing almost everything else from the clouds down to be scrubbed, and even more cooling as the sulphur is removed.

Sulphur ponds at night. PU *lol*

I think the L1 comet will have to be introduced pretty soon after the iron asteroid orbit impacts, or to much useful co will be absorbed into those ponds and rock and iron.

Without the L1 in place i believe that a co Venus continues to decrease its atmosphere until its all gone.
Or all converted into c and co2 at a much lower bar # when the iron runs out.
With radiation still making it through, the co will break into c and o, the co will grab the free o and become co2, the co2 the iron dust turns back into co.
With this chemistry we will loose all the O pretty fast without hydrogen to lock it into h2o.

REB · 2004-05-05 07:30:01

Once a water cycle got going on Venus, wouldn’t the sulfur get scrubbed out and locked into the rocks?

JammerG55 · 2004-05-05 13:07:40

Not nessarily I dont think that there is much water on the planet to start a with.

REB · 2004-05-05 13:12:28

I was assuming we added water to Venus with comets, converting CO2, or some other way and started a water cycle.

I think an ocean worth of water would scrub any harmful sulfur out of the environment.

kippy · 2004-05-05 16:40:05

This is a long post so brace yourself. Also, there’s some crackhead math in here to correct me if I’m wrong.

First, I was thinking about reducing the CO2 to CO with an iron asteroid. The reaction that I found was with molten iron so I don’t even think dropping an iron lump into the atmosphere would do the trick even if it were dust. Even if it could reduce the CO2 into CO, I don’t see a need for that right away. A sunscreen will take care of the heat problem. Also, locking away all that oxygen seems like a bad idea to me. If we do import hydrogen we’d get two molecules of H2O for a CO2 molecule as opposed to a single one for a CO molecule. The more water the better in my opinion. Plus, I don’t think that crashing iron asteroids would yield a dust cloud. I’m inclined to think that they might fuse or just break up into dump truck sized particles that would just crash to the surface.

Now back to the L1 comet idea. Keeping a comet positioned at L1 might be a hard thing to do. Sending the comet toward Venus might be “easy” but breaking it to stop at a particular point in space sounds tough. Even if we could do some magic with a gravity de-assist around Venus and swing it into L1, you would have to constantly correct its position. L1 is unstable to begin with plus the comet will be changing mass and spouting geysers and points of thrust minute by minute. I suppose you could keep it in place with some kind of giant net attached to some craft. They could adjust its position to keep it in place but that might be difficult to impossible.

Another alternative would be to just put them into orbit around Venus. It seems easier to insert them into some kind of orbit rather than halting them at L1. If you could have 4 or 5 in orbit you would still get pretty good coverage. After they burn out, you could leave them where they are and mount magnets and solar sails on them to block solar wind and light.

Now according to my old math, you’d need 3.8 x 10^19 kg if H2 to convert all the CO2 into water and C. I looked up some info on Halley’s comet and if you assume that we can wrangle similar objects they would each contain about 2.45x10^15 kg of water. Only 1/9th of that would be H so each comet would contain about 2.7x10^13 kg of hydrogen. That means you’d need 100,000 (or 1 million if I’m off by an order of magnitude) Halley’s comet type objects to provide enough H to convert the atmosphere to water and graphite. Lumping together that many burnt out comets would make a nice moon but getting that many to Venus sounds impossible to me.

In short, I think the comets will act as great sunshades but whatever hydrogen they add won’t be significant. This also tells me that you’d need something like 10,000-100,000 comets to get 10% of the Earth’s water to Venus. Getting that many there would be tough and crashing them there would devastate the surface. Pure hydrogen importation looks like the only feasible option to get water onto Venus.

That will still take a long time and probably involve founding a gas-mining operation on the outer gas giants but it seems to me that it’s the best way to go.

So let’s assume that you import all that hydrogen and you get a 3 bar nitrogen atmosphere with enough O2 and CO2 to support plant and animal life. UV light would still be a problem but couldn’t we construct an ozone layer to block that out? Sulfur would be a problem but I agree with REB that a water cycle would eventually wash all the acid rain out of the atmosphere. Failing that, I’m sure that anything else we would need could be gotten from the planet itself. If we need to fix oxygen or sulfur with iron or calcium, we could just dig for it pick-and-shovel style and send it up into the atmosphere via balloon, catapult or smokestack. No need for nuclear rockets strapped to planetoids that take 50 years to arrive.

I think the plant life thing will be interesting. There are plants grown in the artic circle that get as big as a car because of the 6 month day. I think certain plants would just go into a 4 month growth spurt during the day and go into winter mode at night. Actually, that’s a much simpler arrangement than what they have now. On earth, they have to deal with patterns of light and dark embedded into a cold/warm cycle. Since Venus’ axial tilt is virtually 0 it’s likely that there will be no seasons, just day and night.

Chat, water is a funny greenhouse gas. It can trap heat or reflect it depending on its form. Since no one knows for sure what the temperature range would be on a stable Venus, it’s hard to tell what the water’s effect would be as a greenhouse gas. That also leads into another realization I had. All the methods we’ve talked about so far deal with getting Venus 90% of the way to habitable. I think that last 10% is going to be the killer. The difference between an average planetary temperature or 15C and 35 C is only 20 degrees but it could drastically change the climate of the place. I think it’s the fine tuning that will be the really touchy part after all the comets, hydrogen, sunshades, L1 magnets, moonlets and biosphere are put into place.

atitarev · 2004-05-05 17:03:47

...I think certain plants would just go into a 4 month growth spurt during the day and go into winter mode at night....

I am just commenting on the length of the Venusian day again. The solar day is not 4 months long but less than 2 (58 days), so is the night. (See my post with a link in this topic from 15 April) The diurnal period on Venus is almost half of its rotational day due to the direction of its rotation. It's an important point about Venus because it makes it somewhat easier to survive for plants and animals.

Otherwise, a great post, Kippy.

I read there are some plants and animals that can survive in 90C (in water). Don't remember what they are. They would be perfect pioneers on a terraformed Venus.

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