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I've always wondered why we don't seed it with some biology that can eat the components of the Venusian atmosphere (ie: sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide) to make a

I've always wondered why we don't seed it with some biology that can eat the components of the Venusian atmosphere (ie: sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide) to make a more habitable planet over time.

thebooktocome 7y ago
Because we've failed to terraform much closer, less inhospitable environments, and the risks for getting it wrong are very high.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  Wait, what are the risks? It's not like you're going to make Venus _more_ inhospitable than it already is. Worst case scenario is we'd lose some valuable scientific information about Venus in its natural state.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    The risk that Venus is or was once host to some form of life, and humans deliberately contaminating Venus with life would obscure any evidence of it. That is a very serious worse-case scenario because non-earth life would be truly invaluable to biology. It seems like a remote risk to me, but not something to shrug off. Particularly since the usefulness of introducing life to Venus is itself quite remote.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Life in temperatures that melts lead? Oh... or do you mean in the atmosphere?
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        > Life in temperatures that melts lead? Why not? It'd have to have different chemistry, sure, but even on Earth life exists in some pretty extreme temperature and environment ranges.
        tfha 7y ago
        Life really starts to struggle above 100 C. I think the most heat tolerant organisms we know of top out around 130 C. Life that could operate at 500 C is probably not water based at all, which would be very novel and certainly interesting to science.
      - darkpuma 7y ago
        Either. It does seem unlikely, but the truth is we just don't know.
      - dougmwne 7y ago
        For all we know the Soviet Vega missions could have introduced airborne microbial life into the high atmosphere. We may have already seeded Venus.
  - thebooktocome 7y ago
    Yes, that is a high risk. We're not exactly lush with accessible Earth-ish planets near the habitable zone.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    Wait, what are the risks? It's not like you're going to make Venus _more_ inhospitable than it already is. To some weird soul out there on the Internet, this sounds like a challenge.
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  Which environments are you referring to? Venus is the closest planet to Earth. The Moon is the only significant body between the two. And by 'we've failed to terraform', did you mean 'we haven't tried yet'?
  - thebooktocome 7y ago
    As far as I'm aware, nobody's succeeded in turning deserts into farm land on a large scale. Various parties keep trying but the water, fertilizer, and maintenance costs are astronomical.
    - hsnewman 7y ago
      Israel has turned much of it's desert into farmland and forests. For example, the Yatir forest is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yatir_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yatir_Forest
    - aeternus 7y ago
      We definitely have. There's huge environmental impact, but that is to be expected. California's Central Valley project is an example, and China has some that are even larger.
    - heurist 7y ago
      All of Los Angeles/most of southern California was a desert, wasn't it? Massive water redistribution is the reason tens of millions of people can live there. Much of California's agriculture comes from the same water redistribution projects. Plus, there's no life that we know of on Venus. A bacterial population capable of living, evolving, and growing exponentially in that environment would be a huge change.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    We're currently in the process of terraforming earth to make it slightly less habitable.
    - anticensor 7y ago
staplers 7y ago
Europeans said the same about North America when they landed on it.. we might want to study it a bit before making biosphere decisions like that.. not to mention the feasibility of it being possible.
Shivetya 7y ago
because we probably don't neither Venus nor the techniques required to make such a change, let alone the money or need. the material requirements alone would be staggering plus we cannot discount the attention span problem, this isn't something likely to be done in a life time
- jacobush 7y ago
  You are probably right, but wouldn't any technology which actually has a chance of working, also have the property that a small seeding might have the chance of "taking hold" and working wether we remember to continue on it or not? To be clear, I mean if someone drops a bunch of microbes, only once, and not all of them die but slowly start to mix and live in the atmosphere, wouldn't they over millennia, very slowly but also very unstoppably, eat until everything they want to eat is eaten?
ar-nelson 7y ago
Wouldn't this take thousands or millions of years? Doesn't seem like there's much incentive for a project like that.
- jacobush 7y ago
  If it's cheap, why not try it?
barkingcat 7y ago
Because what if there are Venusians there already and we cannot afford to wage an interplanetary war.
- bluGill 7y ago
  They might be there and we don't know about it. However the ability to wage interplanetary war implies are a lot of technology that we would be able to detect. Even if we assume they have the space ships in "mothballs", they would need to test and maintain them - something we can detect - or risk that they don't work when they need them.
m31415 7y ago
In Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, Venus is terraformed by inserting a large sunshade in the L1 Lagrange point of the Venus-Sun system. This makes Venus significantly cooler and atmospheric CO2 freezes. The frozen CO2 is then easily removed.
empath75 7y ago
We can’t even fix the climate where we live, with much easier solutions.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  large part of it is sociopolitical: major populated and productive countries are locked by their social and economical structure into the need of perpetual growth to inject capital at the base as the top scoop up any floating wealth, stopping the growth without some for. of wealth redistribution would cause massive instability and with the margin of today production the first two to introduce climate control will be eaten (economically speaking) by the third one. on the other hand we could likely today engineer algae or fungi to fix carbon into cellulose but you're going to need massive space for their growth and some place for their disposal, unless you can make some sort of bioplastic out of it, because burning them would defeat the purpose, and I bet once you put the number in the unbelievable scale needed for the project would scare the bejesus out of the very same ambientalists types that are currently most vocal about saving the world but abhor nuclear anyway I think the real issue NASA has about bioengineering are ethical, and Venus is in the same protection category as Venus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection you can draw parallels between the development of cities as Rome, London, Chicago and Los Angeles substituting environmental protection with historical buildings protections. it's important to preserve the best and most relevant landmarks of course but too much and it becomes a real drag.
- m0zg 7y ago
  Technically we can. We just can't do it (currently) without ruining the living standards for 90% of the world's population.
BariumBlue 7y ago
Microbes require water, and there isn't enough for them on/in Venus
- tfha 7y ago
  Earth microbes require water. Who knows what alien life has as its building blocks.
ianstallings 7y ago
There is debate within the scientific community about changing other planets in general. Not everyone is convinced that we should alter or terraform to suit our needs. Some related links: https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/ https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/ https://www.astrobio.net/mars/should-we-terraform/ https://www.astrobio.net/mars/should-we-terraform/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_terraforming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_terraforming
- gubbrora 7y ago
  This is like nimbyism on steroids. "No one build anything what if there is Rare Science in our backyards". I mean yes I do kinda see your point, but priorities man. There are ridiculously large advantages to colonizing the universe and destroying a few samples is a low price.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Particularly when we don't even know have reason to believe there are samples. If/when we detect life elsewhere we can talk about leaving it alone, but there are plenty of rocks in the universe with no life that we can work with.
    - ianstallings 7y ago
      We can still explore them. It's the contamination of them that is at question.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        Why is contamination a question? there are millions of rocks scattered around that are not contaminated or explored. There is more to learn by contaminating a few and seeing what happens than to leave them all uncontaminated.
  - ianstallings 7y ago
    It's not that we can't or won't. It's that we should study and debate it before we do anything to change the environment. Given how humans have run roughshod over so many environments, I think carefulness might be warranted.
jbay808 7y ago
You might already know this, but Carl Sagan proposed exactly that plan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus It would probably require more advanced bioengineering and understanding of ecology and extremophiles than we currently have, but it might still be the only feasible plan.

I've always wondered why we don't seed it with some biology that can eat the components of the Venusian atmosphere (ie: sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide) to make a more habitable planet over time.

thebooktocome 7y ago

Because we've failed to terraform much closer, less inhospitable environments, and the risks for getting it wrong are very high.

ForHackernews 7y ago
Wait, what are the risks? It's not like you're going to make Venus _more_ inhospitable than it already is. Worst case scenario is we'd lose some valuable scientific information about Venus in its natural state.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  The risk that Venus is or was once host to some form of life, and humans deliberately contaminating Venus with life would obscure any evidence of it. That is a very serious worse-case scenario because non-earth life would be truly invaluable to biology. It seems like a remote risk to me, but not something to shrug off. Particularly since the usefulness of introducing life to Venus is itself quite remote.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Life in temperatures that melts lead? Oh... or do you mean in the atmosphere?
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      > Life in temperatures that melts lead? Why not? It'd have to have different chemistry, sure, but even on Earth life exists in some pretty extreme temperature and environment ranges.
      - tfha 7y ago
        Life really starts to struggle above 100 C. I think the most heat tolerant organisms we know of top out around 130 C. Life that could operate at 500 C is probably not water based at all, which would be very novel and certainly interesting to science.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      Either. It does seem unlikely, but the truth is we just don't know.
    - dougmwne 7y ago
      For all we know the Soviet Vega missions could have introduced airborne microbial life into the high atmosphere. We may have already seeded Venus.
- thebooktocome 7y ago
  Yes, that is a high risk. We're not exactly lush with accessible Earth-ish planets near the habitable zone.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Wait, what are the risks? It's not like you're going to make Venus _more_ inhospitable than it already is. To some weird soul out there on the Internet, this sounds like a challenge.
theandrewbailey 7y ago
Which environments are you referring to? Venus is the closest planet to Earth. The Moon is the only significant body between the two. And by 'we've failed to terraform', did you mean 'we haven't tried yet'?
- thebooktocome 7y ago
  As far as I'm aware, nobody's succeeded in turning deserts into farm land on a large scale. Various parties keep trying but the water, fertilizer, and maintenance costs are astronomical.
  - hsnewman 7y ago
    Israel has turned much of it's desert into farmland and forests. For example, the Yatir forest is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yatir_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yatir_Forest
  - aeternus 7y ago
    We definitely have. There's huge environmental impact, but that is to be expected. California's Central Valley project is an example, and China has some that are even larger.
  - heurist 7y ago
    All of Los Angeles/most of southern California was a desert, wasn't it? Massive water redistribution is the reason tens of millions of people can live there. Much of California's agriculture comes from the same water redistribution projects. Plus, there's no life that we know of on Venus. A bacterial population capable of living, evolving, and growing exponentially in that environment would be a huge change.
- pjc50 7y ago
  We're currently in the process of terraforming earth to make it slightly less habitable.
  - anticensor 7y ago

staplers 7y ago

Europeans said the same about North America when they landed on it.. we might want to study it a bit before making biosphere decisions like that.. not to mention the feasibility of it being possible.

Shivetya 7y ago

because we probably don't neither Venus nor the techniques required to make such a change, let alone the money or need. the material requirements alone would be staggering plus we cannot discount the attention span problem, this isn't something likely to be done in a life time

jacobush 7y ago
You are probably right, but wouldn't any technology which actually has a chance of working, also have the property that a small seeding might have the chance of "taking hold" and working wether we remember to continue on it or not? To be clear, I mean if someone drops a bunch of microbes, only once, and not all of them die but slowly start to mix and live in the atmosphere, wouldn't they over millennia, very slowly but also very unstoppably, eat until everything they want to eat is eaten?

ar-nelson 7y ago

Wouldn't this take thousands or millions of years? Doesn't seem like there's much incentive for a project like that.

jacobush 7y ago
If it's cheap, why not try it?

barkingcat 7y ago

Because what if there are Venusians there already and we cannot afford to wage an interplanetary war.

bluGill 7y ago
They might be there and we don't know about it. However the ability to wage interplanetary war implies are a lot of technology that we would be able to detect. Even if we assume they have the space ships in "mothballs", they would need to test and maintain them - something we can detect - or risk that they don't work when they need them.

m31415 7y ago

In Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, Venus is terraformed by inserting a large sunshade in the L1 Lagrange point of the Venus-Sun system. This makes Venus significantly cooler and atmospheric CO2 freezes. The frozen CO2 is then easily removed.

empath75 7y ago

We can’t even fix the climate where we live, with much easier solutions.

LoSboccacc 7y ago
large part of it is sociopolitical: major populated and productive countries are locked by their social and economical structure into the need of perpetual growth to inject capital at the base as the top scoop up any floating wealth, stopping the growth without some for. of wealth redistribution would cause massive instability and with the margin of today production the first two to introduce climate control will be eaten (economically speaking) by the third one. on the other hand we could likely today engineer algae or fungi to fix carbon into cellulose but you're going to need massive space for their growth and some place for their disposal, unless you can make some sort of bioplastic out of it, because burning them would defeat the purpose, and I bet once you put the number in the unbelievable scale needed for the project would scare the bejesus out of the very same ambientalists types that are currently most vocal about saving the world but abhor nuclear anyway I think the real issue NASA has about bioengineering are ethical, and Venus is in the same protection category as Venus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection you can draw parallels between the development of cities as Rome, London, Chicago and Los Angeles substituting environmental protection with historical buildings protections. it's important to preserve the best and most relevant landmarks of course but too much and it becomes a real drag.
m0zg 7y ago
Technically we can. We just can't do it (currently) without ruining the living standards for 90% of the world's population.

BariumBlue 7y ago

Microbes require water, and there isn't enough for them on/in Venus

tfha 7y ago
Earth microbes require water. Who knows what alien life has as its building blocks.

ianstallings 7y ago

There is debate within the scientific community about changing other planets in general. Not everyone is convinced that we should alter or terraform to suit our needs. Some related links: https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/ https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/ https://www.astrobio.net/mars/should-we-terraform/ https://www.astrobio.net/mars/should-we-terraform/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_terraforming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_terraforming

gubbrora 7y ago
This is like nimbyism on steroids. "No one build anything what if there is Rare Science in our backyards". I mean yes I do kinda see your point, but priorities man. There are ridiculously large advantages to colonizing the universe and destroying a few samples is a low price.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Particularly when we don't even know have reason to believe there are samples. If/when we detect life elsewhere we can talk about leaving it alone, but there are plenty of rocks in the universe with no life that we can work with.
  - ianstallings 7y ago
    We can still explore them. It's the contamination of them that is at question.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Why is contamination a question? there are millions of rocks scattered around that are not contaminated or explored. There is more to learn by contaminating a few and seeing what happens than to leave them all uncontaminated.
- ianstallings 7y ago
  It's not that we can't or won't. It's that we should study and debate it before we do anything to change the environment. Given how humans have run roughshod over so many environments, I think carefulness might be warranted.

jbay808 7y ago

You might already know this, but Carl Sagan proposed exactly that plan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus It would probably require more advanced bioengineering and understanding of ecology and extremophiles than we currently have, but it might still be the only feasible plan.