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I love this idea, but there is something missing: nitrogen. You need to extract some of that from Venus as well, and bring it with you. But if you really want

by mabbo 6y ago

I love this idea, but there is something missing: nitrogen. You need to extract some of that from Venus as well, and bring it with you. But if you really want to have fun with terraforming you should make Venus earth-like. I suggest an exciting starting point: build a solar shade at the Lagrange point and block the sun. That would eliminate most of the hard problems with Venus temporarily while we did whatever work is needed to get it spruced up. CO2 freezes to dry ice below -80C or so. You could let through just enough sunlight to get the atmosphere at a pressure humans can survive- then all we need is warm clothes and an oxygen tank. Once Venus is in that state, the problem is simpler- how to get all the carbon and oxygen separated so that the carbon stays in some kind of solid form. Oh, and we'll want to go get a load of hydrogen, likely from Jupiter, to mix with that Oxygen to form water. Your fleet of transports moving CO2 to Mars needs to make a detour on the way back. Edit: fixed a word and also lol, just start with building a planet-sized solar shade, says some a-hole on the internet.

raducu 6y ago
Reactionless drives would be so nice. Not only could you transport materials around, but you could make Venus spin in 24 hours in ~10^4 years using currenr Earth electricity output and a super-conducting emDrive -- I did the math a couple years ago.
- aeternum 6y ago
  There's really plenty of reaction mass around though. Could probably get it done quicker by having a few large drone ships that harvest reaction mass from the planet or nearby asteroids.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Reactionless drives are indeed nice and really really dangerous - they make Earth shattering relativistic projectiles a bit too much easy to pull off. Pair one such drive with a nuclear reactor and have it fly away from the sun for a while and then back - it will hit ludicrous speed on the way back, likely a good fraction of C. And there is hardly anything that can be done to prevent that as it needs just energy to gain speed, not bulky inefficient reaction mass.
  - pas 6y ago
    There's really no substitute to mind-uploading when it comes to defense against kinetic stuff.
    - m4rtink 6y ago
      Yep - the ultimate solution fo many dangerous sitations - make the people in danger more robust or ideally effectively immportal. Solves a lot of issues & makes otherwise very complicated safety measures into much simpler ones.
nkoren 6y ago
You still have to spin up the planet. An earth-like atomosphere would freeze solid on the dark side, and air from the light side would be rushing into the dark side, where it would freeze, until the light side was stripped of its atmosphere too. So the atmosphere would just be a mobile ice cap on the far side, rotating around the planet once per year, with the only gaseous atmosphere being a small, constantly-moving region of sublimation at the terminator betwen the light and dark sides. Make the atmosphere thick enough to not freeze on the far side, and it'll be absolutely boiling on the near side. The slow rotation means that there is no happy medium: either you've got an atmosphere freezing solid, or you're cooking half the planet at any given moment.
- mabbo 6y ago
  > You still have to spin up the planet. Do we? I think what you really want is to equalize the amount of solar radiation hitting all sides. And if I can build a planet-sized solar shade, well, why not go one step further and instead make a swarm of mirrors in orbit? When they orbit the sun-facing side, they reflect the light away from Venus. When they're opposite, they're in darkness anyway. But when they're in between, they reflect light towards the dark side of the planet! I choose the angle of every mirror in this swarm, and thus I choose the amount of solar radiation hitting each point on the planet at all times. Thus, Venus shall have one timezone, Venus Standard Time, and I swear to you it shall not have anything like Daylight Savings Time.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Not necessary, but convenient. Venus has very little water, so maybe impacting comets at the equator in the right direction would be enough to solve both problems
    - mabbo 6y ago
      That would take more than a few comets. And it might, somehow, make Venus even less livable. I read once that to slow Earth's rotation down to a stop, you'd need to perfectly sling 6 or more moons at it.
CapitalistCartr 6y ago
If you can build a planetary solar shade, engineer blue-green algae to survive the harsh conditions, and as soon as the temp on any part of the planet drops to survivable, seed the algae. It'll explode, sucking up the carbon.
epicureanideal 6y ago
I would love to see an economic analysis of this. How many billions for the solar shade array, for example. How many years until the planet becomes livable with an oxygen tank. How many people would pay to live on Venus, and so on.
- pas 6y ago
  Solar shades the expensive way (as in right now, launch from Earth): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqi0FabHHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqi0FabHHs After kickstarting a Lunar economy so you can manufacture and launch them well outside Earth's gravity well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8
sdenton4 6y ago
All this effort just to get sick at the bottom of another gravity well... Surely there's a nice moon of jupiter where the slippers would be a bit cheaper?
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Need some damn heavy slippers there I guess. Compared to the radiation environment there, earths van Allen belts are a walk in the park.
andy_ppp 6y ago
It’s almost as if we’ve been given a planetary system with an ideal set of building blocks to get to the next phase of life. But instead we’re going to choose to destroy the planet we currently have.

by mabbo 6y ago

raducu 6y ago

Reactionless drives would be so nice. Not only could you transport materials around, but you could make Venus spin in 24 hours in ~10^4 years using currenr Earth electricity output and a super-conducting emDrive -- I did the math a couple years ago.

aeternum 6y ago
There's really plenty of reaction mass around though. Could probably get it done quicker by having a few large drone ships that harvest reaction mass from the planet or nearby asteroids.
m4rtink 6y ago
Reactionless drives are indeed nice and really really dangerous - they make Earth shattering relativistic projectiles a bit too much easy to pull off. Pair one such drive with a nuclear reactor and have it fly away from the sun for a while and then back - it will hit ludicrous speed on the way back, likely a good fraction of C. And there is hardly anything that can be done to prevent that as it needs just energy to gain speed, not bulky inefficient reaction mass.
- pas 6y ago
  There's really no substitute to mind-uploading when it comes to defense against kinetic stuff.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Yep - the ultimate solution fo many dangerous sitations - make the people in danger more robust or ideally effectively immportal. Solves a lot of issues & makes otherwise very complicated safety measures into much simpler ones.

nkoren 6y ago

You still have to spin up the planet. An earth-like atomosphere would freeze solid on the dark side, and air from the light side would be rushing into the dark side, where it would freeze, until the light side was stripped of its atmosphere too. So the atmosphere would just be a mobile ice cap on the far side, rotating around the planet once per year, with the only gaseous atmosphere being a small, constantly-moving region of sublimation at the terminator betwen the light and dark sides. Make the atmosphere thick enough to not freeze on the far side, and it'll be absolutely boiling on the near side. The slow rotation means that there is no happy medium: either you've got an atmosphere freezing solid, or you're cooking half the planet at any given moment.

mabbo 6y ago
> You still have to spin up the planet. Do we? I think what you really want is to equalize the amount of solar radiation hitting all sides. And if I can build a planet-sized solar shade, well, why not go one step further and instead make a swarm of mirrors in orbit? When they orbit the sun-facing side, they reflect the light away from Venus. When they're opposite, they're in darkness anyway. But when they're in between, they reflect light towards the dark side of the planet! I choose the angle of every mirror in this swarm, and thus I choose the amount of solar radiation hitting each point on the planet at all times. Thus, Venus shall have one timezone, Venus Standard Time, and I swear to you it shall not have anything like Daylight Savings Time.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Not necessary, but convenient. Venus has very little water, so maybe impacting comets at the equator in the right direction would be enough to solve both problems
  - mabbo 6y ago
    That would take more than a few comets. And it might, somehow, make Venus even less livable. I read once that to slow Earth's rotation down to a stop, you'd need to perfectly sling 6 or more moons at it.

CapitalistCartr 6y ago

If you can build a planetary solar shade, engineer blue-green algae to survive the harsh conditions, and as soon as the temp on any part of the planet drops to survivable, seed the algae. It'll explode, sucking up the carbon.

epicureanideal 6y ago

I would love to see an economic analysis of this. How many billions for the solar shade array, for example. How many years until the planet becomes livable with an oxygen tank. How many people would pay to live on Venus, and so on.

pas 6y ago
Solar shades the expensive way (as in right now, launch from Earth): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqi0FabHHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqi0FabHHs After kickstarting a Lunar economy so you can manufacture and launch them well outside Earth's gravity well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOr-Gd58zu8

sdenton4 6y ago

All this effort just to get sick at the bottom of another gravity well... Surely there's a nice moon of jupiter where the slippers would be a bit cheaper?

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Need some damn heavy slippers there I guess. Compared to the radiation environment there, earths van Allen belts are a walk in the park.

andy_ppp 6y ago

It’s almost as if we’ve been given a planetary system with an ideal set of building blocks to get to the next phase of life. But instead we’re going to choose to destroy the planet we currently have.