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A crazy idea I had once to terraform Venus is to basically shoot cyanobacteria laden probes through the atmosphere to seed it, then wait for a few decades. You
by L_226 4y ago
A crazy idea I had once to terraform Venus is to basically shoot cyanobacteria laden probes through the atmosphere to seed it, then wait for a few decades. You could probably even engineer the cells to be specifically suited to the environment, temperature etc.
- rwmj 4y agoThis was proposed by Carl Sagan in the 1960s: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1961Sci...133..849S/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1961Sci...133..849S/abstra... https://www.jstor.org/stable/1706530 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1706530
- L_226 4y agoDamn, oh well. Thanks for the link!
- rwmj 4y agoUnfortunately the full article is annoyingly still paywalled (61 years after publication).
- codewithcheese 4y agoGoogle offers this download link for the PDF, works for me: https://canvas.harvard.edu/files/1871005/download?download_frd=1&verifier=n8I9I7C16PlT92wU2zsMNTKAkaugmNTRue9ba4AL https://canvas.harvard.edu/files/1871005/download?download_f...
- bloopernova 4y agoMy crazy Venusian terraforming idea is to attach mass drivers to millions of kuiper and oort cloud objects, and send them hurtling past Venus multiple times. The gravity drag would slowly but surely spin Venus up to a 24 hour day. Once that is achieved, the asteroids and comets would be used to create a moon for Venus, large enough to cause tides. While that is happening, create a large shade between the Sun and Venus. This will freeze the planet's atmosphere onto the ground, allowing processing factories to gather up all the chemicals and start creating soil, water, rivers, oceans, etc etc. It would probably take a while for the vulcanism to die down, but the whole process would take millennia. Like I said, utterly crazy and I'm sure wouldn't work for some flaw I'm not considering. I'd still like to try though!
- dtgriscom 4y agoNow you have the inner Solar System filled with millions of high-energy planetesimals crossing Earth's orbit (twice or more often). What could go wrong?