making it possible to live on Venus

Hey ok you know how Venus is filled with CO2, well I always why we can't just make a machine that can do the job of a tree but a billion times faster and send it off to Venus. Therefore making it probably possible to live there.

 

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The surface of Venus has very high atmospheric pressures that would likely crush you. Not to mention the high temperatures and Venus's sulphuric acid rain. It would take much more than adding oxygen to make it habitable.

 

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Well, go ahead, what are you waiting for? You design and build that machine and I'll see that one gets sent to Venus, okay? Just notify me and I'll fire up the rockets.

Baron Max

 

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Remove a large part of the Venusian atmosphere and ship it to Mars. That's killing two birds with one stone so to speak. When the Venusian atmospheric pressure is about 14.5 PSI at the surface then the temperature will be low enough to allow plant photosynthesis and oxygen production. This is just a start. Getting Venus to rotate at a faster rate will be the hard part.

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The hard part after getting rid of the CO2 would be the lack of hydrogen, and therefor lack water. You would need to ship in vast amounts of water (or hydrogen to combine with Venus's oxygen to make water).

 

If Earth is going to be like Venus, as it probably was in early formation, because of pollution, but humans can find some kind of way to reverse it (they won't), then do "We have the technology?"...

 

I know they are working on potential technologies to terraform Mars, but I am not aware of any similar official project for Venus.

Where are you getting the hydrogen from? Oh, I see Nasor has made much the same comment.

This is an easy one.

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Send von Neuman probes to the Oort cloud, land on comets and direct them in towards Venus, powering them by ejecting their own mass. Impact the comets on Venus in a consistent way so as to speed up its rotation. At the same time you would be delivering volatiles to the planet.

 

Hmm. I guess that depends on whether or not you consider such an endeavor to be "easy." Where are you going to get the energy to move them? It would take a LOT of energy to move a large Oort cloud object all the way to Venus.

 

The problem is water, well hydrogen to be exact, all that CO2 can't be converted into carbon and oxygen because there would be so much oxygen that the carbon that snows to the ground would spontaneous burn back into CO2. Even if you could blow off all the extracted oxygen into space somehow (impact it off for example) venus has so little water that it would be a desert planet. The best solution would be to bring in hydrogen from somewhere, combine it with the oxygen to make water, the carbon would fall out and form a world wide "coal" deposit. Somehow pump it out of the gas giants or ram venus with comets made of ammonia and methane.

 

Yes that type of machine has already been done. I saw it on the science channel once, but it probably wouldn't withstand the pressure. hmm maybe it can be made out a really strong material I don't remember the name of it but it's 10x stronger than steal. Maybe that would work.

 

Harvest the organics within the comet and 'burn' those to generate electricity to power a mass driver.

I may have missed several decimal places in my back of the envelope calculation, but I come up with a delta-V of 7 kms/second. If that's correct (and I shall check it) what's the problem?

 

Ophiolite Oort cloud objects have very low orbital energy but lots and lots of potential energy. Orbital velocity at aphelion is around 2.1 ms (7.5 kph). Very easy to move just takes a long time. If i was out there in a standard NASA space suit I could push against a half meter wide rock and send it straight to the sun. Of course I would end up in interstellar space.

 

Yeah, but at those speeds it will take many thousands of years for them to reach Venus. Terraforming is a very long-term project, but I'm not sure people would be willing to put up with that long of a timeline. It probably wouldn't even be worth starting the project, because you'll probably have a better technology for moving big things around long before your ice barges arrive.

 

I don't think so. Your push would not enable you to achieve solar system escape velocity.

 

Well, the Sun will still destroy Venus utterly as its surface expands out to about the current orbit of Mars, utterly destroying the Earth as well.

The current Kepler mission is looking for a habitable planet we can migrate to.

It is possible Kepler will fail, but they have found some very hot planets so far.

Perhaps we could practise on Venus, then take that knowledge to those hot planets Kepler discovered orbiting another star, then fix them like we did Venus. :shrug:

Sounds like a lot of work. :bawl:

I would rather focus on competent space travel, something we must master.

Currently our space travel is primitive at best.

 

Yes, space-faring technology will have to improve, and one of the most important elements for improving the efficacy of space travel is the development of new thrusters. Recoilless thrusters. Once this can be done it will be easy to colonize at least the solar system.

 

The sun is not going to expand significantly for billions of years, humanity will either die of or "evolve" into a form that does not need habitable planets by then.

 

Well not sure of the escape velocity at that distance from the sun but I would significantly increase my orbital period.

As for Venus lets build a sunshade. Best proposal is a giant circular ribbon made of some ultra light reflexing material maybe 200km wide reducing the solar input into the system. Carbon sequestration on the surface. All way beyond our current economies but (cross thread) when our population gets to 1Trillion we can then spare the change for such ambitious projects.