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Terraforming Venus

SagaLore

SagaLore

Elite Member
Awhile back I started a thread about terraforming Mars - as simple as genetically improving a crabgrass to withstand severe cold and iron-rich claylike soil, and just send it to Mars and let it start growing. It will clean out the CO2 from the atmosphere and produce O2. One of the concerns was that with less carbon dioxide the planet would actually get colder, but based on what I'm learning in my Weather and Climate class, that will not be the case. A desert-like ground is radiating too much heat - a ground cover will help stabilize the temperature.

But anyway, this thread is about Venus. While researching Mars, I started running into info about Venus. It is only slightly smaller than Earth, with slightly less gravity. It already has a lot of atmosphere to play with. It actually has more Nitrogen in the atmosphere, which is great - if we can cool the planet and process that CO2 into O2, the nitrogen dillutes the air so we don't spontaneously ignite and excess nitrogen will be needed by plants.

Our first mission is to block some of the most direct sunlight hitting Venus. It will take a large satellite we send out and place into orbit between the sun and Venus' equator. The satellite will unfold a huge sheet of thin reflector material - basically a big solar blanket.

Our second mission, which can be started simultaneously, is to transplant a microbe capable of surviving the intense atmospheric pressure, the intense heat, and sulfuric acid. Enter the halobacterium. We could use the Halo to splice chloroplastic genes from cyanobacteria and the sulfur eating genes from thiobacillus. This little guy would thrive on Venus. It will help sift out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and give us oxygen in return.

The objective is to stall the runaway greenhouse effect. Also since O2 will be less dense than CO2, the atmosphere will lose pressure.

Our third mission is plantlife. A mixture of crabgrass and vines that can live in hotter climates. Until we get the temperature completely under control, we'll use the planet's slow rotation to our advantage (takes 243 earth days before 1 complete rotation). The plants can live on the dark/colder side of venus, and will be able to outgrow the rotation as they get killed off from overexposure of sunlight on the light side. I imagine that once we colonize Venus, we will have to live in caravans and just move seasonally. Or, we'll have to genetically combine a rainforest species with a redwood and tweak the leaves to reflect as much sunlight as possible (nearly white leaf with a silver hue).

At some point I'd hope we could discard the solar blanket (don't want to rely on it indefinitely).

Okay discuss.
 
does mars or venus have enough water to support crabgrass? or are we going to engineer crabgrass that doesnt need water?
 
Mars would require a thick ozone layer to be habitable, the radiation from the sun would easily kill us with Mars' current ozone(or the lack of thereof).
There's no way venus could be habitable. Volcanoes constantly goes off everywhere, making up the very dense CO2 atmosphere. The atmosphere of venus is about 70x more dense than on earth.
 
Originally posted by: conjur
Crabgrass?? You know hard that stuff is to get rid of?? Imagine a whole planet of that vile weed!
Click to expand...

:laugh:



anyways, sounds really cool, and actually doable...

I think that sounds like an awesome idea, but what kind of time frame would it take to do something like this?

Also, you said that the plants would all die from overexposure to the sun, so wouldn't the plant not be able to thrive if they had no sun

You also mentioned blocking out some, if not all of the sun, how would that affect the tempatures, I would think greatly, and is something like that feasable? Wouldn't solar winds knock it out of orbit and possibly into the planet?

I read something one time that said that in the clouds in Venus there is a very very high chance that there is some living bacterium, would that affect the crabgrass from growing? And wouldn't the extreme change in the atmosphere make all of these bacterium die, would that be right to kill an entire species off?


Okay, end of file...
 
Even assuming all of this is possible, it would take millions - or at least tens of thousands of years for it to actually happen.....
 
To cool down Venus I suggest bombarding the planet with trillions of tons of comets from the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud.

To warm up mars I suggest voting curious George Dubya president of that planet. :Q
 
Venus surface temperature is 900F due to the greenhouse effect, but I wonder about the humidity even if we can shield ourselves from the sun (somehow).
 
Originally posted by: SagaLore
Awhile back I started a thread about terraforming Mars - as simple as genetically improving a crabgrass to withstand severe cold and iron-rich claylike soil, and just send it to Mars and let it start growing. It will clean out the CO2 from the atmosphere and produce O2. One of the concerns was that with less carbon dioxide the planet would actually get colder, but based on what I'm learning in my Weather and Climate class, that will not be the case. A desert-like ground is radiating too much heat - a ground cover will help stabilize the temperature.

But anyway, this thread is about Venus. While researching Mars, I started running into info about Venus. It is only slightly smaller than Earth, with slightly less gravity. It already has a lot of atmosphere to play with. It actually has more Nitrogen in the atmosphere, which is great - if we can cool the planet and process that CO2 into O2, the nitrogen dillutes the air so we don't spontaneously ignite and excess nitrogen will be needed by plants.

Our first mission is to block some of the most direct sunlight hitting Venus. It will take a large satellite we send out and place into orbit between the sun and Venus' equator. The satellite will unfold a huge sheet of thin reflector material - basically a big solar blanket.

Our second mission, which can be started simultaneously, is to transplant a microbe capable of surviving the intense atmospheric pressure, the intense heat, and sulfuric acid. Enter the halobacterium. We could use the Halo to splice chloroplastic genes from cyanobacteria and the sulfur eating genes from thiobacillus. This little guy would thrive on Venus. It will help sift out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and give us oxygen in return.

The objective is to stall the runaway greenhouse effect. Also since O2 will be less dense than CO2, the atmosphere will lose pressure.

Our third mission is plantlife. A mixture of crabgrass and vines that can live in hotter climates. Until we get the temperature completely under control, we'll use the planet's slow rotation to our advantage (takes 243 earth days before 1 complete rotation). The plants can live on the dark/colder side of venus, and will be able to outgrow the rotation as they get killed off from overexposure of sunlight on the light side. I imagine that once we colonize Venus, we will have to live in caravans and just move seasonally. Or, we'll have to genetically combine a rainforest species with a redwood and tweak the leaves to reflect as much sunlight as possible (nearly white leaf with a silver hue).

At some point I'd hope we could discard the solar blanket (don't want to rely on it indefinitely).

Okay discuss.
Click to expand...
Dude!

Mars: too small to hold a dense atmosphere like Earth's. Mars' gravitational pull is 1/5 of Earth's.

Venus: at 500 degrees F and air pressure alteast 100 times ours, no one is terraforming it anytime soon. Even if you blocked the sun completely from Venus it was take millennia for it to cool down.

Stop daydreaming about this.
 
solar blanket would be shredded by the large amount of smal and large particles that travel throw space at very high speeds.
 
why not redirect icy comets into Mars' path, causing collisions, changing it's orbit closer to ours, increasing water supply and planetary mass ?

also, with Venus, it's relatively same mass as Earth, all we need to do is attach solar sails to Venus to increase it's velocity to same as Earth, this will cause it's orbit to approach our orbit ?

eventually have all 3 planets roughly same size and equal distance from Sun, spaced out 120 degrees apart.


 
Originally posted by: Tom
why not redirect icy comets into Mars' path, causing collisions, changing it's orbit closer to ours, increasing water supply and planetary mass ?

also, with Venus, it's relatively same mass as Earth, all we need to do is attach solar sails to Venus to increase it's velocity to same as Earth, this will cause it's orbit to approach our orbit ?

eventually have all 3 planets roughly same size and equal distance from Sun, spaced out 120 degrees apart.
Click to expand...

The Martian atmosphere is being striped away by the solar winds. It needs a magnetic field to protect itself. The lack of shielding from an ozone or mag. field is and will forever be a problem.
 
Scientists speculate that Venus may have been Earth-like at some point in its history. They said if Earth were to move just a little closer to the sun, it would wind up exactly like Venus is now.
 
Originally posted by: Descartes
Do you realize how large the "huge sheet of thin reflector material" would need to be?
Click to expand...

Well let's figure that out. When the moon is directly between the path of the Sun and Earth, we end up with a solar eclipse, which is what we want to accomplish. But the satellite won't be in a lunar orbit - it needs to be able to stay between the Sun and Venus. Is that possible?

If it's not possible, then perhaps the satellite will have to orbit Venus, at least for some time each orbit it will keep light off the equator.
 
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