Terraforming Venus

[Chirios]

I've heard a lot about terraforming mars, but next to nothing about venus, why is this? What would be needed to do it?

 

[5810Singer]

Atmospheric pressure on the Venusian surface is approx 92 times what it is on the Earth's surface:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus


So one of the first things you'd need to do is get rid of a lot of excess atmosphere.

I wonder how you'd do that?

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Idkn.. A solar burp? But removing the excess atmosphere would still make the surface of the palnet a litle bit to hot not to get barbecued, you would probably need a factor 500000 sun screan.

 

[5810Singer]

Idkn.. A solar burp? But removing the excess atmosphere would still make the surface of the palnet a litle bit to hot not to get barbecued, you would probably need a factor 500000 sun screan.

I believe most of the heat is trapped in the atmosphere, and heat = pressure, pressure =heat, so if you could thin out the atmosphere and reduce the pressure, it should go a considerable way towards lowering the temperature, as well as reducing the atmosphere's ability to store more heat.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Not really much because Venus is musch closer to the sun then the earth, but Venus doesn't have much magnetic activity and the surfaces stays turned to the sun days on end (temperature gradients would be insane).

 

[5810Singer]

the surfaces stays turned to the sun days on end (temperature gradients would be insane).

That's true, the Venusian day is longer than it's year,....the temperature gradients would indeed be insane.

 

[acheron]

Temperatures across the Venusian surface are actually quite uniform, but very very hot (460-500C). The reason that there isn't much gradient from light to dark side is that little sunlight makes it to the surface anyway due to the heavy cloud cover, and the density of the atmosphere keeps the heat from disappating too much. We've never managed to put a mission on the surface that lasted more than an hour.

Colonization of the surface is probably impossible in any realistic timeframe, but there has been discussions of aerostat/floating city colonization. We probably have the technology to do that today actually.

There's quite a good Wikipedia article on the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus

 

[Womble]

A big problem is the lack of water, and by that i don't just mean freely available stuff i'm also talking about the chemical requirements to make the stuff!! Water molecules are lost due to photodissosiation of the H and O, with the H then escaping off into space. We'd have to import water/H to make live there possible.....excluding the issues of pressure and the sulphuric acid rain.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Well if we have acid, then prety much we have the H problem solved.

 

[nasher168]

Well if we have acid, then prety much we have the H problem solved.

And the O problem as well, although breaking down H2SO4 in such huge quantities would surely be quite energy consuming. Perhaps with fusion technology we could make some headway, though.

 

[sgrunterundt]

There is some sulphuric acid, true, but Venus is still greatly lacking in hydrogen.

Funny that a thread like this springs up here and at the xkcd forum at almost the same time.

 

[e2iPi]

Harry was a chemist
but Harry is no more
what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4

:geek:

-1

 

[Chirios]

There is some sulphuric acid, true, but Venus is still greatly lacking in hydrogen.

Funny that a thread like this springs up here and at the xkcd forum at almost the same time.

I posted the thread twice on different forums.

 

[Jotto999]

Mars will likely be much easier to terraform than Venus, even though it would still of course have to be well planned and an expensive project. Actually, putting some life on Mars might happen even just accidentally from the presence of human equipment.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100427111252.htm

Of course, that's pretty far away from successful terraforming, but on Venus you couldn't simply accidentally contaminate it with bacteria, great work would have to be done before even that would be possible.

 

[tangoen]

I read somewhere that venus is a lot like the earth millions of years ago could it already be "terraforming" itself and hence need just millions of years to become habitable

 

[Unwardil]

Well, it's really a whole lot closer to the sun, so what you'd really need to do isn't to thin the atmosphere but to fill it with sun blocking gases that are inert in the human body.

This means Helium.

Loads and loads of helium, just like deep sea divers use. How you'd go about transforming a primarily amonium atmosphere into about 90% helium I haven't the foggiest, but it's what you'd have to do.

 

[sgrunterundt]

There is some sulphuric acid, true, but Venus is still greatly lacking in hydrogen.

Funny that a thread like this springs up here and at the xkcd forum at almost the same time.

I posted the thread twice on different forums.

Oh well, I should have noticed that the username was the same. I am Tass on xkcd by the way.

 

[5810Singer]

To everyone who keeps saying "Venus is so hot because it's so close to the Sun, so we'd need plenty Sun block too....."

From Wiki (but you can find it in lots of other places too):
"Above the dense CO2 layer are thick clouds consisting mainly of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid droplets. These clouds reflect about 60% of the sunlight that falls on them back into space, and prevent the direct observation of Venus's surface in visible light. The permanent cloud cover means that although Venus is closer than Earth to the Sun, the Venusian surface is not as well lit. Without the greenhouse effect caused by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the temperature at the surface of Venus would be quite similar to that on Earth. Strong 300 km/h winds at the cloud tops circle the planet about every four to five earth days."

 

[nemesiss]

hmm, wouldn't it be interesting if we could "farm" the abundance of atmosphere from venus and transport it to mars?

 

[DTBeast]

I don't really see us going for the inner planets in the near future, the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt seem like the best plans for human expansion. Maybe staying close to home but working with resources from space, i.e. somehow dragging large resource rich asteroids from the belt to Earth/Moon Lagrange points for harvesting.

The other thing you have to worry about with Venus is the resurfacing. Since Venus has a molten mantle and core but no tectonic plates, Every few hundred million years or so we think that it undergoes massive volcanism that lasts for about a hundred million years and totally refreshes it's surface. I'd hate to be in a colony there when that starts.

Although I was reading some speculative fiction that had us completely coating the surface of Mercury in photo-voltaic cells to take care of all of Earths energy needs, and that seemed like a cool idea.