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Terraforming Venus' Atmosphere

Why, even the other gases will liquefy under pressure.
That was fast. You must hover over this thread.
Other gases would "liquefy" under pressure, sure, but you were specifically talking about CO2.

Yes but why take the time and effort leaving the other gases in the atmosphere? just suck the lot in, no messing about.

and no I don't hover over the thread, I keep a page open on the TrekBBS main page and now and then I refresh it to see if anything has changed, if someone posts in this thread it appears on the main page as the last thread posted in. Not too many people post in the S&T forum. ;)
 
Ya know, it couldn't be too out there to think about colonising the dark side of the planet.
No?

How hot will it be on the sunny side after your project? How cold will it be on the dark side? What will the winds and weather be like due to atmospheric mixing of the two? How tiresome will it get for people to 'migrate' back and forth all the time (assuming all our work even achieves the desired goal)? What will we use for water?

Don't you think we should have a pretty good probability for success before starting something like this? We haven't even figured out very well yet how weather and climate work on this planet.

---------------
 
Yes but why take the time and effort leaving the other gases in the atmosphere? just suck the lot in, no messing about
I am not an expert and know far more about carbon (dioxide) capture and sequestration than the same process for any other gas, but I wonder if "sucking the lot in" would create a "stable" enough supercritical fluid for sequestration. It might be that you have to separate each gas, then turn it into its own supercritical fluid, then sequester it separately (in separate underground caverns or in separate porous, permeable rock layers). I don't know, I haven't been able to find anything on the subject.

I don't know about scotthm's questions after the project, but currently the temperature on Venus is approximately 460 degrees Celsius. Apparently the temperature does not vary significantly between the night and day sides at present, something to do with heat transfer by wind in the lower atmosphere. I don't remember where I read that. I also read somewhere that the winds would make it hard for a human to walk on Venus, but of course I don't know if the proposed project would have any effect on the winds.
 
96.5% of Venus' Atmosphere consists of Carbon Dioxide which is helping to cause the extreme greenhouse effect. So how can we terraform such an atmosphere?

We build machines on the surface of Venus (powered by Mini nuclear reactors) that extract the CO2 from the Atmosphere and then compresses that CO2 into a Liquid form into huge tankers. There are then two options, the liquefied CO2 can either be shot into space and transported to Mars and dumped into the Martian atmosphere OR the CO2 is pumped and buried under the Venusian surface into pre-mined sealed caverns.

When the CO2 level in the atmosphere reaches a safe level we introduce Flora to convert the remaining CO2 into Oxygen.

This plan just cannot fail.

A future possibility then could be to obtain Hydrogen from Jupiters atmosphere, transport it to Venus and react it with the Oxygen in the atmosphere to create water.

first of all, pressure on Venus is far too great for anyone or anything going and dinging holes there, let alone sending a nuclear reactor to do your work, secondly temperature is 484celsius.

Only way is to terraform Venus is to smash ice comet at it, not one, but dozen or so midsized comets. These would deposit large amounts of water and cool the planet down a bit, I mean surface. Also Venus is outside habitable zone, Habitable zone is 127 - 187 million km, Venus is out of it.

Venus is way to close to our Sun, it would not be feasible as 2nd earth, unless you move it bit closer to earth and away from the Sun.
 
I you want to put people and flora on Venus, I would recommend the mountains, many of which are higher than Everest and have atmospheric densities and temperatures more to our liking. Your weeds could start affecting the CO2/O2 balance at high altitudes and gradually spread downward, even creating a little ozone in the process.

And taking off from Venus should be easier from an elevation of 11 kilometers.
 
Let's go really super rubber science and drop wormholes with exits to the Moon and Mars. Then we pressurize two worlds with the excess of one, increase the likelihood of making both Venus and Mars habitable, and bring blue skies and clouds to the Moon for a little bit.

[sniffs hot chocolate]

Hmmm ... I wonder what she put in this?
 
I have a foolproof plan to make Venus inhabitable.

1) Make the planet spin faster.

2) Reduce the atmosphere to Earth normal.

3) Push planet out to Earth orbit.

4) Put water and life on the planet.

It's foolproof!
 
^^^:guffaw:

Maybe Tachyon Shield should visit this web page.

Anyway, a few quick comments.

The average temperature on Venus is high enough to melt lead.

The surface atmospheric pressure is 90 times that here, equal to being a kilometer underwater .

Making machines that can operate in this environment would be very complicated. Of the two probes that landed there, the longest lived one only survived barely over two hours, and the other slightly under one hour.
 
How hot will it be on the sunny side after your project?

Like I said, we don't know how hot it will be after the greenhouse effect has been cancelled out, also (like I said) we could add orbital mirrors to help reflect a lot of the suns rays off of Venus.

How cold will it be on the dark side?

Well we don't freeze to death on Earth when we're on the dark side but it is pretty cold, i'd imagine the dark side of Venus would be quite warm and juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust right.

What will the winds and weather be like due to atmospheric mixing of the two?

Only one way to find out.

How tiresome will it get for people to 'migrate' back and forth all the time (assuming all our work even achieves the desired goal)?

Not very tiresome seeing as they wont need to migrate for 243 days at a time (nearly 9 months). But chances are that won't need to happen once we extract the CO2 and deploy orbital mirrors if needs be.

What will we use for water?

LIKE I SAID. We will take Hydrogen from Jupiter and burn it on Venus to create water.
I'm not saying we can do all this now, Terraforming Venus could take centuries and we will still need to develop new ways of get about the solar system and getting the extractors onto the Venusian surface.

The average temperature on Venus is high enough to melt lead.

The surface atmospheric pressure is 90 times that here, equal to being a kilometer underwater .

The temperature and atmospheric pressure will drop to tolerable levels once we've cleaned the atmosphere. Surely that is common sense.

Making machines that can operate in this environment would be very complicated. Of the two probes that landed there, the longest lived one only survived barely over two hours, and the other slightly under one hour.

Money is the only problem I see, with enough money we could easily build something to withstand those extremities and like I said, this isn't going to happen overnight, we could develop new technologies.

Also Venus is outside habitable zone, Habitable zone is 127 - 187 million km, Venus is out of it.

Even being as close to the sun as it is I believe we will be able to lower the temperature on Venus to tolerable levels by atmospheric cleaning, orbital reflectors and big arse air conditioning units.
 
I have another idea now anyway to clean the atmosphere that doesn't require surface extractors.
There's mention of floating habitations on Venus, well my idea is to have small (but many) extractor units floating through the atmosphere, these units are connected to a platform in orbit via a flexible pipeline. The floating extractors pump the CO2 up the pipe to the orbital platforms and the platforms release it into space.

Jobs a good'n.
 
Even allowing the idea that we have machines that could withstand the pressure and heat to operate on Venus for extended period, there's another problem facing terraforming- the slow rotational period. Right now a Venusian day is longer than a Venusian year. Even if the planet had earth-like conditions otherwise, that fact alone would render the planet uninhabitable as one side would be cooked for half the year while the other would be frozen solid. We would need a means to put the planet into a faster spin.
 
Even if the planet had earth-like conditions otherwise, that fact alone would render the planet uninhabitable as one side would be cooked for half the year while the other would be frozen solid.

The sunny side wouldn't necessarily get cooked, we don't know exactly how hot it would be with a CO2 free atmosphere and orbital reflectors in place. As for the dark side, how cold would it get really? we already have people living in the coldest parts of the Earth and surviving, it's called central heating....... and Venus is closer to the sun.
 
Even if the planet had earth-like conditions otherwise, that fact alone would render the planet uninhabitable as one side would be cooked for half the year while the other would be frozen solid.

The sunny side wouldn't necessarily get cooked, we don't know exactly how hot it would be with a CO2 free atmosphere and orbital reflectors in place. As for the dark side, how cold would it get really? we already have people living in the coldest parts of the Earth and surviving, it's called central heating....... and Venus is closer to the sun.


You do have a point, We have people living in the northern most parts of the world where it's night for 6 months at a time, and they survive. Even before the advent of electricity and heating they made it by. Sure, it wouldn't be the most pleasant at first, but Humans have a tendency of defying nature and living where they want to.
 
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