Yeahhh, I should’ve written micrometeorite impacts
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How accurate do you think are the kurzgesagt videos on terraforming Mars and Venus?
The Venus one is unhinged, freezing Venus to get rid of it’s atmosphere seems like a really bad idea. It it were mars sized, maybe, but it’s gravity well just seems too big to me. it’d seem smarter to turn the CO2 into carbonate or something. I’m not sure how you’d pull that off, but any method to avoid lifting bulk material off a deep gravity well. The mars one is hilariously violent but sounds totally workable “leaving alone” some parts of mars won’t work though, imagine the weathering and random stuff that could happen to any square meter of surface during an event like the space lasering, or even just formation of oceans.
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Pretty sure that terraforming mars permanently is not possible without having to constantly replenish it’s atmosphere due to the weak gravity well even if a magnetic shield was to be installed. It’s just too small
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Yeah, without volcanos that’s true. However, I don’t think we terraform to have a rock we can leave unattended for a hundred million years, and even perfect terraforming won’t give you a rock you can leave alone for a billion, earth likely won’t be inhabitable in a billion years. So long as it is t a constant source of worry, it doesn’t matter that it need upkeep. Hell, leave a few self replicating robots and unless you mess it up, you’re good. (Self replicating robots are, in fact ,comically easy to mess us.)
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If volcanos were to replenish the atmosphere of such a small planet to “acceptable levels”, it would probably be a too active planet to settle on it. It would be an Io-like world.
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I genuinely have no clue what the balance would be. I was assuming an artificial magnetosphere, but that still doesnt make me sure.
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Not to mention that in the video they also stored the frozen atmosphere on an orbit around the venus. Which would demand the resulting satellite to be shaded all the time or else it would turn into a giant comet
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honestly a much better option for venus would be giving it a thick, durable, clear shell and then a great oxygenation event
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So like a floating layer of glass?
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one that’s held up by some kind of support, but yes
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And it has to cover the entire planet? How thick does it need to be?
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Thick enough to resist the inevitable meteorite impacts, I’d suspect.
Why make a clear shell, anyway? Would that turn it into a pressure cooker? Would it deflect solar heat? And what sort of hypermaterial chicanery is going on to have the shell be supported, somehow? That’s a lot more extreme on the materials and orbital physics front than a space elevator, and space elevators are already ridiculous.
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Replacing a bunch of Venuses Carbon Dioxide with Oxygen won’t make it much more habitable than it already is. You still need a way to make the atmosphere thinner.
That’s the point of the shell, so the bottom layers aren’t your problem anymore. Still a bit of an iffy idea, kinda a time bomb, but so are all the other methods.
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Wouldn’t such a large amount of materials find a better use in constructing ringworlds?
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it will make the atmosphere much cooler without making it easy to blow into the void, and the shell’s supports could have an elevator habitat unit thing that lowers or raises you slowly enough to let you get used to the pressure, which would still have its limits, but insects could survive throughout the entire thing, especially ants, roaches, and beetles, and it’d be a high enough pressure atmosphere you could have ammonia oceans on the surface, especially with the lower temperature from a greatly decreased level of heat retention, and to deal wit the atmosphere pressure you’d want to either make people who can withstand more, or take the oxygen, liquefy it, and move it to other planets for life support while setting up colonies
this solution is more of a way to turn Venus into an oxygen tank people can live above the clouds in until you’ve expanded far enough to get it to a reasonable pressure than a way to terraform it to make the surface livable immediately
and with an atmosphere that dense that’s primarily O2, you could have dragons that breathe fire and look like their wing size is reasonable, and you could have bird people as well, and a high pressure, >80% oxygen atmosphere could let you get a lot of weird organisms with a lot of difference between the levels of the atmosphere, and photosynthesizers might prefer to use CO and a lot of water over CO2 and equal amounts of water for photosynthesis since CO can get higher in the atmosphere easier than CO2, so the carbon cycle would also be much more interesting than on earth if you left it as is!
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What should the shell be made of?
it could be a dodecahedral grid made of steel (or some other material that can be made into strong, light beams) in the shape of a sphere with glass panes to let the light through, stop gas flow between the cells of the grid, and stop all impacts with multiple layers of protection unless it’s a threat big enough to notice well before it hits the shell, and that way you could also use the cells of the shell as living spaces or functional rooms, and filling the cells with gas would also make them explode in the direction of whatever broke them, and being made of many smallish compartments would make it easily repairable, as well as make the way light reaches the surface be very interesting!
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Do you think that this is the easiest way to terraform venus?