Comments on: New Images Suggest Hellish Venus Was Once More Like Earth

By: Russell

Russell — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:06:30 +0000

Don’t assume Venus was always in its current position. It might have been ripped from Jupiter in pre-historic times (legends point to this) and moved past Earth to its present locale.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:06:20 +0000

maybe if you could find a way to take the co2 out of the air, you wouldn’t have to shade it. The temperature would drop, the atmosphere would thin.
Freeze the CO2, and ship it off to mars. heh

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:24:13 +0000

@ Rebecca,

While changing planetary orbits is far beyond us technologically, shading the planet is possible now (though very expensive). There are proposals out there to shade Earth as a response to global warming.

Also, I thought that changing orbits was a no-no anyhow? Something about the orbital lanes being the only ones stable relative to the other planets. If you just altered the orbit of Venus, you get instabilities in the new orbit and eventually Venus gets ejected from the solar system.

There’s an orbital mechanics ratio for most of the planets. Each planet is twice as far from the Sun as the next planet in. If you mess with the ratio you are asking for trouble.

By: chris

chris — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:24:45 +0000

#7 Obviously we would just fuse/fission the already present materials into the proper forms of matter.

#5 Well a giant shade seems a bit more feasible then moving the entire planet.

Also I believe mars is a little too small to hold a dense atmosphere thus making it some what less desireable. However since we’re engaging in massive engineering projects, I suppose we could just add some mass to it.

Then again this may not be cost effective and we’d actually just end up constructing a Dyson’s Sphere (s?).

By: desotojohn

desotojohn — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:53:14 +0000

And where would the nitrogen needed to dilute the atmospheric gasses come from? A Comet perhaps?

By: amphiox

amphiox — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:48:14 +0000

#3: You’d still need a way to permanently lock the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Just seeding microbes wouldn’t be enough. They might fix CO2, but when they die and decay, the CO2 goes right back into the air. You have to add some mechanism that permanently buries organic matter deep into the crust.

#4: One idea would be to take a big, icy comet and crash it into Venus at the appropriate angle to restart the spin. This might have the added benefit of blowing away much of the greenhouse atmosphere, and give Venus a chance to “reboot” its atmospheric evolution at a stage before the runaway greenhouse effect got established (And add some water to the mix). Any if you’re really ambitious and envisioning truly supreme technological levels, then you could use Mercury or maybe even Mars as the impactor, to give Venus a large moon and re-kickstart plate tectonics.

#5: Earth would probably get in the way. . . . The Earth-Sun and Venus-Sun Lagrange points, I think, are already disrupted by the other planet as it is. Not that this is a necessarily completely insurmountable problem, but. . . .

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:46:16 +0000

Rather than shading it with a disk, what if you enlarged its orbit? Moved the planet further from the sun. Likewise, what if we could bring Mars in a little closer?

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:52:05 +0000

You will need to speed up the spin, any poor bugger who ended up living there would have one hell of a long work week.

By: wjv

wjv — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:41:18 +0000

The next step after the solar array/mirrors/aerosols are in place to block the sun and cool Venus would be to seed it with oxygen producing microbes and simple plants. Of course this would be done after the temperature was below 100 degrees Celcius. But then we can have two planets worth of resources to exploit! YAY!

By: scribbler

scribbler — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:35:11 +0000

This is when the Star Trek crew would fire photon torpedoes that would evenly disburse chemicals that would produce a cascading, multi-layered reaction that free oxygen and such and negate the greenhouse effect…

;-)

As for blocking the sun, I s’pose if you positioned your disc properly between the planet and the sun, you could cause an eclipse. If you got close enough to the sun where a small disc would block a large area at the planet’s orbit, it’d be doable.

I’d be interested in looking at a comprehensive estimate of what chemical reaction would occur naturally in the atmosphere with a temperature drop.

By: Lou

Lou — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:44:11 +0000

I WONDER WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO VENUS OF A LARGE SOLAR ARRAY SHADED THE ENTIRE PLANET FROM THE SUN AND DROPPED ITS TEMPERATURE DOWN TO SOMETHING MORE EARTHLIKE?