Best hydrogen source for Venus

[kunok]

I may be explaining myself very bad, I was not looking to split the atoms down, something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain_reaction (I'm researching a little not only asking), the fusion of two atoms of He³ has 2 H¹ of byproduct. There is a lot of commercial nuclear reactions, some may have already hydrogen as an byproduct.

 

EDIT: this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_emission

Edited April 24, 2016 by kunok

[kerbiloid]

1. Asteroids are puny things in comparison with Venus.

2. Better hang up a giant teleport gate under a balloon in the Jupiter's upper atmosphere and equalize pressures,

3. Venus's atmosphere consists of CO₂, which is acidic oxide highly soluble in water.
Once you deliver hydrogen and begin to create water, this water will immediately devour CO₂ and react with it.
As a result you will get a boiling ocean of carbonic acid, dissolving the crustal minerals, covering the Venus surface with a skin of carbonates.
Once you consume all the atmospheric CO₂ with hydrogen, you will get a planet with thin, still CO₂ atmosphere, boiling and salty acidic ocean on its subsolar side and an acidic ice cap on its night side.
As Venus rotates once per several months, and its clouds will no more reflect the Sun light, the acidic hurricanes will uplift huge amounts of the acidic liquid to the sky, where it will be splitted by the solar UV photons,
Released hydrogen and oxygen will dissipate into space, and several centuries later only a thin vomicose layer of carbonates will remind about the vanished atmosphere and the attempt to make an ocean on the burny, lifeless planet...

Edited April 24, 2016 by kerbiloid

[kunok]

32 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Snip

We are not talking at all about that. We are talking about the hydrogen needs of floating colonies in venus

[todofwar]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

1. Asteroids are puny things in comparison with Venus.

2. Better hang up a giant teleport gate under a balloon in the Jupiter's upper atmosphere and equalize pressures,

3. Venus's atmosphere consists of CO₂, which is acidic oxide highly soluble in water.
Once you deliver hydrogen and begin to create water, this water will immediately devour CO₂ and react with it.
As a result you will get a boiling ocean of carbonic acid, dissolving the crustal minerals, covering the Venus surface with a skin of carbonates.
Once you consume all the atmospheric CO₂ with hydrogen, you will get a planet with thin, still CO₂ atmosphere, boiling and salty acidic ocean on its subsolar side and an acidic ice cap on its night side.
As Venus rotates once per several months, and its clouds will no more reflect the Sun light, the acidic hurricanes will uplift huge amounts of the acidic liquid to the sky, where it will be splitted by the solar UV photons,
Released hydrogen and oxygen will dissipate into space, and several centuries later only a thin vomicose layer of carbonates will remind about the vanished atmosphere and the attempt to make an ocean on the burny, lifeless planet...

OK there are a few issues with this. First, a teleport gate is probably not actually possible. Second, the reaction to produce carbonic acid isn't exactly spontaneous. There is an equilibrium between carbonic acid and free co2, but it's very pH dependent and the more acidic you get the more co2 you expel. You can see this by adding vinegar to baking soda. So even if you did add that much water it would more likely fully react with all the SO2 forming sulfuric acid. So really, not much of a change from Venus today. There might be some carbonate formation but I doubt it would be nearly enough to cause the kind of change you describe. Also, that process of hydrogen loss has been going on for millions of years, hence why we need hydrogen in the first place.

[todofwar]

Oh, and it's impossible to have floating balloons on Jupiter. 

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, todofwar said:

First, a teleport gate is probably not actually possible.

 

5 hours ago, todofwar said:

Oh, and it's impossible to have floating balloons on Jupiter

Well, then an Alcubierre shuttle is in order.

9 hours ago, todofwar said:

There is an equilibrium between carbonic acid and free co2

Sure. But on Venus you have almost pure CO₂ without any significant H₂O.
So, the equilibrium will be anyway between H₂CO₃ * n CO₂ and H₂CO₃ * m CO₂, unless you cover all over the planet with a deep ocean.

 

9 hours ago, todofwar said:

reaction to produce carbonic acid isn't exactly spontaneous

H₂CO₃ is itself enough ephemerous substance, either H⁺HCO₃^- or H₂O * CO₂. But it reacts enough well with basic oxides such as stones are.
 

Edited April 25, 2016 by kerbiloid

[lajoswinkler]

There's probably plenty of water bonded in the lithosphere of Venus as hydrates. Not much, but way more than there is present in free form in atmosphere.

[kerbiloid]

12 minutes ago, lajoswinkler said:

There's probably plenty of water bonded in the lithosphere of Venus as hydrates

Not sure, because it still has an enormous amount of CO₂.
Both substances (H₂O and CO₂) are being exhausted from the lithosphere as volcanic gases, then cool down and condensate. That's when hydrates and carbonates are being disintegrated by the mantle processes.
So, we can presume that significant amounts of water (comparable to the Earth hydrosphere) already had been exhausted (and dissipated into space) and there is not too much of it in accessible form.

Edited April 25, 2016 by kerbiloid

[lajoswinkler]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Not sure, because it still has an enormous amount of CO₂.
Both substances (H₂O and CO₂) are being exhausted from the lithosphere as volcanic gases, then cool down and condensate. That's when hydrates and carbonates are being disintegrated by the mantle processes.
So, we can presume that significant amounts of water (comparable to the Earth hydrosphere) already had been exhausted (and dissipated into space) and there is not too much of it in accessible form.

Plausible, but what if the mantle recycling is dead or almost dead? There are abominable amounts of water in terrestrial planets bonded inside their lithospheres.

[kerbiloid]

Currently it's probably almost dead, as we yet haven't listen about multiple volcanos throwing out clouds of water steam (as on the Earth).
(Poor little romantic sci-fi of 50s with its boggy and volcanic Venus, I miss it.)

But 90 bars or CO₂ are already here, so we can be sure that in past the Venus was a very volcanic planet.

A partial pressure of CO₂ of the Earth atmosphere is only 0.03 bar.
Afaik, the ocean contains 140 times more of dissolved CO₂. So if release it, the Earth CO₂ pressure would be several bars.

I.e. looks like the Venus has already exhausted even more gases than the Earth dreams to do. Both CO₂ and H₂O.
And as we can't see H₂O in its atmosphere...

Also, probably proto-Venus has appeared 1.5 times closer to the Sun than the proto-Earth.
This means that its original material had lost more light elements before it became a planet.

Also its atmosphere contains huge amounts of H₂SO₄.
Probably this means that the Venerian rocks were heated even more than the terrestrial ones, as there is not so much sulfic oxides over the Earth.
(The ultimate case is Io. It lost almost all water and CO₂, but still being heated, exhausts the sulfic gases appeared from disintegrated sulfic minerals).

So, I'm afraid there's some lack of water in Venus.

Edited April 25, 2016 by kerbiloid

[todofwar]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

 

Well, then an Alcubierre shuttle is in order.

Sure. But on Venus you have almost pure CO₂ without any significant H₂O.
So, the equilibrium will be anyway between H₂CO₃ * n CO₂ and H₂CO₃ * m CO₂, unless you cover all over the planet with a deep ocean.

 

H₂CO₃ is itself enough ephemerous substance, either H⁺HCO₃^- or H₂O * CO₂. But it reacts enough well with basic oxides such as stones are.
 

Carbonic acid is completely ustable. The only reason it persists in the ocean is because it can dissociate a proton to water and survive as carbonate. I doubt it would ever reach the surface before decomposing, and if it did it would need to free up that proton somewhere. Any basic minerals tied up in rocks won't be terribly accessible. It would be interesting to see if there are carbonate skins on some rocks, but no way you can get the kind of sea of carbonic acid you describe. Think of it this way, if that was how co2 and water reacted your bottle of soda would be pure carbonic acid. But it's not, because phosphates buffer it to low pH so all the co2 remains co2.

[kerbiloid]

47 minutes ago, todofwar said:

I doubt it would ever reach the surface before decomposing,

If we talk about Venus, the acid wouldn't "reach the surface", it would "appear while the surface absorbs the atmospheric gas (i.e. CO₂)".

And as there is much more CO₂ than H₂O in any moment of this terraforming, and as CO₂ is highly soluble in water, we can await a "pool of acidic solution under pressure of carbon dioxide".

The more water you deliver - the more acid you have, until you create a deep ocean where all the atmospheric CO₂ can be dissolved.

So, the minerals are very accessible until the water depth is less than kilometers.

About CO₂/H₂CO₃: when you breathe, CO₂ appears in your cells and dissolves in H₂O of your blood.
And you can breathe only because appearing H₂CO₃ irritates your acidic receptors in the brain.

Edited April 25, 2016 by kerbiloid

[todofwar]

19 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

If we talk about Venus, the acid wouldn't "reach the surface", it would "appear while the surface absorbs the atmospheric gas (i.e. CO₂)".

And as there is much more CO₂ than H₂O in any moment of this terraforming, and as CO₂ is highly soluble in water, we can await a "pool of acidic solution under pressure of carbon dioxide".

The more water you deliver - the more acid you have, until you create a deep ocean where all the atmospheric CO₂ can be dissolved.

So, the minerals are very accessible until the water depth is less than kilometers.

About CO₂/H₂CO₃: when you breathe, CO₂ appears in your cells and dissolves in H₂O of your blood.
And you can breathe only because appearing H₂CO₃ irritates your acidic receptors in the brain.

We might be talking about different things here, i meant enough hydrogen for floating cities, not to terraform the planet. If you mean to dump enough water on Venus to form an ocean, you'll first need to drastically cool it. Even at that point you won't really acidify anything too much because again, carbonic acid is unstable so lower than a certain pH no more co2 will dissolve regardless of relative amounts. And some of the most efficient enzymes on earth (theoretically you can't actually get more efficient through evolution than these things) are the ones evolved to catalyze the conversion of co2 to carbonate and vice versa, which is why co2 can get in and out as needed.

[kerbiloid]

7 minutes ago, todofwar said:

We might be talking about different things here

Yes, looks like that.

[Finox]

What about using the hydrogen from the solar wind by setting up a magnetic "sail" to redirect it back towards Venus?   Magnetic sails have already been theorized; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet so this would be re-purposing and scaling up an existing idea.   The biggest problem I see (aside from the engineering of something this big), is balancing the pressure of the solar wind with Venus's gravity to keep it in position.   I think putting it at the Venusian L2 lagrange point would solve this, and as a bonus if might be able to recapture some of the hydrogen being lost to the solar wind.

Thoughts?

[todofwar]

1 hour ago, Finox said:

What about using the hydrogen from the solar wind by setting up a magnetic "sail" to redirect it back towards Venus?   Magnetic sails have already been theorized; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet so this would be re-purposing and scaling up an existing idea.   The biggest problem I see (aside from the engineering of something this big), is balancing the pressure of the solar wind with Venus's gravity to keep it in position.   I think putting it at the Venusian L2 lagrange point would solve this, and as a bonus if might be able to recapture some of the hydrogen being lost to the solar wind.

Thoughts?

Interesting idea. I don't know about a source of hydrogen, but maybe as a way to counteract loss from the upper atmosphere. 

[lajoswinkler]

8 hours ago, Finox said:

What about using the hydrogen from the solar wind by setting up a magnetic "sail" to redirect it back towards Venus?   Magnetic sails have already been theorized; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet so this would be re-purposing and scaling up an existing idea.   The biggest problem I see (aside from the engineering of something this big), is balancing the pressure of the solar wind with Venus's gravity to keep it in position.   I think putting it at the Venusian L2 lagrange point would solve this, and as a bonus if might be able to recapture some of the hydrogen being lost to the solar wind.

Thoughts?

No. The amounts of matter it could collect in reasonable time are laughable.

[Finox]

 

13 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

No. The amounts of matter it could collect in reasonable time are laughable.

I'd assume terraforming Venus would already be a pretty long term project given how much extra CO2 there is to sequester, probably on the order of centuries.   Even with something as diffuse as the solar wind a planet sized magnetic sail could still potentially capture a great deal of hydrogen.   Besides once its set up such a system shouldn't require much operator intervention or much in the way of consumables, so all that hydrogen would largely be free once the sail is built.   It's not the fastest way to bring in hydrogen, but worth considering?