Terraforming Venus, the hard (fun) way

[Zuni]

No species, at least that I know of, have evolved towards greater stupidity.

*ahem ahem* Humans! *ahem*

We are pretty much ruining our own planet after all. How stupid can we get?

[Idobox]

An interesting proposal but I don't think so for two reasons.

Firstly, the lighter elements escape preferentially and hydrogen is in very short supply at Venus. The planet has e.g. only ~30 ppm H2O in the higher parts of the atmosphere where it shows up in absorption spectra. (Water is probably less common low down, since it's less dense than CO2.) The crust also seems to be bone dry.

Secondly, you must be at an altitude where aerodynamic effects are significant for the meteors to have the desired effect. So if a random heated molecule wants to escape, it must first go up through a lot of atmosphere interacting with and losing heat to other molecules along the way.

It should cause some loss of gas, but nothing significant compared to what solar radiation and solar wind already does. The gas released by the meteor might even be more for the right kind of meteor (I haven't done any calculations).

I was thinking more of pushing the atmosphere away. If you enter fast enough, some of it might not have the time to move to the side of the asteroid before it is out of the atmosphere.

You could increase the effect by shaping the asteroid like a bucket

[RuBisCO]

This is why the terraforming threads need to be made stickies, because we are just going to get them over and over again.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68857-Terraforming-Venus

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68857-Terraforming-Venus?p=970801&viewfull=1#post970801

Anyways Venus is going to require a lot of work, several orders of magnitude that of mars, it going to require importing several plutoid sized bodies in water for one. I calculated out the amount of mass and energy imparted via impacting or "dumping" that much water on venus from the Kepler belt, good news: more then enough energy to spin Venus up to what ever day length we want, bad news: the heat of impacts would exceed solar heating by order of magnitudes, in fact to match the energy input of the sun with impacts would mean spreading out the 10^22 kg of water delivered over 3 million years, any faster and we roast the planet MORE then it is! Even with a sun shade blocking out all sunlight to Venus we could easily melt the planets crust with enough impact events close enough together.

Mars we could possibly terraform in 1000 years, assuming it has everything we need on it, Venus would take much, much longer.

[OgreMagi]

well one idea is to terriform the moon.

its close, it does have gravity, bombard it with a lot of comets to give it an atmosphere. it wouldn't last long in the galactic scale of events only 50,000 years but yea that easier to do. atmospheric pressure wouldn't be great but you could get it high enough to support life and people for a while.

another idea was to use a gravity to move a planet, take a object and accelerate it to a very high velocity and have it make many many close passes to the target, over time it will move but again this will take a few thousand years...

drill Mo Holes in the core of mars, warm it up a bit. like the moon idea you can drop a bunch of comets into its atmosphere to thicken it up, more than the moon but it would last longer.

Venus well heat is venus problem, anthing you drop into the atmospshere will cause it to heat up, what you need to do it cool it. need a sun shield to cool the temp enough to get a way to fix the carbon, life forms to reduce the co2, ect ect but a much harder challenge.

I would say give the moon an atmosphere,

[Holo]

*ahem ahem* Humans! *ahem*

We are pretty much ruining our own planet after all. How stupid can we get?

Don't worry, it's just you dragging the average down.