Terraforming venus with a Von Newman Machine

[Rakaydos]

Let us posit a device, that can be affordably manufactured in space, that turns Co2 into a graphne baloon filled with o2, and leftover carbon, using solar energy.

Let us suspend this device over venus on a baloon. Let it make more baloons, and put more devices under them. (the Leftover carbon gets compressed into graphite and dropped to the hellish surface)

Eventually, all the C02 of the atmosphere will be locked into graphite blocks and oxygen baloons. How much would this reduce the atmosphereic pressure of Venus? Can we improve this number by using the leftover carbon to lock nitrogen atoms in solids as well? What useful compounds can we turn Sulpheric Acid into?

[ZetaX]

Assuming all of the atmosphere is CO2 (am lazy), the loss of mass is at most the loss of the carbon; thus you loose a little less than 1/3 of the mass, and thus of the pressure.

[Idobox]

You're going to have to release some of that O2 in the atmosphere (unless you want to fill the whole planet with balloons), and you will end up with super high partial pressure of O2, super hot, and large quantities of graphite. Sooner or later, the thing will catch fire and turn back to normal.

You need to find another way to lock your oxygen for that to happen. I don't know much about Venus geology, but there might be some unoxidised rocks available.

[Nuke]

i suppose you could bring in hydrogen and just burn it with the released oxygen. this would create that useful stuff called water. unfortunately it would probibly vaporize and make the runaway greenhouse conditions worse.

[LaytheAerospace]

There's also the huge quantities of sulfuric acid in the atmosphere to contend with, which will rapidly destroy your balloons.

Sequestration in rock formations would work better, I think, but you're not going to keep machinery operating on the surface for very long. Certainly not long enough for large scale terraforming. Maybe you can just blast the atmospheric gasses off into space, slowly bleeding the atmosphere off and leaving a torus of gas in Venus's orbit? Most would be blown away by the solar wind, I suspect, rather than falling back to the surface.

[Tommygun]

You could build mass drivers to shoot some of the carbon off world.

But if you can get it to solid form, why not just bury it.

Maybe mine the Kuiper belt for water and pH base minerals that can neutralize acids and build mini comets out of this material?

Then let millions of these mini comets aerobrake through the atmosphere and melt without hitting the surface over hundreds of years.

Edited July 31, 2014 by Tommygun

[RuBisCO]

This was discussed in detail on a terraform Venus thread, I personally ran over the calculations.

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

-Venus's atmosphere 4.8*10^20 kg and is 96.5% CO2 (Wikipedia people!)

-We would need 4.2*10^19 kg of hydrogen to convert all that into water and solid carbon.

-that would require one thousands ships delivering 1 cubic kilometer of liquid hydrogen per ship (from say a gas giant I suppose), every year for 20,441 years.

Yeah Self-replicating machine and AI smart enough to build, maintain and fly ships in outer-space would be a must to support such and endeavor.

We could also smack Venus with Kepler belt bodies, millions of multiple kilometer wide comets or a few "dwarf planets", but later calculations on the heat produced from impacts show it would exceed solar heating of the planet and turn venus into a lava ball unless that mass is impact evenly over a few million years. So yeah thousands of comet moving ships over several million years could also do the job, again that would require a huge space industry and likely a fully automated industry aka Van Newman Machines.

[Rakaydos]

what about some kind of magnetic scoop, to collect alpha particles from the solar wind and "burn" them with oxygen to produce water?

[christok]

what about some kind of magnetic scoop, to collect alpha particles from the solar wind and "burn" them with oxygen to produce water?

(You mean protons. Alpha particles are helium nuclei.)

Similar things already occur naturally, for example on the moon where a small amount of water is continually being created by solar wind reacting with rocks. I just don't think the flux is high enough to terraform Venus.

[LaytheAerospace]

Yeah Self-replicating machine and AI smart enough to build, maintain and fly ships in outer-space would be a must to support such and endeavor.

I'm not sure even this would do anything but make the planet hotter. Water vapor is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

[christok]

I'm not sure even this would do anything but make the planet hotter. Water vapor is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

This is true but the matter is a little more complicated. The water on our own planet also acts as a carbon sink, by dissolving CO2 and binding it into rocks.Without water, the Earth would look a lot more like Venus.

[Rakaydos]

Well, if we have baloons that are carrying oxygen, and fill them with just enough water to keep them in the (cold) upper atmosphere, we should be able to keep most of the water in liquid (or solid) form.

Can we break down the sulpheric acid for hydrogen? if we converted all the acid in venus's atmosphere, how much water could we put in balloons? What would be the leftover elements after converting the acid?

[christok]

Can we break down the sulpheric acid for hydrogen? if we converted all the acid in venus's atmosphere, how much water could we put in balloons? What would be the leftover elements after converting the acid?

You don't need the acid to make water. There's more H2O than H2SO4 in the atmosphere of Venus. (30ppm vs. 1-2.5ppm, though only 0.8ppm H2O in the mesosphere, high up.) It also has some traces of HCl and HF.

The confusion comes about because the clouds are made of H2SO4.

[RuBisCO]

I'm not sure even this would do anything but make the planet hotter. Water vapor is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

No that so Venus can have a hydrosphere for life, cooling the planet will require a solar shade, I discussed that before: a solar shade at Venus-Sun L1 would need to be over 4 times the diameter of Venus to shade the planet completely and likely needs to be beyond L1 a bit to counter solar pressure. Yes machines would be need to build that too.

[jwenting]

Just give up on the pipe dream of terraforming Venus. Venus is NOT a paradise that just is a bit overheated because someone was evil and released a bit of CO2 into the atmosphere.

It's a hellish environment for a variety of factors, CO2 being the least of its problems.

Too much solar input to ever be habitable, sulphuric acid in abundance (which is like water and methane a far more potent "greenhouse gas" than is CO2, plus talk about acid rain....

Extreme atmospheric pressure makes things even hotter and will crush anything you try to land as well as cooking it (if it survives the acid bath).

[78stonewobble]

-We would need 4.2*10^19 kg of hydrogen to convert all that into water and solid carbon.

-that would require one thousands ships delivering 1 cubic kilometer of liquid hydrogen per ship (from say a gas giant I suppose), every year for 20,441 years.

20,441 mio. cubik kilometers of liquid hydrogen... And it's relatively small planet *lol* ... oh god...

[Rus-Evo]

Such a machine would first need to be used to reduce CO2 on earth!

[RuBisCO]

Yeah that gives you and idea of the material problems required in terraform Venus. We have 88 atmosphere of CO2 on a earth size world that needs to be converted to solid carbon and water, that is over 4*10^20 kg! To put in in other terms the atmosphere of Venus weighs as much as some plutiod! Terraforming mars on the other hand is many orders of magnitude easier, geoforming that is controlling the earths climate is practically child's play compared to Venus, on earth we have to deal with at most 600 billion tons of CO2 that is 6*10^14 kg or 1/800,000 that amount on venus.

Anyways: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68857-Terraforming-Venus?p=989328&viewfull=1#post989328

[AngelLestat]

These are not venus problems:

-levels of co2, H2SO4 and other similar components.

-venus-sun distance.

The only problem of venus is the total amount of H2, it has 10000 times less water than earth.

Venus rotation may be a big problem too if you plan a full terraforming process.

About the graphene o2 ballons idea may work if these considerations are taking into account:

Ballons needs to have some coating protection against h2so4 and UV light, this may be done using some elements from the atmosphere (but they would not last much, is possible that after some years would need to be coated again), the other solution is to use metals from the surfuce as coating, platinum or tantalum would be permanent. Of course the graphene O2 ballons would remain very high, where the temperature is low (this reduce by a lot the h2so4 corrotion)

In case we use tantalum or platinum as coating , the extra ballon reflectivity would increase the colling ratio of the atmosphere. Of course even without reflective coating, the atmosphere would cool too, just because we are reducing the atmosphere density by just trapping o2 and let the remaning carbon to fall to the surface.

So if atmosphere density decrease adding these ballons, then their floating altitude would start to fall in similar ratio than the temperature does.

They would start at 100km height at -80Celcius degree, then after a while they may be at 10km height at 0 Celcius degree.

It would come a point where the ballons would touch surface, the o2 would be release, and we end with a planet of O2 atmosphere and earth like temperatures. (the lack of water or other greenhouse gases keeps venus temperature similar even being more close to sun)

But the venus rotation and lack of water problem remains.

Then we have another issue, Venus has heavier components than earth, that means extra radioactive elements in its core. This mean extra volcanic activity which may revert all the process before being completed.

Edited August 1, 2014 by AngelLestat

[EdFred]

Better idea:

Build a teleportation device and teleport Venusian atmosphere to Mars.

Two birds, one stone.

[RuBisCO]

Better idea:

Build a teleportation device and teleport Venusian atmosphere to Mars.

Two birds, one stone.

I thought about the idea of a wormhole pump. Big problem is how the heck do wormholes deal with kinetic and potential energy, pumping gas from one planet to another, each planet is moving relative to the other at several km/s, so when the gas from one world is pumped out to another does it come out at that velocity diffrence? Assuming that problem is solved yes a wormhole pump would solve several problems at once, we could just pump hydrogen from the gas giants to venus, pump CO2 and nitrogen to mars from venus, pump water from europa or the ice moons of the out planets to both mars and venus. Either it will come spraying out at high velocity or the wormhole has to make up the energy diffrence somehow.

We still have the rotation of venus problem to deal with. I don't think it is that bad, so venus will have a ~4 month long day, we could have a eco-system live on that, it would be kind of exotic to have season-day instead of a season-year. There is the magnetic field problem but if we can make wormhole pumps we could probably make a artifical magnetosphere for a planet easy.

Edited August 1, 2014 by RuBisCO

[ZetaX]

You know, even hypothetically assuming wormholes, you would still probably have to conserve energy and momentum (or your wormholes are just fantasy). This includes the wormhole needing lots and lots of energy to transport the matter.

[RuBisCO]

You know, even hypothetically assuming wormholes, you would still probably have to conserve energy and momentum (or your wormholes are just fantasy). This includes the wormhole needing lots and lots of energy to transport the matter.

Yep, that my whole point, the change in potential energy has to come out of something, might as well be the wormhole.

[Rus-Evo]

If we are far along enough to have wormholes do we even need to terraform Venus? Technology that advanced could have mining rovers to survive there.

[RuBisCO]

If we are far along enough to have wormholes do we even need to terraform Venus? Technology that advanced could have mining rovers to survive there.

Where are people suppose to live?