I think this plan is impractical, but the coolest possible way I could terraform Venus. As I mentioned before, Carl Sagan had a plan to have a city encased in a plexiglass bubble, filled with Earthlike air. Placed in Venus's atmosphere, this floats like a balloon, about six miles over Venus's inhospitable surface, where the temperature and pressure are Earthlike.
We deploy millions of these in a Dyson-like swarm. (Dyson's sphere, as described by Dr. Dyson, is not a solid object, but a swarm of satellites in clever orbits that never quite collide, and prove dense enough to capture 99% of a star's output.) The swarm orbits around Venus, and when they're close enough to each other, we connect them with steel rods, and then form "bowls" with metal plates in the area between the rods and the bubble cities. Venus now has a second "surface". Below, the supercritical carbon dioxide cools in the darkness, while above, a large planet with lots of room. We fill one bowl with imported soil, and grow plants in it. Preferably crop-plants. Any waste shucked off by the farming is put into the other bowls to compost. When the composting is done, they are super-fertile farming areas. The process accelerates until the entire surface is full of greenery. At that point, the plexiglass can be removed from the bubble cities, as human beings could now breathe this planet's air.
Down below, the carbon dioxide cools in the darkness until it is a liquid. It probably won't reach solid temperatures at this pressure. I can imagine the farmers above siphoning small amounts off on occasion. As this gets used up, the rocks below can become a second resource. Or, thirdly, the gap can be used for waste disposal, because no human being's ever going down there.
Now at the beginning, I said this was impractical. Even one sagan-bubble city would be a massively expensive trillion dollar undertaking, with some very difficult engineering in the process. This is talking about making millions, possibly even billions, of them. And as for the connecting stage, I'm not sure earth even has that much steel.
Showing posts with label Terraform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terraform. Show all posts
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Tree Wall
The Sahara desert of northern Africa is spreading southward. This is very alarming to the countries on its border, who fear a loss of farm productivity and civil chaos as this kills their agricultural production and leads to swarms of people moving to the nearest city in the hopes of earning enough to sustain themselves.
Discovery News reports that 11 affected nations are cooperating to build a wall of trees that will halt the expansion in place. BBC reports that the trees prevent the desert from expanding by halting erosion, slowing the wind, and changing the ground conditions in a way that encourages water retention.
A big sticking point in this is money. All the nations must contribute land and money and effort if this is to succeed. If even one hole in the wall exists, the desert can push through the hole and around the rest of the wall, rendering it useless. And this region is not particularly famous for being wealthy. Unfortunately, the nations involved are doing this because they must. They must or conditions within will become much worse.
If this works, the affected countries could even push back the desert with additional walls, creating additional farmland and making their country more attractive to both agriculture and industry.
Discovery News reports that 11 affected nations are cooperating to build a wall of trees that will halt the expansion in place. BBC reports that the trees prevent the desert from expanding by halting erosion, slowing the wind, and changing the ground conditions in a way that encourages water retention.
A big sticking point in this is money. All the nations must contribute land and money and effort if this is to succeed. If even one hole in the wall exists, the desert can push through the hole and around the rest of the wall, rendering it useless. And this region is not particularly famous for being wealthy. Unfortunately, the nations involved are doing this because they must. They must or conditions within will become much worse.
If this works, the affected countries could even push back the desert with additional walls, creating additional farmland and making their country more attractive to both agriculture and industry.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Cheapest Terraforming Mars
A youtube video suggests a really, really, cheap way to terraform Mars.
Bacteria. Little bacteria genetically engineered to endure the high radiation, low temperature nightmare that Mars is now, slowly pushing it warmer, wetter, gassier, and more able to help us.
The cost? He estimates it to be about "two shuttle launches," which would add up to $120 million USD at lowest and $2.6 billion USD at highest. Both are astronomical sums, but well within the reach of multiple nations, and even a few corporations.
The bacteria would work slowly, but would operate in conjunction with any other project undertaken. Warming Mars with lasers would speed it up. Adding CO2 would speed it up. Dropping resource-rich meteors would speed it up. A coal-burning remote base would speed it up.
He points out that a common objection to this kind of thing is "but we have problems here on Earth!" Which we do. For $2.6 billion, apartment complexes could be built in such numbers that rent prices would collapse nationwide, ending homelessness for the foreseeable future. Or, a comprehensive medical anti-drug program could end narcotic addiction. Or any number of other worthy projects.
However, another big benefit to this project is that it can be piggybacked on a scientific mission, the kind we were planning to do anyway, for only marginally more money. An extra $500 on a billion dollar project. And that makes it a little harder to argue.
Bacteria. Little bacteria genetically engineered to endure the high radiation, low temperature nightmare that Mars is now, slowly pushing it warmer, wetter, gassier, and more able to help us.
The cost? He estimates it to be about "two shuttle launches," which would add up to $120 million USD at lowest and $2.6 billion USD at highest. Both are astronomical sums, but well within the reach of multiple nations, and even a few corporations.
The bacteria would work slowly, but would operate in conjunction with any other project undertaken. Warming Mars with lasers would speed it up. Adding CO2 would speed it up. Dropping resource-rich meteors would speed it up. A coal-burning remote base would speed it up.
He points out that a common objection to this kind of thing is "but we have problems here on Earth!" Which we do. For $2.6 billion, apartment complexes could be built in such numbers that rent prices would collapse nationwide, ending homelessness for the foreseeable future. Or, a comprehensive medical anti-drug program could end narcotic addiction. Or any number of other worthy projects.
However, another big benefit to this project is that it can be piggybacked on a scientific mission, the kind we were planning to do anyway, for only marginally more money. An extra $500 on a billion dollar project. And that makes it a little harder to argue.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Terraforming Mars Slowly
Long ago, I described a plan for terraforming Mars, a plan that would vastly increase the territory available to Earthly life, including our own. It would be slow and agonizingly expensive, but worth it. Now, here's a second means of doing it, far more slowly, but in more affordable bites.
We start with a robotic probe, steel pieces, a tank of compressed air, and plexiglass. The probe lands, finds the steel, and assembles it into a frame. It then slides the plexiglass between the steel, and seals it airtight. This structure should also have an airlock. On the inside, leave the air tank, preferably opened. When the pressure is earthly pressure, (760 Torr, or one "atmosphere"), then we have something very valuable indeed: a base of operations on Mars that could sustain a small group of people. The first group to use this should be with them a collection of plants, or at least seeds. This will keep the air breathable by humans. They should also attempt to farm to reduce the amount of supplies needed, and dig an underground complex for when radiation levels come high.
One of the missions of human visitors to Mars should be to build additional complexes. This will allow expansion of the number of missions, and will cost less than the original, robotic one. Some of these may even be sold as exotic living space, which I'm sure a few people can not only afford, but want to buy.
When we have a number of these, we can attempt megaprojects to reactivate the Martian core, resupply the Martian atmosphere, and melt the ice on Mars. A few meteor supplements can fill out the Martian sea, and when an atmosphere is established, then plants can be planted outside to make it human breathable. In the end, Mars would be as friendly to Earthly life, humans included, as the Earth itself.
This project would run for millions of years in total, but at no point would more than $1 billion be needed. Mars would slowly gain value as the project progressed, as it gained industry, agriculture, and sustained more and more people. Ownership is an issue, as a treaty in place forbids national ownership of the turf in question. All space powers, including the United States, have signed this treaty.
I think that within the next thousand years, this slow method or the fast method, will become necessary for the sustaining of our collective economic systems, which demand perpetual growth. This requires an ever-growing population, and an ever-growing amount of factories, mines, and so on, and the Earth is only so big. As it grows, we increasingly have to make some hard choices. We can spend trillions growing Mars, or we could sacrifice wild lands, or we could expensively build under the sea. Any of these options have some painful drawbacks, but we must persue one.
We start with a robotic probe, steel pieces, a tank of compressed air, and plexiglass. The probe lands, finds the steel, and assembles it into a frame. It then slides the plexiglass between the steel, and seals it airtight. This structure should also have an airlock. On the inside, leave the air tank, preferably opened. When the pressure is earthly pressure, (760 Torr, or one "atmosphere"), then we have something very valuable indeed: a base of operations on Mars that could sustain a small group of people. The first group to use this should be with them a collection of plants, or at least seeds. This will keep the air breathable by humans. They should also attempt to farm to reduce the amount of supplies needed, and dig an underground complex for when radiation levels come high.
One of the missions of human visitors to Mars should be to build additional complexes. This will allow expansion of the number of missions, and will cost less than the original, robotic one. Some of these may even be sold as exotic living space, which I'm sure a few people can not only afford, but want to buy.
When we have a number of these, we can attempt megaprojects to reactivate the Martian core, resupply the Martian atmosphere, and melt the ice on Mars. A few meteor supplements can fill out the Martian sea, and when an atmosphere is established, then plants can be planted outside to make it human breathable. In the end, Mars would be as friendly to Earthly life, humans included, as the Earth itself.
This project would run for millions of years in total, but at no point would more than $1 billion be needed. Mars would slowly gain value as the project progressed, as it gained industry, agriculture, and sustained more and more people. Ownership is an issue, as a treaty in place forbids national ownership of the turf in question. All space powers, including the United States, have signed this treaty.
I think that within the next thousand years, this slow method or the fast method, will become necessary for the sustaining of our collective economic systems, which demand perpetual growth. This requires an ever-growing population, and an ever-growing amount of factories, mines, and so on, and the Earth is only so big. As it grows, we increasingly have to make some hard choices. We can spend trillions growing Mars, or we could sacrifice wild lands, or we could expensively build under the sea. Any of these options have some painful drawbacks, but we must persue one.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Terraforming: Earth II
Okay, I'm back. That was a nightmare of an assignment, now I hope I can sleep enough such that I don't go insane and/or die.
So, in the early days of this blog, I showed you plans to terraform Venus and Mars, both plans being thousand-year, trillion dollar, logistical nightmares that would provide multi-trillion dollar benefits. And of course, that won't get financing because no one organization is sure that it will live that long. (I can describe the UK as being that old, if I really stretch the definition of what "the UK" is.)
But let's say you handed me all the money on the earth, and demanded that I produce a terraformed planet in 100 years. This much, I think I can handle. With the insanest plan, ever.
Using some very large mass driver (to be invented by someone at NASA, someone more insane than me), we haul Venus from its current orbit, and into the L4 Lagrange point. If this causes too much gravitational disturbance, we can replace it with its weight in similarly mass-driven rocks from deeper in the solar system. The Kupiter belt if need be.
Now we go to Mars, and ram its two moons into its surface. Then we mass-drive it over to L4. That's right, we ram them together. Preferably at an angle other than 90 degrees, because we need to spin Venus up.
The two will violently collide, providing quite the light show here on earth, slagging both of their materials molten. Part of the two will spin off into a small moon, and the other one will spin quite fast, having a ten hour day. Toss a few ice meteors at this every year, both to provide oceans and to keep the cooling time down to a mere 100 years.
At this point, the planet is like early Earth, but don't move there yet. No oxygen. You'd die. But when liquid water is apparent on the surface, it's time to bring over many plants. Any humans doing this would have to wear diving suits, because the pressure would be great, but the air would choke you dead. When the seas are full of seaweed and the ground is full of trees, then we watch. Within 50 years, it should be human-breathable.
The good news is that the planet would now support human life, but the bad news is that this would be a baby planet, with no fossil fuels. If you want coal or oil, you'll have to bring it over from Earth, at great expense. A better idea would be to fill it with wildlife and hippies. Zoo-planet, maaaaan. Also, Theodore Kazinski. He'd love the wilderness, and maybe he could manage to not get eaten.
If this plan proves wonderful, we can repeat it with Jupiter's moons, Saturn's moons, Uranus's moons, and some Kupiter belt objects, all tossed into L5 and exploded together.
So, in the early days of this blog, I showed you plans to terraform Venus and Mars, both plans being thousand-year, trillion dollar, logistical nightmares that would provide multi-trillion dollar benefits. And of course, that won't get financing because no one organization is sure that it will live that long. (I can describe the UK as being that old, if I really stretch the definition of what "the UK" is.)
But let's say you handed me all the money on the earth, and demanded that I produce a terraformed planet in 100 years. This much, I think I can handle. With the insanest plan, ever.
Using some very large mass driver (to be invented by someone at NASA, someone more insane than me), we haul Venus from its current orbit, and into the L4 Lagrange point. If this causes too much gravitational disturbance, we can replace it with its weight in similarly mass-driven rocks from deeper in the solar system. The Kupiter belt if need be.
Now we go to Mars, and ram its two moons into its surface. Then we mass-drive it over to L4. That's right, we ram them together. Preferably at an angle other than 90 degrees, because we need to spin Venus up.
The two will violently collide, providing quite the light show here on earth, slagging both of their materials molten. Part of the two will spin off into a small moon, and the other one will spin quite fast, having a ten hour day. Toss a few ice meteors at this every year, both to provide oceans and to keep the cooling time down to a mere 100 years.
At this point, the planet is like early Earth, but don't move there yet. No oxygen. You'd die. But when liquid water is apparent on the surface, it's time to bring over many plants. Any humans doing this would have to wear diving suits, because the pressure would be great, but the air would choke you dead. When the seas are full of seaweed and the ground is full of trees, then we watch. Within 50 years, it should be human-breathable.
The good news is that the planet would now support human life, but the bad news is that this would be a baby planet, with no fossil fuels. If you want coal or oil, you'll have to bring it over from Earth, at great expense. A better idea would be to fill it with wildlife and hippies. Zoo-planet, maaaaan. Also, Theodore Kazinski. He'd love the wilderness, and maybe he could manage to not get eaten.
If this plan proves wonderful, we can repeat it with Jupiter's moons, Saturn's moons, Uranus's moons, and some Kupiter belt objects, all tossed into L5 and exploded together.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
A Use For Mercury
When I study why people come to this blog using Google Analytics, I find out some odd things about my readership. For one, something like 3/4ths of the searches are for things I specifically wrote about. Perhaps these people half-remember something they read here and wanted to see it again. Or perhaps my reputation somehow proceeds me, and they've somehow heard of me through non-internet means. Or perhaps they think strange thoughts like I do.
I also learn interesting things about where they are. Most of my readers are American like I am, and the most common hits are New York and California, the two most populous states, and Texas, where I'm physically located. (Some of those Texan hits may have been me, up to all of them.) And then there's the weird parts. One person in Trondheim, Norway, reads my blog 7 times a month. It does not tell me what he or she is looking for, other than the read time is very very fast and that it's one distinct person. I hope he or she finds whatever it is that he or she wanted to read here. I also have hits elsewhere in Europe, Asia and Australia, but they've mostly seemed to have left quickly after a few seconds. Not quite what they wanted, I suppose. But I'm getting off topic.
One person apparently read my article about terraforming Mars and Venus, and was trying to find a plan to terraform Mercury. It was a very interesting idea, and I've thought it over, and I regret to say that no, Mercury cannot be terraformed. For several reasons. There is one bright spot, but first the reasons why it cannot happen.
The first reason is that Mercury is too close to the sun. Powerful solar winds strike mercury at all times, and any atmosphere brought to it would quickly be blasted into outer space. Also, any humans brought to the surface would be dead of skin cancer within a year's time even if the atmosphere was continuously magically replenished.
Two, mercury is semi-tidally-locked. It orbits the sun in a 3:2 resonance, such that 1.5 mercurial days make up a mercurial year. Any plants brought along would die during the 44 day long night. Unlike Venus, if spun up, it would spin back down due to the gravitational effects.
Three, even if we somehow magically solve the first two problems, mercury is smaller than mars. It would have difficulty retaining the atmosphere even without the solar wind, and gravity would be incredibly low, which would have unpredictable results on human health.
And lastly, the vastly closer sun provides 10 times the sunlight that the earth receives, resulting in temperatures about 20 times higher. If you think the desert is hot, wait until you see weather that can melt aluminum. Oh, and if you don't bake to death, you'll dehydrate to death sweating.
However, Mercury is not completely useless for us. In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla discovered that power could be wirelessly beamed about. So we send in a probe to work on the cold, night side, and have it endlessly construct solar panels that wire together to a beaming station. We have it continuously move along the axis of rotation, staying perpetually on the night side where it is cold enough to operate. On the poles, we build the beaming station that receives all the energy from the panels.
When the panels are rotated into the day side by Mercury's natural rotation, they produce lots of power. Mercury gets 1370 watts per square meter, of which we can hope to capture about 10%. The station changes it into a wireless form that we can pick up elsewhere in the solar system. We can pick this up on Mars for heating, on the ISS for powering scientific tools, or hypothetically even on earth to power our cities. The panels should be replaced every 20 or so years.
Downsides: How to build the power-transmitting station such that it doesn't melt down when in the day side. How to deal with rotation, as Mercury is not perpendicular to the solar system plane, but slightly tilted. (About 6 degrees.) Oh, and getting thousands of square miles of solar panels and hundreds of thousands of feet of power transmitting cable not only into space, but onto Mercury's surface without being damaged. Also, the robot probably needs to be able to build everything without human intervention, which could take up to 12 minutes depending on the distance of our planets at the time. (Speed of light limitations are a bitch, aren't they?)
I also learn interesting things about where they are. Most of my readers are American like I am, and the most common hits are New York and California, the two most populous states, and Texas, where I'm physically located. (Some of those Texan hits may have been me, up to all of them.) And then there's the weird parts. One person in Trondheim, Norway, reads my blog 7 times a month. It does not tell me what he or she is looking for, other than the read time is very very fast and that it's one distinct person. I hope he or she finds whatever it is that he or she wanted to read here. I also have hits elsewhere in Europe, Asia and Australia, but they've mostly seemed to have left quickly after a few seconds. Not quite what they wanted, I suppose. But I'm getting off topic.
One person apparently read my article about terraforming Mars and Venus, and was trying to find a plan to terraform Mercury. It was a very interesting idea, and I've thought it over, and I regret to say that no, Mercury cannot be terraformed. For several reasons. There is one bright spot, but first the reasons why it cannot happen.
The first reason is that Mercury is too close to the sun. Powerful solar winds strike mercury at all times, and any atmosphere brought to it would quickly be blasted into outer space. Also, any humans brought to the surface would be dead of skin cancer within a year's time even if the atmosphere was continuously magically replenished.
Two, mercury is semi-tidally-locked. It orbits the sun in a 3:2 resonance, such that 1.5 mercurial days make up a mercurial year. Any plants brought along would die during the 44 day long night. Unlike Venus, if spun up, it would spin back down due to the gravitational effects.
Three, even if we somehow magically solve the first two problems, mercury is smaller than mars. It would have difficulty retaining the atmosphere even without the solar wind, and gravity would be incredibly low, which would have unpredictable results on human health.
And lastly, the vastly closer sun provides 10 times the sunlight that the earth receives, resulting in temperatures about 20 times higher. If you think the desert is hot, wait until you see weather that can melt aluminum. Oh, and if you don't bake to death, you'll dehydrate to death sweating.
However, Mercury is not completely useless for us. In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla discovered that power could be wirelessly beamed about. So we send in a probe to work on the cold, night side, and have it endlessly construct solar panels that wire together to a beaming station. We have it continuously move along the axis of rotation, staying perpetually on the night side where it is cold enough to operate. On the poles, we build the beaming station that receives all the energy from the panels.
When the panels are rotated into the day side by Mercury's natural rotation, they produce lots of power. Mercury gets 1370 watts per square meter, of which we can hope to capture about 10%. The station changes it into a wireless form that we can pick up elsewhere in the solar system. We can pick this up on Mars for heating, on the ISS for powering scientific tools, or hypothetically even on earth to power our cities. The panels should be replaced every 20 or so years.
Downsides: How to build the power-transmitting station such that it doesn't melt down when in the day side. How to deal with rotation, as Mercury is not perpendicular to the solar system plane, but slightly tilted. (About 6 degrees.) Oh, and getting thousands of square miles of solar panels and hundreds of thousands of feet of power transmitting cable not only into space, but onto Mercury's surface without being damaged. Also, the robot probably needs to be able to build everything without human intervention, which could take up to 12 minutes depending on the distance of our planets at the time. (Speed of light limitations are a bitch, aren't they?)
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Terraforming Venus
Venus, poetically referred to as our sister planet, is much more tempting as a target of terraforming. It has nearly the same size as Earth (98% of earth's size, compared with Mars's ~60%), is closer to the sun, which would both improve plant growth and allow for greater use of solar power, and due to gravitational aspects too complex to discuss here, would be an ideal launching area for missions to the asteroid belt.
Unfortunately, the downsides are much bigger. For starters, Venus's surface is 482C, hot enough to melt lead. The atmosphere at the surface is 94 times earth's pressure, which is so thick that it starts acting like a liquid. So anything we send now would get crushed and melt down. At the same time. On top of that, Venus has little hill-sphere, so using satellites would be much much harder, and Venus rotates extremely slowly, and backwards. (The sun would rise in the west on Venus.) The Venerial (That's 'related to Venus,' btw. It does not refer to sex.) day is only two weeks shorter than it's year. So any plants grown on the surface would die from lack of light during the night, assuming they didn't crush or catch fire. Or melt. Lastly, it rains on Venus right now, but not exactly water. It rains sulphuric acid, a compound that works great in a car battery, but would really suck if it fell on your face, or your crops.
Thankfully, the late Carl Sagan did think up a way where Venus could be lived on today. See, the upper atmosphere of Venus has an earth like temperature and air pressure, and if you were to build a city inside a glass (or other transparent surface, plexiglass would do the trick) bubble, and fill that bubble with earth's atmosphere, the bubble would float like a helium balloon on earth, up five miles. There it would float, and with some of NASA's new ion jets attached, it could be sped into a 24 hour "day" of circling the planet. While all of this is workable, and I would strongly suggest this to displaced people in need of a hard to invade nation (Tibet and Palestine, for instance), it's just too sensible for this blog. Besides, the bubble would only make one city that would need special effort to get in or out of, I want a planet that works like earth. Thankfully, Sagan's city-balloon is the first step in what previously would have been impossible.
The other half of this plan comes from New Mexico, where a group of scientists made a little device, the size of a beer keg, that, when heated to 2600F (1444C), strips oxygen out of carbon dioxide, leaving carbon monoxide that extracts into a small container, to be piped away as fuel. Cooled back down to 2000F (1111C), it releases the oxygen into the atmosphere. If water is added, it produces hydrogen gas instead, with a similar oxygen-extracting process. These scientists are suggesting heating it with solar panels, and keeping it near a coal fired power plant, where it would extract 45 pounds of CO2 from the air per day, pressing it into 2.5 gallons of monoxide to be made into fuel, and then releasing its stored oxygen during the night, resetting itself for another day's extraction. Amatures, I say! I have a much grander, insaner plan!
I plan to have a Sagan bubble-city with a number of these oxygen-cans on movable arms. The bubble city would use ion jets to stay in perpetual daylight. Cans would be raised hourly, with a new can lowered. Only a little solar power would be needed to heat it to the insane temperatures needed, as Venus is already very hot. The cans might occasionally be damaged by the sulpheric acid, but they should extract the hydrogen from the water before suffering significant damage. A human could live in the bubble city, or a city of humans. They would extract some monoxide for their use as fuel, but put most of it onto an off world rocket. For best results, this rocket should go to Mars, which needs greenhouse gases. And Martian people will need fuel too, of course.
Over time, thousands of years probably, these combined actions would use up a large amount of the Venerial atmosphere. The bubble city would find itself lower and lower until it scraped bottom, with no increase in temperature. The remaining carbon dioxide could be used to synthesize baking soda to neutralize the sulphuric acid, as one promising American company has done with their smokestacks. The planet's spin speed could be increased by meteor impact. At this point, plants would be planted, water used to form oceans, and the planet of Venus would be a beautiful place to live.
The faster plan would be to put a solar shade in front of it, with an ion jet to hold it in place against the solar wind. After 1000 years of cooling, it would only be a matter of sawing up, packing up, and rocketing away the dry ice, hitting the meteor, removing the shade, and doing the plant thing. Still, that has the disadvantage of no one being able to USE venus while in the process of terraforming, while still being rather expensive.
Unfortunately, the downsides are much bigger. For starters, Venus's surface is 482C, hot enough to melt lead. The atmosphere at the surface is 94 times earth's pressure, which is so thick that it starts acting like a liquid. So anything we send now would get crushed and melt down. At the same time. On top of that, Venus has little hill-sphere, so using satellites would be much much harder, and Venus rotates extremely slowly, and backwards. (The sun would rise in the west on Venus.) The Venerial (That's 'related to Venus,' btw. It does not refer to sex.) day is only two weeks shorter than it's year. So any plants grown on the surface would die from lack of light during the night, assuming they didn't crush or catch fire. Or melt. Lastly, it rains on Venus right now, but not exactly water. It rains sulphuric acid, a compound that works great in a car battery, but would really suck if it fell on your face, or your crops.
Thankfully, the late Carl Sagan did think up a way where Venus could be lived on today. See, the upper atmosphere of Venus has an earth like temperature and air pressure, and if you were to build a city inside a glass (or other transparent surface, plexiglass would do the trick) bubble, and fill that bubble with earth's atmosphere, the bubble would float like a helium balloon on earth, up five miles. There it would float, and with some of NASA's new ion jets attached, it could be sped into a 24 hour "day" of circling the planet. While all of this is workable, and I would strongly suggest this to displaced people in need of a hard to invade nation (Tibet and Palestine, for instance), it's just too sensible for this blog. Besides, the bubble would only make one city that would need special effort to get in or out of, I want a planet that works like earth. Thankfully, Sagan's city-balloon is the first step in what previously would have been impossible.
The other half of this plan comes from New Mexico, where a group of scientists made a little device, the size of a beer keg, that, when heated to 2600F (1444C), strips oxygen out of carbon dioxide, leaving carbon monoxide that extracts into a small container, to be piped away as fuel. Cooled back down to 2000F (1111C), it releases the oxygen into the atmosphere. If water is added, it produces hydrogen gas instead, with a similar oxygen-extracting process. These scientists are suggesting heating it with solar panels, and keeping it near a coal fired power plant, where it would extract 45 pounds of CO2 from the air per day, pressing it into 2.5 gallons of monoxide to be made into fuel, and then releasing its stored oxygen during the night, resetting itself for another day's extraction. Amatures, I say! I have a much grander, insaner plan!
I plan to have a Sagan bubble-city with a number of these oxygen-cans on movable arms. The bubble city would use ion jets to stay in perpetual daylight. Cans would be raised hourly, with a new can lowered. Only a little solar power would be needed to heat it to the insane temperatures needed, as Venus is already very hot. The cans might occasionally be damaged by the sulpheric acid, but they should extract the hydrogen from the water before suffering significant damage. A human could live in the bubble city, or a city of humans. They would extract some monoxide for their use as fuel, but put most of it onto an off world rocket. For best results, this rocket should go to Mars, which needs greenhouse gases. And Martian people will need fuel too, of course.
Over time, thousands of years probably, these combined actions would use up a large amount of the Venerial atmosphere. The bubble city would find itself lower and lower until it scraped bottom, with no increase in temperature. The remaining carbon dioxide could be used to synthesize baking soda to neutralize the sulphuric acid, as one promising American company has done with their smokestacks. The planet's spin speed could be increased by meteor impact. At this point, plants would be planted, water used to form oceans, and the planet of Venus would be a beautiful place to live.
The faster plan would be to put a solar shade in front of it, with an ion jet to hold it in place against the solar wind. After 1000 years of cooling, it would only be a matter of sawing up, packing up, and rocketing away the dry ice, hitting the meteor, removing the shade, and doing the plant thing. Still, that has the disadvantage of no one being able to USE venus while in the process of terraforming, while still being rather expensive.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Terraforming Mars
Perhaps you've heard in the news about the US (and perhaps other countries), trying to travel to Mars. One of the goals of the project is to finally either confirm or deny the existance of life on Mars, be it now or thousands of years ago.
Many people are complaining, as this mission is expensive and doesn't produce a material result. (It wouldn't be worth bringing back any materials that didn't have a large scientific interest, and mining is done in tons anyway.) Well, for material results, I've got something for you that I read in a magazine once.
Terraforming is a slow process that would make Mars more Earthlike, until we could build cities and wildlife reserves on it. It'd be like gaining another Eurasia for all of earthly life. (Mars is smaller than earth, and the lowest land on Mars would become flooded by the new ocean.)
The first step would be to crash Mars's two moons into the surface, as the moons aren't as scenic as ours and would be inside the Martian atmosphere by the time we finished, which would crash them anyway. Then have satellites release CFCs from the surface. This would not erode the Ozone layer as it does on earth, because Mars does not have an ozone layer. The thickening of the atmosphere would increase the temperature, which would allow for better options. At this point, we would release large amounts of methane and CO2 into the Martian atmosphere, which is useful to us as both of those are essentially waste in our atmosphere.
By this point, Mars is like the polar regions of earth: cold and miserable, but able to support some life. Lichens would be seeded at strategic points on the Martian surface. Mars has some water to sustain them, but probably not enough for, say, a penguin, or a polar bear. We would want to add more. NASA would find asteroids in the asteroid belt rich in water, and crash them into Mars. As it warms, small lakes would develop. More CO2 and methane would keep it from freezing back over.
In addition to providing oceans and life support, vaporized water is a greenhouse gas, further raising the temperatures. We're at the three quarters completed point, and now some regions of mars resemble Siberia. The wetter areas would support arboreal trees.
We continue to add CO2, but now we're planting more plants. The plants break down the CO2 with the power of the sun. The carbon becomes their food and bodies, the oxygen is released into the atmosphere. The original CFCs have probably decayed or escaped into space, so an ozone layer would form, protecting Martian life from the powerful radiation of the sun. Water would also need to be added. Contaminated earthly water could be used too, if bacteria are added to break down the pollution.
It would also be wise to find a way to reactivate the magnetic core of Mars. Earth's molten core provides a magnetic field that in addition to aiding in navigation through the use of compases, also reflects harmful radiation from space.
At the end of the project, mars has oceans, plants, and the deserts on which plants continue to expand into. We add animals now, including ourselves. Any humans there build cities, and run civilizations, be it as a colony of the sponsoring nation, or independantly. Space travel would connect the two planets economically, and I imagine the Martian population booming from the rich resources and lack of people to compete with the colonists.
All in all, this project would cost trillions of dollars and take over a thousand years to complete, and there is some risk of Mars slowly de-terraforming, returning to the lifeless husk it is today. I am absolutely convinced that it is worth doing
Many people are complaining, as this mission is expensive and doesn't produce a material result. (It wouldn't be worth bringing back any materials that didn't have a large scientific interest, and mining is done in tons anyway.) Well, for material results, I've got something for you that I read in a magazine once.
Terraforming is a slow process that would make Mars more Earthlike, until we could build cities and wildlife reserves on it. It'd be like gaining another Eurasia for all of earthly life. (Mars is smaller than earth, and the lowest land on Mars would become flooded by the new ocean.)
The first step would be to crash Mars's two moons into the surface, as the moons aren't as scenic as ours and would be inside the Martian atmosphere by the time we finished, which would crash them anyway. Then have satellites release CFCs from the surface. This would not erode the Ozone layer as it does on earth, because Mars does not have an ozone layer. The thickening of the atmosphere would increase the temperature, which would allow for better options. At this point, we would release large amounts of methane and CO2 into the Martian atmosphere, which is useful to us as both of those are essentially waste in our atmosphere.
By this point, Mars is like the polar regions of earth: cold and miserable, but able to support some life. Lichens would be seeded at strategic points on the Martian surface. Mars has some water to sustain them, but probably not enough for, say, a penguin, or a polar bear. We would want to add more. NASA would find asteroids in the asteroid belt rich in water, and crash them into Mars. As it warms, small lakes would develop. More CO2 and methane would keep it from freezing back over.
In addition to providing oceans and life support, vaporized water is a greenhouse gas, further raising the temperatures. We're at the three quarters completed point, and now some regions of mars resemble Siberia. The wetter areas would support arboreal trees.
We continue to add CO2, but now we're planting more plants. The plants break down the CO2 with the power of the sun. The carbon becomes their food and bodies, the oxygen is released into the atmosphere. The original CFCs have probably decayed or escaped into space, so an ozone layer would form, protecting Martian life from the powerful radiation of the sun. Water would also need to be added. Contaminated earthly water could be used too, if bacteria are added to break down the pollution.
It would also be wise to find a way to reactivate the magnetic core of Mars. Earth's molten core provides a magnetic field that in addition to aiding in navigation through the use of compases, also reflects harmful radiation from space.
At the end of the project, mars has oceans, plants, and the deserts on which plants continue to expand into. We add animals now, including ourselves. Any humans there build cities, and run civilizations, be it as a colony of the sponsoring nation, or independantly. Space travel would connect the two planets economically, and I imagine the Martian population booming from the rich resources and lack of people to compete with the colonists.
All in all, this project would cost trillions of dollars and take over a thousand years to complete, and there is some risk of Mars slowly de-terraforming, returning to the lifeless husk it is today. I am absolutely convinced that it is worth doing
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