How to terraform Venus in 5 easy steps..

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

1. Push Venus into an orbit similiar to Earth's

2. Blow most of Venus' atmospere off

3. Bombard the planet with giant chunks of ice...creating oceans

4. add algea to the planet

5. plant trees across the planet

I'm a genius!

 

[Hakim]

Grrrreat topic!!

The orbit is ok, with good terraforming you can bring the temperature down.

You forgot the most important: make the Venusian day shorter, it's currently one week.

Not sure how though. In the Red Mars-series they try doing this with something called Dyson-something. I think it made Venus into some kind of electrical motor propelled by the Sun. Kinda.

Btw: the Red Mars-trilogy is packed with terraforming stuff, about Mars.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

If you push Venus into Earth's orbit, isn't it going to affect Earth's orbit?

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

XIII--Not if its far enough away...I'd put it in the same orbit...but DIFFINITELY not the same position...it'd have to be far enough away that it wouldnt effect earth.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

If it's in the same orbit but not the same position, what guarantees are there of Venus not colliding into Earth?

Also, you do know that planets also influence each other's orbit? Remove Venus, and Earth's orbit might be disturbed... a little... I think. Enough for an Ice Age or such.

 

[steviejay]

put Venus and Earth into the same orbit and you'll end up with a huge Galatic set of those office toys, fun to watch, but you wouldn't want to be the ball

good idea though

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

It wouldn't effect earth if its far enough away from earth..

If its rotating around the sun in the same direction as Earth, than it would be impossible for the two planets to collide. Also, the orbiting speed would have to be the same, to prevent one planet from catching up with the other and acting as cosmic bumber cars.

 

[Hakim]

I think that terraforming of Venus could go quicker than Mars if you just could get some kind of life to survive there. Although it's too hot now, the heat would make the life very vivid, completing its design task quicker.

The atmoshere would have to be designed to let out as much heat as possible, CO2 would have to be removed altogether.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

4. add algea to the planet

This is the only one we could accomplish right now. We could seed it with bacteria, algae, whatever, that scrub the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and create oxygen.

 

[Gumby78]

You forgot the most important: make the Venusian day shorter, it's currently one week.

The Venusian day is 243 'Earth days'. The Venusian year is 224.70 'Earth days'. So a day is longer then a year on venus. The rotation is also retrograde(backwards).

 

[Norseone]

It wouldn't effect earth if its far enough away from earth..

If its rotating around the sun in the same direction as Earth, than it would be impossible for the two planets to collide. Also, the orbiting speed would have to be the same, to prevent one planet from catching up with the other and acting as cosmic bumber cars.

First of all what he was saying i believe is that moving it out of its original orbit would affect earth and the rest of the planets a bit. Also, how would we even move the planet? Im not aware of anything that is powerful enough to move a planet that humans will be controlling any time soon....

 

[stratego]

If it's in the same orbit but not the same position, what guarantees are there of Venus not colliding into Earth?

Maybe we should just let it come close to colliding, then build a giant elevator connecting Earth and Venus. The elevator would help keep the distance, and also allow travel between the two rocks.

 

[Hakim]

The Venusian day is 243 'Earth days'. The Venusian year is 224.70 'Earth days'. So a day is longer then a year on venus. The rotation is also retrograde(backwards).

Gosh! Thanks for correcting me!

It definitely needs to be quickened!

 

[North King]

Speeding up its rotation is easy enough. Just take one of the bigger ice bodies from the Oort cloud, like the ones almost as big as Pluto, and smash it into the planet at an angle at the right velocity, and, there you have it! Oceans and a nice, quick day. You'd have to get rid of most of the atmosphere, and hopefullly find some good asteroids with lots of oxygen, and then use lichen to break down the rock into soil and algae to make a breathable atmosphere, plankton, and then try adding higher and higher life forms, like brush and small animals first, then grass and bigger animals, trees and bigger animals... etc. I imagine you could put it exactly opposite Earth's orbit and it wouldn't affect it, though the absense of Venus in its proper place would be a problem... Do it gradually, though, and it wouldn't be too bad.

 

[Perfection]

Okay, moving a planet's orbit is extremely hard, that's not the way to go. You couldn't move it slowly because then your gonna disrupt eath's orbit. You'd need to apply enormous thrust to get it there then enormous thrust again to prevent it from hurtling into space. This would simply be unfeasible. Rotation too would be a major pain, if you used North King's idea of a TNO you'd have so much heat from impact that it wouldn't be terrafromable for thousands if not millions of years. The only way I can think of is directed comet and asteroid grazing where you take a large number of small asteroids/comets and hurtle it very near the planet it in the direction of its rotation, after thousands and thousands of these you might get more rotation. This could be done graudually though over many many years.

Now for the atmosphere what would occur is the removal of CO2, this is also tricky, but nature has given us a great asset, photosysthesis. What we do is built huge complexes at the poles, these complexes would cool the plants as well as keep a higher oxygen content. Then we take the plants and set them outside (we may need to further heat them) to produce charcoal. The charcoal would then be purified to carbon and buried. Over time the operations would expand O2 levels would rise as well H20 from the plant material. The big problem is though the whole thing would require large amounts of water, this could be transfered from a gas giant, combined with the O2 produced by plants (that would also prevent an O2 surplus) we would have water and power for the machinery. Eventually with the help of cloud albedo from H20 we could topple the greenhouse effects. Pressure too must be addressed, there is simply to much atmophere. The solution is while burying the charcoal to dig up iron and other metals, these will be oxidized by the O2 taking it out of the atmophere. The end result would be a forested venus with much ocean, the atmosphere would be breathable atmophere composed primarly of oxygen and it would also be much wetter then the earth. It wouldn't be exactly like earth, but it would do the trick.

 

[Blackbird_SR-71]

Sword of Geddon,
Good idea but their is problems in your theory:

1. If you would push Venus into Earths orbit then the balance of gravity would be destroyed and Earth would either be flung nearer to the sun or flung farther away fromt the sun resulting in Earth leaving the so called "Hospitalable Zone" that is the region far enough from the star to be comfortable for life.

2. You can't just blow all the carbon dioxide from Venus. You would have to have some sort of machine that would be able to withstand the pressure and heat while converting the carbon dioxide to oxygen. The longest live spacecraft on Venus survived only for 2 hrs...........

3. Possible but how would you be able to direct the metores to hit Venus at the right angle and not cause catastrophic event that would destroy Venus? Also the amount of ice needed would be alot.

4. Adding algea isn't that easy because most of the algea would die because they can't adapt to the environment. The living ones would die a couple of days later.

5. Planting trees would take decades to do and decades to grow before their any use and most seeds will be destroyed because they can't survive in Venuses soil.

Good idea but many flaws in this concept. Why is their a sudden urge of posting terraforming?

 

[Mise]

For the sake of arguement, lets say we could instantly move the planet Venus from its orbit to another orbit. We can't put it in the same orbit as Earth, because the extra gravitational force will distort our orbit. BUT, lets put it on the other side of the sun! Nope, can't do that either, because the gravitational force would pull both planets into the sun. So we'd have to increase the velocity of the Earth's orbit, i.e. make the Earth's year shorter. This would throw agriculture on Earth into absolute chaos. SO, lets make Earth's orbit slightly further away, and still increase the orbital frequency, but because of the larger orbital radius, the years would be the same length of time. BUT, it would be colder, causing more chaos in agriculture. SO, lets pollute our atmosphere with more CO2 and increase the Earth's temperature accordingly? Yay for global warming!

 

[Perfection]

We can't put it in the same orbit as Earth, because the extra gravitational force will distort our orbit.

That may not be the case, numerous bodies share orbits, however in all of examples in the solar system it's just a big one and a small one. Still If they were placed far enough the gravitational effects will be small

BUT, lets put it on the other side of the sun! Nope, can't do that either, because the gravitational force would pull both planets into the sun. So we'd have to increase the velocity of the Earth's orbit, i.e. make the Earth's year shorter.

Umm the effects would be absolutly miniscule it would have around 2.4 millionths the effect on earth as the sun.

 

[Amenhotep7]

1. Push Venus into an orbit similiar to Earth'sp/quote]

No you won't. Two bodies, (I read somewhere) can share the same orbit if, and only if, they are 45 degrees apart. But even so, this would affect tides on earth SO GREATLY...It'd be more toruble than it's worth...

 

[Perfection]

1. Push Venus into an orbit similiar to Earth'sp/quote]

No you won't. Two bodies, (I read somewhere) can share the same orbit if, and only if, they are 45 degrees apart. But even so, this would affect tides on earth SO GREATLY...It'd be more toruble than it's worth...

Actually it's 60 degrees, they're called LaGrange points. I know these are particularly stable but I'm not sure that outside they are doomed to fail. Oh and the tidal effect would be miniscule. Venus would be very very far away, as far as the sun.