Terraforming Venus

[Rynn]

All of these and similar have been proposed at one time or another (although the ideas used fusion rockets rather than conversion). When I was in college, the science library on campus had back issues of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society available - I spent many happy hours reading them Papers on most of these ideas could be found in one issue or another.

When it comes to spinning up Venus, some proposals look at only taking it up to a 96hr 'day' (48hrs of day, 48hrs of night) to make the process a bit easier.

Paul Birch has suggested that mass beam tech could spin up Venus in around 30yrs.

Sounds like library time well spent hmm, yeah after I posted it it occured to me that it's not so outlandish (as you and Cray have pointed out). The 96h day point is interesting as well, given OA bioengineering in many cases populations might decide to "meet in the middle", as either a practical or just aesthetic compromise. Personally I've always thought it would be cool to have a longer day, 24 hours just never seems like enough.

In terms of cooling the planet, I've seen a paper that suggested that a big soletta might freeze out the atmosphere (for easier packaging and removal) in around a thousand years or so. Although I wonder if you would need to get it down to freezing or could manage just getting it down to a temp that nanomachines/gengineered lifeforms could survive and start consuming the atmosphere and turning it into other stuff (more of themselves, rocks, packages for shipment offworld, etc.) Might be faster. Although my sense is that, at least in OA, terraforming is done more for fun or because people think it's a good thing to do rather than for any pressing need.

Agreed on both points, presumably OA tech could overtake simple things like this through more advanced interventions. In terms of terraforming I think that's really the only reason why anyone in OA would do it. Aside from cases where it might be due to extreme ideological/political motivations (like Mars) there's really no reason to terraform when megascale habs can be built. Unless of course you feel like doing it.

Given OA automation it could be a very fun and communal thing to do rather than anything of significant effort. For example: the population of a hab might decide to terraform and move to a nearby planet. They have the templates for a variety of biospheres so they could just fab up the seed units for a terraformer swarm and just wait, but instead make it a public competition. They announce a deadline of one year to submit a concept piece for the ecosystem (basic biochemistry, major taxonomy etcetera). After that there's a period of advertising and a public vote. Then anyone is free within the year after that to design a neogen within the scope of the winning concept (like how we all contribute to OA). At the end of that it's all fed into a biosphere design program (that adds leaves to the branches and figures out how to incorporate everyone's designs) which then coughs up a template to put into a swarm.

Ten years later it's colonization day for the universally contributed to world