The Orion's Arm Universe Project Forums





Terraforming Venus
#6
(04-23-2015, 06:57 PM)Rynn Wrote:
(04-23-2015, 09:43 AM)Cray Wrote: 1) Say you've spun up Venus to a 24-hour day.

Man that would be a huge challenge even for OA tech (in terms of time at least). I'm not even sure how it would be done; conversion drives all over the surface anchored deep into the crust? Trillions of gravity tractors put in orbits that cause them to slingshot around the planet by the billion? Crash thousands of relativistic kinetic rounds into it or directed boost bombs?

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 themSmile 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.

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.

Todd
Reply


Messages In This Thread
Terraforming Venus - by Cray - 04-23-2015, 09:43 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Rynn - 04-23-2015, 06:57 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Cray - 04-23-2015, 10:02 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Drashner1 - 04-24-2015, 01:25 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Rynn - 04-24-2015, 05:16 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Cray - 04-24-2015, 09:51 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by stevebowers - 04-23-2015, 09:04 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Rynn - 04-23-2015, 09:17 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by radtech497 - 04-24-2015, 05:07 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Drashner1 - 04-24-2015, 11:28 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by stevebowers - 04-24-2015, 07:42 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Rynn - 04-24-2015, 07:57 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by stevebowers - 04-24-2015, 08:35 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Rynn - 04-24-2015, 08:51 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by stevebowers - 04-25-2015, 12:33 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Cray - 04-25-2015, 01:03 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by Dalex - 04-25-2015, 06:17 PM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by ai_vin - 04-26-2015, 12:56 AM
RE: Terraforming Venus - by stevebowers - 04-25-2015, 07:37 PM

Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)