Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: thedoc on 21/01/2016 06:50:02
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John Mc Caffery asked the Naked Scientists:
When we talk of terraforming a planet we are always talking about Mars with the huge expenditure of effort time and money involved.
Venus is far closer to Earth in most ways.
Yes the temperature at the surface is 600deg celcius and the atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide with high atmospheric pressure.
But if the Geologists are to be believed this used to be the conditions on Earth.
Why cant we seed the upper atmosphere of Venus with say 10 kg of single cellular photosynthetic organisms .
If they double every 5 days say. Then we have 7 trillion tons within 6 months, doubling every 5 days. With the free oxygen , temp comes down and water appears. With lowering of temp and higher oxygen we can reseed with more sophisticated organisms plus they would be evolving also. On Earth life had to evolve in this hostile environment over billions of years then photosynthesis had also to evolve.
Dumping 10 or 20 kg of organic material seems like an easy solution.
Regards John
What do you think?
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Totally agree.
We not only have good extremophile candidates but we can genetically design them to be just right.
The only thing is the moral issue.
Should we?
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Oh dear every time we start to interfere with nature we get it wrong whether it be toads and rabbits in Australia or climate change. If you must colonise a planet, figure a way to do it without messing with it's eco-system.
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Oh dear every time we start to interfere with nature we get it wrong whether it be toads and rabbits in Australia or climate change. If you must colonise a planet, figure a way to do it without messing with it's eco-system.
I suppose that means genetically modified Humans engineered to survive in the existing environment.
Maybe we can be chlorophyl based and balloon shaped.
Hmmmm...
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In any real problem, science will generally find an answer to whether, and engineering can then propose how and how much, but the key questions are why, and why not.
I don't think I'm sufficiently bored with this planet to want to mess about with Venus. Distance isn't a problem once you have left earth orbit, and Mars looks like a lot of fun for a lot less effort - certainly less inhospitable from the outset, and only a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult than Antarctica.
Not sure it's worth starting a project that will take a billion years to reach a useful or interesting stage: the probability is that our descendants will be superstitious morons who won't understand why we did it in the first place, even if we had an answer to that question.
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It would be good to understand what pushed Venus "over the edge" so the greenhouse effect became irreversible.
Otherwise we may find ourselves Venus-forming Earth.
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It would be good to understand what pushed Venus "over the edge" so the greenhouse effect became irreversible.
Otherwise we may find ourselves Venus-forming Earth.
It has been suggested that, at a certain levels of concentration, water vapour can generate a runaway greenhouse effect.