Implications of a terraformed Venus/Triton

[Flyndaran]

Dense gases like nitrogen sticking around make sense. But that much helium is downright spooky weird.

If literally only hydrogen is needed, but none of the commonly attached elements, then you're left with scooping from gas giants.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Use floating factories to convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen and diamond dust?

More likely coal, but either way, does a surface consisting of about 200 tons per square meter of flammable materials seem like a good idea in combination with an oxygen atmosphere? You need to arrange to bury it somehow, and I don't think Venus has convenient subduction zones. You might actually want to import some nickel-iron asteroids and use them to store carbon.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by Anthony

More likely coal, but either way, does a surface consisting of about 200 tons per square meter of flammable materials seem like a good idea in combination with an oxygen atmosphere? You need to arrange to bury it somehow, and I don't think Venus has convenient subduction zones. You might actually want to import some nickel-iron asteroids and use them to store carbon.

It is a heck of a lot of carbon, isn't it? You could create a diamond sphere with a radius of 200 kilometers in orbit around Venus (come to think of it, there is no reason why the floating factories could not have mass drivers to send larger diamond into orbit). It is surprising that Venus has that much carbon, considering that it would consist of 60% of the carbon within Venus unless Venus possessed much more carbon than Earth during its formation.

[Flyndaran]

For a hypothetical distant future primitives setting, having a large deep layer of diamonds is interesting at least.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Anthony

More likely coal, but either way, does a surface consisting of about 200 tons per square meter of flammable materials seem like a good idea in combination with an oxygen atmosphere? You need to arrange to bury it somehow, and I don't think Venus has convenient subduction zones. You might actually want to import some nickel-iron asteroids and use them to store carbon.

Obviously some of it is going into the biosphere, and you probably will want to build with it too, since it will be abundant, so your solettas, aerostats, and eventually even your ground structures can be made of locally-sourced graphene, fullerenes, diamond, carbon composites and bio-material. There's still a lot of carbon, though.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Anyway, what you probably want to do with most of Venus' atmosphere is throw it way. Acrosome could ship a good bit of it to Mars with his wormholes. It'd be more useful there.

Mars was terraformed at a much lower (i.e. pre-wormhole) tech level already, and the atmospheric pressure was dictated by treaty.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Ultra tech that fixes the carbon into gargantuan blocks of graphite spewing tons of gaseous oxygen in the process should be well within these guys' ability.

Pseudolimestone is just too damned handy in a low-tech society for me not to precipitate a lot of that carbon as calcium carbonate. I just need a source for one hell of a lot of calcium. And magnesium and potassium. Preferably one amenable to mass wormhole transport...

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

For a hypothetical distant future primitives setting, having a large deep layer of diamonds is interesting at least.

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Obviously some of it is going into the biosphere, and you probably will want to build with it too, since it will be abundant, so your solettas, aerostats, and eventually even your ground structures can be made of locally-sourced graphene, fullerenes, diamond and carbon composites. There's still a lot of carbon, though.

Actually, I had thought of something like this already. Assuming that a TL12 civilization uses diamond as construction material, there will be large piles of it still sitting around. Dams. Skyscraper rubble. Pavement. Etc. Dirt cheap, those rocks.

[Flyndaran]

CaCO3 would end up using more oxygen than the original CO2 did.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

CaCO3 would end up using more oxygen than the original CO2 did.

Yes, but I am moving literal oceans of H2O onto the planet...

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by acrosome

The problem is that real-life wormholes would be spherical, so you'd need to engineer a nozzle that can take that much energy.

Not all wormhole designs are spherical - it just makes it easier to analyze the equations that way. For example, the Visser wormhole design can be circular or polyhederal.

Luke

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

Not all wormhole designs are spherical - it just makes it easier to analyze the equations that way. For example, the Visser wormhole design can be circular or polyhederal.

Oh? I'll have to read a bit.

EDIT-- oh, but you come through it with chirality flipped. That would be rather a problem for a living thing. Or is it even worse? What would that do on an atomic scale? Anything? Is spin reversed? Do electrons turn into positrons? That would be kind of exciting- infinite antimatter for everyone! But it would sort of prohibit using it as a sun-rocket, since I want Venus in a non-vaporized state. Well, actually I guess that's not true. I could just use a much smaller wormhole, then Venus's atmosphere become the matter side of the matter-antimatter reaction, and now I'm using an antimatter rocket.

Interesting second-order assumption, though. If you have wormholes, you have cheap antimatter.

EDIT AGAIN-- Yes, it turns out that they do make antimatter! Neat. The big brains refer to this as an Alice's Universe, and the charge on a particle is a Cheshire Charge.

I guess ya learn somethin' every day.