[Space] Terraformed Venus as a setting

[tantric]

What if you just want to bioform it? Interesting test of the Gaian principle, if you could get some algae to live in the clouds.

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by tantric

What if you just want to bioform it? Interesting test of the Gaian principle, if you could get some algae to live in the clouds.

The challenge there is engineering something to live in the Venusian clouds. After that, it's just a matter of delivery and waiting.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

If you could fix the serious greenhouse problem Venus has, it would probably feel like some of the hotter periods of Earth's past. The only problems would be terrible conditions for farming, and the lack of a magnetic field being bad for forming an ozone layer. If you could artificially generate one to keep the upper atmosphere stable, it would just be a hot Earth. No volcanos, though. Venus' period of hyper volcanism went on a lot longer than any volcanic period Earth has experienced.

If we didn't have an artificial magnetic field, thus no ozone layer, how stable would the atmosphere be? Are we talking changes in a few centuries, or changes in many millenia?

I suppose the other problem would be growing crops (in addition to the crappy soil, you have a pretty irradiated environment, thanks to a lack of an ozone layer, a lag of magnetosphere, and being so much closer to the sun). Handwaving away the crappy-soil problem, would it be possible to grow crops? Or possible to genegineer plants that could tolerate this sort of environment? And how substantially different would you need to make the biosphere of the world? Would we be talking a top-down change, or could we just adjust some of the basic seeds of life, like our planktons and our grasses, and the rest would be alright, presuming it could eat the altered plants?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

If we didn't have an artificial magnetic field, thus no ozone layer, how stable would the atmosphere be? Are we talking changes in a few centuries, or changes in many millenia?

Why would it make any difference at all? Actually, it might make the atmosphere *more* stable, since the ozone absorbs incoming energy in the ultraviolet at higher elevations, and higher temperatures at high elevations mean more gas escape.

Um, and why is lacking a magnetic field supposed to damage the ozone layer? If anything high energy radiation will generate more of it.

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Why would it make any difference at all? Actually, it might make the atmosphere *more* stable, since the ozone absorbs incoming energy in the ultraviolet at higher elevations, and higher temperatures at high elevations mean more gas escape.

Um, and why is lacking a magnetic field supposed to damage the ozone layer? If anything high energy radiation will generate more of it.

Without a magnetic field, solar winds literally blow your upper atmosphere away. If Mars hadn't lost its magnetic field, it would still have enough atmosphere to support liquid water and (possibly) life.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Originally Posted by tantric

What if you just want to bioform it? Interesting test of the Gaian principle, if you could get some algae to live in the clouds.

Astrophysicists have seriously proposed, recently, that Venusian clouds may be inhabited by microbes with a very different metabolism from those on Earth, as an explanation for some chemical anomolies in the upper atmosphere. Assuming they don't exist, sufficiently advanced genengineers could presumably create them. With especially advanced engineering it should be possible to create life to seed Titan, Europa, Enceladus, and any other moon with a subsurface water/ammonia ocean.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

Astrophysicists have seriously proposed, recently, that Venusian clouds may be inhabited by microbes with a very different metabolism from those on Earth, as an explanation for some chemical anomolies in the upper atmosphere. Assuming they don't exist, sufficiently advanced genengineers could presumably create them. With especially advanced engineering it should be possible to create life to seed Titan, Europa, Enceladus, and any other moon with a subsurface water/ammonia ocean.

Some times I think 'life' just means 'really quirky chemistry'

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

Astrophysicists have seriously proposed, recently, that Venusian clouds may be inhabited by microbes with a very different metabolism from those on Earth, as an explanation for some chemical anomolies in the upper atmosphere. Assuming they don't exist, sufficiently advanced genengineers could presumably create them. With especially advanced engineering it should be possible to create life to seed Titan, Europa, Enceladus, and any other moon with a subsurface water/ammonia ocean.

And since the amount of Venusian atmosphere blown off by solar winds is measurable out to Earth's orbit, that may actually be a boost to the theory that some diseases come from space o.O

[Fred Brackin]

If there's a sunshade that keeps Venus from being baked by visible and IR wavelength sunlight why doesn't hat same sunshade block the UV and the solar wind?

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

Without a magnetic field, solar winds literally blow your upper atmosphere away. If Mars hadn't lost its magnetic field, it would still have enough atmosphere to support liquid water and (possibly) life.

Yeah, but that's on a geological scale, right? Over the course of 10,000 years, it wouldn't really substantially change your atmosphere, right?

If we dropped off some colonists on our World of the Black Sun, and their civilization collapses a few hundred years later, and then after a thousand years, a new civilization arises on its ruins, and then it collapses into a new dark age and the players are in tribes trying to restore the rightful empire, or what have you.

Under those circumstances, you wouldn't need a magnetosphere, right? The atmosphere is being stripped, but this is largely academic for the humans on the world.