Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Terraformation versus interstellar travel costs

50 billion exajoules...
Adam — (archived)

Hi All

That's the energy needed to send Venus' CO2 to infinity - 5e+28 joules.

If we're launching million ton starships at ~ 0.2c that's ~ 2 million exajoules per ship. Hence Venus degassed is equivalent to ~ 25,000 starships.

But I wasn't degassing Venus. My colonies were floating in the atmosphere.

As for Tom's idea - detonating Venus would take ~ 150 trillion exajoules, some 3,000 times the cost in energy of degassing it. Even the cost of importing hydrogen to turn the O2 in CO2 into oceans would cost a lot less than that ~ 10 billion exajoules if imported from Uranus.

A huge energy collecting soletta could be parked in front of Venus to shade it, and send an energy beam of particles to Uranus to power operations there, while cooling Venus off in less than ~ 200 years. By deccelerating the inbound hydrogen regeneratively the overall energy costs could come way down, and the left-over power could easily launch Gary's starships on energy beams. In fact there's probably a net energy gain from letting hydrogen fall from Uranus' orbit to Venus.

Adam

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