Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Hummm...Buckeyball Bugs...

re: Hummm...Buckeyball Bugs...
Robert — (archived)

Perfect. I'll bet they could be configured to be reflective, producing a high albedo with a lot less material than a solid. The shape might also be configured to trap and sequester the sulfuric acid and the other nasty stuff in addition to the CO2.

The low-orbit comet's a good idea too. Seems like I was thinking in too simple terms, just visualizing slamming the comet into the surface, but that's likely to lose more from heat and re-ejection than dribbling water down in a more controlled way. Make it graze the atmosphere to gently ablate the water, as the orbit decays slowly.

I'm pretty sure the heat would dissociate the H2O; the theories I've read suggest that Venus lost its original water that way. I think timing's important, the curtain layer of buckeyballs in the atmosphere should probably be in place first to start cooling the planet, and to trap water from outgassing. Hmmm, making it harder for the water to get in, too. Still needs work.

I don't know as we'd have to figure out exactly what was lost to decide what to replace. On the theory that the comets we can find today are pretty much like those that would've hit in the beginning, we just use the same stuff, and trust the proportions are approximately correct. We'd want organics and water, and with enough of it sloshing around, we could figure out how to use it later. The important thing is to have a bunch of resources.

I think with a whole planet to play with that's not much use to us anyway, we wouldn't necessarily have to work it all out to the last detail. Just adjust the gross problems like temperature and the atmospheric composition, heap in a bunch of approximately the right volatiles and stuff, and then at that point study what we've got and figure out how to continue on. The system of a whole planet's too complex to plan anyway, and trying to think it all through ahead of time is probably just useless arrogance. We'd get it wrong and have to improvise anyway, so I'd just skip right to the improvising.

Up the thread there's talk about slamming Mercury into Venus, and I haven't gotten up there yet. But what of instead we made Mercury a satellite of Venus, and synchronized the orbit so that it's always eclipsing the sun? Kinda tidally-locked at the LaGrange point. If it doesn't block enough light, we could give it a debris halo to expand the disk. That's another kind of sunshade.

I'd better go up and actually read those posts to see whether somebody else already thought of it.

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