Terraforming of Venus

History

Prior to the early 1960s, the atmosphere of Venus was believed by astronomers to have an Earth-like temperature. When Venus was understood to have a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere with a consequence of a very large greenhouse effect, the idea of altering the atmosphere to make the surface more Earth-like became a possibility. This prospect, known as terraforming, was first seriously proposed by Carl Sagan in 1961, as a final section of his classic article in the journal Science discussing the atmosphere and greenhouse effect of Venus. Sagan proposed injecting photosynthetic bacteria into the Venus atmosphere, which would convert the carbon dioxide into reduced carbon in organic form, thus reducing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reducing the greenhouse effect.

Unfortunately, the knowledge of Venus' atmosphere was still inexact in 1961, when Sagan made his original proposal for terraforming. Thirty-three years after his original proposal, in his 1991 book Pale Blue Dot, Sagan conceded his original proposal for terraforming would not work because the atmosphere of Venus is far denser than was known in 1961:

"Here's the fatal flaw: In 1961, I thought the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus was a few bars ... We now know it to be 90 bars, so if the scheme worked, the result would be a surface buried in hundreds of meters of fine graphite, and an atmosphere made of 65 bars of almost pure molecular oxygen. Whether we would first implode under the atmospheric pressure or spontaneously burst into flames in all that oxygen is open to question. However, long before so much oxygen could build up, the graphite would spontaneously burn back into CO2, short-circuiting the process."

Following Sagan's paper, there was little serious discussion of the concept until a resurgence of interest in the 1980s.

Proposed approaches to terraforming

A number of approaches to terraforming are reviewed by Martyn J. Fogg (1995) and by Geoffrey A. Landis (2011).

Biological approaches

The method proposed in 1961 by Carl Sagan involves the use of genetically engineered bacteria to fix carbon into organic forms. Although this method is still commonly proposed in discussions of Venus terraforming, later discoveries showed that biological means alone would not be successful.

Difficulties include the fact that the production of organic molecules from carbon dioxide requires an input of hydrogen, which on Earth is taken from its abundant supply of water, but which is very rare on Venus. Because Venus lacks a magnetic field, the upper atmosphere is exposed to direct erosion by the solar wind and has lost most of its original hydrogen to space. And, as Sagan noted, any carbon that was bound up in organic molecules would quickly be converted to carbon dioxide again by the hot surface environment. Venus would not begin to cool down until after most of the carbon dioxide has already been removed.

Floating colonies could gradually transform the Venusian atmosphere. For example, their reflectivity could alter the overall albedo of Venus. Colonies could also grow plant matter, if water or another source of hydrogen were imported, which would gradually sequester carbon dioxide in the air. However, it would take an enormous number of such colonies, and large quantities of introduced hydrogen, to have a significant atmospheric impact, because there is over 1.2×10²⁰ kg of carbon in Venus's atmosphere.

Although it is generally conceded that Venus could not be terraformed by introduction of photosynthetic biota alone, use of photosynthetic organisms to produce oxygen in the atmosphere continues to be a component of other proposed methods of terraforming.

Capture in carbonates

In 1989, Smith proposed that Venus could be terraformed by lithosphere overturn, allowing crust to be converted into carbonates. Landis 2011 calculated that it would require pulverizing the surface to a depth of over 1 km to produce enough rock surface area to convert enough of the atmosphere. Modelling by Mark Bullock and David Grinspoon of Venus's atmospheric evolution suggests that existing surface minerals, particularly calcium and magnesium oxides, could serve as a sink of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. If these could be exposed to the atmosphere, then the planet would cool and its atmospheric pressure decline somewhat. One of the possible end states modelled by Bullock and Grinspoon was a 43 bar atmosphere and 400 K surface temperature.

Bombardment of Venus with refined magnesium and calcium could sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium and magnesium carbonates. About 8×10²⁰ kg of calcium or 5×10²⁰ kg of magnesium would be required, which would entail a great deal of mining and mineral refining. 8×10²⁰ kg is a few times the mass of the asteroid 4 Vesta (more than 500 kilometres (310 mi) in diameter).

Introduction of hydrogen

According to Birch, bombarding Venus with hydrogen and reacting it with carbon dioxide, could produce elemental carbon (graphite) and water by the Bosch reaction. It would take about 4×10¹⁹ kg of hydrogen to convert the whole Venerian atmosphere, and such a large amount of hydrogen could be obtained from the gas giants or their moons' ice. Another possible source of hydrogen could be extracting it from possible reservoirs in the core of the planet itself. According to some researchers the Earth's core might hold large quantities of hydrogen. Since the inner structure of Earth and Venus are generally believed to be somewhat similar, the same might be true for the core of Venus.

Iron aerosol in the atmosphere will also be required for the reaction to work, and iron can come from Mercury, asteroids, or the Moon. (Loss of hydrogen due to the solar wind is unlikely to be significant on the timescale of terraforming.) Due to the relatively flat surface, this water would cover about 80% of the surface, compared to 70% for Earth, even though it would amount to only roughly 10% of the water found on Earth.

The remaining atmosphere, at around 3 bars (about three times that of Earth), would mainly be composed of nitrogen, some of which will dissolve into the new oceans of water, reducing atmospheric pressure further, in accordance with Henry's law.

Direct removal of atmosphere

The removal of Venus's atmosphere could be attempted by a variety of methods, possibly in combination. Directly lifting atmospheric gas from Venus into space would probably prove difficult. Venus has sufficiently high escape velocity to make blasting it away with asteroid impacts impractical. Pollack and Sagan calculated in 1994 that an impactor of 700 km diameter striking Venus at greater than 20 km/s, would eject all the atmosphere above the horizon as seen from the point of impact, but because this is less than a thousandth of the total atmosphere and there would be diminishing returns as the atmosphere's density decreases, a very great number of such giant impactors would be required. Landis calculated that to lower the pressure from 92 bar to 1 bar would require a minimum of 2,000 impacts, even if the efficiency of atmosphere removal was perfect. Smaller objects would not work, either, because more would be required. The violence of the bombardment could well result in significant outgassing that would replace removed atmosphere. Most of the ejected atmosphere would go into solar orbit near Venus, and, without further intervention, could be captured by Venus's gravitational field and become part of the atmosphere once again.

Removal of atmospheric gas in a more controlled manner could also prove difficult. Venus's extremely slow rotation means that space elevators would be very difficult to construct because the planet's geostationary orbit lies an impractical distance above the surface; and the very thick atmosphere to be removed makes mass drivers useless for removing payloads from the planet's surface. Possible workarounds include placing mass drivers on high-altitude balloons or balloon-supported towers extending above the bulk of the atmosphere, using space fountains, or rotovators.

In addition, if the density of the atmosphere (and corresponding greenhouse effect) were dramatically reduced, the surface temperature (now effectively constant) would probably vary widely between dayside and nightside. Another side effect to atmospheric-density reduction could be the creation of zones of dramatic weather activity or storms at the terminator because large volumes of atmosphere underwent rapid heating or cooling.

Cooling planet by solar shades

Venus receives about twice the sunlight that Earth does, which is thought to have contributed to its runaway greenhouse effect. One means of terraforming Venus could involve reducing the insolation at Venus's surface to prevent the planet from heating up again.

Space-based

Solar shades could be used to reduce the total insolation received by Venus, cooling the planet somewhat. A shade placed in the Sun–Venus L₁ Lagrangian point also would serve to block the solar wind, removing the radiation exposure problem on Venus.

A suitably large solar shade would be four times the diameter of Venus itself if at the L₁ point. This would necessitate construction in space. There would also be the difficulty of balancing a thin-film shade perpendicular to the Sun's rays at the Sun–Venus Lagrangian point with the incoming radiation pressure, which would tend to turn the shade into a huge solar sail. If the shade were left at the L₁ point, the pressure would add force to the sunward side and necessitate moving the shade even closer to the Sun than the L₁ point.

Modifications to the L₁ solar shade design have been suggested to solve the solar-sail problem. One suggested method is to use polar-orbiting, solar-synchronous mirrors that reflect light toward the back of the sunshade, from the non-sunward side of Venus. Photon pressure would push the support mirrors to an angle of 30 degrees away from the sunward side.

Paul Birch proposed a slatted system of mirrors near the L₁ point between Venus and the Sun. The shade's panels would not be perpendicular to the Sun's rays, but instead at an angle of 30 degrees, such that the reflected light would strike the next panel, negating the photon pressure. Each successive row of panels would be +/- 1 degree off the 30-degree deflection angle, causing the reflected light to be skewed 4 degrees from striking Venus.

Solar shades could also serve as solar power generators. Space-based solar shade techniques, and thin-film solar sails in general, are only in an early stage of development. The vast sizes require a quantity of material that is many orders of magnitude greater than any human-made object that has ever been brought into space or constructed in space.

Atmospheric or surface-based

Venus could also be cooled by placing reflectors in the atmosphere or on the surface. Reflective balloons floating in the upper atmosphere could create shade. The number and/or size of the balloons would necessarily be great. Geoffrey A. Landis has suggested that if enough floating cities were built, they could form a solar shield around the planet, and could simultaneously be used to process the atmosphere into a more desirable form, thus combining the solar shield theory and the atmospheric processing theory with a scalable technology that would immediately provide living space in the Venusian atmosphere. If made from carbon nanotubes (recently fabricated into sheet form) or graphene (a sheet-like carbon allotrope), then the major structural materials can be produced using carbon dioxide gathered in situ from the atmosphere. The recently synthesised amorphous carbonia might prove a useful structural material if it can be quenched to STP conditions, perhaps in a mixture with regular silica glass. According to Birch's analysis, such colonies and materials would provide an immediate economic return from colonizing Venus, funding further terraforming efforts.

Increasing the planet's albedo by deploying light-colored or reflective material on the surface could help keep the atmosphere cool. The amount would be large and would have to be put in place after the atmosphere had been modified already, because Venus's surface is currently completely enshrouded by clouds.

An advantage of atmospheric and surface cooling solutions is that they take advantage of existing technology. A disadvantage is that Venus already has highly reflective clouds (giving it an albedo of 0.65), so any approach would have to significantly surpass this to make a difference.

Combination of solar shades and atmospheric condensation

Birch proposed that solar shades could be used to not merely cool the planet but that this could be used to reduce atmospheric pressure as well, by the process of freezing of the carbon dioxide. This requires Venus's temperature to be reduced, first to the liquefaction point, requiring a temperature less than 304 K (31 °C; 88 °F) and partial pressures of CO₂ to bring the atmospheric pressure down to 73.8 bar (carbon dioxide's critical point); and from there reducing the temperature below 217 K (−56 °C; −69 °F) (carbon dioxide's triple point). Below that temperature, freezing of atmospheric carbon dioxide into dry ice will cause it to deposit onto the surface. He then proposed that the frozen CO₂ could be buried and maintained in that condition by pressure, or even shipped off-world (perhaps to provide greenhouse gas needed for terraforming of Mars or the moons of Jupiter). After this process was complete, the shades could be removed or solettas added, allowing the planet to partially warm again to temperatures comfortable for Earth life. A source of hydrogen or water would still be needed, and some of the remaining 3.5 bar of atmospheric nitrogen would need to be fixed into the soil. Birch suggests disrupting an icy moon of Saturn and bombarding Venus with its fragments to provide perhaps an average depth of 100 meters of water over the whole planet.

Altering day–night cycle

Venus rotates once every 243 days—by far the slowest rotation period of any known object in the Solar System. A Venusian sidereal day thus lasts more than a Venusian year (243 versus 224.7 Earth days). However, the length of a solar day on Venus is significantly shorter than the sidereal day; to an observer on the surface of Venus, the time from one sunrise to the next would be 116.75 days. Nevertheless, Venus's extremely slow rotation rate would result in extremely long days and nights, which could prove difficult for most known Earth species of plants and animals to adapt to. The slow rotation also probably accounts for the lack of a significant magnetic field.

Space mirrors

One proposal to compensate for the rotation rate is a system of orbiting solar mirrors which might be used to provide sunlight to the nightside of Venus and possibly shade to the dayside surface. In addition to his suggestion of slatted system of mirrors near the L₁ point between Venus and the Sun, Paul Birch has proposed a rotating soletta mirror in a polar orbit, which would produce a 24-hour light cycle.

Changing rotation speed

Increasing the speed of Venus's rotation would require energy many orders of magnitude greater than the construction of orbiting solar mirrors, or even than the removal of Venus's atmosphere. Recent scientific research suggests that close fly-bys of asteroids or cometary bodies larger than 60 miles across could be used to move a planet in its orbit, or increase the speed of rotation. The energy required to do this is large. In his book on terraforming, one of the concepts Fogg discusses is to increase the spin of Venus using three quadrillion objects circulating between Venus and the sun every 2 hours, each traveling at 10% of the speed of light.

G. David Nordley has suggested, in fiction, that Venus might be spun-up to a day-length of 30 Earth days by exporting the atmosphere of Venus into space via mass drivers. A proposal by Birch involves the use of dynamic compression members to transfer energy and momentum via high-velocity mass streams to a band around the equator of Venus. He calculated that a sufficiently high-velocity mass stream could give Venus a day of 24 hours in 30 years.

More recent research has however shown that the current slow rotation rate of Venus is not detrimental to the planet's capability to support an Earth-like climate. Rather, the slow rotation rate enables the formation of thick cloud layers on the side of the planet facing the sun, which raises planetary albedo and acts to cool the global temperature to Earth-like levels, despite the greater proximity to the sun. According to calculations, maximum temperatures would be just around 35 °C, given an Earth-like atmosphere. Speeding up the rotation rate would therefore be both impractical and detrimental to the terraforming effort. A terraformed Venus with the current slow rotation but a more Earth-like atmosphere would result in a global climate similar to warmer versions of Alaska or Siberia with "day" and "night" periods each about 58 days long. The "day" would resemble a short summer with warm humid climate, a heavy overcast sky and ample rainfall. The "night" would resemble a short winter with quite cold temperature and snowfall. There might be periods with more temperate climate and clear weather at sunrise and sunset.