RE: Somebody born in space (e.g. on Mars) csn never conduct Hajj or Umrah
February 13, 2016 at 8:56 pm
(This post was last modified: February 13, 2016 at 8:59 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(February 13, 2016 at 6:37 pm)Alex K Wrote:(February 13, 2016 at 6:28 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: The Venereal atmosphere would be tough to dispose of.
Big job, really big job.
Can't one genetically engineer microbes which use the temperature differences there to eat the co2 and convert it to carbon etc?
Microbes can't subsist purely on CO2. They need access to the elements that support the rest of their metabolic processes. Since no microbes could survive anywhere near the surface of Venus, microbes has to somehow make due with any infinitesimal traces of these elements they can get from any dust grains carried into the upper atmosphere of Venus. This probably puts a very severe constrain on the amount of biomass that could be supported on Venus. This in turn puts a very tight limit on how fast the terraforming process can go at the beginning.
Later on, as these trace elements in the Venusian atmosphere are depleted, the constraint on the rate of organic terraforming would become limited by how fast the geological processes on Venus can replenish the atmosphere with dust containing these elements.
The nearest analogue might be the oxygenation of earth's atmosphere through organic processes. That took about one and a half billion years. With Venus the process would have to work through a primeval atmosphere 100 times more massive than earth's atmosphere. My guess is the process to convert Venusian atmosphere with engineered organic processes would not be measured in centuries, but tens or hundreds of millions of years.
