Would you live on terraformed Venus?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The atmosphere is sulfuric acid, the surface temperature is 870 Fahrenheit (a result of a greenhouse effect that’s far worse than even the biggest global warming alarmist expects us to reach), the atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of Earth’s,  and it has active volcanos out the wazoo. At this point, you’d have to be high to think terraforming Venus is an option.

Actually, not much worse than the worst scenario of the biggest global warming alarmist.   If we really don’t tamper our release of greenhouse gas for, say, several centuries, we can get into a true runaway green house, which, once started, can not be slowed or reversed by any act of repentance we can currently envision.   The earth will inexorably lose all of its surface water, leaving a largely oxygen atmosphere orders of magnitude thicker than ours now, ready to be converted to CO2. When the conversion is complete, Earth will be a second Venus.

I’ve seen estimates which suggest the tipping point Or the beginning of unstoppable runaway greenhouse affect occurs when average global temperature increased by about 20 degrees centigrade.   Some projections Sees the world Moving 1/4 of  the way there in the next 100 years if no action is taken now.

Regarding the specific issue of terraforming Venus, some of what you say is not accurate.  Yes, Venus is covered with volcanos.  But Venus undergoes no little or no weathering despite sulfuric acid so all the Vulcano and lava flow ever erupted there in the last several hundred million years are all clearly visible and quite fresh looking.  So the fact that there are many more visible volcanos on Venus than on earth doesn’t mean there are more active volcanos on Venus than on earth.  In fact we’ve seen no evidence that any volcano has erupted on Venus since when we begin to maintain surveillance of Venutian atmosphere. Earth of course undergoes continuous volcanic eruptions at mid-ocean ridges as well as at several very active volcanos like Kilauea, plus around 50 significant discrete volcanic eruptions away from oceanic ridges each year.   So the level of volcanic activity on Venus May well be much lower than on earth.

Regarding the atmosphere, the upper Venusian atmosphere is nowhere near as hellish as near the surface.  There is a band of attitudes in the Venusian atmosphere where the temperature and pressure are similar to conditions near sea level on earth.  You will still need oxygen because Venusian atmosphere is almost all co2.  But you can survive in shirt sleeves wearing something like airline emergency oxygen mask.   So right now we can live in dirigibles or blimps in the Venusian atmosphere.

The key to completely terraforming Venus is extracting and fixing the carbon from the CO2  in Venusian atmosphere.   There are many ideas regarding how that can be done.  Some promising techniques involve using gene engineered microorganism to use photosynthesis to extract carbon from atmosphere CO2and fixing them as biological cell structure.  The cell structure will not return the carbon back to the atmosphere when the organism dies.

But the time frame of complete terraforming will be tens to hundred of thousands of years.  So if we don’t slow the rate at which we injection green house gas into earth’s atmosphere, we would lock the earth on an inexorable course towards becoming Venus long before we make the smallest dent with any effort to turn Venus more like earth. 

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Yup.  By the time the technology, the capital, and the political will are available for terraforming Venus, they'll be spent on fixing the one bit of local real estate suitable for humans.

Boru

There are intractable problems associated with fixing a damaged and dilapidated building whose uncooperative residents are all still there, have political pull, and insists that they are not inconvenienced.   These problems need not be faced if one is building a new structure from scratch.

In fact part of the solution To the problem of fixing the building with uncooperative  residence could be to finish parts of the new building first and moving some of the residents there so work on the old building can proceed with Ed’s disruption.

But more and more residents of the dilapidated building are coming round to the idea that their building needs to be fixed.  Imagine their reaction when they find out that the developers' solution is to construct another building an inconveniently far distance away, that won't be ready to move into for 1000 years.

Boru