Friday image and transcription

by Anton P. Nym (aka Steve) , London, Ontario, Canada, Friday, February 15, 2013, 18:42 (4298 days ago) @ Xenos

The case for terraforming is getting very strong with the Venus story; Venus has been a favourite for talking terraforming since the '70s, and there's a lot of that discussion embedded here if I'm reading the tea-leaves right.

Sunlight is starved.

Venus is hot enough to melt lead thanks to runaway greenhouse gases. One way to cool it off would be to shield it from the Sunlight that's heating it up.

The fierceness is
chilled and thinned, made sweet again.

Venus's atmosphere is pretty stormy with all that heat energy bound up in it, and it's immensely thicker than the Earth's. Thinning out the carbon dioxide would be an essential step to making the surface habitable. There's also a lot of sulfur in Venus's clouds; in petroleum jargon the presense of sulfur in oil makes it "sour" and the absence makes it "sweet". (Also, sulfur combines with water in the clouds to make sulfuric acid which, if you drank it, would taste sour for the few minutes it took to kill you.)

A new ocean emerges, thick and salty and
hot, from springs and geysers that drench
the dead ground.

Dunno if this would be supported by the geophysics guys, but I suppose there could be underground water reserves on Venus... I sort-of assumed, though, that the bulk of any terraformed Venus's oceans would be formed by all the excess oxygen that'd be left over once you take the carbon out of the atmosphere. Bring in enough hydrogen and voila H2O.

-- Steve can't wait to see if this pans out.