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I've always wondered why we don't seed it with some biology that can eat the components of the Venusian atmosphere (ie: sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide) to make a more habitable planet over time.
I've always wondered why we don't seed it with some biology that can eat the components of the Venusian atmosphere (ie: sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide) to make a more habitable planet over time.
Some related links:
https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The risk that Venus is or was once host to some form of life, and humans deliberately contaminating Venus with life would obscure any evidence of it. That is a very serious worse-case scenario because non-earth life would be truly invaluable to biology. It seems like a remote risk to me, but not something to shrug off. Particularly since the usefulness of introducing life to Venus is itself quite remote.
Life in temperatures that melts lead? Oh... or do you mean in the atmosphere?
Why not? It'd have to have different chemistry, sure, but even on Earth life exists in some pretty extreme temperature and environment ranges.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The risk that Venus is or was once host to some form of life, and humans deliberately contaminating Venus with life would obscure any evidence of it. That is a very serious worse-case scenario because non-earth life would be truly invaluable to biology. It seems like a remote risk to me, but not something to shrug off. Particularly since the usefulness of introducing life to Venus is itself quite remote.
Life in temperatures that melts lead? Oh... or do you mean in the atmosphere?
I've always wondered why we don't seed it with some biology that can eat the components of the Venusian atmosphere (ie: sulfuric acid, carbon dioxide) to make a more habitable planet over time.
Because we've failed to terraform much closer, less inhospitable environments, and the risks for getting it wrong are very high.
And by 'we've failed to terraform', did you mean 'we haven't tried yet'?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because we've failed to terraform much closer, less inhospitable environments, and the risks for getting it wrong are very high.
Wait, what are the risks? It's not like you're going to make Venus _more_ inhospitable than it already is. Worst case scenario is we'd lose some valuable scientific information about Venus in its natural state.
So I had two thoughts while reading it: Is it possible that in the 3 billion years that it had liquid water, Venus evolved advanced life that managed to trigger runaway greenhouse warming? Secondly, is Venus’s atmosphere a worst case scenario for global warming here or is there something that would prevent it happening?
I've often wondered the same thing! A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult. Not at all my area, but it doesn't seem like we can actually answer that question you posed. It's fascinating. Carl Sagan's COSMOS might be the first time I'd ever heard about Glob…
Now imagine detecting one, when the entire planet is covered in a 90 bar atmosphere with sulphuric acid clouds.
I'll update my downer Sci-fi novel premise. Humanity makes its first Alcubierre drive warp ship. On its test run, something goes wrong, and the ship is shifted by a vast amount in time-space. The ship arrives at an unfamiliar, abandoned star system, with a different sized Sun, vast amounts of orbital construction, but an eerily similar though slightly different configuration of planets. Over time, the test pilot crew realizes that they were merely in stasis and "arrived" back in the Solar System far in the future, and that the 2nd Venus-like planet is actually the Earth.
The upper atmosphere has temperature and pressure similar to Earth at sea level.
Maybe the wind is a big problem? Or insertion from orbit?
So I had two thoughts while reading it: Is it possible that in the 3 billion years that it had liquid water, Venus evolved advanced life that managed to trigger runaway greenhouse warming? Secondly, is Venus’s atmosphere a worst case scenario for global warming here or is there something that would prevent it happening?
(The worst we could do is still enough to destroy us, though.)