11–20 of 179 posts
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.
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 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.
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 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 probably don't neither Venus nor the techniques required to make such a change, let alone the money or need. the material requirements alone would be staggering plus we cannot discount the attention span problem, this isn't something likely to be done in a life time
To be clear, I mean if someone drops a bunch of microbes, only once, and not all of them die but slowly start to mix and live in the atmosphere, wouldn't they over millennia, very slowly but also very unstoppably, eat until everything they want to eat is eaten?
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.
Wouldn't this take thousands or millions of years? Doesn't seem like there's much incentive for a project like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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?
they would have just gone to Earth
Also it's possible earth wasn't suitable for Venisian life back then.
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?
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 Global Warming, and he explained how it was through the study of Venus that we really began to understand it.
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.