"...Pity Venus's atmosphere doesn't have anything they'd need on Mars. I'd
gotten this idea for large, and I mean large, balloons made out of
'waved cloth and rubber being used to ferry atmosphere from one planet
to the next. Maybe not even being towed at all, just drifting until
someone at the other end can catch them..."
Venus has CO2; great greenhouse gas for warming the planet and adding mass to the atmosphere, plus it breaks down to carbon and oxygen, both of which will be essential in establishing an ecosystem. Import methane from Jupiter (an even better greenhouse gas, by the way, *ten times* more efficient at trapping IR than CO2...but not anywhere near as efficient as plain old water vapor, which is over 100 times more efficient than CO2...but I digress.) and you get hydrogen, nitrogen, and more carbon. Run the CO2 through a greenhouse full of blue-green algae and you get breathable O2, and the enriched CO2 in the atmo makes the algae grow faster. Burn the methane, you get CO2 and water vapor. Process the methane into anhydrous ammonia, and you get one of the best nitrogen-fixing fertilisers ever developed.
Venus' atmo also has sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid; both useful chemical compounds in their own right.
CHON: Carbon. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Nitrogen. The building blocks of life.
gotten this idea for large, and I mean large, balloons made out of
'waved cloth and rubber being used to ferry atmosphere from one planet
to the next. Maybe not even being towed at all, just drifting until
someone at the other end can catch them..."
Venus has CO2; great greenhouse gas for warming the planet and adding mass to the atmosphere, plus it breaks down to carbon and oxygen, both of which will be essential in establishing an ecosystem. Import methane from Jupiter (an even better greenhouse gas, by the way, *ten times* more efficient at trapping IR than CO2...but not anywhere near as efficient as plain old water vapor, which is over 100 times more efficient than CO2...but I digress.) and you get hydrogen, nitrogen, and more carbon. Run the CO2 through a greenhouse full of blue-green algae and you get breathable O2, and the enriched CO2 in the atmo makes the algae grow faster. Burn the methane, you get CO2 and water vapor. Process the methane into anhydrous ammonia, and you get one of the best nitrogen-fixing fertilisers ever developed.
Venus' atmo also has sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid; both useful chemical compounds in their own right.
CHON: Carbon. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Nitrogen. The building blocks of life.