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[Crazy] Venus and Planetary-scale engines?
RE: [Crazy] Venus and Planetary-scale engines?
#5
To spin up Venus to Earth- like solar cycle you need 1,6x10^29 joules or 50 billion petawatt hours. In 2013 Earth total power production is around 18 terawatt- hours per year. It should be theoretically possible to speed up Venus rotation by launching atmosphere out of mass drivers positioned at the equator and firing mass streams at the speed of around 10% c. At this speed gasses would escape into interstellar space since they would be moving above Sol escape velocity and thus they would not encounter Venus again. The thing is, you would be wasting precious gasses that could be used in other places such as terraformation of Mars. You can fire gasses at Mars that way as well killing two birds with one stone. Note that Venus has a lot of nitrogen which is irreplaceable for life and thus it is a very precious export gas. At the same time Mars has little nitrogen in its atmosphere (in total, not just proportionally) and thus it would have to import it to get an Earth- like atmosphere.

I think that the main issue particularly in fenspace setting is the scale. You would need hundreds of thousands to millions of titanic mass drivers lobbing carbon dioxide 24/7 into space for decades. This would be orders of magnitude bigger than anything ever built on and off Earth combined. A single mass driver like that would be an engineering marvel for current civilization, millions are beyond the “current” fenspace capabilities. The corrosive atmosphere effect on the structures with insane pressures can actually be handwaved away with special ‘wavium paint, it is not too far away from what it already allows.

It might be worth it to use a combined method along with hydrogen import. Venus almost completely lacks hydrogen so to get any water you need to import it, most likely by dropping huge comets. You can control comet arrival to impart rotation which can be combined with gas exports for maximum results, but it is still a matter of hundreds if not thousands of years.
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RE: [Crazy] Venus and Planetary-scale engines? - by Hivemind_Chan - 08-11-2020, 11:39 AM

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