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Gazetteer Topics
Re: Timeline Follies
#51
Buggy racing!? Sweet, wish I'd thought of that... *ponders a Subaru WRX with a 'wavetech life support system feeding air to the turbo*
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Venusian Terraforming Redux
#52
So I've been kicking around the Venus Terraforming Project a bit, and I've come to one solid conclusion: the Senshi really got shafted here. Even with handwavium, this one's easily a multi-century project. (As opposed to the simpler Martian Terraforming Project, which could be done or at least livable by 2050.)
There are three big problems with Venusian terraforming:
* There's too much atmosphere and it's all entirely of the wrong mix.
* The surface temperature is 500C and can't cool because of the weight of the atmosphere.
* There's no water. At all.
(There's a fourth problem - Venus rotates in the wrong direction and it takes 243 days to do it - but solving that one's a bit out of range for this partcular diatribe.)
The core of Venusian terraforming is the atmosphere; getting rid of it doesn't solve everything, but it takes a lot of the pressure off. Problem is, 92 bars of atmosphere (96.5% of it pure CO2) is a lot of atmosphere to get rid of. And it has to be gotten rid of. At the very least, the carbon needs to be sequestered in a non-flammable form, otherwise just cracking the CO2 into 02 and C will create a very explosive layer of graphite under a thick, nearly pure-oxygen atmosphere. Not good.
Currently, we've got the Senshi working with algae and other forms of airborne plantlife engineered by the Jason and their own biotech people, using that to convert CO2 and start cooling the planet. Problem is, this won't work on its own. Biological terraforming on Venus is dependent on water. As mentioned above, Venus doesn't have any. It makes Arrakis look like the bottom of the Pacific. The very small amount of water vapor in the upper atmosphere would be very quickly used up by the plants, which would then die, sink to the surface and return the sequestered carbon back to the atmosphere.
So the Senshi plan on its own won't work, because Venus has no water. Venus has plenty of oxygen, though, so it should be easy to make water, right? Well, sort of. Venus also has no hydrogen, which is what you need to make water. Now, there's plenty of hydrogen in the solar system, so it's a matter of trucking it in and just dumping it into the atmosphere and presto, right?
Not quite. There's the Bosch reaction, which converts hydrogen and CO2 into water and graphite, and it will work at the temperatures found on Venus. The problem here is you need lots of hydrogen to reduce the Venusian atmosphere. If you have enough hydrogen the Bosch reactionn will reduce the entire CO2 content of the atmosphere into water and graphite, but in order to do that you'd need 2*10^16mt - that's 20,000,000,000,000 metric tons - of hydrogen to do the job. The Senshi could commandeer all the heavy shipping in Fenspace for the next thousand years and not move enough hydrogen to reduce the atmosphere.
(In parenthesis I'll add this caveat: Should the Professor or the Wizarding World or somebody else develop a device that creates a stable wormhole, like a stargate or a portkey or a farcaster or something similar, then this particular hurdle becomes moot. All that needs to happen then is to sink one end of the wormhole relatively deep in Jupiter's atmosphere, sink the other about mid-level in Venus' atmosphere, open the wormhole and let pressure differential do the work. But this technology has not been invented yet, so the above paragraph still applies.)
The Senshi can still import hydrogen to create water, but the tonnage they can import is only a drop in a very large bucket. At best they can import enough hydrogen to keep their biological mediation plan alive - more or less - while they work on industrial methods of reducing the atmosphere.
(It may be that the Senshi didn't know - or still don't - that the "we can terraform Venus with a handful of algae!" plan is woefully incorrect, and committed themselves to the project before realizing this. That said, it's entirely plausible that Castle Magellan and the future Castles are going to need some significant upgrades to deal with reality.)
The best industrial way of reducing the atmosphere is to suck it up, seperate it into component gasses, bottle it and ship it somewhere else. This can even include cracking the CO2 into oxygen and carbon, both of which can be moved elsewhere. This will take just as long - possibly longer - than moving hydrogen from Jupiter, but the benefit here is that it can work alongside the biological mediation, and it provides the Senshi with items for trade in the Fenspace economy.
What items? Nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. Gaseous nitrogen and oxygen are critical components necessary for Martian terraforming, and using the Venusian excess of atmosphere to bulk up Mars' excuse for air has a nice symmetry to it. Pure carbon can be sold to manufacturing concerns on Luna and the asteroids for use in creating handwavium-composite building materials for bigger and better habitats, as well as the next generation of Fen spaceships. The current VTP plan has the Senshi making complex organics for export as well, but the hydrogen requirements suggest that they're better off putting all their imported H2 into water production and not hydrocarbons.
---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#53
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* There's too much atmosphere and it's all entirely of the wrong mix.
Yup.
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* The surface temperature is 500C and can't cool because of the weight of the atmosphere.
And the sun don't help, either.
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* There's no water. At all.
Sou desu.
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(There's a fourth problem - Venus rotates in the wrong direction and it takes 243 days to do it - but solving that one's a bit out of range for this partcular diatribe.)
Solving this one is actually the ultimate purpose of the Castle network, as I see it. They generate about four to five times as much energy as they use - and store it. When they're all complete and fully charged, they'll activate in unison and wrap the entire damn planet in a drive field. They won't actually take it anywhere, just tweak its relative motion to something more... useful. And in the meantime, any single one of them is enough to make a given bit of space in their vicinity go eye-of-a-supercollider-grade wierd, making them a quite effective defensive system in the minds of those few paranoid enough to've thought about it.
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(In parenthesis I'll add this caveat: Should the Professor or the Wizarding World or somebody else develop a device that creates a stable wormhole, like a stargate or a portkey or a farcaster or something similar, then this particular hurdle becomes moot. All that needs to happen then is to sink one end of the wormhole relatively deep in Jupiter's atmosphere, sink the other about mid-level in Venus' atmosphere, open the wormhole and let pressure differential do the work. But this technology has not been invented yet, so the above paragraph still applies.)
Given all the other wierd shit Handwavium's done, in their position I'd be perfectly willing to bet on my ability to find or create this by the time I ran out of other things to work on.
Another possibility would be coming up with a widget that suppresses the weak nuclear force within an extremely limited volume. CO2 splits into C and O2; C goes into the widget, 3*H2 comes out, probably very energetically, and can be reacted with your O2 and more CO2 to taste.
At this stage in the game, neither of these devices exist. But if they end up being created, they'll be a long way short of being the wierdest or most implausible thing handwavium's done.
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(It may be that the Senshi didn't know - or still don't - that the "we can terraform Venus with a handful of algae!" plan is woefully incorrect, and committed themselves to the project before realizing this. That said, it's entirely plausible that Castle Magellan and the future Castles are going to need some significant upgrades to deal with reality.)
Their design accounts for such, yeah. I doubt Magellan has a population much over, oh, five thousand or so - its biosphere sections are mostly parkland, and something like a third of its 'dungeons' are still just sitting empty. Beyond that, it'd be quite possible to build, then dome, a series of terraces along the outer rim of its disc, and increase size that way. Or hang buildings off the bottom and another layer of doming on top of the current one... So. Significant upgrades are to be expected, and were.
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The best industrial way of reducing the atmosphere is to suck it up, seperate it into component gasses, bottle it and ship it somewhere else. This can even include cracking the CO2 into oxygen and carbon, both of which can be moved elsewhere. This will take just as long - possibly longer - than moving hydrogen from Jupiter, but the benefit here is that it can work alongside the biological mediation, and it provides the Senshi with items for trade in the Fenspace economy.
For that matter, you can quite easily do both - ship comes in carrying metallic hydrogen and leaves with graphite and LOX.
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What items? Nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. Gaseous nitrogen and oxygen are critical components necessary for Martian terraforming, and using the Venusian excess of atmosphere to bulk up Mars' excuse for air has a nice symmetry to it. Pure carbon can be sold to manufacturing concerns on Luna and the asteroids for use in creating handwavium-composite building materials for bigger and better habitats, as well as the next generation of Fen spaceships. The current VTP plan has the Senshi making complex organics for export as well, but the hydrogen requirements suggest that they're better off putting all their imported H2 into water production and not hydrocarbons.
In terms of direct increase in the world's resemblance to Earth, yes, but...
Economically speaking, Fenspace is the dusty accretion disc swirling around the neutron star that is Earth. An overwhelming majority of the human race and its wealth is tied up in the world and will remain so for the forseeable future.
Earth will pay good money for complex organics. Earth won't pay for water. Earth has water coming out its ear-holes already. Running and expanding a terraforming project takes good money.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#54
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Solving this one is actually the ultimate purpose of the Castle network, as I see it. They generate about four to five times as much energy as they use - and store it. When they're all complete and fully charged, they'll activate in unison and wrap the entire damn planet in a drive field. They won't actually take it anywhere, just tweak its relative motion to something more... useful.
Hell, they don't have to change vector or anything, just accelerate the existing rotation. Sure, it's retrograde, but that just adds to the rustic charm.
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Given all the other wierd shit Handwavium's done, in their position I'd be perfectly willing to bet on my ability to find or create this by the time I ran out of other things to work on.
Oh sure. It's a fair bet that eventually somebody working on Limit Break technology is going to come up with a widget that will work more or less like that. That guy will probably get a statue built in his honor in Crystal Tokyo.
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Earth will pay good money for complex organics. Earth won't pay for water. Earth has water coming out its ear-holes already. Running and expanding a terraforming project takes good money.
Venus isn't creating water for export; Venus is creating water for Venus, to keep the airborne biosphere alive for another month while they keep working on alternate solutions. If they stop that, the biosphere dies and the whole project takes four steps backward.
Trading soley with Fenspace will keep the money coming in without having to throw expensive imports right back out the window. Hydrogen from Jupiter to Venus; LOX, LN2 and graphite from Venus to Luna and Mars; manufactured goods from Luna and Mars to Jupiter. Y'know, the basic triangle trade. It's not mad money, but it keeps the cash and more importantly the material resources needed for terraforming coming.
Maybe it's just the Fan Panther side rearing its ugly head, but to me using precious Jovian hydrogen needed to keep the ecosystem running to make organics for export to Earth says "if they do this, then they'll fail, and they'll deserve to fail."---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#55
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Maybe it's just the Fan Panther side rearing its ugly head, but to me using precious Jovian hydrogen needed to keep the ecosystem running to make organics for export to Earth says "if they do this, then they'll fail, and they'll deserve to fail."
Hmm. To me, though, elegance is irrelevant.
The question is, I repeat, economic. What costs more? Hydrogen on Venus or Water on Earth? And what is the cost of petroleum products on Earth, relative to those?
My... guess, evaluation, opinion... is, that the profit margin of making hydrocarbons is greater than the cost of shipping them to Earth and water back in return.
Say, Moondance starts at Jupiter. She pumps her holds full of a slurry of metallic hydrogen dust or pellets suspended in a liquid of your choice - liquid hydrogen is easy to get but has handling problems; water is simple to work with but has to be shipped in from the moons. Goes to Venus. Sells that and loads oil - net profit. Goes to Earth. Sells, recovering costs and covering the next step and a little extra. Loads foodstuffs, luxuries, electronics, cultural goods. Goes to Luna, sells those and buys hydrogen wire. Takes that back to Earth and sells it to all the thousand and one groups finding uses for a room-temperature superconductor. Loads seawater for a nominal fee, then to Venus. Cha-ching. Graphite from there to Mars has a low profit margin but is doable. From Mars, take food and some luxuries and wavetech sky mining gear to Jupiter.
Seriously, unless you're willing to accept subsistence living conditions and a total, unadulterated dependance on handwavium technology - with all that entails - the idea of excluding Earth from the Fenspace equation is about like expecting the Conch Republic to ignore the United States.
The fact that most of the more interesting aspects of the history of the times are happening in Fenspace doesn't change the fact that its inhabitants are, in a very literal way, the lunatic fringe of society as a whole. That group might well entertain the same delusions of self-sufficiency that affects most of the world's demographic groupings (China, the USA, India, Kuwait, etc.), but saying it don't make it so.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#56
hmm, you could have venus condensate out atmosphere and reduce the pressure that way. That might be some of what the organics are doing, and when you lower the pressure you also lower the temperature.
also Venusian biologics might not require much or any water, using different biochemical reactions than those we are used to. Which ones I couldn't say since I'm not a biochemist, and I even doubt most biochemist could tell you offhand.
Still handwavium is sometimes semi-organic so combine it with engineered plants and see what you get.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#57
Okay, Valles... clarify for me, because I'm not really getting it. Why is it cheaper for Venus to construct oil than it is for Earth? My understanding is that oil is really pretty nontrivial to create, and the only reason we use the stuff is that we can pump it out of the ground. There will still be oil pumping out of the ground throughout the time we're covering here, and I utterly fail to see how any process to *create* the stuff can hope to compete on price. You could probably make an efficient LNG run the other way. You could pick up CO2 from Venus, freeze it down into blocks, drag it off to Jupiter and mix it right with hydrogen - forming natural gas and water. You use the water for whatever you need water for locally, liquify the natural gas and ship it back home. Unfortunately for Venus, his is eight hydrogen in for every carbon out, and that's really just not efficient. If you're saying that the great efficiencies come from use of handwavium - well, there are earthbound users of wavetech - Australia if nowhere else - and they've got pretty much *all* of their resources local. So what's Venus got in the complex hydrocarbon trade that Earth don't got?
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#58
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Okay, Valles... clarify for me, because I'm not really getting it. Why is it cheaper for Venus to construct oil than it is for Earth? My understanding is that oil is really pretty nontrivial to create, and the only reason we use the stuff is that we can pump it out of the ground. There will still be oil pumping out of the ground throughout the time we're covering here, and I utterly fail to see how any process to *create* the stuff can hope to compete on price. You could probably make an efficient LNG run the other way. You could pick up CO2 from Venus, freeze it down into blocks, drag it off to Jupiter and mix it right with hydrogen - forming natural gas and water. You use the water for whatever you need water for locally, liquify the natural gas and ship it back home. Unfortunately for Venus, his is eight hydrogen in for every carbon out, and that's really just not efficient. If you're saying that the great efficiencies come from use of handwavium - well, there are earthbound users of wavetech - Australia if nowhere else - and they've got pretty much *all* of their resources local. So what's Venus got in the complex hydrocarbon trade that Earth don't got?
My impression of the status of handwavium in its 'legal zones' planetside was that it's, mmm, allowed but treated as a hazardous material? That, while not actively hostile to having fen running around, they're still essentially mundane.
Checking the chemical formulae for hydrocarbons on wiki, the rate of occurance is between two and three to one. Metallic hydrogen has a predicted density of 2.5; dry ice's is about 1.6, but about a third of that is oxygen, which is undesirable for our purposes. Overall, I think they come out surprisingly equal.
Economic competition vs. terran-origin fuels would come down to two things, both stemming from the same source: Since Venusian fuel is totally synthetic, its composition can be chosen precisely. This means that it is, 1, better fuel (since it has only the parts of conventional fuel that give power, but none of the others), and, 2, much better for the environment (because the bits that'd ordinarily end up forming smog and such just aren't there).
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#59
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Hmm. To me, though, elegance is irrelevant.
But it's not elegance, it's necessity.
Let's say you have a car. You take this car out to get it fueled. Once you've topped off the tank, you take it home, siphon off all of the gas you just bought, filter it and sell it on EBay. Then you pop back into your car and go down to the 7-11 for a celebratory Big Gulp. When the car stalls out halfway between your house and the destination, you express surprise.
The analogy is crude, but it's pretty plain. Venus has only trace amounts of water, all of which will be pulled into the terraforming ecosystem very quickly. In order for the ecosystem to survive it needs irrigation. In order for the irrigation to work you need water. In order to make water, you need hydrogen, thus you sign a contract with the Jossies to buy hydrogen from Jupiter.
However. Instead of using the shipment of hydrogen to create water vapor for the irrigation project, you use it to create - surprise, surprise - hydrocarbons for the export market. You immediately ship those hydrocarbons back to Earth to be used to accelerate global warming, you cash the nice fat oil cartel check and wonder why all the plants are dying.
Do you see how this plan of action is suicidal for the terraforming effort? I mean, if all the VTP is going to do is produce hydrocarbons for Earth, then why fucking bother with the whole grand sheme to speed up the planet's spin? Yeah, it's a neat idea but all it nets you is a hell world with a 24-hour day if you don't reduce the fucking atmosphere and add water.
You can talk economics all you want, but if your goal is to terraform Venus, then this is the wrong way to do it. Period.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#60
Ahem.
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My... guess, evaluation, opinion... is, that the profit margin of making hydrocarbons is greater than the cost of shipping them to Earth and water back in return.
Thank you.
In other news, terraforming will require a whole mess of specialised equipment and, more importantly, expertise that Fenspace simply won't have the economic base to produce on its own. Genetic engineers need to be paid. Gene sequencers need to be bought. Turbine generators cost money. And so on; relying on handwavium tech for these things will create an ecosystem completely saturated in the stuff. Something people other than the most daring fen would be willing to live in takes hardtech, and hardtech takes cash.
If you want to run an operation the size of the VTP, let alone expand it, you need money. Period.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#61
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Ahem.
There are better sources of water than Earth. Sources like Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, the Kuiper Belt... or just manufacturing the damn stuff on-site with Jovian hydrogen.
Buying megatons of water from Earth makes no fucking sense unless you're planning on stripping that biosphere to feed the VTP - and that'll go over well with the 'danelaw, you betcha.
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And so on; relying on handwavium tech for these things will create an ecosystem completely saturated in the stuff. Something people other than the most daring fen would be willing to live in takes hardtech, and hardtech takes cash.
As opposed to the handwavium-free environment in which the rest of Fenspace lives in?
No, skip it. That's not a slapfight I'm ready to take on yet.
Hardtech may take cash, but importing hydrogen to make oil (and why the fuck does it make sense to feed the mundane hydrocarbon addiction anyfuckingway?) is a stupid way of making it. If the VTP wants to depend on a single source of income with the 'danelaw - and in my dimly-remembered Econ 101 classes they called that a "bananna republic" - then the intelligent thing to do would be to set up a daughter organization mining hydrocarbons in the outer system and shipping it from there. With speed drives running at 0.01C the solar system is only a couple weeks wide if you'll recall. More than competitve for dirtside tankage.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#62
Side issue: How big a contributor is the sun to the Venusian hell-temperatures? Unless I'm missing something -- like massive geothermal ("venerothermal"?) input into the system -- shouldn't some manner of shading drop the temperature? What's to keep the VTP from buying vast quantities of aluminized mylar -- or buying an aluminized mylar production facility and then 'waveteching it -- and then hanging the stuff at the Sun-Venus L1 point?
It'll need a support crew to sherperd the stuff since the L1 point isn't the most stable, and to do repairs and whatnot, but even if you cut down the solar input by a just a couple percent, won't that help? Reducing the overall energy input to the Venusian atmosphere should have paybacks all over the board, just starting with a possible temperature reduction.
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#63
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Side issue: How big a contributor is the sun to the Venusian hell-temperatures?
Insolation's pretty much the major energy input for the runaway greenhouse. There's a bit of geothermal activity, but not as much as Earth. (Save for - we think maybe - every 500 million years or so when the entire crust turns over like a flapjack.)
Cutting the solar input will help, since it'll let the planet start radiating away all the excess heat and maybe freeze out the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Freezing the planet like that is a process that's measured in decades, though, so there wouldn't be any dramatic change within the immediate Fenspace timeframe.
The only drawback to the scenario-as-written would be the lack of sunlight wreaking havoc on the engineered ecosystem. No light, no plants; no plants, no broadleaf.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#64
1) Agree wholeheartedly with Fnord on the hydrogen issue.
2) Re insolation. Would it be possible to construct an orbital filter that passes through only a limited set of frequencies, including those needed for broadleaf et al to propogate, and reflects others away from the planet? It wouldn't kill insolation heating completely, but it would sure as heck reduce it a lot, and without killing the ecosystem we're trying to create.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!

--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#65
Re #2... A filter like that might be doable in the lab, but I dunno if it'd work on a large scale like a lagrange parasol.
On the other hand, it might - might - be possible to create plantlife that uses infrared for photosynthesis. In that case even a shaded Venus would have enough heat energy to power an ecosystem for a good long time. That'd take some seriously 'waved-up biochemistry to pull off, though. Hm...---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#66
The thing to remember about radiation, though, is that it's not gross - it's net. In order to have net positive radiation absorbence, the thing that's doing the absorbing has to be cooler than the thing that's doing the radiating. If the broadleaf can find some way to keep its surface cooler than the surrounding gasses, then running off of planetary radiation migh work. Otherwise, it doesn't.

EDIT: I did not know what I was talking about. Thanks be to wikipedia.
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Venus Earth forming
#67
Actually Earth Plants are pretty much tuned for the lower frequency bands of visible light or in other words they are already tuned more for the red and near infrared end of the light spectrum.
I don't think the ?800? degree rocks and atmosphere might not be hot enough to radiate infrared light at a high enough frequency to be useful.
Incidentally that's part of the reason why most plants are seen as having Green or blue/green leaves. They take in the lower frequencies and reflect the higher more damaging frequencies of the spectrum.
Filtering out Ultraviolet light will improve the plant's growth and productivity.
From a thermodynamics point of view all lifeforms must extract energy for life by movement of energy usually from hot to cold or alternatively bright to dark it's also possible to use high concentration to low concentration as a food source.
it would be very hard engineer a plant lifeform in the ?800? degree hot house that is currently Venus the plant would need chemical processes that were hotter than the surronding temperature.
Unless the plant lifeform has some sort of exotic internal cold sink say a hyperspace handwavium tap to one of the moons of Jupiter where the other half of the plant lives. The plant on Venus feeds off the heat surronding it and venting it to Jupiter's Moon where the other half the plant feeds off it again venting it into frozen enviroment of the Jupiter moon.
The hot half the plant warms the cold half through hyperspace while the cold half cools the hot half the same way.
These handwavium plants could be a powerful source of energy in the outer solar system allowing you to in effect use them to draw energy from Venus and use it to power your ship venting the waste heat into space.
howard melton
God bless
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#68
I remain convinced that, at this stage in the terraforming process, a small net hydrogen gain and a considerable net capital gain are preferable to a large hydrogen gain and a smaller profit.
Fortunately, one of Fnord's arguments tweaked something in my head that may let us combine the best of both approaches.
See, for Earth, it isn't about importing element X or substance Y; it's about energy, and, more specifically, about energy that's cleaner than what it's using already but can be handled by the same infrastructure.
So, first the Castles build some handwavium widget - call it a Shipstone - and then they charge it up; the nature of the stored energy is irrelevant for our purposes - what matters is that it can be gotten out on demand. When they're full, you load them in the freighter bound for Earth and dump them at a VTP-owned chemical plant somewhere along the Austrailian shoreline in the absolute middle of nowhere. These plants use the Shipstones' stored power to suck in CO2 from the air and HOH from the sea and run them through another wavetech gadget that converts them to (insert hydrocarbon flavor of choice), which is highly salable.
In other news, seeding Venus with bacteria that contain and integrate handwavium into their life cycle is different from a wavetech air scrubber in that both pass things in their environment through them without a change beyond chemical arrangement, but the bacterium is both self-replicating and small enough to be taken into a human body. IOW, the problem isn't the air, it's the stuff floating in the air.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#69
Let's take a step back and look at goals here. The Venusian Terraforming Project (VTP) is being run by Sailor Moon Fen, who want to make Crystal Tokyo. They've got giant 'castles' in orbit (at least the first of which was probably a dozen heavily decorated trailor homes lashed together) from whence they're doing this.
They don't want Crystal Tokyo in ten years, or a thousand. They want it tomorrow, or the day after. They're not going to say, 'how can I make the planet venus like earth?' They're going to say, 'How can I use this can of goop to build a city on that overheated ball of rock?'
Then, the brighter and more creative amongst them is going to say, 'Well, we want a city made of crystal, right? And Diamond is a crystal. And there's lots of carbon down there, and I read on the internet that you can make artifical diamond in super-hot chambers using gasses and carbon. So let's just make our cities out of diamonds, and build giant diamond domes around them!'
And everyone will cheer, because when you're living in an RV in space with nothing but a bucket of goop to keep you alive, This All Makes Perfect Sense.
And you know what? It's handwavium. You raid the equipment from a derelict microchip manufacturing plant, you put it together into something only slightly larger (and far stranger looking) than a bulldozer, and you start converting the CO2 in the atmosphere into accreted, synthetic diamond (and O2). You build domes and houses out of this diamond. You very quickly get a city made of crystal - perhaps not the best 'crystal tokyo' possible, but certainly a lot faster than if you tried to make the whole darn planet liveable, and suddenly you have a ground base of operations to work from. You pump the dome full of breatheable atmosphere, apply liberal amounts of 'wavium so that you don't boil alive inside the dome, and viola, you've got yourself a city on venus.
Estimated time to completion: A year to have a liveable dome for a hundred people. Additional domes cropping up on a regular basis, attaching to the first one like barnacles, so that eventually you end up with something that looks like a cross between a giant mutant snowglobe and a mass of soap bubbles.
Issues: After all that effort, you have a city in a bubble, with expansion work likely continuing to build additional bubbles on all the time. You'll have to import all of your starting atmosphere and water, probably enough to get a small ecosystem started (so food can be generated locally), and most of your 'wavium supply is going to go towards maintaining the giant crystal bubble.
On the plus side, you'll have an ever-growing city of fen on the surface of venus, in addition the the floating castles. Plus, no one is EVER going to crack those domes (they're made of diamond, after all).
The Broadleaf plot is completely unaffected, since you're not making a significant environmental impact on the planet as a whole, just one spot of it.
"Not this again!" Minerva said. "Albus, it was You-Know-Who, not you, who marked Harry as his equal. There is no possible way that the prophecy could be talking about you!" - Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality, Chapter 84
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#70
I have an answer to the Trade Issue (though I'll admit that Kestrel stole a whole lot of my thunder. You'll see.)
So... Economically speaking, making money isn't just a matter of doing something that's worth money. It's a matter of doing it in aome way that's *better than anyone else*. (Worst-case scenario, you do it by paying your workers a pittance, and trying to make it on price.) Now, there are basically three things (that I can think of) that you can do to make money from a stable location without taking it by force. (ie, leaving out Information Gathering and Trade - neither of which Venus is well-equipped to exploit on a significant scale, and theft/conquest - which they'd be opposed to.)
- You can gather raw materials. This requires that you have a location rich in said raw materials. Being relatively close to potential buyers, having the proper gear for raw material extraction, and having reasonably well-trained workers also help.
- You can manufacture raw materials into something useful. This requires that you have the infrastructure and trained (or trainable) workforce to do the manufacturing. Being relatively close to both potential buyers and resource providers also help.
- You can do tourism. This requires that you have something that people want to see or experience. It helps if you are close.
- You can do some sort of information/human interaction work. This requires highly skilled workers, some critical bits of (generally quite portable) infrastructure, and adequate lines of communication with your customers/clients (where "adequate" varies dramatically depending on particulars and may or may not have anything to do with physical location).
Running through this list from the bottom up, the Venusians start out looking pretty hosed. The Senshi wont generally be particularly tech-savvy as Fen go. They might be able to tellecommute as customer service for a little while, but that's a really *good* way to utterly crush the soul of your growing nation, and they'd realize that pretty quick. Information work is out. Tourism is going to pretty much be a Dane thing, and Venus is pretty far out of the way for most Danes. The ones who *do* decide to come visit will probably be doing it mostly for the *cough* scenery *cough*. Again, taking this one too far gets to be rather on the soul-destroying side. They don't have any infrastructure to start with, or much in the way of starter capital to get any, and the average level of manufacturing skill among the group is also pretty low, so no real advantages there.
That pretty much leaves raw materials. So... let's ignore Thionite for the moment (since no one knows abotu it, it's got waaay too many political complications to be worthwhile and the Senshi would would be violently opposed to the idea anyway). What else do they have. Well, they've got heat. It's not directed enough to tap for energy, but it might be useful in some low-level industrual processes. They've got pressure. Again, it's pressure as in atmospheric. Again, not so much on the power-generation, but might be useful industrially. Finally, if they put a bit of effort in to reshuffle some bonds, they've got a whole lot of oxygen, and a whole lot of carbon. Why not sell diamonds?
Now, the market for diamonds as gemstones is limited by purity. You could probably put the savage hurting on DeBeers pretty quickly, but most of the diamond that comes out of your production lines won't be high enough quality to go that way. The market for industrial diamonds would saturate pretty rapidly, even once you drop the price down past "everyone who can afford one right now" to "everyone who might want one." (You know that Sears is going to love the idea of selling diamond saws at reasonable prices in its "power tools" section.) Still, that's okay. Once we take Kestrel's idea (which seems obvious on the face of it, now that it's been mentioned) the senshi are going to have a number of cities on the surface (what's the gravity down there, anyway?) that are pumping *tons* of tappable waste heat out of their heat sinks, and will have at least a few general-purpose handwaved device-types for creating extreme pressure gradients. setting up a diamond factory won't even be *hard* - and that means you can go even *bigger*. What do you think the market for diamond knives will look like? You think there's anyone out there with a whole lot of money to burn who might like the idea of a diamond staff? What about a diamond cutting board?
Mind you, you *do* have to be careful to keep things in balance. If you pull too much carbon out of the atmosphere without doing anything about the heat and pressure, your diamond domes *will* burst into flame. For the moment, you can take care of it by making sure that the domes are multi-layered, and that the bits with the heat and the bits with the oxy atmosphere aren't ever the same bits, but it's definately something to be careful about.
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#71
Okay, I didn't exactly put a lot of thought into the VTP when I wrote it in, but here's what occurs to me from that.
Firstly, the VTP is not expected to produce results as soon as the MTP. It's expected to take years, probably decades, by the most optimistic view. It's also very much a work in progress. The actual real estate for the short and medium term future are the Castles (this hasnt stopped a decent amount of land on Venus being sold to speculators to raise capital).
The rough division I had for the hydrogen trade was for each molecule of CO2 to have 4 molecules of H2 added, splitting it down to a single CH4 and two H2O molecules. So half the hydrogen sent to Venus would be used for terraforming and half for an export material (CH4 is, of course, a major fuel). I'm by no means married to this notion.
Now that I've run the numbers for moving the CH4 to Earth, it would take about 900 years for 10 vessels carrying as much as a modern LNG tanker to move it all (and the effect of burning it all in Earth's Atmopshere would probably turn it into something very much like Venus). Assume comparable figures for moving Hydrogen and the scheme becomes very long term indeed. Possibly CO2 is simply being scooped up and moved into space, creating a belt effect of frozen CO2. If 10 units were moving 150,000 tonnes a day into space, that would reduce the timescale to about 90 years. More units would make it faster. Perhaps a combination of space elevators with giant atmospheric filters...
Imagine, if you will, Venus ringed by belts of CO2 and scores of Castles suspended like beads, each the midpoint of a cable of diamond filaments stretching dow towards the surface (as far down as the temperatures allow) and as far up as orbital space.
Of course, building such devices would be an immense task, and there would then be a need for water and biological work, but it would be pretty damn cool.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#72
Um. While I have no objection, as such, to the existence of surface cities, the arguments Kestrel and Scirrocco have made for them are based on an apparent misunderstanding of the Castles, as I see them.
Specifically, they're stratospheric balloons, not orbital stations. Wiki sez that, above the clouds and lower atmosphere, the venusian atmosphere eventually reaches a point where its pressure and temperature are at shirtsleeve levels.
That's where the Castles are. They're tethered to specific points on the surface by lightweight nanotube cables, which are, in turn, cored by some sort of thermally conductive material, which may or may not need to be insulated from the load-bearing outer layer. What happens over time is that the cable core assumes the same temperature along its entire length - and, if we expose a lot of its material near the surface, that'd make that temperature something in the range of the six-hundred-odd C that's prevalent down there.
Fray the top end out a bit, then stick it in a boiler, and you have the first stage of an otherwise perfectly conventional electrical generator station - and you can make it as big as you want.
The only problem with building these things that I can see is one of materials. You need something that is:
1. Immune to sulfuric acid
2. Strong enough to take the stresses being exerted on the cable
3. Thermally insulative
4. Completely stable at both room temperature and inside an oven set on 'CLEAN'
5. Light enough that a thirty-mile long cable of the stuff won't be completely insupportable
And... 'Wavetech can provide all of those. In something that's visually transparent, no less - giving you the 'crystal city' effect for free!
'Cause, make no mistake, these things are the size of small cities already.
So, the heat of the surface is quite tappable.
It's also about half of what you need to make diamond, and... several orders of magnitude... less than the neccessary pressure. That'll happen by wavetech if it does at all.
You've got a point about its being salable, though.
Another assumption I'd been making is that a spacecraft that hasn't been designed for it cannot survive the Venusian surface, probably due more to temperature than pressure.
Drakensis: AFAIK, the latest word from the physicists is that they're not sure metallic hydrogen will stay metastable at STP, but that it's likely enough to include in hard sci-fi, let alone our little pastiche. They've also predicted its density with a high degree of confidence - 2.5; so, five times as many H atoms per tanker in vs. LNG.
And I like the idea of the Dry Ice Rings of Venus.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#73
Quote:
Perhaps a combination of space elevators with giant atmospheric filters...
The problem with space elevators on Venus is the planet's spin is so damned slow you have to stretch the elevator cable out to 1,500,000 km in order to keep it balanced. Also, you have to worry about all the CO2 either falling back to Venus or wandering off into somebody else's ecosystem.
The shortest route I can think of immediately would be to use a sunshade and wavetech radiators or heatsinks of some sort, cut off the energy input and start sucking away as much heat as possible. Once the CO2 starts to freeze out, the Senshi can release the Crystal Milennium goo, start coverting all that dry ice into diamond & oxide/carbonate rocks. Still leaves the spin and water problems, but the Castles can handle both of those easily enough. (Imagine, once the Castles spin Venus up to a proper day-night cycle, they detach, head for the Kuiper and grab a nice cometary body a little larger than Pluto. Haul it back and start stripping it for water.)---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#74
Quote:
The shortest route I can think of immediately would be to use a sunshade and wavetech radiators or heatsinks of some sort, cut off the energy input and start sucking away as much heat as possible. Once the CO2 starts to freeze out, the Senshi can release the Crystal Milennium goo, start coverting all that dry ice into diamond & oxide/carbonate rocks. Still leaves the spin and water problems, but the Castles can handle both of those easily enough. (Imagine, once the Castles spin Venus up to a proper day-night cycle, they detach, head for the Kuiper and grab a nice cometary body a little larger than Pluto. Haul it back and start stripping it for water.)
Hmm... I think I might have a better idea - a variant on Drak's.
First step is to build the Castles - call it twenty, total. Could well be more but I don't have the energy to look up the number for even coverage at the moment.
For a decade or two they act as bases for earning the cash for operation and expansion, and, at the same time, charge up for The Spin. Once that's over, the six fully inhabited 'primary castles' stay in place while the elevators are constructed... and the rest, the ones that were more like giant drilling platforms than actual towns, are stripped of much of their equipment before turning on their drives, opening their doors, and turning their internal thermostats down below the freezing point of CO2.
Being as they're... rather larger than a LNG tanker, this should speed up the process of straining the atmosphere considerably. Eventually, this will get the air to what's considered an 'acceptable' point, and they stop hauling dry ice and go off in search of suitable comets or whatever.
Overall time taken, at an utterly wild-assed guess... fifty, sixty years or so.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"
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Re: Venusian Terraforming Redux
#75
I dunno about using the Castles as tankers. I don't see it speeding up the process that much - it'd probably make more sense to go the Big Spin, then go with Drak's idea of using space elevators as fountainheads. It still leaves the problem of getting the CO2 moving fast enough and going far enough that it doesn't just fall back onto the planet, but with enough spokes a combination bucket brigade/radiator elevator would work.
I still like the idea of freezing the CO2 and going for the Crystal Milennium goo, though. It provides such an interesting visual of the finished landscape. And deBeers would go totally apeshit at the idea of Venus, the Diamond Planet. %)---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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