The Venuzian
Yes, this is possible
Venus has all the ingredients of a habitable planet.
By the end of this century, the north and south pole regions will be ready for colonisation.
Terraformation of Venus
This site is about the prospect of transforming Venus into a habitable planet by the end of this century.
It lays out the principal stages in the development, from the colonisation of the upper clouds of the planet, to mankind’s next ‘giant step’ by a dainty, bare foot on Venus’s highest mountain, quickly followed by the landing of many others onto the surface.
Venus, the nearest planet to Earth, already has all the components of a breathable atmosphere.
It’s like a sculpture of the goddess Venus as yet uncarved from a block of marble.
But the task is not merely Herculean. New adjectives may be needed. As will be made clear, it is achievable — some might say, inevitable.
This is a project for clear thinkers given the freedom to apply their thoughts.
Research in this direction has been hamstrung by the prevailing belief in the greenhouse effect. It has left the field open, and the opportunity knocks.
Essentially, people and robotic juggernauts must go to Venus and ‘scrub’ the atmosphere of its principal component, carbon dioxide, by means of brute chemical engineering and introduced biological agents.
This will convert calcium oxide in Venus’s crust to calcium carbonate, sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the process.
Conversion methods can be divided in to three kinds; surface, sub-surface, and atmospheric.
The people performing and financing these efforts, ‘scrubbers’, will earn a vast virgin territory.
Their land titles can be derived from blockchain shares that are coined for the project from present-day times, thus seeding the project.
All of humanity’s ingenuity, its lessons from economics, and its faith in its own abilities must be cultivated.
The timeline for the project puts it within the field of commercial interest, and the aforementioned giant step, followed by millions of other steps, will happen in the 2090s, within the lifetimes of many now living.
It will be mankind’s greatest achievement.
Enter – the Tadpoles
Written here is the outline of a method for conversion of the Venusian atmosphere to a breathable one for humans.
Called, at this stage, the Tadpole Terraformation Theory, will be a gargantuan chemical engineering project, with most of the industrial construction necessarily taking place on the moon.
At first glance, the sheer scale of the mission makes it seem out of reach.
However, the key ingedients here are human ingenuity, inspired by a desire to reach for the morning star, and time.
It must also be remembered that the energy required for the atmospheric transformation is released as part of the central chemical reaction, which is exothermic.
CaO(s) + CO2 (g) = CaCO3(s) + 178 kJ/mol
The astute may ask, “If the reaction is exothermic, why hasn’t it happened already?” The answer is that it has…on Earth.
Earth’s formerly abundant atmospheric CO2 has been sequestered into seams of lime by a process called weathering.
On Venus, this process has not been kinetically possible without the key solvent – water.
But the process will be performed on Venus artificially using “tadpoles”.
Tadpoles will burrow and melt their way through the Venusian crust, sucking CO2 up on the way and burning it with Calcium Oxide to make Calcium Carbonate.
They are so-called simply because they will have big heads and tapering tails.
The heads will combust the reactants and use the energy produced to keep the leading edges hot enough to melt the oncoming volcanic material.
The tails will lay out at least two breather pipes behind the tadpoles; one for sucking in atmosphere and and exhaust pipe expelling mainly nitrogen (N2).
(Nitrogen, a convenient minority gas on Venus, will make up most of the remaining atmosphere post-terraformation.)
The tadpoles will be the size of small factories – as noted later, 20×30 metre frontal cross-section is envisaged.
Each will likely work side-by-side with other tadpoles, so that they can share resources, including intake and exhaust holes.
Some tadpoles may even specialize in the production of some material essential to the cause.
So they will be launched off the moon in long strings of, say, 400 of them. Already, the scale the task will be becoming apparent to the reader.
The first sticker shock is the number of these tadpole strings that will be needed for the task – it’s a cool one million.
The second sticker shock is the performance that will be expected of the tadpoles once they get to Venus – a performance one would expect of any robot hurled so far across the solar system; the tadpoles would each need to melt through more than 3000 kilometres of crust.
From the Wright brothers to the Apollo missions, people have looked to the sky to lay claim to their achievements.
This project will look to the depths.
The new technologies developed will be tested and proven on Earth’s own volcanic crust, first, naturally, on a very small scale, and ultimately on a terraforming scale.
With enough capacity the scrub, once started, could be performed in a little over a generation: 33 years.
The rest of this essay deals with these issues, but first, let us look at the planet in question.
Venus at One Atmosphere
At an altitude of 50 kilometres above the average surface level of Venus, you will find the most Earth-like conditions of anywhere in the solar system.
The atmospheric pressure there is about one atmosphere (1 atm or ~1 bar), the same as Earth’s at sea level, and the temperatures are in a tolerable range.
This is no small matter for the potential colonist. A quick look at the nearby alternatives yields a lunar surface either unbearably cold or hot, with no atmosphere at all, or a Martian landscape that is viciously cold with little pressure.
But the Venusian heights are the only other place in the solar system where you can stand outside in your T-shirt and shorts.
You would need a mask with a bottle of compressed air, the acidic nature of the gas there would get to your eyes and skin after a while, and the ultra-violet light is harsh, but the first generation of colonists will be able to go outside briefly as part of their Venusian initiation rite.
A pretty quick death awaits any such attempt elsewhere in the solar system.
(In point of fact, the three smaller gas giants — Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — have similar pressure/gravity environments to that of Earth’s surface and the Venusian heights, but the cold would restrict T-shirt excursions to excited dashes between close portals.)
Venus’s habitable-zone hospitality does not end there.
Where Does One Stand?
Venus’s gravity is so similar to Earth’s that the difference will go almost unnoticed by colonists, but where would a person stand?
Unfortunately, none of Venus’s mountains reach up to the 50km safe zone.
The critical advantage Venus has for scrubbers is that its atmospheric composition is mainly made up of relatively dense carbon dioxide.
Colonists could therefore inhabit large airships in which the lifting gas is the nitrogen/oxygen mix we breathe on Earth, itself.
NASA has no plans to fund this exciting concept, and the idea seems to be on a permanent back-burner.
The airships of Venus could be so-named for containing breathable air, instead of being ships that simply float in the air with hydrogen or helium lifting gases.
Projects have already been proposed to place dirigibles in the Venusian habitable-zone for exploration of the planet.
Huge flat-bottomed airships would make for big living spaces with all the comforts of home.
There need only be a thin and hardy plastic or teflon sheath between the colonists and the atmosphere outside.
Since both the interior and exterior gases have the same pressure, holes or small tears in the envelope will be no terrible threat.
In the First World War, Zeppelins attacking London from Germany would cop multiple bullet holes, and their pilots would carry on, drop their bombs and turn for home, where the repairs could be made.
With equal pressures inside and outside, no gas hissed out (as out of a balloon), nor squirted in (as through a breached ship or submarine hull).
Floating above Venus, colonists alerted to a hole in the envelope could merely choose to fix it before or after lunch. Zeppelins were eventually defeated with tracer bullets.
The bullets started fires on the envelope where outside air would mix with the flammable lifting gas, hydrogen.
No such fuel/oxidant flame-propagating mechanism will be present on Venus. There would be very little to limit the size of these airships.
They would have the dimensions and functions of towns, farms, factories, sports arenas and airports.
There could even be recreational bodies of water with beaches.
People’s personal space would rival that of many back on Earth.
Aggregations of these balloons and airships will look like bubble wrap from space.
The Weather on Venus after Terraformation.
On a planetary scale, Venus could be a habitable planet should its atmosphere simply be reduced to 1 bar (or to a comfortable pressure below that).
At that pressure, the planetary average temperature would be around 66 degrees centigrade.
However, reduced to the same atmospheric pressure as La Paz, the high-altitude Bolivian capital (about 0.65atm), Venus would have an average temperature of 37 degrees centigrade.
Going off Earth’s southern hemisphere, the average isotherms are be about (coincidentally) 37 degrees south, and this will be roughly the same for Venus.
Towards the poles of these 37 degree latitudes – north and south – the weather will cool, and make the average temperature comfortably below 37C.
Towards the equator from these latitudes, the average temperatures will simply be too high for us.
Although this constitutes 60% of Venus’s surface area, though much of it will have been marked by the terraformation effort.
It is not that the rest of Venus will be a temperate paradise.
It will have ultra-Siberian extremes, especially after mid-day and mid-night (remembering Venus has two months of daylight then two months of night).
Housing, vehicles and infrastructure will need to have both Arctic and Saharan properties.
The two-month-long day will have nearly twice the sunlight intensity, 24-hour daylight, and growth-promoting CO2 level tuned to three or four times that of Earth.
This represents a growing season for both food and biofuels.
Stage One
A thorough exploration of Venus will have to take place to confirm the most likely scenario — that the planet is lifeless.
If life is found there, no terraformation will be able to take place, morally.
The discovery of life on Venus would have such profound implications for the nature of existence, that all other questions, including those surrounding the terraformation, would become of secondary importance.
It would imply that the universe is teeming with life, with a strong possibility of intelligence elsewhere. But the chances of that remain mercifully slim, if colonisation is to go ahead.
Cloud Towns
If life is not found cloud towns can start up.
Their first task will be to measure the Venusian crust’s distribution of calcium oxide (this is usually called quick lime, but I’ll use its chemical name to avoid confusing it with the [calcium carbonate] lime product of the terraformation).
Ferric and magnesium oxides form carbonates which will also contribute to the sequestration of CO₂, and a combined output of these carbonates will determine each tadpole’s yield per cubic metre of crust consumed.
Like the cloud city administered by Han Solo’s old friend Lando Calrissian in the movie The Empire Strikes Back, the towns will be suspended in the Venusian atmosphere.
The mining operations will be largely autonomous but some oversight from cloud towns will be required.
The other role of the cloud towns will be to develop infrastructure and housing on the surface, and to support any biological terraformation efforts, which will have to take place at altitude.
It was unclear what force kept the Star Wars movie’s cloud city from falling, but the Venusian cloud towns will use their natural buoyancy.
As previously stated, the inside of a Venusian airship’s envelope will serve as the living area for the colonists — huge open spaces.
As CO₂ is denser than Earth’s nitrogen-oxygen mix, and each cubic metre yields 3.2 Newtons of buoyancy, so a 100-metre cube of air could support a 300-tonne airship. (1 bar, CO₂ 66°C, air 20°C, g=8.87m/s²)
The airships would only have to station themselves a few kilometres above the 50km height to be in even more Earth-like temperatures, if they sacrificed some weight.
The winds at an altitude of 50km are strong and will tend to carry non-tethered towns around the planet every few Earth-days, providing an almost Earth-like night and day for the first towns.
Anchored towns, tethered to the ground by long chains, will have to adapt to Venus’s two-month day and two-month night.
The chains would have to be buoyed (supported from without) throughout their length.
While supporting the mining operations initially, cloud towns would later oversee infrastructural developments on the surface in anticipation of future settlement.
Conversion Techniques
Let’s assume the ploughing of the Venusian calcium oxide begins in the 2060s.
Most of the conversion will probably take place by sub-surface tadpoles.
The sub-surface tadpoles will be supplemented by surface and aerial efforts.
Cloud-towns will remotely operate semi-autonomous bucket-wheel excavators, each at least the capacity of the Takraf Bagger 293 strip miner, which processes 10 tons of material a second.
The advantage surface excavation will have over tadpoles is their refining ability.
A network of conveyor belts transports calcium-bearing ore to refining, processing and CO2 sequesting sites.
There will be limits to the open-cast operation that will leave hopes on the form of the tadpoles.
Energy Inherent in the Process One of the first question marks would naturally concern the energy requirement.
However, it should be noted that the process of converting calcium oxide and carbon dioxide to lime is exothermic — in other words, it releases energy:
CaO(s) + CO₂(g) → CaCO₃(s) + 178 kJ/mol
This is not a world away from the output of actual fuels with similar molecular weight, such as ethanol (the alcohol in drinks):
C2H5OH(l) + 3O2(g) → 2CO2(g)+ 3H2O(l) + 1368 kJ/mol
Chemical reactions that reduce a gas to a solid are generally encouraged by pressure, a property amply supplied by Venus.
Tadpoles will exploit the energy of the reaction they harness to melt through the crust and perform all their other operations from what, in effect, is a ‘burn’.
For the bucket-wheel operations, central nodes of factories that refine and burn calcium oxide will produce and distribute the lime ‘ash’.
The ore will be supplied by bucket-wheel excavators and conveyors, and the resultant lime may be redistributed using the same network.
Already, materials have been identified that can withstand the harsh conditions at Venus’s surface, including aluminium and silicon carbide.
A bonanza of usable materials will be made available when the reactive sulphuric acid is first scrubbed out of the atmosphere (this is discussed later).
The lime factory nodes are net energy producers and will power the bucket wheels and conveyors supplying them.
They may also power the cloud towns anchored above, as well as any mechanism that gets calcium-bearing material to biological lime producers up at life-friendly pressures and temperatures.
The nature of productivity dictates that most of the lime will be made in the final years of the scrub, when production peaks.
It Has Already Happened Here
This process has happened on Earth already, over geological time.
Known as weathering, the conversion of CO₂ and calcium oxide to limestone has already sequestered CO₂ from Earth’s atmosphere into the ground and under the oceans.
It has changed an atmosphere that was once a third CO₂ into one in which it is a trace gas.
In contrast to prevailing thought, the biggest threat to life that comes from CO₂ is a lack of it, not too much.
Today, the level of CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere is already close to the trace concentration at which many plants can no longer photosynthesize.
So this chemical, and biological, process is what will be artificially induced on Venus, and will be the task of the scrubber generation.
The aerial/biological scrubbing will make it ‘snow’ with limestone shells from an artificially developed ecosystem well above the surface of Venus.
Chemical engineering plants on and under the surface will do most of the donkey work, however.
Going even further back in geological time, relatively light calcium, floated to Venus’s crust during its molten stage.
The proportion of calcium in Venus’s crust will be similar to the proportion on Earth, where it is about the fifth most common element, coming in at four per cent of the crust’s total.
The metal exists mainly as its oxide, so it it about 11 percent of the crust.
The moon’s crust has eight per cent calcium.
For argument’s sake, we’ll let the following loose dates suffice.
Timeline
2024 Experiments are made to determine the thermodynamics of CO2 propelled calcium oxide combusters. Designs are sought for small-scale volanic material melt-borers – the first tadpoles.
2025 The Venuzian crypto-currency is launched, in which people can invest in potential tadpoles and their territory-earning capabilities.
2026 Scale tadpoles, perhaps 100 square centimetres across, are tested. Intake and exhaust-laying ideas are tested.
2030 One-metre-diameter tadpoles are tested on in-situ volcanic material.
2035 The first unmanned Venusian airship is deployed. Lunar surveys explore sites for mining, tadpole factories and circular magnetic launch facilities.
2040 The fact that Venus is barren of any life-forms is established. Populated airships are deployed and intensive research into the mass production of cloud towns begins. A one-tenth scale tadpole is made.
2045 A full scale tadpole is commissioned for testing on earth. A floating landing strip for re-entering spacecraft is commissioned, along with associated bio-propellant and oxidant-producing farms.
2050 Lunar factories for tadpoles and bucket-wheel excavators are established. The first tests of floating algae and calcium-carbonate-yielding ecosystems are done on Venus.
2055 The deployment of scrubbing cloud-towns begins. Tadpoles, 600 square-metres in frontal area, are deployed to Venus.
2060 The mass migration of scrubbers, lunar workers and associated professions begins. Lunar operations develop quickly. Colonists use the lunar launch facilities to send resources and travel to other planets and orbiting bodies of our sun.
2065 Full-scale tadpole (and other method) scrubbing begins.
2070 Sulphur dioxide/sulphuric acid clouds are scrubbed down to gypsum (drywall), denuding the goddess, and the surface becomes visible from cloud towns. Venusians celebrate having an atmosphere that does not smell like rotten eggs. Introduced life need not be acidophile and acid counter-measures on cloud towns and excavators can be abandoned.
2075 Oxygen levels, increasing as a by-product of the some kinds of scrub, create a thicker ozone layer, protecting cloud towns from ultraviolet light.
2080 Oxygen levels become high enough for new, respirating, scrub-contributing life.
2090 Scrubbing capacity peaks in this decade.
2095 The Step. The next giant step occurs on the mountain Skadi, when the pressure there drops to one bar and the temperature to 37°C.
2099 The next mass migration begins — every bit as dramatic as that to Earth’s new world.
2100 The mean surface altitude attains target pressure of 0.65 bar and there is mass migration to the north and south poles of Venus, where it is cooler than the planetary average of 37°C. Here is some speculation on what might come next, as a natural consequence of success.
2150 A comet or icy asteroid is shrouded by foil and has towers and propulsion mechanisms stuck in the poles of its spin axis. Nudged towards Venus, it is put into a very low orbit where its exposed underside boils away into the Venusian atmosphere. Soon after, Venus has its first rain. There is now no restriction to the population’s expansion.
2200 The population of Venus reaches a billion.
2300 The population of Venus exceeds that of Earth.
3000 The population of Venus reaches a third of a trillion and people are not just interplanetary, they are interstellar.
Scrubbers
Scrubbers are the stars of the show. They include investors, engineers, cloud colonists and lunar workers.
They would be paid in land titles according to the tonnage of lime their operations produce.
There will be three main methods of lime production; surface, sub-surface and aerial.
Surface and sub-surface converters will produce lime in huge chemical engineering operations.
If the surface method becomes the main method, the surface Venus will be transformed by massive excavators and the resultant calcium oxide-depleted slag.
However, the sub-surface (tadpole) method is the more likely success story.
It will burrow deep into Venus while leaving holes wide enough to suck in and eat up atmosphere.
For the surface and sub-surface methods, the ‘burn’ of CO₂ and CaO will provide the energy needed for the bucket wheel, borer, or whatever innovative excavation method wins out.
The surface method will also need this energy for the dispersement of the slag.
Assuming the soil contains about 11 percent CaO, each ton-per-second of crust harvesting capacity will yield nearly 20 megaWatts of power.
The tadpoles will behave in a way reminiscient of jet engines.
The heat-generating combustion chamber of the machines will deliver mechanical energy and heat to the forward boring/melting section the way of the turbine/compressor relationship of a jet engine.
The molten “exhaust” slag will have a slightly larger mass and volume than the crust cultivated.
The hot slag will provide back pressure, or thrust, for the front of the juggernaut which is melting its way through the crust, like a hot knife into butter.
Heat will be transferred from the reaction chamber to tynes and blades at the front. Though the tadpoles will initially bore down, they will level out at pre-assigned depths. Tunnels will have to be laid behind the tadpoles for intakes and exhaust.
Potential resources in the volanic material include iron, with the potential for steel, aluminium and other metals.
The lime produced by the burn, and the pressures and temperatures may also yield hard marble.
The tadpole machine’s “tail” will have to create these tunnels in the solidifying slag running behind.
Humans go to a depth of down to 4000 metres on Earth, and drillers have managed a 12,000 metre hole.
It is, therefore not outside the realms of possibility to imagine factory-sized machines capable of similar depths, which merely have to supply gas.
Otherwise tunnel supporting rigs will have to supply tunnel lining from the surface, a scenario which might best be avoided.
As already mentioned strings of attached tadpoles will be able to use each other’s blowhole resources.
They may also use the tunnels of other tadpoles strings above and below them.
The aerial method will use the heat of the reactions below to propel refined CaO up chimney/tethers to feed bio-conversion operations nearer the cloud-towns.
This will be a less efficient but it may be necessary for displacing the atmosphere’s excess nitrogen, as will be discussed later.
The top 3.5 kilometres of the Venusian crust will have plenty of the CaO needed. Much less of the crust will be required if ferric and magnesium carbonate yields are high.
Incentives for the Scrubbers
The industrial might necessary sounds futuristic, but there is the better part of a century to prepare, and the expectation of the kind of advances supplied by the last century are not unrealistic.
A blockchain issuance akin to Bitcoin which incentivises innovators is the clear path forward.
People could buy a tadpole today, in anticipation of its future construction and the reward of Venusian land in the future.
The Land Market
The most valuable land will be at the cooler poles.
Vast, scorching equatorial regions will have hardy air-conditioned towns, cooled using techniques perfected in the cloud towns.
So Venus’s landscape cannot be predicted from this distance in time, and the surface will rise by an average of 200 metres with the descent of the CO2.
Rotten Eggs
As per the timeline, the first lime snows will scrub the SO₂/H₂SO₄ out of the atmosphere in the same way in which smoke-scrubbing operations clean high-sulphur coal plants using lime.
An average of about 11cm of gypsum will be layed under and throughout Venus during this period.
Venus will be rid of the smell of rotten eggs at this stage, not that people will be habitually breathing it.
(The smell will have been an early warning of a perforation in the envelope of an airship or cloud town.)
As the sulphur dioxide is a principal component of Venus’s clouds, the goddess will be denuded of these clouds and the surface of the planet will become visible from space, perhaps taking on a Martian-red hue from Earth’s perspective.
This will be a temporary colouring until the lime production begins in earnest, returning the morning star to its bright, white origins.
Productivity will gain a boost after this period because metals that would otherwise suffer acid attacks can be used in the scrubbing operation.
The SO₂ scrub may liberate a small amount of water into the atmosphere — a welcome prospect for a parched planet.
Venus possesses a Lake Superior-filling quantity of water, a comparative drop in Earth’s oceans’ worth, but since it will all be vapour, the occasional wispy cloud may form from it. This amount of water will be just enough for scrubbers’ own use.
They will also recycle it as a valuable solvent, taking care not to produce too many hydrophilic carbonates lest the precious resource disappear.
Water will be extracted directly from the atmosphere, perhaps with simple refrigeration and condensation.
Ultimately the colonists may choose to capture a comet or icy asteroid to supplement the terraformation. (It is supposed a comet supplied Earth’s water.)
Stage 2
The cloud towns will be produced in the expectation of earning new land, as a whole new planet becomes accessible to humankind.
Only a free market where scrubber innovation is rewarded with this land will create the boom.
Their first inkling of success will be when the level of the Venusian atmosphere at one bar begins to descend.
It will start slowly, as this will mean converting the densest carbon dioxide layers to lime during the slowest part of the production cycle.
The Great Descent
Some of the volcanic soil of Venus will be refined to pure CaO and directed to the heights for biological conversion to lime.
Photosynthesising algae and other suspended plant life will produce food for shell-producing life.
The bugs will burn and boil away as they descend, leaving their calcium-carbonate shells to snow onto the Venusian surface.
The surface will be far too hostile for direct human oversight. It will instead be dominated by semi-autonomous robots, to the extent that they will become quite the masters of the Venusian surface.
The construction of tadpoles and bucket-wheel excavators and their associated rigging and conveyor belts will be too much for the cloud-towns, and will be a task best carried out on Earth’s moon.
The raw materials for the heavy machinery exist on the moon, and the excavators, perhaps with people tagging along, could be launched towards Venus with magnetic rail guns.
These factories will be the moon’s principal industry.
A multiplicity of competing lunar factories will ultimately have to produce millions of tadpoles and excavators and their CaO/CO₂ burn chambers.
The lunar rail-gun industry will have the side-effect of giving Earth access to the rest of the solar system.
Circular and linear magnetic railways on the moon will be able to accelerate and launch materials and people in quantity.
Venusians will develop their own traditions and ways as the descent to the surface occurs over a generation or two.
One fun practice will be to drop containers of raw food down into the literal pressure-cooker conditions below, and have them bounce back up.
When the food is cooked, balloons inflated from pressurised cylinders will return the cooked food to the cloud towns (a Venusian hangi?).
The variety of towns and their methods will contribute to the efficiency of the terraformation.
Such a large number of societies will inevitably innovate and steer the cloud towns towards the most productive set-up.
The great descent will accelerate to a climax.
Ninety percent of the main reaction will occur in the last half of the effort, when the most efficient processes have been identified and applied.
A lot of surface infrastructure, such as roads, will be set up during this time in anticipation of human touch-downs.
Private housing and factories will also be sent from Earth’s moon in advance of people.
Before the Step, individuals will make brave, brief visits to the still hot and bothered surface in specialised craft and insulated suits, perhaps even before the centennial of the moon landing.
The Next Giant Step
The big event will be when a person steps onto the surface of Venus unprotected by special suits or boots.
Making a point of the human arrival on Venus, a bare foot will have this contact.
The person elected for the job will alight from a hovering vehicle onto a mountaintop with a comfortable one-bar pressure and a temperature of no more than 37°C (body temperature).
Venus’s highest mountain, Skadi, may have a dusting of lime — the detritus of shell-producing creatures.
Unlike Neil Armstrong’s footprints, which will last thousands of years, the new prints will blow away.
The small step for a person, and simultaneous giant step for mankind, will be a historical event.
Service Cloud Towns
Other cloud towns will have functions in service to the scrubbers.
Their airships will include recreational services, such as bodies of water for swimming, boating and beach sunbathing.
Agricultural airships will be big enough for Venus to be able to feed upwards of a million scrubbers and their support people.
Some of the first airships will produce bio-propellant for rockets to make the return journey to space and to Earth.
Only multiple-stage systems in which the sub-orbital stages glide back in a truly reusable sense will be practical on Venus.
Perhaps hydrogen-filled balloons will take the rockets to upper altitudes for a start off.
Space-port airships will be the link between the scrubbers and low-Venusian orbit.
A rotating-wheel space station will provide both artificial gravity for its people.
Without a convenient moon which can support vast rail guns, chemical rockets will be the main method of returning to Earth.
Mid Descent As the one-bar altitude descends, the processes of scrubbing will become easier. The back-of-the-envelope figures provided above for the scrub were flat-line in terms of production, for illustrative purposes.
The lime production will increase, peaking towards the end.
Many cloud towns will find themselves at a comparative disadvantage and will be re-purposed, while others hit their straps.
At the crescendo, cloud towns will find themselves rapidly approaching the surface at several kilometres per year.
Other Gases Despite their apparent inconvenient quantities, the gases of Venus could be argued to be almost ideal.
If a greater mass of CO₂ caused the pressure and temperature at the surface to be twice what it is, then the lime would dissociate before sequestering its CO2 and the terraformation would not be possible. Happily, the mass of the gas is in the scrubbable range.
N₂: Being 80 per cent of Earth’s atmosphere, nitrogen will be largest proportion of gas resulting from the terraformation.
The mass of nitrogen in Venus’s atmosphere is presently about four times that of Earth’s, though only 3.5% of the total on Venus, in second place behind CO₂.
While the quantity of CO₂ on Venus is a tremendous terraforming challenge, the amount of nitrogen, N₂, in the atmosphere is exactly the right amount for our purpose.
It is a critically important feature of our as-yet-unsculpted Venus.
A concurrent reaction that could happen in tadpoles is the conversion of nitrogen into nitrates, and exhaust them back onto the Venusian surface.
This will be a minority reaction, tuned to take out the exact amount needed for a breathable atmosphere.
Otherwise, in the course of the bio-chemical conversion of mineral calcium oxide and CO₂ to lime, a by-product will be nitrates, which will fall to the surface.
Combined, these processes will eat up three-quarters of the nitrogen, leaving one bar’s worth of it for easy respiration.
The nitrogen cycle on Earth, which temporarily stores three-quarters of Earth’s nitrogen in the soil, will very possibly be replicated on Venus, with a little tweaking by our scrubbers.
Leguminous cloud towns may specialise in cultivating diazotrophic bacteria that ‘fix’ nitrogen into other forms, perhaps snowing nitrates onto patches for later collection and sale throughout the planet.
O₂: Obviously the most important life-sustaining gas, oxygen will be a by-product of the photosynthesis process in scrubber work.
It could also be extracted from oxides in the crust with a another ‘sideline’ for the tadpoles.
Though there is no direct and obvious oxygen producing process chemically, the elemental resources, at least, are abundant.
Targeting Earth’s 20/80% ratio of oxygen to nitrogen will be a central scrubber concern.
If the thinner atmosphere is targetted, then a 25/75% ratio might be preferred, so people can beathe easier.
There will not be a particular shortage of O₂, and it will be part of the new biospheric cycle.
As alluded to in the timeline, oxygen will quickly flesh out Venus’s existing, albeit thin, ozone layer.
Not much O2 is needed for this function. A concentration of a fifth what Earth has suffices.
As its concentration rises, it will be of use to colonists for combustion engines and jets.
The first direct breathing of Venusian air, when the CO₂ level gets down below five per cent, will be an event akin to The Step.
SO₂/H₂SO₄:
The sulphuric acid cycle is, presently, an important part of Venus’s cloud formation and inter-strata chemical movements.
This will be scrubbed, as earlier described, as a matter of course, SO₂ being precipitated as gypsum in chemical preference to lime.
Venus will finally not smell like the goddess has just farted.
The Land Scramble
Skadi peaks at 11 kilometres above Venus’s mean surface level.
The mountain may be subject to limestone snow drifts.
The surface will quickly cool to the temperature dictated by the whispier air.
Once the atmosphere is at one bar or lower, however, the night side will actually have a big problem with cold.
The night side will cool significantly in the two-month-long darkness, as well as getting very hot in the equally long day.
Insulated housing will be a necessity, as the climate will be anything but temperate.
The cloud towns will have had a generation to prepare for it.
Between Venus’s latitude of 37° north and that of 37° south, the temperatures will hit extremes, and the land will be of lesser value than that at the poles.
Even before The Step, parts of the Venusian surface will experience their first dips below the freezing temperature of water.
On or near Skadi, snow blowers will carpet the first Venusian ski-fields, this time making real snow, not the lime kind.
An appropriate refrigerant may take part in a great trade between the day and the night side – heating and cooling – perhaps using the intake and exhaust piping laid out by tadpoles.
Again, such infrastructure may be laid down in the descent.
The conveyor-belt network may also be repurposed in various ways, including personal and other material transport.
The Tropics Versus the Poles Other terraformation theorists such as NASA’s Landis, and Britain’s Fogg believe the temperature of a post-teraformation Venus would be too high because of the Greenhouse effect.
However, Nikolov and Zeller’s work proves only surface pressure and proximity to the sun determine the average temperature at the surface.
Between 37° north and 37° south — the bulk of the Venusian landmass — daytime temperatures will most likely be too hot for colonisation outside air-conditioned buildings.
The size of the hemispheric habitable zones will depend on the atmospheric mass of nitrogen and oxygen that the scrubbers settle on.
A lighter atmosphere, with a low ground-level atmospheric pressure akin to Bolivia’s capital La Paz, will bring the average planetary temperature down to 37°C, and allow for a larger spread of ground-dwelling people.
The poles will have temperate averages, if a little on the extreme side in the two-month long days and nights.
Even night-side temperatures may only be comfortable for a week or two before plunging below freezing point.
The cloud towns and their entourages will already be equipped to deal with such challenges, having developed counter measures during the ‘scrubber generation’.
Nearer the equator, the descending cloud towns will establish bubbles that are near-permanently air-conditioned, and domes held up by self-supporting helium-filled skins will be the order of the day.
The domes would allow for the preservation of an inverse-lapse-rate interior with a cool ground level.
They would be slightly silvered, or gold-tinged, to bring the sun’s intensity down to an Earth-like level.
They may even have a function for turning the sky dark during daytime to support inhabitants’ Earthy bio-rhythm.
Other Sources of Water
Hydroxyl apatites are important calcium-bearing minerals that could potentially be used to create lime along with CaO.
Apatites are the hard mineral present in our teeth.
They could also be a source of water.
The hydroxyl group can be used in a process that squeezes water from stone.
This process has already been proposed for creating water on the moon, though more recently ice has been discovered on the moon’s poles.
One hinderance is that the process may be expensive compared with extracting water from the atmosphere.
Towers
All of the practical technology to perform this terraformation is at hand. One sticky problem remains, however.
That is getting the calcium-oxide ore from the surface to an altitude where it can be biologically processed.
Towers are being constructed on Earth to cultivate the wind power held within an artificial tornado.
Large scale towers constructed on Venus, central nodes of the bucket-wheel excavators and conveyor systems, may just perform the trick. They would be akin to the ‘Feersum Endjinn’ in the sci-fi book by that name.
A downwardly spiralling outer vortex, perhaps seeded by frozen CO₂ dropped from a cloud town, would be channelled by the towers.
The inner vortex would carry hot calcium-bearing dust to algae-fertilising altitudes.
Buoyancy-exploiting cylindrical balloons could direct material upwards to where the tower tops out, and so on until the artificial eco-system is fed.
Alternatively, mechanical elevator transport may be better placed to serve the towns and their limey bugs.
Marble
Marble may be made artificially out of the abundant lime, as there will already be the temperatures, and possibly the pressures, inside tadpoles needed to produce it.
Although this is one of the few technologies that the project does not yet possess — everything else proposed can be done but for want of scale — it will be a lucrative field of endeavour if it solves the tail pipe issue.
Marble would also be a useful material for making works of art associated with each cloud town.
They would have the time and resources to make a literal Colossus each.
Some will base their statues on the classically sculpted Venus figures of ancient Greece (preferably giving the poor girl arms).
Night and Day
There is no getting around having a very long day and night on the Venusian surface.
Life, human and otherwise, will have to adapt to it.
Crops may be planted at dawn with their harvesting in mind by dusk, two months later.
Anchored cloud towns will already have developed methods of dealing with the long days and nights.
Perhaps they will synchronise an artificial 24-hour system with the timezone they most identify with on Earth.
In the case of, say, the Swahili-speaking towns, their days will align with those in Africa. Such arrangements may extend past The Step, leaving a checkerboard of timezones on the surface.
As the wind-carried cloud towns descend, they will presumably come across slower winds, and the long-day cultures will develop for them over the scrubber generation.
Mass Migration from 2100
Migration to the free, new world will populate the planet.
Those property developers aiming to create Tokyos rather than prairies will be the most handsomely paid off.
There will be no limit to the sprawl of human development, free to do as it pleases with the land without heed to natural habitats (as there will not be any).
Over time, the geographical centre of humanity will move towards Venus as the planet out-populates Earth.
The urban space may become planet-wide and another Star Wars planet, Coruscant, could become the model.
With the problem of a lack of water solved by a captured comet or icy asteroid, there will be no limit to the potential population around the poles.
Doubling every generation, the human population on Venus could approach a third of a trillion by the year 3000.
They will be the vast majority of our descendants.
They will be a people with the wherewithal to reach for the stars.
Back to Now
From the here and now on our keyboards to the The Step seems like an impossible task.
How are the ultimate resources — people — to be cultivated?
We are talking about a vast amount of territory.
It should more correctly be termed property.
Only with the ultimate reward of property will any person work.
Property rights will ensure that the value of the said property remains high enough for people to risk their existing resources.
The project, from the outset, has to be able to survive any state molestation of its governing body.
Initially, a comfortable period will proceed due to the project being labelled crank greenhouse-gas-denying bunk.
Interestingly, autonomous software in the form of blockchain algorithms (such as for Bitcoin) has lit the way to thwarting the designs of the absolutist state, and may have a role in confirming people’s shareholdings in the Venusian project.
What should be valued, and on what basis should the valuation be made?
The answer lies in the concrete calculation that every tadpole, or a tadpole-equivalent effort, on Venus will yield an average of 50 hectares of post-Step property in its habitable zone.
The competitive lime makers will undoubtedly extol their own contributions, and independent arbitration will have to be agreed on for establishing legitimate claims.
As the tadpoles will be surveying the entire upper crust of Venus, traditional ore mining will have all the information it needs to establish mining operations.
There is a case for the settling of land titles well before The Step, as developers will want to embed infrastructure into the rising drifts of lime snow.
Examples may include reservoir basins for water, thermal energy exchange systems for surviving the long cold nights and scorchingly hot days, transport tunnels, and anything else the human mind can conceive or human hands can create.
Agency
A product of the human mind such as a state or other territorial authority (as opposed to an actual human), cannot own property, according to natural law.
Those entities do not have agency, and cannot be reliably called upon to make sense, to be responsible owners of the new properties or to resist changing the rules to suit state ot public body managers.
The owners of Venusian tadpoles will have to consist of individuals.
Redemption
Bitcoin’s issuance, backed up by a shared understanding, makes for an inspiring model, quite aside from its role as a dagger-sized thorn in the side of the state.
How could money invested in the Venusian project, which promises distant land 75 years hence, expect to yield a return other than by advancing the project materially, including its understanding among Earthlings?
The practicalities of the engineering and science of each field could be elucidated in the form of a regular magazine — The Venuzian — online and, perhaps, in print.
Scrubbers’ scientific forums, both online and in-person, will become well-attended debating theatres.
Organisational, scientific and intellectual contributions will have to be rewarded, though many will come to the project by virtue of sheer inspirational spark.
The most valuable ideas for the scrub will be volunteered quite freely, and adopted by innovators throughout the project.
The ideas will multiply like the microbial life exploited by the scrubbers, passing between people and advancing cloud towns and lime-production ideas, from now until the point when project completion is a foregone conclusion.
Perhaps the project will inspire rivals, but a Rothbardian free market that guarantees property rights will triumph.
Land titles can be issued to any number of rivals based on their contribution to the scrub.
The more the merrier.
The project will have the value of the newly habitable planet Venus, should it come to fruition.
Let the debate on how the ideas should be valued and evaluated begin.
An on-line library will have to be established to make sure people’s contributions are recorded.
Particularly insightful suggestions can be rewarded in various ways.
The best ideas will get the most upvotes from educated evaluators.
Bad ideas will be downvoted into oblivion — or just get nixed by the board of directors — unless they get revived through good revision.
The Venusian magazine will put the ideas to the public in an entertaining and informative way.
A Venusian wiki will be invaluable, and should be produced in as many languages as the project will support.
Refutations of the terraformation idea will have to be addressed. Naysayers may be right, after all.
Only an open and honest appraisal of the various challenges can be allowed.
Operating in stark contrast to climate science and pandemic fields will be a point of difference and of honour.
Trolls and other obvious dickheads will be simply excluded.
Meaningful tadpole scale models and prototypes are the priority.
An inspiring call will be for cloud-town designs – both anchored cloud towns and those freely floating in the winds, because people can imagine living on these.
Architectural models will draw the enthusiastic sci-fi crowd into a real space adventure.
Despite my trumpeting of Bitcoin-esque digital currency as a shareholding mechanism, gold is the only money against which the value of the project can be safely measured over the long term.
Author: Bede Kerr Southland, New Zealand
Contact… venuzian at proton.me
About me: I am an ex-journalist with a scientific streak. My career wanderings have included developing infra-red detection technology for use in pest control. I earned a chemistry degree in the distant past, and I have always wondered why the Venusian proof of a CO₂ ‘radiative forcing’ value of zero has not been recognised, even by most sceptics. Then I encountered the Sky Dragon Slayer set, and Nikolov and Zeller’s work, and I came to the above realisation about Venus and its potential.
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