(ORDO NEWS) — NASA scientists have proposed making Venus habitable for humans by enclosing the entire planet in a giant shell that can trap the toxic part of the lower atmosphere inside and allow the colonists to create a breathable atmosphere above
An article about this is posted on the electronic preprint site arXiv.org and is being prepared for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
The essence of the project by Alex Howe, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, is to build vast porous structures – a kind of rafts consisting of hollow connected sections the size of a city block, which are supposed to be made less dense than the surrounding air – in this way they will hover over the uninhabitable layers of the Venusian atmosphere.
This “crazy terraforming project,” according to the Daily Beast, which interviewed the developer, is expected to take at least 200 years to complete. First of all, robot probes will begin to absorb the toxic atmosphere of Venus, while retaining oxygen, which will be useful for the breathing of the settlers, and carbon will be used to build huge tiles.
It would take 72 trillion tiles the size of a city block, to cover an entire planet nearly the size of Earth, each hovering at an altitude of almost 50 km. Then, with the giant shell in place, geoengineering of the upper atmosphere could begin to make it suitable for humans to breathe.
Despite the almost unbelievable logistical challenges of terraforming Venus, Janusz Pietkowski, an MIT astrobiologist who studies the planet, praised the proposed project as “very possible.”
Potential benefits of building on Venus include “Venus’s gravity almost identical to Earth’s, an atmosphere thick enough to provide protection from cosmic rays and ultraviolet radiation that Mars is unable to provide, and, finally, shorter travel times from Earth.” “.
However, the problem will remain the lack of water in Venusian conditions. Howe proposed for this to mine ice on Ceres, a dwarf planet located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
It is supposed to build a space elevator on the surface of Ceres and lift pieces of ice into space, where rockets will pick up and transport it to Venus.
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