Re: Terraforming Venus will be easier

From: habshi (habshi_at_anony.net)
Date: 02/07/05 

Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:36:07 GMT

        I still think it will be a lot easier to take the bugs from the ocean depths which love
superheated steam at 200 C and thrive on sulfuric acid , to the upper atmospheres of venus and let
them take down the co2 so we can terraform Venus . Besides Venus is only 27m miles away compared to
100m for Mars

Global warming the key to life on Mars

Tim Radford, science editor
Monday February 7, 2005
The Guardian

US scientists have thought up a new way to create a second home - by warming up the atmosphere of
Mars.
Mars - which used to be warm and wet - has an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide. But because the red
planet's atmosphere is so thin, the planet is now freezing cold.

But Margarita Marinova, of Nasa Ames research centre in California, and colleagues report in the
Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets that artificially created greenhouse gases could set the
Martian climate simmering. "Bringing life to Mars and studying its growth would contribute to our
understanding of evolution, and the ability of life to adapts and proliferate on other worlds," Dr
Marinova said.

"Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any
possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived."

She and her colleagues created a computer model of the Martian atmosphere, and tested it with a
series of fluorine-based gases. They found that a gas called octafluoropropane could begin a process
of global warming on Mars.

This would take hundreds or even thousands of years. But since the raw materials already exist
there, some future space mission could start to turn up the heat in a world frozen for at least 2bn
years.

Venus is a well known planet, similar to our Earth. It's slightly closer to the Sun then we are.
Around 1900, several researchers including the famous Swedish Arrhenius even believed this planet
could support life. Simple calculations showed that a planet like our own would only have a slightly
higher temperature, around 35 C, if placed that close to the Sun. Arrhenius imagined the planet
atmosphere having a composition similar to our planet during the Carbon period, where primitive life
was believed to flourish all over.

However, in the 1970's, Russian spaceprobes showed that our sister planet has extreme, killing
temperatures, hot lava flows (NASA - Magellan Radar Image - notice the structure moving left to
right), conditions 500 C above what was expected. These high temperatures are the result of a
powerful greenhouse effect. Venus has a thick cloud cover with an atmosphere more than 100 times as
massive as ours. This thick acidraining atmosphere acts as a huge quilt, reflecting practically all
infrared heat back to the surface of Venus

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