"Michael S. Lorrey" wrote:
>
> It looks like I'll be writing one or two papers for the ESA's ITSF project, most
> likely in the areas of extraterrestrial mining and in terraforming Venus. The
I dunno if anyone has suggested it in fiction, but in a conversation
with Eric Drexler, I suggested a several step process:
1) Place a shell around Venus, supported either by kinetic energy loops
or by the atmosphere. (Drexler suggested wall to wall balloons, seal
them together, then pump the rest of the atmosphere inside to leave a
vacuum outside.)
2) This shell is both a microwave rectenna and a thermal radiator at
about 1200 K. The input power is about 10^19 W, the radiated heat is
about 2 times that.
3) Heat pumps cool the planet and the upper ten km of the crust to 280 K
in less than ten years.
4) "Gardening" the crust also allows most of the CO2 to be locked up as
carbonate rocks.
5) Hydrogen and nitrogen must be imported from the outer solar system.
Short of doing complete disassembly, this is the fastest method, about
30 years total.
-- Doug Jones Rocket Plumber, XCOR Aerospace http://www.xcor-aerospace.com
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