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Q&A

Comments on How to Terraform a Dead Earth

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How to Terraform a Dead Earth

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In the foreseeable future, a scientific community has discovered an alternate universe in which the solar system centers around a binary system of G-type suns, unlike the one G-type that ours orbits. The first planet is a diamond-crusted carbon planet twice as wide and eight times as massive as Earth, orbiting the second star from a distance of 1.1 million miles. The second planet is a Venus-like planet 175% as wide and five-and-a-half times as massive as Earth, orbiting both stars from a distance of 109 million miles. In the habitable zone is the third planet, an Earth-like planet 5800 miles wide with the following features:

  1. A gravity 75% that of Earth

  2. A retrograde rotation (suns rise from the west and set in the east) of 42 hours, a cycle that must be completed 827 times to make up one revolution (an "Asgardian" year)

  3. A single moon 3,474.2 miles wide and orbiting "Asgard" from a distance of 384,400 miles An axial tilt varying from 109.7 to 118.32 degrees every 1.4 million years

This alternate Earth is also more volcanically active, as indicated in the dimensions of its oceans:

  1. Shallow seas cover 40% of the oceans

  2. Deep seas cover 32% of the oceans

  3. Trenches and deeps cover 15% of the oceans

  4. Abyssal plains are the smallest feature of this alternate Earth's oceans, covering only 13%

The atmosphere consists primarily of carbon dioxide and methane, but it still has 2% as much oxygen as our Earth.

In every respect, it should have life. The problem with that is that it used to have life, but we have just missed a mass extinction severe enough to wipe the slate clean.

Image alt text

This is a map of "Asgard". The red presented at the bottom of the map is the cause of the crisis that wiped out all life--a large basaltic plateau representing a volume of 80,000,000 cubic miles and a maximum elevation of 9,800 feet. Such a series of eruptions would have released enough greenhouse gases to wipe out even the toughest of organisms. So this Earth-like planet is too extreme for our first wave of terraforming pioneers, blue-green cyanobacteria, to thrive. Through a combination of natural and manmade means, how do we cool down the planet and possibly dilute the acidity of the oceans to the extent of making cyanobacterial colonization possible?

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General comments (7 comments)
General comments
Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 4 years ago

What makes you say cyanobacteria can't live there now? You've got liquid water on the surface, so there must be places with appropriate temperatures. And there must be rain, so fresh water somewhere, making the acidity of the oceans irrelevant.

Enfield‭ wrote over 4 years ago

If an igneous province has a volume of 80 million cubic miles, then it would have released enough greenhouse gases to be too extreme for even extremophiles to thrive. That is what the Speculative Evolution Forum told me.

Skipping 1 deleted comment.

Cazadorro‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@Enfield your question is way too specific. I'm not even sure what your question exactly is. Are you just saying "Suppose there was another earth, and it was devoid of life, how would we revive it?" If so, you should edit your question to have way less exposition.

Enfield‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@Cazadorro Clarity is everything. If I remove any specifics, that would confuse everything and stray everyone from the question.

Canina‭ wrote over 4 years ago

Your planet has an orbital period of 34734 hours, or just about exactly four Earth years. In our solar system, Ceres (pretty close to smack in the middle of the asteroid belt) has an orbital period of 4.61 Earth years, so your planet should have an orbital circumference slightly less than that of Ceres. That would put it somewhere around 2-2.5 AU out, resulting in about a quarter of the insolation compared to 1 AU out.

Canina‭ wrote over 4 years ago · edited over 4 years ago

A very quick Fermi estimate therefore suggests that you need about 4-5x the radiated energy to achieve a similar equilibrium temperature with (eventually) a similar atmosphere compared to Earth, which is suggested by the fact that the planet has liquid water on large portions of its surface and you want it eventually hospitable to Earth-like life ("Terra"-form). I'm not sure how compatible that is with just two G-type stars.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 4 years ago

" If I remove any specifics, that would confuse everything and stray everyone from the question." Exactly the opposite. Discussion is already straying from the question due to all the irrelevant information, and because it's not obeying physics. Stating something with high precision implies that's necessary, which wastes everyone's time when it's really irrelevant. Go learn about "significant digits", along with basic physics. This site is for scientific speculation, not phantasy.