How to render Venus semi-habitable?
It must be very dark and hot on the surface of Venus, but my humans want to change that and make a Venusian colony. The problem? The extremely thick atmosphere would make it problematic to say the least. There would be a contest between heat and atmospheric pressure to see who can do the colonists in first. The colonists solution? Send atmospheric drainage ships into orbit around Venus and extend a giant robotic Proboscis into the Venusian atmosphere.
The gas from the atmosphere will be drained into massive "Drainage Ships" that will be sent to Mars to add some of the atmosphere to it. The rest will be sent away, out of the Solar System. Since Venus is in inner fringes of the habitable zone of our system we can now place a permanent colony on Venus.
Is this realistic? How could I make it more realistic?
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1 answer
I proposed something like this in another question, but it might work better here.
Put something in orbit between the sun and Venus to cut down on the amount of sunlight. If you can block it completely, then the atmosphere would basically freeze, and you'd be able to scoop it up or seal it away.
The original suggestion was for some kind of soletta, kind of a giant solar umbrella made from solar sail material, but it would have to be very very big. Other ways that might work would be to ring the planet with a dust cloud, or possibly a cloud of small solar sail satellites, which would reflect the solar radiation and heat away. They could even collect the energy and beam it down to the planet to power the teraforming. When the work is done, you remove some of the satellites/cloud to bring the temperature up to the point you want it, while still keeping it cooler and cutting down on the radiation.
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