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Comment by rtx | Hacker News Reader

Or send some microbes which convert it into oxygen. You are right Mars doesn't have enough resources to support anything.

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The problem is that Venus is missing important ingredients for life. Most notably is the lack of hydrogen.

If you are interested in learning more on hypothetical approached of terraforming Venus, I suggest reading this Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus#Biologic...

But the outer planets have excesses of hydrogen, so round trips could help there?

The upside is, of water aka H2O that we need, the 2 H atoms are the lighter component, specifically:

2H = 2 * 1.67 * 10(-24) grams 1O = 1 * 2.65 * 10(-23) grams

So hydrogen is 11% of water, and oxygen is 88%;

meaning every kg hydrogen can combine with 8kg oxygen to give 9L water.

So all the Oxygen already being there (in CO2) is good.

If we were capable of planetary-scale transportation of materials, we wouldn't really need to live on planets anyway - it'd be a rather moot point.

Space stations would also be practical, yes, but I'm not sure how desirable they'd be (for long-term habitation). Also, we don't really know the long-term effects of low gravity, whereas earth and Venus have similar gravity wells.

Transportation no, but with large enough reflective surfaces we could redirect comets to impact courses on Venus.

Early stage terraforming need not be too fussed about collateral damage from multiple extinction-events (and the footage I presume would be spectacular).

Also Venus is closer (minimum 38.2 million kilometer for Venus vs minimum distance of 55.7 million for Mars).

However I don't know about the microbes, i fear that they might get killed at an average temperature of 737 K (464 C).

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.htm... https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/venusfact.ht...

You cant really use distances for orbiting bodies like that. But it is true it's easier to get there.

Hopefully someone can provide more info, but apparently there are some bacteria in geothermal vents near Baja California that seem to be able to handle venus-like conditions. No idea what the details are though

Interesting, wikipedia says these microbes are called thermophiles, and that they can survive for up to 122 degrees celcius. That is still less than what they have on Venus, that is 464 degress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophile

that's an interesting proposition. If terraforming is really about engineering the right microbes to slowly (over several millenia even?) the atmosphere to habitable for humans, do we currently have the technology to actually accomplish it? Or is it still too advanced form of engineering?

We can't even terraform the Earth.

we are terraforming the earth - see how much co2 is being pumped out!

Since we're trying to move _away_ from "terra", should we call the current state maybe "marsforming"?

Terraforming refers to 'turning another planet into a second terra'. Marsforming would be 'turning the planet into a second Mars', which wouldn't be particularly useful, since we can't live on Mars anyway.

The joke they're making is that since we are in the process of turning the Earth into a second Mars, we should be calling what we are doing now marsforming.

i think you'll find that venus is the place with the runaway greenhouse effect, not mars!

Whoosh... Sorry

We're going towards Venus rather than Mars, though. So "veneraforming".

The combining form would be marti-. (Compare "Martian".)

It is being prepared for species better adapted to high temperatures than us.

I think biology-wise it’s a question of money. We might not be able to engineer such microbes just right now, but we could if we had more resources dedicated to it.

With concerted effort I’m sure we can do something about it in a couple decades at best.

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