Venus shouldn’t be a fantastic place to be. Its floor reaches temperatures up to 475°C, which is scorching sufficient to soften lead. Even excessive up within the environment the place the temperatures and pressures aren’t so intense, the sky is tormented by clouds of sulphuric acid. But Venus most likely wasn’t at all times so unhealthy – it might have as soon as been a temperate world comparable to Earth, earlier than a runaway greenhouse impact ruined the place.
In this episode of Dead Planets Society, our hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane try to turn again time on Venus, serving to it stay up to its liveable planet potential. Planetary scientist Paul Byrne at Washington University in St. Louis joins them as soon as once more on this uncharacteristically benevolent mission to repair Venus.
The first step is to clear out that dense, scorching, sulphur-filled environment – a tough activity, though simpler than terraforming Mars can be, thanks to Venus’ bigger dimension. This might be carried out utilizing a few of the similar applied sciences proposed to assist mitigate international warming on Earth… or it might be carried out through the use of an enormous potato gun that shoots asteroids. It’s anybody’s guess which path our hosts will select to go down, however one factor is for positive: it shouldn’t be going to be nice for the remainder of the photo voltaic system. And issues will solely get extra chaotic once they transfer Venus right into a cooler orbit farther from the solar so as to keep its new, friendlier local weather.
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare.
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