Colonizing Venus Is Crazy… Or Is It?

Venus isn’t just a dead planet. It might actually be one of the most overlooked places humans could live.

In this episode of Entropy Rising, we break down the reality of colonizing and terraforming Venus. From floating cloud cities in the upper atmosphere to the insane engineering required to strip away its crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere, this is what it would actually take to turn Earth’s hottest neighbor into a second home.

A lot of people assume Mars is the obvious choice. The reality is more complicated.

Venus has Earth-like gravity, a thick atmosphere, and regions where humans could survive with minimal protection. But it also comes with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and pressures that crush spacecraft in minutes.

So which wins out?

We explore:

• Why Venus might be more viable than people think
• The science behind floating cities in the clouds
• How you could remove or freeze an entire atmosphere
• The biggest challenges standing in the way
• And whether terraforming a planet is even worth it

The reality is, colonizing Venus sounds insane at first. But once you break it down, it starts to look less like science fiction and more like a long-term engineering problem.

Would you live there?

Transcript

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I mean, that's how Earth's atmosphere was created. It was mostly a carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. You had all these ano bacteria come, they worked through aerobic processes. They, of course let oxygen off as a, as a byproduct. And then they famously, basically. Poisoned themselves. They, they turned all this very for them, carbon dioxide, rich, beautiful atmosphere, what they needed to live into this very poisoned, oxygen rich atmosphere, which the ended up killing them. Um, so yeah, that is an interesting, a pathway and that's fair. I like that Hello, and welcome to Entropy Rising, a A podcast all about exploring science and possible futures. I'm your host Jacob, and I am joined with the ever so lovely co-host Lucas ever. So lovely. I'm trying to change it up. I don't wanna bland a bland opening every single time. I know. You know, I never get to, I'm here with the wonderful, amazing, Ja, thank you. Maybe I should let you do the next opening. Yeah, yeah. Maybe. I don't know. They might not like that I don't like change. Yeah. Well, you know, if they don't like change, I don't think this is the podcast for them, since that's essentially all we talk about. That is very true. Lucas, I have to ask the question, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Jake. How are you? I'm doing well, except for the abysmally high pollen counts that we're dealing with here in the ever wonderful North Carolina, the pollen capital of the United States. That's right. When I pulled my car out of the driveway today, it's like a smoke grenade went off behind it. Oh, I know. It's great. Every car is yellow. Doesn't matter what it was before. It's yellow today. That's right. Free paintings for everyone. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe we can fix all the pollen issues with today's topic, which is gonna be colonizing and terraforming Venus. One of the hottest planets, or actually the hottest planet in the solar system and an interesting colonization target.'cause it's not one that I think a lot of people really consider. We talk about colonizing Mars all the time. Mm-hmm. And you know, a lot of people think that Mars will be the first place we, we colonize and we live on. But it wasn't that long ago that we actually thought Venus would be the first planet that humanity lived on. If you read any old science fiction, you might be surprised to notice that they usually talk about life on Venus and living on Venus. Uh, whereas more modern science fiction obviously focuses on Mars. Now granted that was because we didn't know much about the planet, and we later on figured out that it's, um. Quite a bit warmer than we expected and, and not the best target to live on, at least on the surface. But, uh, still it's an interesting topic and one we're gonna be exploring today. I mean, I'm excited to dive into it. I know it's one of the most, uh, hostile places in our solar system. So thinking about living there, like Jake said, usually doesn't cross everybody's mind. But, I think that it's a great candidate for it, be it that it has, you know, about Earth's gravity, And, uh, and it does have an atmosphere which makes it different than the other places that we've talked about on this channel before. Um, so I think it has a lot of different possibilities that we can dive into. You know, I think that's one of the things that draw people to Venus, because whenever I talk about colonizing Venus, a lot of people just kind of push it off to the side on why would you ever want to , colonize such a hostile place. But you did kind of hit the nail on the head there, which is that it has earth-like gravity. It's, I forget the exact number, but something like 92, 90 3%. It's, it's very close to earth gravity. So that is a huge benefit, especially if we find out that humans are more sensitive to gravity than we expect. That's a common concern with colonizing Mars is that maybe there's a, a risk that humanity can't live in such low gravity, and even with a rigorous workout routine, you might not be healthy on Mars. You might never be healthy on Mars, but Venus does kind of get around that issue. And the earthlike gravity, I think is the biggest draw to it. And you mentioned it having an atmosphere, which is actually, I guess a, a pro and a con, right? Like that is the issue with Venus is that it has an immensely. Thick atmosphere. And, and just to be clear, maybe you know this, maybe you don't here in the audience, but the reason Venus is so hot is not because it's close to the sun. I mean, it is close to the sun. Um, obviously if it was out in the outer solar system, it wouldn't be as hot. But the reason it's the hottest planet in the solar system is because of its immensely thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. In fact, it's hotter than mercury. Despite Mercury being closer to the sun than Venus. And that's all due to its atmosphere. Mm-hmm. So that atmosphere, you know, I guess a pro and a con. Yeah. We're able to work with it and manipulate it, right? Assuming if we are colonizing Venus or Terraforming Venus in the future, we will have that technology and it gives us, something to do with all that carbon. But, um, it also, like Jake was saying, makes it incredibly hospitable, giving it an atmospheric pressure about, 97 times that of Earth and it's carbon dioxide content is about 93% of its atmosphere. It's, it's mostly carbon dioxide. It's a very carbon dioxide rich atmosphere, which has some interesting side effects. and, and of course one of 'em is the insane heat that we see. I mean, this is the greenhouse effect on steroids. Mm-hmm. It's, it's, I've seen people point to it and be like, that's what it's gonna be. Of, of course, not even in our most extreme. Example of the greenhouse effect. We would never get that extreme, but it is an example of just what carbon dioxide can do in the atmosphere. Now, Lucas, really quick before we, I think jump into all the technical details, because you and I have done our own research and, and, and we know about it. I am just generally curious, especially before you did all your research, what was your thoughts on, on colonizing Venus and living on Venus? Did you think this was crazy, stupid, or were you already like, no, Venus is a good option. Um, well, I, honestly, I think it's just more work. Yeah. Okay. I, uh, uh, as, as opposed to colonizing other planets specifically Mars or trying to colonize, a moon, but I think that there are better moons out there Okay. Available to us because not only do we have to give it a human ready atmosphere, we have to first strip it of it's very, very hostile. atmosphere to everything. and reduce all of the, the damage or that has seeped into that, that planet over time with all the carbon dioxide and the nitrogen. Okay. That's fair. And has that, was that your reaction before your research or after, or both? Um, I mean, well before really all that I knew about Venus was like we, we had sent. Something there to go and take pictures and the second that it touches the surface, it gets crushed and dies. Well, no, it made it for I think, uh, seven minutes. And they send back pictures. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I mean, if the machines can only last seven minutes, you can only wonder, and those pictures, it did send back, I don't know if the color grading was off, but it looked like, you know, a place where you'd go to die. Well, that's pretty accurate considering the atmospheric density and the, the surface temperature's hot enough to melt lead. Uh, yeah, no, that's a very accurate representation and I, I kind of agree with you before. Really researching colonizing Venus. Um, I always thought that it was, and the reason it took us so long to get to this topic was, I kind of thought the concept was dead on arrival. I, I didn't think it was a great idea. I will say that while I still remain skeptical that that would ever be a target, at least in our early form. Of colonization. I mean, maybe a K two civilization that has a Dyson swarm and can kind of just do whatever they want. could colonize and terraform a, a planet like Venus because they have the energy to do whatever they want. Mm-hmm. but I, I did have a lot of reservations that we would ever target Venus as a potential colonization site before reaching that point. And while I don't think I have fully changed my mind, I do see some more benefits to it now that I've done the research for this episode that I didn't otherwise think about. And so it's gonna be interesting to dive into that and see if we can change the mind maybe of some people in the audience or at the bare minimum, make you aware of some of the things that give you at least a pause for thought and be like, okay, maybe still not ideal, but maybe, yeah. I mean, it would, it would definitely be, be cool. Let let us know if you guys, uh, want to colonize Venus or not. Absolutely. So first, I think let's dive into the idea of actually colonizing Venus and not terraforming it. You did mention. some of the things earlier that would be more aligned with terraforming. Mm-hmm. But it's worth pointing out, we don't need to terraform the planet to live on it. Now, obviously, we can't live on the surface, uh, without doing some type of terraforming or para terraforming. for those of you who don't know, para terraforming means essentially slightly altering the planet, but also altering the people so that you can kind of meet your crossroads. That way you don't have to fully change the planet. But you also might adapt our own biology and physiology, to allow you to live in a harsher environment while making the environment a little less harsh. a good example of that would be genetically modifying a species to be able to withstand a thinner atmosphere. That way you don't have to fully create like a one, you know, atmospheric pressure on Mars. long story short, we're probably not gonna live on the surface of, of Venus without doing some type of terraforming. Or Paraform. Right. So you're then assuming that we would be able to live, not on the surface, but what in the sky of Venus? Yeah. Actually the sky of Venus, that's not, uh, a bad option. That is something that we've seen explored a lot in science fiction and even not in science fiction even. There's been some, earnest proposals for building cloud cities on Venus, and it's not as crazy as it sounds. Mm-hmm. Uh, one of the things is that when you get above. The surface of Venus at around the 50 to 55 kilometer mark off of the surface, you reach an area in Venus, this atmosphere where you actually have pretty mild conditions. You have about one earth's atmosphere of pressure and you actually have, uh, the temperature range that we're used to here on earth. You know, we have a temperature where liquid water can exist and it's actually the right pressure for us as well. And so you can pretty much walk outside and exist with nothing more than an oxygen mask. Because again, the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and, uh, some type of just suit to protect your skin because unfortunately there is a lot of sulfuric acid in venus's atmosphere, so you still do need some type of protection from that sulfuric acid, but you don't need a heated or pressurized suit. And so if you did build these floating cloud cities, that's, um, that's a genuinely decent draw. Not having to worry about, uh, pressure or temperature. I mean, yeah, that it could be, you know, the first real thought of a cloud city. It's just, I'm trying to imagine what a stable city like that would look like. Yeah, that is fair. Um, obviously, I think the biggest concern is you're gonna need a lot of redundancies if you build a cloud city, because the fear, of course is, you know, a hole in your balloon and then you go flying down on a surface. that was, for me, a big non-starter was just the sheer amount of redundancies you would need to feel safe on this. But you have to think if you're going to live in space anyways, you've gotta already have a populace that's fairly comfortable with the idea that one critical failure could essentially destroy your entire city. So with the right engineering and safeguards, there's no reason to say that a cloud city's inherently more risky than like an Neil Cylinder or that people would feel inherently less safe on a cloud city than an O'Neill cylinder. Yeah. Uh, 'cause you're already probably by this point, have people used to existing in these artificial environments. And trusting the engineering controls and the fail safe and the redundancies. It's the same risk. Like we're all, or most of us, a lot of us are comfortable with getting in airplanes or getting into our cars even. So it would just be like that. Yeah, exactly. And again, you know, you have to imagine you're not gonna build your first ever space colony in the atmosphere of Venus. You're probably already gonna be used to living in O'Neill cylinders and living in some sort of space habitat. So the idea of just having a habitat floating on a, on a planet probably isn't that much crazier from a safety perspective to the populace. And then from an engineering perspective, you can control for it in much the same way, uh, you know, through a bunch of redundancies, different balloons. Another benefit too that, uh, is a drawback sometimes. But a benefit in this case is that the Venetian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide is 44 grams per mole, significantly heavier than our atmospheric makeup, where we're used to, which is nitrogen and, uh, oxygen, which I believe rounds out to something like 29 grams per mole. Mm-hmm. So the benefit of that is that our atmosphere is actually buoyant in Venus at this 55 kilometer mark. Where you have Earth-like temperature and pressure, which means that a habitat filled with, the gas, just makeup that we're used to that we need to breathe would be buoyant. Right? So that's kind of a benefit as well. And then in addition to that, things that are already buoyant on earth, right? Like hydrogen and helium are even more buoyant. In a place like Venus you have, they're more effective. We can actually get a by with lifting more weight. Or less volume of something like a gas bag or a balloon. So that's, that's also something to consider as well. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's excellent because that's less material that you have to transport there to, you know, produce the buoyancy. Yeah. Or just, you know, a bigger habitat you can have per, uh, volume of a lifting space. Right. Like a balloon or anything. So a hot air balloon or a, a Zeppelin on Venus works a lot better than one on Earth. You can make it a, a much bigger payload per size of, of your craft or whatever. And that, that would be crazy living. Like, uh, I would be so terrified to look over the edge of that. That's true. But you have to think that what's the alternative? You, you, you probably decided to relocate from your O'Neill cylinder there. That's much higher up in, in actually orbiting a planet, than, and knowing that if, you know there's a crack, uh, all your atmosphere seeks out and you, and you suffocate versus on Venus, where it's like, you know, if the, if the atmosphere opens up. All you need is supplemental oxygen, you'll, you'll survive. So yeah, um, that could definitely be a, a big benefit. And then in addition to that, you get a lot of protections as well that you don't otherwise get in space. If you're that deep into an atmosphere, you're, you're fairly protected, from meteorites and micro meteorites 'cause they'll all burn up before they reach you. So you never have to worry about getting hit by a random micro meteorite, which is something you always have to be conscientious of if you're in some type of an orbital habitat. So in that way it can actually be a lot safer or at least one less thing you have to worry about. I mean, granted, and like an O'Neill cylinder, we think you'd be able to handle that with like thick shielding or potentially, um, some point defense type systems. Mm-hmm. But it is at least something to consider that you're not worried too much about micro meteorites. Of course. Yeah. I mean it's, it's interesting to think, but it also makes me wonder why would we want to be there to begin with? That is the tricky point. Do you have, is that a rhetorical, do you have an answer or did you actually, I mean, well I'm, I'm thinking right, because we could be there to mine carbon dioxide, you know, for carbon and oxygen. Right. If we are planning on terraforming other planets. but once we get past there, like, like, I don't really know what the planet itself offers us except for an almost earth-like gravity. The earth-like gravity is, uh, is really a big one. And when you're asking the question of like, why on earth would you ever build a floating cloud sitting on Venus versus just an O'Neill cylinder? I really do still struggle with that question. And that's why in the beginning I said, I'm still not fully convinced because I can justify it from an engineering perspective and I can see some benefits. But realistically, an O'Neill cylinder is probably gonna be a more attractive option. you just have a lot more that you can control. You can precisely pick your day length, your gravity. you know, this is something that we can talk about ad nauseum, but I think we're always gonna come back to this, this thing. Space habitats are just kind of the way to go. And I do generally believe that, I don't know if you've ever read the culture by e and m Banks. Mm-hmm. Well, they all live in like orbital space habitats. And I do think that's something he got right. And that's a realistic future. I could see. However, you can't deny that the idea of a cloud city on Venus sounds pretty cool. I mean, it does. It absolutely does. You know, and I'm safer for asteroids. That's amazing. I love that. you can't discount the. We're gonna do it just because we can. I'm not saying that Venus would ever be, a hub of the civilization or an area where a majority of your population lives, but it's very possible you still might have some cloud cities existing in Venus, especially for a particularly advanced humanity where we've pretty much mastered space travel. And the idea of popping a few cloud cities up in Venus is, potentially tourist spots, vacation spots, could be a real possibility of research centers. The planet below is, fairly metal rich. So there is some potential mining operations that could happen where you have remote drones below, and then you have floating cities above that. You can imagine a remote drone going and gathering up all this material and floating it up, and then a, a floating city that then catches that and harvest it. So, you know, there is some real potential for some smaller settlements there, uh, that all might center around, uh, rather niche and small industries. I do genuinely believe though, it's probably never going to be. Center of your civilization, at least not in the near future. Right. I mean, yeah. I guess at the end of the day for anything it could just be more real estate. Yeah, exactly. You know, and it would be an impressive view it, yeah. Of the, the storms raging below. Yeah. I mean, especially if a space travels fairly mundane. If you have really cheap and efficient fusion power or you know, potentially even something else, and, and you can go to Venus for, for a vacation, I would go. I mean, yeah, dude. I, yeah, exactly. So yeah, who knows, maybe that could be the case for it. Uh, not gonna be your first settlement, obviously, but potentially, uh, there could be some there realistically, as with most things, first settlements would probably be for science and, and research, uh, if we did that. but to answer your question, yeah, you, you're gonna have. Way more O'Neill cylinders in other space habitats than you ever will, I think of cloud cities on Venus, of course. But, I think that you do, definitely bring up a, a good point there of well, we might do it because, just because we can. Yeah. and, um, that, brings up another thing for me, which is, uh, I know that you mentioned earlier, um, our next option for it would be terraforming. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. Turning it into a planet like Earth. Right. Somewhere that we can call a second home. And, uh, and that that with it brings some value, you know, against, the complete utter annihilation of our planet by a large asteroid. trying to mess with different BioD diversities and raise them up in a planet similar to earth to test things on the main planet, but that, that's a massive undertaking. It is. And there is one thing I want to point out, which is that you said it would protect us and it would give us an alternative planet as like a safety net. like an asteroid strike. Although the issue is of course, if you have the technology to terraform a planet, uh, you're pretty much not worried about any asteroid strikes or your home planet's fairly impervious to anything but, a solar system. Annihilating calamity, right? Yeah. Yeah. So if you can terraform Venus, you can fix all of the atmospheric problems you have on Earth. You can fix global warming, and you can definitely stop an asteroid strike. So. I don't really necessarily buy terraforming any planet as like a backup. Mm-hmm. Um, but that's not to say that it's not something you would wanna do. And you know, you did allude to the main reason you'd want to do it, which is that it has earth-like gravity, which is already one of the things that would be really hard to control with Mars. Right? Like we can terraform Mars, we can build up an atmosphere, we can give it a magnetosphere, do an artificial magnetosphere, but the gravity is very hard to fix. You. You would need to effectively add another Mars to the planet in order to. Get the gravity you need. And that's really hard to change. Yeah. That's something that we already have here on Venus. Right. And that's, like you said, is probably the biggest factor that, that we can replicate our gravity, know that we can have colonies there that are having, you know, children and families that are able to develop normally, not under the strain of only having 40% of earth gravity. Yeah, exactly. As for how you would actually go about doing it. there's some options. Mm-hmm. Uh, I'm happy to dive into it unless you want to handle it. I think that we could both cover some, of course, the, uh, one that I was researching would be to take from its neighbor, uh, mercury. We could steal calcium from the surface, launch it, off the surface because it's smaller planet, it would be easier to just use mass driver systems. Shoot it into the atmosphere of Venus crashed into the planet, and then the calcium would mix with the, carbon in the atmosphere and turn into an element that settles. Yeah. Calcium carbonate. Right. Calcium carbonate. Okay. Exactly. I, so I'm not familiar with this. I know you mentioned it shortly when we were setting up to record. so basically what you just told me is all I know about it, interestingly, there's been some ideas of using, uh, a similar process of using calcium and. Allowing it to turn into calcium carbonate to remove carbon dioxide here on Earth. Mm. To help mitigate global warming. And so. The idea of taking it from Mercury. Now, I will fully admit my ignorance here. I'm not sure. I'm guessing you already did the research and you know, there's a ton of calcium just on mercury. Yes. Believe it or not, I don't know the composition of every planet off the top of my head. Um, so no. Yeah, it's an interesting, proposition. So I guess the point is, right, you take all this calcium, bring it into the Venetian atmosphere, it turns into calcium carbonate, and then you ship it off planet. Is that, uh, right? And you, we could either turn it into a moon. And use it for its material because it's a, essentially a moon made out of carbon. Um, that we can then separate back into carbon and calcium. I'm not entirely sure of the chemistry, but if we're terraforming planets, I think that we can do it. Yeah, I mean, if you can get a moon's worth of material to Venus in the first place, probably not too hard to get it off granted. Um, you have to fight against an atmosphere, is always challenging, although I am curious, do you know how much calcium we need to actually reduce the thickness of the atmosphere to be one earth atmosphere? The reason I'm asking is I'm just curious if there's an avenue where you actually just leave the calcium carbonate on venus's surface to reduce the atmosphere. That way you don't have to expend the enormous amount of energy to then ship it off of Venus, and then it also bolsters the gravity a little bit and gets you even closer to one earth normal gravity. Although my, my fear, of course is that you actually need so much, uh, calcium to do this, uh, that you overshoot. I'm actually not entirely sure what it, we would need to, to do to get it to that point. Yeah. Well, I mean, if there is enough calcium on mercury, then it's only a mercury's worth of calcium, which obviously Mercury isn't all calcium, but it is a very small planet. So it's, it's probably not a ton that you would actually need. when you were researching this, is there enough calcium on. Mercury. Yes. What I was reading because I read two different articles and one said, it was using calcium and another material that was located on mercury that both can sequester the carbon dioxide outta the atmosphere. But they said that, uh, you would only need the calcium and not even all of it. Okay. So yeah. Then, you know, potentially you don't even need to build a moon. Which you would be nice.'cause if I'm not, there's no moon for Venus. Mm-hmm. Having a moon would be nice. Uh, maybe we want one. Uh, it does a lot of things. It stabilize the planet's spin axis. So perhaps you do want a moon, especially if you're gonna make it more earthlike. Having a massive moon is obviously, prerequisite to be earth-like, or I still like the idea of just leaving it on planet. Letting it sequester all that carbon. And then not only do you now not have to ship it off planet and spend a bunch of energy doing that, but uh, you actually get closer to one Earth gravity. maybe a little above, maybe a little below, but yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah, it definitely is. But after what you talked to me about, I think it is the harder of two options. Well, to be fair, I hadn't thought about the idea of actually just leaving the calcium on the planet, which, if you can do that, is hugely beneficial because Venus is slightly less than one Earth gravity. So. Maybe it is the harder of, of two, but I, if you can leave it on, on planet and actually get more gravity, maybe not, well, slightly less than one Earth gravity could end up being beneficial as well, possibly. But yeah, I do like that idea. the other avenue, of course, that I was talking about that you are just referencing mm-hmm. Is slightly different. Instead of shipping a material like calcium to sequester the atmosphere, what you can actually do is you can actually, block. The sun from reaching Venus, and you would do this with a solar shade. probably in the L one LaGrange point, which , every two body system will have five LaGrange points. I think I've given this explanation before. Mm-hmm. There are essentially stable points in the orbit, uh, where the gravity cancels out, and you can put something there and it will track the planet. So normally if you were to try to put something in orbit between Venus and the sun. Necessarily because it exists closer to the sun, it would orbit faster. But in LaGrange point, that's not the case. It'll actually track with Venus. Uh, so if you put a giant solar shade in the L one LaGrange point and completely block all of the sunlight hitting Venus, then what'll actually happen is that the atmosphere will start to condense. Eventually it will turn into liquid carbon dioxide, and if you continue blocking the solar radiation, it'll actually turn into solid carbon dioxide, which we know is dry ice. At that point, you have a few options. You can ship it off planet. Potentially to somewhere like Mars where you actually need to build up an atmosphere to Terraform. So there is a kind of two for one deal. You can split the carbon from the oxygen and then that gives you some oxygen to build up the oxygen atmosphere that you would need to make it earth-like. And then potentially use the carbon for something like carbon nanotubes. A lot of the times we talk about building space habitats. We, we talk about doing 'em with carbon nanotubes and structures like McKendry cylinders, which is like the O'Neill cylinders. Bigger brother actually rely on carbon nanotubes and those can be quite big. Bishop rings also rely on carbon nanotubes, and we do imagine that there's a real use case for that type of material in the future. So it's very possible that you would want as much carbon as you could get. There could be a real pause for it. And potentially for a very advanced civilization, you might terraform the, the planet as just a byproduct of harvesting all that carbon dioxide from its atmosphere. Anyways, granted there's a lot of carbon freely available and asteroids and stuff like that that you would go to first, but. It's a real possibility. Yeah. I mean, knocking out two birds with one stone there could be worth it to civilizations a little bit more advanced than ours. Yeah, absolutely. so that, or you could potentially also pave over it. And if you can keep that, uh, carbon dioxide under enough pressure, uh, then even as you raise the temperature back up, it would still say solid. Ooh, that's scary though. Yeah. You know, that's a little time bomb happening. I don't love that option. You need a lot of pressure to do it. And um, also with pressure comes heat, so you, you end up changing the mm-hmm. Uh, that phase diagram. But, uh, it is technically possible. Is there a lot of volcanic activity on Mercury? Uh, on Venus? I don't think so. Um, off the top of my head, I'm not sure. I mean, the whole plant's basically a volcano. but so, you know, a drawback of Venus that we forgot to talk about earlier is that it doesn't have a magnetosphere, which leads me to believe that, it probably doesn't have a very active core. Probably not a lot of volcanism, not a lot of volcanic activity, I would imagine. that is certainly one option to go about it, free the planet, and then scoop the atmosphere off, take it up to space to use it as something else or. Keep it on planet, um, and do whatever you want. Yeah. You know, you could leave a couple wellsprings of the carbon dioxide underground though, and you could build like soda shops on. Oh my goodness gracious. Have some like artificially made geyser. Yes, that's right. so now we've gotten rid of all the carbon dioxide and that leaves us with another big problem of it's still not an oxygen rich atmosphere. It's mostly nitrogen. Yeah, exactly. And so really what you would need to do is, one of the options I mentioned was of course. Stripping the carbon dioxide turning into two and then carbon. Mm-hmm. Uh, which could be a source of, of your oxygen. And you would still probably need to, I imagine, import some nitrogen to get one atmosphere of pressure, um, with oxygen or, or not. I mean, the, the planet's so thick, even though. Nitrogen's a very small component of Venus's atmosphere. I'm fairly certain there's actually still more nitrogen on Venus than on earth. Yeah. definitely could be a way, uh, a way that I was researching is one that's very, very simple, very organic, is just nitrogen consuming algae. Yeah. Um, they produce oxygen rich atmospheres and a lot of scientists speculate that they were some of the first organisms that were able to produce an oxygen rich atmosphere for the earth. I mean, that's how Earth's atmosphere was created. It was mostly a carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. You had all these ano bacteria come, they worked through aerobic processes. They, of course let oxygen off as a, as a byproduct. And then they famously, basically. Poisoned themselves. They, they turned all this very for them, carbon dioxide, rich, beautiful atmosphere, what they needed to live into this very poisoned, oxygen rich atmosphere, which the ended up killing them. Um, so yeah, that is an interesting, a pathway and that's fair. I like that you still would, you know, obviously wanna leave some carbon dioxide in for them to turn it into. Mm-hmm. If that makes sense. You would wanna stop at like one atmosphere. Um, also there is another way you can terraform that I, I did wanna touch on as well. Oh, okay. Well, we mentioned you can cool down the planet, right. And freeze the atmosphere. You can go the other way too. Turn it into a plasma. Uh, you don't need to go that hot, but essentially, yeah. If instead of freezing the atmosphere and condensing it, what you can actually do is you can, instead of putting a solar shade mm-hmm. You can put giant orbital mirrors to reflect more sunlight onto the planet. Because when the planet gets hot, then the atmosphere is more likely to be stripped by the sun. So if you direct more sun to it, you can actually strip the atmosphere that way. I see. And so you effectively just blast Venus with the sun, for a very long time until all of the atmosphere gets stripped off, or at least most of it gets stripped off. And then you, you know, remove the mirrors, let it cool down, and there you go. You know, that could be more effective because of how thick its atmosphere is. Its diminishment of its heat on its surface of us freezing. It would take decades, like like 40 or 50 years. I mean, at this point, a decade is a blink in the eye. This is a whole process. No matter how you do, it's gonna take thousands of years. So. It's really not a, that's not a too big of a concern. Right. But if we hit it with the mirrors, it might only take 30. That saves 20 years. No, no, no. Even directing it with, uh, with mirrors is still gonna take tens of thousands of years likely to strip the atmosphere. Atmosphere stripped very slowly. So even if you just blast it with the sun, it's gonna, it's not gonna be a quick process. Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. Oh. Yeah, just to be clear, no planet's gonna be terraformed on a human life scale or even really even what we would consider a civilizational life scale even faster. Terraforming methods are gonna be longer than all of human history right now, and that's why some people think it's impossible. I personally don't think it's impossible. I think once you're at the point where you're space bearing civilization, you, you're gonna persist for a very long time. Uh, it's not a fast process no matter what you do. Yeah. And humans start projects that take several generations to complete anyways. Yeah. It's right. Right, right. Right now it's, it's nothing crazy. And us doing it for entire things like creating a new planet, I, I think is definitely very doable. Yeah. It's like building a cathedral right Back in the medieval ages, that would take multiple generations. It's just that, but a little bit longer. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Uh, but yeah, no, that's certainly one approach. Just blast the planet. Um, let the planet cool down. And there you go. You got a, a nice, less thick atmosphere and, uh, the plant's already about where you want it to be. Uh, Venus is in the habitable zone, by the way. It's in the inner edge of the habitable zone, but it is in what we would consider the goldilock zone. So it's already where we want it. The only other thing you really have to deal with is that it doesn't spin fast enough. Venus's day is actually longer than its year. The planet spins so slowly. Oh, that would be very uncomfortable on either side. Yeah. So you're gonna have to deal with that. So you've got two options. Option one is you just gotta spend the planet faster. Uh, which is tricky to say the least, but it, you know, when you're talking about stripping atmospheres and potentially building entire moons to go with it. You, you probably have the technology for, uh, option two though is if for some reason you have the technology to strip the atmosphere and rebuild the whole planet, but not the technology to spin the planet faster, you could potentially use orbital shades and mirrors, uh, to deflect and reflect light, reflect light to the dark side of the planet. Then deflect light from the light side of the planet and just have that in a 24 hour period and just really customize whatever day you want. Uh, it might be a very complex setup with some really, you know, a lot of mirrors all orbiting and moving around in the orbits to, to reflect light when needed and deflect light when not needed. Uh, but it is certainly doable and, and technically a lot easier than, uh, of spinning the whole planet faster. But both options are viable. Okay. Yeah, I mean that's, It's definitely not, not something that I thought about, but, uh, I mean that, that would be great. It it, but it all just comes back to that, that point of, if we're already producing like, like this reflected light onto the planet surface, I'd rather just live in a new cylinder. Yeah. That is always the issue, right? And we come back to it time and time and time again. It's why go through all this effort to build this planet when you know you're gonna live in an O'Neill cylinder. And I think our viewers probably know my views of it very well. Mm-hmm. Which is the case that, you know, I genuinely believe most of humanity will reach a point where most of humanity lives in space, in some type of space habitat. And that's the future you see in works like the Culture series from e and m Banks. I know I mentioned that earlier, uh, which is a novel or really not a novel, but a whole, uh, book series that's near and dear to my heart. One of my favorite science fiction universes. Uh, but planets are very rare in this, in this series, they all live on things they call orbitals, which are basically giant, uh, ring habitats. Uh, we even talked about their orbitals in our ring habitat and ring world. Uh, episode that was a few episodes back, I believe. Not too many. Um, and I, I do agree with Ian in that, in that depiction of humanity, I think we'll eventually reach this crossover point where you have more people in habitats and in space than on planets. That's not to say though, that you wouldn't still want to live on planets, and if you have these insane, vast resources that something like even a single Dyson sphere gives you, then why would you not terraform a planet that's just sitting there? That might just be kind of a. Yeah, we're bored. We might as well do it type project. Yeah. And like to go back to the point that you were at in the beginning, they could just be like, living on a planet could be like a luxury or, you know, maybe vice versa. Yeah. Or just, yeah. Yeah. A preference. Some people like to live at the beach. Some people like to live at the mountains. Some people like to live on planets. Others like a new cylinders. It's just, you know, it's, it could just be one of those things. Yeah. It is what it is. That's right, that's right. Um, but you know that it's exciting to see, Why we would come up with wanting to live on a planet in the future. And, and it's been very exciting talking about all the different ways that we could colonize Venus. Absolutely. Uh, both as a colonization cloud cities, and as a terraforming target. So, yeah, I've really enjoyed this episode. I hope you all have as well. Please join us next week where we're gonna be talking about truly ancient civilizations, what it looks like as a civilization outlives, its planet outlives, its star, and maybe even outlives the universe. I think that'll be a fun topic for discussion. And I, for one, I'm looking forward to doing the research and recording it. Yeah, that's gonna be awesome. Absolutely. Thank you all for joining us again. Special thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers. You keep the show going and you know, we really appreciate all your support and of course all of you who follow us on YouTube and subscribe to us on your platform of choice. I encourage everyone to comment if you have questions or suggestions for future episodes or consider following us or subscribing to us on whatever platform you follow on. Thank you all very much. Thank you so much guys. Take care. Bye-bye.