Venus shouldn’t be an important place to be. Its floor reaches temperatures as much as 475°C, which is sizzling 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. However Venus most likely wasn’t all the time so unhealthy – it could have as soon as been a temperate world just like Earth, earlier than a runaway greenhouse impact ruined the place.
On this episode of Useless Planets Society, our hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane try to show again time on Venus, serving to it dwell as much as its liveable planet potential. Planetary scientist Paul Byrne at Washington College in St. Louis joins them as soon as once more on this uncharacteristically benevolent mission to repair Venus.
Step one is to scrub out that dense, sizzling, sulphur-filled environment – a tough process, though simpler than terraforming Mars could be, due to Venus’ bigger measurement. This might be finished utilizing a number of the similar applied sciences proposed to assist mitigate international warming on Earth… or it might be finished through the use of a large 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 isn’t going to be nice for the remainder of the photo voltaic system. And issues will solely get extra chaotic after they transfer Venus right into a cooler orbit farther from the solar in an effort to keep its new, friendlier local weather.
Useless Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about how you can 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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