![]() ![]() The surface temperature of Venus is around 500 degrees Celsius and the atmospheric pressure is a crushing 92 times that of the Earth. The atmosphere consists of 97% carbon dioxide (Williams 2015), a powerful greenhouse gas which traps the Sun’s heat. What a terraformed Venus might look like – Image from Wikimedia Commons ![]() However, setting that aside, it is interesting to consider the various challenges to making Venus habitable, so that humans can live and work on the planet without any need for protective equipment, such as space suits or oxygen supplies. There would have to be fundamental changes in the way in which human beings work together on a global scale, and the conditions of life for the whole of humanity would have to be considerably better than they are now, were such vast amounts of time and money to be committed to a project like this. It has to be said at this point that the international willingness to commit to a project like this is much harder to imagine than the existence of the technical ability to do so. Even so, there is no reason why – given enough resources and time – an advanced human civilisation would not be able to terraform Venus. Most papers on terraforming have focussed on Mars. So far there has been very little detailed scientific research on terraforming Venus. ![]() Because of this the planet was sparsely populated for many thousands of years recently it has been successfully terraformed. The planet was shrouded with clouds of sulphuric and hydrochloric acid and the mean surface temperature was 480 C, making the world extremely hostile to terragen and carbon-based life. Originally a hot dry greenhouse world, (Cytherian Type) with an atmosphere consisting mostly of carbon dioxide with a surface pressure 94 times greater than that of Earth. For example, there is an entry for a terraformed Venus in the science fiction work “Encyclopaedia Galactica” which is set thousands of years in the future. Because it is so far beyond our current technological capabilities, most articles about terraforming have been written by science fiction writers rather than scientists. Terraforming is the process of changing the global environment of a planet in such a way as to make it suitable for human habitation. ![]()
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