Terraforming: A Vision of the Future

 Do you want to explore the galaxy(cuz the universe is impossible to explore)? Well today is your lucky day as I am going to write about our future survival and how we can colonise our galaxy. There are many planets in our galaxy. Almost every star system has planets of its own. Sadly, we can only choose planets the size of Earth. I will explain in a few minutes. You must have heard that Elon Musk and his SpaceX are making moves to colonise Mars. There is only one problem. Mars is so much smaller than Earth. Why you may ask is this a problem? Well curious reader you have hammered the nail right.

 The issue is Gravity. Earth’s gravity is 9.8 m/s². For us monkeys this gravity is only good for our survival. Mars’s mass is so much less than that of Earth that it is gravity is also low. Mars’s gravity is only a third of the Earth’s. If we humans want to survive on Mars the people living there will have to exercise for literally hours daily to remain fit otherwise gravity may cause some long term effects. Mars is apparently not an option.

Although there is one planet in our Solar system whose mass and gravity are almost similar to that of Earth. The answer is Venus. Venus’s gravity is 8.9 m/s². Which is almost that of Earth’s. If people live there they won’t have to exercise every day for hours. Venus is also way closer to Earth than Mars. You may be thinking that MrWhat, Venus is a perfect option, let's go there. You will be partially correct. Some of you may know that Venus is the hottest planet in the Solar system. Almost 500^oC. That is too hot. (Now we are getting into the topic of this article).

We need to terraform Venus. Terraforming is the process by which we convert an inhabitable planet to a habitable planet. I won’t explain how to terraform Venus because I want to use my own creativity and go a step further. Venus is the closest match though.

Lets make up a hypothetical planet with all sorts of flaws(although we have to keep the planet the size and mass of Earth). We will name it Planet Sagan(named after Carl Sagan, the legend). Sagan is a planet with Nitrogen rich atmosphere with no oxygen and traces of Sulphur dioxide, Carbon dioxide and Carbon monoxide. Obviously, this planet is uninhabitable. Our job is to make this planet habitable.

First of all we start by deploying Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. We need so much Carbon Dioxide that we convert it into a significant portion of the atmosphere like 0.004%(1/10^th of Earth’s Carbon Dioxide). This much should do. Its parent star is a red dwarf meaning that the star is a tiny star compared to the Sun. Although Red Dwarfs live for trillions of years. We need to construct a planet mover which can relocate the planet to the habitable zone of the tiny star. Say a few million kilometres from the star. Luckily to deposit the carbon dioxide we have two perfect sources with ample carbon dioxide. Venus and Mars. We can collect CO₂ from the atmosphere and convert it into dry ice. The dry ice will be kept in an extremely cold and pressurized environment in the spaceship.

We have ticked off two important procedures – moving the planet and depositing carbon dioxide. Let's properly pressurise the atmosphere. Let's say that the atmospheric pressure of the planet is 0.00156 Pa compared to Earth’s one. To properly pressurise the atmosphere we need to make the planet even warmer. We won’t need to do that since we already brought the planet closer. Although this process would take time like centuries or even millennia to properly warm and pressurise the atmosphere.

We now have the planet properly warmed, pressurised and with some useful gases. Now we need to drain the Sulphur dioxide and the Carbon monoxide. Sulphur dioxide mixes with the rain and creates acid rain. We don’t want that do we. We first need to supply the atmosphere with water vapour. This water vapour will react with Sulphur dioxide and turn into Sulphuric acid. Once that is done we need to supply Sodium hydroxide to the atmosphere. The reaction will create Sodium sulphate.

Now for the carbon monoxide. We need to add water vapour to the atmosphere and the Carbon monoxide will turn into Carbon dioxide and Hydrogen.

This is not easy. Skip a few centuries later. We are done and we have drained Carbon monoxide and Sulphur dioxide from the atmosphere.

We will discuss land formation and habitability in the next article.

That is all for today folks. Hope you enjoyed it.