Leaving earth to find new homes in space is
an old dream of humanity and will sooner or later be necessary for our survival. The planet
that gets the most attention is Mars, a small, toxic and energy poor planet that just about
seems good enough for a colony of depressed humans huddled in underground cities. But what if we think bigger? What if we take
Venus, one of the most hostile and deadly places in the solar system and turn IT into
a colony? Not by building lofty cloud cities, but by creating a proper second earth? It
might be easier than you think. Venus is by far the hottest planet in the
solar system with a surface temperature of 460°C, hot enough to melt lead. This heat
is due to the most extreme greenhouse effect in the solar system. CO2 is great at trapping
heat – even a rise from 0.03% to 0.04% in Earth's atmosphere is heating up our planet
right now. Venus's atmosphere is 97% CO2. Also, Venus's atmosphere is 93 times denser
than earth’s. Standing on Venus’ surface would feel like taking a dive about 900 meters
deep into the ocean. The pressure would kill you instantly. It’s a truly horrible place! So why should
we even bother? First and foremost, Venus is almost as big
as Earth and has 90% of its surface gravity. Surface gravity is a big problem when colonizing
the solar system because it is very likely that long stays in low gravity places will
have negative health effects. Venus’ size means it could be the second
largest habitat in the solar system. A new home for billions of humans and trillions
of animals. With oceans, lush forests and a beautiful blue sky. A properly terraformed
Venus may be the most pleasant place to live outside of Earth. While we can’t exactly terraform Venus today,
a slightly more ambitious future version of us COULD take this project on. It will take
a few generations to complete and be a huge challenge – like building the great pyramids
was for our ancestors. But then it’s not like humans have never started projects that
took more than a lifetime to complete. Ok! Let’s do it! Before anything else, we need to cool Venus
down and remove the gas that makes up the extremely heavy atmosphere. As mentioned,
there is a lot of it. Around 465 million billion tons. How do we do that? There are a few options.
We could create giant solar collectors powering a huge array of laser beams, that heat up
the atmosphere so much that it is blasted into space. Although we would need thousands
of times the entire power generating capacity of humanity and it would still take thousands
of years to remove the atmosphere. Another way is to sequester the atmosphere.
Binding the CO2 in different compounds through chemical reactions. We could mine elements
like Calcium or Magnesium on Mercury and shoot them at Venus via mass driver systems – Electric
rails that make rockets unnecessary on smaller planets. The metals would combine to bind
the CO2 into different carbonates basically forever. But the scale makes the whole thing
impractical. We would need several hundred billion tons of material to sequester the
CO2 this way. Seems like a waste of material and might take too long. An equally ridiculous idea that could actually
work is to put Venus in the shade. Literally. By constructing a huge mirror to blot out
the sun to just freeze the atmosphere. The mirror does not need to be complex or massive,
just a very thin foil with a little structural support. Building such a large flat surface
so close to the sun will turn it effectively into a solar sail and push it out of position,
so instead of one giant circular object, our mirror will consist of many different pieces. Annular slats of angled mirrors can reflect
sunlight from one set of mirrors to the next. Mirrors would be angled, reflecting light
from one to another until the light is redirected to the back - balancing the force on the front
and holding them in position. After a few years of getting the infrastructure
in place, things start slowly and then escalate. For the first few decades, the atmosphere
slowly cools down but stays dense and deadly. Until, after some 60 years it reaches the
critical temperature of 31° Celsius. Suddenly, the Great Flood begins on Venus, as CO2 turns
to liquid at this pressure and begins to rain down- a constant global rainstorm of unbelievable
proportions lasting 30 years. The pressure and temperature suddenly begin to drop in
unison. For almost a century, puddles turn into lakes and oceans. The surface temperature is now -56° Celsius
and the pressure has dropped to only seven times the pressure on earth. Finally, at a
really unpleasant -81°, the CO2 oceans begin to freeze and the rain turns into snow. This
leaves us with a frozen Venus covered in oceans as hard as rock and gigantic CO2 glaciers.
What remains of the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, at about 3 times earth’s surface pressure.
If you don’t mind freezing and suffocating, you can now take a stroll over Venus' surface. But the frozen CO2 remains a bit of a problem.
At some point we want to warm up the planet, but if we do, the CO2 ice will melt and fill
up the atmosphere again. So we need some way to keep it from doing
that. One is to simply cover it all with cheap plastic
insulation and cover it up with ground-up venus rock or water oceans. Although some
planetary scientists will be very stressed out about us building a new planet containing
a potential timebomb like that. A few unfortunately timed volcanoes could melt a lot of CO2 at
once and ruin everything. Another obvious solution is to shoot it all
out into space and collect it into a small moon for storage and future use. We can make
this more efficient by using mass drivers instead of rockets, but moving all that mass
will still be a pretty intense challenge that will take some time to solve. Whatever we end up doing with the atmosphere,
to move forward we need water, which we could get from Ice-Moons. Europa, a moon of Jupiter,
has twice as much water as Earth’s oceans. Now catching a moon and transporting it through
the solar system is not exactly easy. So instead it might be easier to cut chunks
of ice off Europa with an army of construction drones and shoot them at Venus using more
of those mass drivers. Space tethers could save us a lot of effort and energy here – we
made a whole video explaining how they work, but in a nutshell, they are slings that can
take a payload on both ends. On Europa, they do most of the work needed
to catapult our ice to Venus. The ice hits the Venus tethers, which gently drop it into
the atmosphere, where it falls down as snow. In exchange, the Venus tethers get to catch
CO2 ice shot up from below and accelerate it into orbit.
We can remove excess nitrogen using this same method to further lower our atmospheric pressure. After a few decades or centuries, Venus would
be covered by a nice, shallow frozen ocean a few hundred meters deep. It would look extremely
different from today. A few continents and countless islands have formed. This is beginning
to look a bit like our planet! Now the last and most magnificent phase of
terraforming begins: Making the atmosphere breathable and adding life. First we need light though and we need to
heat the planet up again. A Venus day is 2802 hours long. More than 116 Earth days. So if
we just remove our giant mirror, we would grill half of our planet. Even without the
massive atmosphere, temperatures would reach unbearable levels. The simplest way to create
a day/night cycle and let some energy in again, is with another set of mirrors to illuminate
our continents and melt our water oceans. Which would let us completely control how
much energy we get and where it goes. The atmosphere is now mostly made up of nitrogen
and basically devoid of oxygen. So the first inhabitants will likely be trillions and trillions
of Cyanobacteria, which can get photosynthesising and release oxygen. We know that they can
quickly turn around the atmosphere of a planet because billions of years ago, they were probably
responsible for turning the toxic atmosphere of our young Earth into an atmosphere with
enough oxygen for more complex animal life. But not only that – Cyanobacteria can fix
Nitrogen from the atmosphere and turn it into nutrients that can be used by living beings.
This way they will essentially fertilize our dead ocean water and prepare it for more complex
organisms. On land, our colonists need to grind down
some of the former venusian surface to make soil for nitrogen fixing plants to grow on.
Eventually billions of trees would spread creating large forests, covering massive parts
of the continents. Venus would turn green. First the oceans, then the land. To speed
things up, CO2 would be strategically released to supply the plants and cyanobacteria. Areas
already covered with plants could get extra daylight from our orbital mirrors, so the
plants would be active for most of each day. Maybe, we won’t have to do this with the
same plants and animals we know today. As genetic engineering matures and our understanding
of genetics and the machinery of life expands, we might just engineer life as we need it. All in all, it would take several thousand
years to make the atmosphere breathable by humans. In the meantime, you could stroll
around with nothing more than regular clothes and an oxygen mask. Settlers would enjoy a
vast new planet, filled with resources and bathed in sunlight. They might think of new
ways to use the vast amounts of carbon dioxide ice and nitrogen orbiting in space above.
Industrial processes, rocket fuel or even boosting the terraforming of another planet,
like tiny Mars Venus is fully terraformed. Animals roam through
vast ecosystems. Cities are being constructed. Billions of settlers and their descendants
make this world their home. They will see images of the past. How Venus was once the
most hostile planet around. How it took hundreds of years to freeze hell and to ship in the
oceans and another few thousand years to make it possible to breathe freely. They will barely
be able to believe it. Ok. Maybe it is not that easy to terraform
Venus and a lot of things must go right for this future to become reality. But it is possible
and with technology that is within the reach of a motivated and slightly more advanced
humanity that wants to venture into space. The only thing that is stopping it is our
imagination. And that at least is a problem that’s easy to overcome. If you think about it, your imagination is
the only thing stopping you from doing all kinds of things. All you need is a little
nudge – and we might just have the right thing to get you started. We are big fans of Skillshare, an online learning
community that offers thousands of classes for all skill levels in tons of creative discipines
like Illustration, Animation, or Film and Video. Or you could try a class on Home Decoration,
Growing Houseplants or Playing the Guitar – there is something for everyone really. The first 1,000 kurzgesagt viewers to click
the link in the description will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare.
Since we started working with Skillshare, you, our viewers, have taken over 100,000
hours of classes – including our own three Skillshare classes on how we make our animations!
If you want to learn more about motion graphics, give them a try. And if you need an extra little push to get
you going, maybe get started with some advice on motivation and inspiration. We liked the
Scientific Method for Artistis: Find Inspiration, Get Motivated and Grow your Creative Skills
by Kendyll Hillegas. In this class, Kendyll explains her four-phase process for exploring
and figuring out your direction as an artist. For us, it was a great way to get into the
flow of creating something. But anything that makes you feel excited and
sparks new ideas is a great first step. If you want to get creative with new skills
and support kurzgesagt, give it a go.
HOW TO TERRAFORM VENUS (QUICKLY)
Leaving earth to find new homes in space is an old dream of humanity and will sooner or later be necessary for our survival. The planet that gets the most attention is Mars, a small, toxic and energy poor planet that just about seems good enough for a colony of depressed humans huddled in underground cities.
Sources and further reading: https://sites.google.com/view/sources-terraform-venus/
Start of the video: "It might be easier than you think"
End of the video: "Okay, maybe it's not that easy"
A trip to and colonization of the Galilean moons is more plausible and probably could be achieved in less than quarter of the timeframe.
Maybe next video?
I thought Venus didn’t have a viable magnetosphere to support an Earth-like stable atmosphere? Wouldn’t you have to mess around with the planet’s core for that?
I might sound super dumb and naïve saying this, but couldn't we just skip directly to the step of importing modified algae/cyanobacteria?
My understanding is that between those 83 bars of atmospheric pressure on the surface, and the 0 bars of pressure in space, is a transition zone. I've watched JPL videos about those lofty cloud cities that were mentioned, they say there is a semi-habitable sweet spot of around 1 bar pressure when you get a few dozen kilometers above the surface.
Could certain algae and bacteria become buoyant in these pressures? Could it be possible that microorganisms dropped into the atmosphere could float on the thick gasses?
It would be super cool to engineer some algae that could float in the dense air, eat the c02 and process it into other byproducts, and reproduce. I guess it still doesn't solve the need for water, though.
Am I the only one that’s having trouble comprehending how we would truly get rid of all that frozen CO2?
10’000 years is still amazingly fast for a planet to become life like. How many billions of years did it take earth?
Great video. Seems entirely plausible, and very fast in the universal time frame sense. Even in the human sense, less than 5000 years to complete something of this magnitude would be astounding. Easier said than done, of course, as it is with all the videos regarding terraforming, but the ideas presented are not out of reach considering how fast technology has grown and how much it will continue to grow even in just the next 100 years, never-mind 1000+.
I still believe Mars would be an easier planet to terraform, but that of course depends on what our technology could do come that time and it may even be logistically easier/better to do Venus as the video states. Perhaps even the Galilean moons or moons of Saturn themselves could be terraformed, if we truly understand tidal heating from the two planets and how to turn the icy moons into small, breathable and livable moons.
Yay!!