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Everyone is constantly focusing on the terraforming of Mars. However, how could one terraform Venus?

The most obvious problems are the high pressure CO2 atmosphere, sulphuric rain, lack of water, lack of magnetosphere, slow rotation, lack of nitrogen, high temperature and an inadequate ozone layer. However, when you try and solve these problems more problems seem to arise.

The high pressure CO2 atmosphere may be able to be condensed and separated leaving you with more oxygen in the atmosphere and hardened carbon on the surface. This would lower the heat because of a lower greenhouse effect and simultaneously lower the pressure. This could possibly be done with thermophilic bacteria already present on earth that do similar separations. The high pressure would increase their heat resistance. However, with less pressure, Venus’s entire atmosphere would be stripped by solar wind when a magnetosphere is not present. The obvious course of action would be jumpstarting Venus’s core and returning it to liquid but you still need geodynamo forces to actually create a magnetosphere.

This brings us back to the slow rotation, which, if sped up, could possibly aid in the creation of a magnetosphere. That seems like an obvious solution, but it is hard to actually accomplish. So, in order to even start reducing pressure and separating the oxygen and water vapor from the atmosphere, you need a magnetosphere or else the hydrogen and such would get stripped away. Solar wind already strips away $2 \cdot 10^{24}$ hydrogen atoms every second. But, from there, more problems arise.

You would have a huge excess of oxygen and practically no nitrogen which only accounts for 3% of the atmosphere. Extreme athletes can only survive with about 50% oxygen in the atmosphere and venus would have way over that. Also with a reduced bond albedo and greenhouse effect the planet could possibly get way too cold.

The whole thing is all very problematic and we haven't even tried to introduce hydrogen. Does anyone have a way of solving any of these?

Rodrigo de Azevedo
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LukeB
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  • It looks like you have looked into this a fair bit. So you know how broad this is, and how much we don't know, how interdependent it all is. We seek specific questions that can be answered clearly and factually in less than a page or so of text, maybe a bit more if it is an especially compelling question, or if a lot of images are pulled in. Several of the issues you have raised here could be asked as separate questions. Just bear in mind that we stick to facts or well understood theory, and keep speculation to a minimum, and only in support of more factual data. Welcome to Space Exploration. – kim holder Apr 27 '16 at 16:03
  • So what i'm saying is, please try to narrow this down a lot, to something we can clearly answer. – kim holder Apr 27 '16 at 16:04
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    @RodrigodeAzevedo: I am approving your edit, but be aware that this question is closed as a duplicate. Also, to make a subscript, the MathJax code $_2$ is shorter than the HTML code <sub>2</sub>. – DrSheldon Mar 31 '21 at 03:22

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