One problem is just how thick Venus’s atmosphere is. If you converted all the carbon dioxide into oxygen and sequestered carbon, you’d have an atmosphere of nearly pure oxygen at something like twenty times Earth pressure! To terraform Venus, lots and lots of carbon dixoide needs to be put away somewhere, like maybe as carbonate in rocks. IIRC, the key thing lacking is hydrogen, enough to form oceans of water.
The Moon is a lot closer.
Too bad you didn’t fix “dixoide” while you were at it. 
Let’s assume we have wormhole technology. We open up one million wormholes, each about three meters in diameter, around Venus’s equator. The other ends of these wormholes circle Mars’s equator. We let them sit for about six months. Which planet gets a tolerable atmosphere first?
I think six months might be too long. Venus has a solar orbit of 224.7 earth days and mars has a solar orbit of 686.971 days. You wouldn’t want them to be on opposite sides of the sun, causing your wormhole to go through the sun and carry solar atmosphere to either planet.
Or did I not watch enough DS9 to get the whole ‘wormhole’ thing correct?
Pffft. Those Sci Fi writers don’t know anything about wormholes. You have to work at the top secret facility at Cheyenne mountain to know anything about wormholes.
The chief difficulty is incredible pressure. Incredible pressure and amazingly harsh chemicals. Chemicals and pressure. The two chief difficulties are incredible pressure, amazingly harsh chemicals. And blistering heat. The three chief difficulties are incredible pressure, amazingly harsh chemicals, blistering heat. And a truly ridiculous distance to cross. I’ll come in again.
I’ve read about past Venus landers and their limited lives. Is it theoretically possible to build a refrigeration unit that would work on the surface of Venus and keep the critical parts of the spacecraft at standard Earth temperature?
My WAG is yes…
which is why I wanted to start this thread in the first place.
Because, living in the gawd awful heat of florida, I have always DREAMED of…drum roll please…
A nuclear powered air conditioner.
But there is a minimum size for a nuclear reactor (smaller than most people would probably guess though).
With one on those you could go decades at least. This ignores any possible corrosive effects of the atmosphere at the surface and probably many other things though…
Nobody expected the Venereal Colony!
An air conditioner doesn’t just magically remove heat. It has to put the heat somewhere. That means that part of the air conditioner itself actually has to be hotter than Venus. Heat wont flow away from the capsule unless it’s hotter than it’s surroundings. Good luck designing an air conditioner that can operate with that type of temperature extreme. I don’t care what power source you have, it can’t work.
Why not? Nobody said that it would be easy, or cheap. The excess heat can be radiated from an external heat exchanger. We can store liquid helium and hydrogen with the use of a refrigeration system that has a huge temperature differential with the outside world.
From Wikipedia. Not my prefered source, but it will do for this question.
Atmosphere: 96.5% carbon dioxide, 3.5% nitrogen.
Pressure: 93 times Earth
Temp: 450° - 480°C (842°- 896°F). Hotter than Mercury.
Clouds: Suflur dioxide and sulfuric acid. 100% coverage.
Magnetosphere: Negligable.
The surface: “90% of the surface Venus appears to be recently solid basalt lava”
So overall, it would be a challenge beyond anything we would give any serious consideration to soon. Going underground could provide protection from the pressure and solar radiation, but I would expect no relief from the temperature unlike here on Earth where caves are suitably comfortable.
Wikipedia’s Colonization of Venus suggests that floating habitats would be a viable beginning to having a human presence there.
Antique fridge could keep Venus rover cool
It looks like it is possible.
I’m reminded of that episode of Futurama where the Galaxy Express ship sinks underwater. Fry asks the Professor “how many atmospheres of pressure is the ship designed to withstand?” To which he replies “well…it’s a spaceship so between zero and 1”.
Basically, it would be like colonizing the inside of a large car battery…sitting in a volcano…at the bottom of the ocean.
Well I’ll be. I don’t put much faith in The New Scientist, but I probably jumped the gun when I said it wasn’t possible.
I certainly didn’t. And neither did my doctor.
Air conditioners actually move heat? And that heat has to go somewhere? Well I’ll be darn, they never told me that in my thermodynamics class.
Yeah, its pretty darn toasty out there, but todays engineers design and build things that operate so hot they are glowing or nearly so. Venus aint quite THAT hot.
While the pretty hot atmosphere is a problem, at least the fact it is really dense helps. Makes it much easier to dump heat into than a thin hot atmosphere.
Thats one problem with heat dumping on the moon, mars, or in space. The extremely thin or lack of atmosphere means if you want to dump heat you need either pretty large heat exchangers and they need to run pretty hot as well, since about the only way the heat gets “dump” is by way of thermal radiation.
Thats like one of my all time lifetime favorite “scenes”. To paraphrase it further:
The professor also exclaims “The pressure difference will crush us”
Fry “How do we equalize the pressure?”
At that point the ship springs a leak(s)
Professor “That oughta do it”
Its the perfect scene combination of stupidy, back of the envelope science, timing, and dry sarcasm.
It’s kind of like the Soviet Russia joke:
On Venus Colony, atmospheric heat dump into you!
I’m not an HVAC expert or anything, but doesn’t a terrestrial air conditioner work because the exhaust side of the air-conditioner is hotter than the outside atmosphere? IOW, your Venusian air conditioner would become a heat pump, taking heat from the outside and conveying it inside.