saoirse:
If I could hijack the thread a bit, I’ve wondered on and off for years if terraforming Venus would be easier (please note the comaprative ending) than terraforming Mars. From what I recall, Venus is more like Earth than Mars is, only incredibly hot.
Surface probes sent to Venus rarely function more than an hour or two. They seem to have a distressing tendency to, well . . . dissolve. The clouds are made of suphuric acid and sulphur dioxide.
Say, this is interesting:
Venus has an extremely thick atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. The pressure at the planet’s surface is about 90 times that at Earth’s surface—a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of 1 kilometer under Earth’s oceans. The enormously CO2-rich atmosphere generates a strong greenhouse effect that raises the surface temperature to over 400 °C. This makes Venus’ surface hotter than Mercury’s, even though Venus is nearly twice as distant from the Sun and receives only 25% of the solar irradiance.
Studies have suggested that several billion years ago Venus’ atmosphere was much more like Earth’s than it is now, and that there were probably substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere.[9]
Wonder if we’ll eventually find the fossilized remains of oil rigs and SUV factories . . .