[extropy-chat] Nuclear terraforming

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Alan Brooks <albrooks2006 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'll cease posting for awhile, being the principle instigator of
> political threads at this time. However PLEASE do understand there
> wont be much of a future if the pot in the Mideast boils over, a big
> cloud of fallout may drift over here someday.

Some people think that turning the whole place into a glowing
glass desert would help more than hurt - mainly so the people
there stop exporting violence, stop creating crises that
humanitarians are drawn to respond to, and stop exporting cheap
oil so that we'd finally have sufficient incentive for fast
development of alternatives (with the temporary economic
disruption viewed as acceptable: common exaggerated jokes aside,
most people actually would still be able to go to work and take
trips, especially once the chaos subsided).  Said people are a
distinct minority, and are likely to remain so for some time.

But speaking of applying nuclear weapons to vast surfaces...I
wonder - has anyone looked into the feasability of, say,
initiating nuclear winter on Venus so as to rapidly chill the
planet, so that much of the sulfuric acid comes out of the
atmosphere (which might then allow establishment of more
permanent temperature-control mechanisms, infeasable to deploy
right now mainly because of the immense temperature, pressure,
and acid rains at Venus's surface)?  Most of the radioactive
fallout could probably be localized, and even if the atmosphere
were magically converted to Earth-temperature oxygen-nitrogen
overnight, the soil will probably need cleaning before people can
live there as it is anyway (again, due to the sulfuric acid
rains).