[extropy-chat] Nuclear terraforming

[Jeff Davis]

--- Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:

> 
> 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,...

Okay, here's another approach.  A large flat disk,
several atoms thick, spin stabilized, and placed at
the L1 point between Venus and the sun.  A sunshade if
you will.  Just slightly closer to the sun than the
actual L1 point so as to gravitationally balance the
photon pressure.  And given just enough precession so
that it always "faces" the sun.  After the initial
cool down, you could make it smaller so as to adjust
the amount of sunlight to the "right" level.  

Now even though such a disk might be as much as 8,000
miles in diameter, because it would only be a few
atoms thick it probably wouldn't be very massive. 
I'll leave it to someone else to calculate how massive
it would be, or the material of which it should be
composed, bearing in mind that you might want to get
said material from either lunar regolith or some
vagrant asteroid.

Go for it.  

Best, Jeff Davis

               "You are what you think."
                              Jeff Davis


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