[extropy-chat] Nuclear terraforming

[Joseph Bloch]

I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work.

The different between nuclear winter and greenhouse effect is a fine 
line, and has to do with albedo and suchlike. You'd probably do much 
better cooling Venus with a scheme to get rid of the cloud cover, so 
more heat was radiated into space, rather than being reflected back to 
the surface.

Such is my layman's understanding...

Joseph

Adrian Tymes wrote:

>--- 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).
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