Dreaming of New Homes: Why Venus?#

Leaving Earth to find new homes in space has always been a big human dream. Honestly, sooner or later, it’ll likely be necessary for us to survive.

Now, when you hear about space colonies, most folks think of Mars. Yeah, it gets lots of attention. But let’s be real, Mars is small, kinda toxic, and doesn’t have much energy. It seems just barely good enough for a small group of maybe not-so-happy humans hiding out in underground cities.

But hey, what if we thought bigger? What if we took Venus, one of the most unfriendly and deadly places in the whole solar system, and actually turned that into a colony? Not just building those fancy “cloud cities” people sometimes talk about, but making it a real, proper second Earth? Believe it or not, it might actually be easier than you’d think.

What’s So Bad About Venus Right Now?#

Okay, let’s look at Venus as it is today. It’s definitely the hottest planet in the solar system.

• Surface Temperature: A scorching 460°C. That’s hot enough to melt lead, seriously.
• Why so hot? It’s got the most extreme greenhouse effect anywhere we know of in the solar system.
• Atmosphere Composition: The atmosphere is a massive 97% CO2. (Just for comparison, on Earth, even a tiny increase from 0.03% to 0.04% CO2 is warming things up right now).
• Atmosphere Density: Venus’s atmosphere is 93 times thicker than Earth’s.
• Surface Pressure: Standing on the surface would feel like diving about 900 meters deep into the ocean. The pressure would crush you instantly.

Yeah, it’s a truly horrible place right now!

So, Why Even Bother With Venus?#

Given how nasty it is, why put in the effort? Well, there are some huge upsides:

• Size: Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth.
• Gravity: It has about 90% of Earth’s surface gravity. This is a big deal because spending long periods in low gravity is likely bad for human health.
• Potential Habitat: Because of its size, a terraformed Venus could become the second-largest habitat in the solar system. We’re talking a new home for billions of humans and maybe even trillions of animals! Imagine it with oceans, thick forests, and a beautiful blue sky.
• Livability: A fully terraformed Venus could potentially be the most pleasant place to live outside of Earth itself.

Now, we can’t just snap our fingers and terraform Venus today. But a slightly more ambitious future version of humanity could take on this massive project. It’s not a quick fix; it would take a few generations to finish and be a huge challenge, maybe like building the Great Pyramids was for our ancestors. But humans have definitely started projects before that took longer than one lifetime to complete.

Okay! Let’s imagine we decide to go for it!

Step 1: Cool it Down and Get Rid of the Air#

The very first thing we need to do is cool Venus way down and remove that incredibly heavy atmosphere. As mentioned, there’s a lot of it – around 465 million billion tons. How could we even start to do that?

Here are a few ideas folks have thought about:

• Giant Lasers: Build huge solar collectors to power massive laser beams. These lasers would heat the atmosphere so much it blasts into space.
  • Problem: You’d need thousands of times the entire power-generating capacity of humanity today, and it would still take thousands of years to remove the atmosphere this way.
• Chemical Sequestration: Bind the CO2 chemically into different solid compounds.
  • How: Mine elements like Calcium or Magnesium from someplace like Mercury. Shoot these metals at Venus using systems called Mass Drivers (basically electric rails that launch stuff without needing rockets on smaller planets). The metals would combine with the CO2 to form different carbonates, locking the CO2 away pretty much forever.
  • Problem: The sheer scale makes this pretty impractical. You’d need several hundred billion tons of material to lock up the CO2. Seems like a waste of valuable stuff, and it might take too long.
• Putting Venus in the Shade (Literally): This one sounds a bit wild but could actually work. Build a gigantic mirror in space to block out the sun and just freeze the atmosphere.
  • Design: The mirror doesn’t have to be super complex or heavy, just a very thin foil with some basic structure. A single huge flat object close to the sun would get pushed out of place by sunlight pressure (like a solar sail).
  • Better Design: Instead of one big piece, use many different pieces. Annular slats (ring-shaped sections) of angled mirrors could reflect sunlight from one mirror to the next, redirecting the light backward. This balances the force from the sun hitting the front, holding the mirrors in position.

The Great Freeze and The Great Flood#

Once the shading infrastructure is set up (which could take a few years), things start slow but then pick up speed.

• For the first few decades, the atmosphere cools down gradually but stays thick and deadly.
• After about 60 years, it finally hits a critical temperature: 31° Celsius.
• Suddenly, the Great Flood begins on Venus. At this pressure, CO2 turns into liquid and starts raining down. It’s a constant, global rainstorm on an unbelievable scale, and it lasts for 30 years.
• As the CO2 rains down, the pressure and temperature drop rapidly together.
• For almost a century, the puddles grow into lakes and eventually oceans.
• The surface temperature drops to -56° Celsius.
• The pressure is now only about seven times Earth’s surface pressure.
• Finally, at a rather unpleasant -81° Celsius, the CO2 oceans start to freeze solid. The rain turns into snow.

This leaves us with a frozen Venus. It’s covered in oceans as hard as rock and gigantic CO2 glaciers. What’s left of the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, at about 3 times Earth’s surface pressure. If you don’t mind freezing your socks off and, well, suffocating, you could technically walk on the surface now (with appropriate gear, obviously!).

Dealing With the Frozen Problem#

That frozen CO2 is still a bit of an issue. Eventually, we want to warm the planet back up. But if we do, that CO2 ice will melt and turn back into gas, filling up the atmosphere again and ruining everything. So, we need a way to keep it from doing that.

• Option 1: Cover It Up: One idea is to simply cover all the frozen CO2 with cheap plastic insulation. Then, cover that with ground-up Venus rock or even the new water oceans we plan to add later.
  • Concern: Some planetary scientists might get really stressed out about building a new planet with a potential time bomb like that. A few badly timed volcanoes could melt a lot of CO2 at once and mess everything up.
• Option 2: Shoot It Into Space: Another, maybe more obvious, solution is to blast all that frozen CO2 ice out into space. We could collect it into a small moon to store it for future use (maybe for industry or even for terraforming other planets like Mars).
  • Efficiency: Using mass drivers instead of rockets makes this more efficient, but moving that much mass is still a massive challenge and will take a while.

Whatever we decide to do with that frozen atmosphere, to move forward, we need water.

Step 2: Bringing in the Water#

We need water, and a good place to get it is from the ice moons in the outer solar system.

• Source: Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, actually has more than twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined.
• Getting it Here: Catching a whole moon and moving it through the solar system? Not exactly easy.
• Better Method: It might be easier to send an army of construction drones to Europa, cut off chunks of ice, and shoot them towards Venus using more of those mass drivers.
• Saving Energy: Space tethers could save a lot of effort and energy here. (There’s a whole video explaining them, but simply put, they are slings that can hold a payload on both ends).
  • On Europa, space tethers would do most of the work needed to launch our ice chunks towards Venus.
  • As the ice arrives at Venus, other space tethers would catch it and gently drop it into the atmosphere, where it would fall as snow.
  • As a bonus, the Venus tethers could use the energy from catching the ice to also grab CO2 ice shot up from the surface and accelerate it into orbit (tying into the storage idea!).
• Adjusting Pressure: We could even use this same method to remove excess nitrogen from the atmosphere, lowering the pressure further towards Earth levels.

After a few decades or maybe centuries of this, Venus would be covered by a nice, shallow frozen ocean, maybe a few hundred meters deep. It would look incredibly different from today. Some continents and countless islands would have formed. Now, it’s starting to look a bit more like our home planet!

Step 3: Adding Air and Life#

This is the final, most amazing part of terraforming: making the atmosphere breathable for humans and adding life.

• Light & Heat: First, we need light and to warm the planet up again. A day on Venus is super long – 2802 hours, which is over 116 Earth days! If we just removed our giant shade mirror now, half the planet would get grilled. Even without the thick CO2 atmosphere, temperatures would get unbelievably high.
• Day/Night Cycle: The simplest way to create a normal day/night cycle and let some energy back in is with another set of mirrors in orbit. These mirrors would be used to illuminate specific areas, like our continents, and help melt the water oceans. This gives us total control over how much energy the surface gets and exactly where it goes.
• Making Air Breathable: The atmosphere is now mostly nitrogen and hardly any oxygen.
  • The First Colonists: The first living things would likely be trillions upon trillions of Cyanobacteria. These amazing microbes can photosynthesize and release oxygen.
  • Earth’s Example: We know they can change a planet’s atmosphere quickly because billions of years ago, they were probably responsible for turning Earth’s toxic early atmosphere into one with enough oxygen for complex animal life to evolve.
  • Fertilizing: Not only do Cyanobacteria make oxygen, but they can also fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, turning it into nutrients that other living things can use. This essentially fertilizes the dead ocean water, getting it ready for more complex organisms.
• Creating Land Soil: On land, colonists would need to grind down some of the old Venusian rock surface to create soil. They’d plant nitrogen-fixing plants to improve this soil further.
• Going Green: Eventually, billions of trees would spread, creating huge forests covering large parts of the continents. Venus would literally turn green – first the oceans, then the land.
• Speeding Things Up: To make the process faster, CO2 could be strategically released from storage to give the plants and Cyanobacteria more carbon to work with. Areas already covered with plants could get extra daylight from the orbital mirrors, allowing plants to photosynthesize for most of the Venusian “day”.
• Engineered Life: Maybe we won’t even need to use the same plants and animals we know today. As genetic engineering gets more advanced and we understand life better, we might just design the life we need specifically for Venus.

The Long Road and the Final Result#

All in all, making the atmosphere breathable for humans would probably take several thousand years. In the meantime, settlers could walk around with normal clothes and just an oxygen mask.

But eventually, settlers would have a huge new planet, full of resources and bathed in controlled sunlight. They might figure out new ways to use the vast amounts of frozen carbon dioxide ice and nitrogen orbiting above – maybe for industrial processes, rocket fuel, or even to help terraform another planet, like tiny Mars.

Finally, Venus would be fully terraformed. Animals would roam through vast ecosystems. Cities would be built. Billions of settlers and their descendants would call this world home. They would look at pictures of the past, remembering how Venus was once the most hostile planet around. They’d think about how it took hundreds of years just to freeze that hellish atmosphere and bring in the oceans, and then another few thousand years to make it possible to breathe freely. It would be hard for them to even believe it happened.

Is It Really Possible?#

Okay, maybe terraforming Venus isn’t exactly “easy,” and a lot of things would need to go right for this future to happen. But the point is, it is possible. The technology needed is within reach of a motivated human race that’s just a little more advanced and really wants to expand into space.

The only thing truly stopping it? Our imagination. And that, at least, is a problem we can maybe solve.