A NASA researcher suggests making Venus a better place to live. What is the only catch? It suggests putting the entire planet in a giant shell and trapping the toxic atmosphere below.
The paper describing the plan was spotted by the Daily Beast.
Alex Howe, the NASA astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center behind the paper, told the Beast that the interest lies mostly in the spirit of exploration.
He promoted the idea by saying that Venus has an atmosphere thick enough to protect against UV radiation and cosmic rays, and that it is near Earth-like surface gravity.
The plan would be extremely challenging, even by the already-nearly-impossible standards of terraforming, with the exception of climate change on our home planet of Earth.
The first thing robotic probes would do was suck up the toxic Venusian atmosphere, storing the oxygen for use by later settlers while using the carbon to construct vast tiles, each the size of a city block. It would take 72 trillion tiles to cover the planet. With the giant shell in place, they could start engineering the atmosphere to be friendly to humans.
The project is very much a possibility despite the logistical difficulties, according to Janusz Petkowski, an MIT Astrobiologist who studies the planet.
It is a fun idea.
MIT scientists say life may have been detected on Venus after all.
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