Terraforming Venus would be challenging. It has surface temperatures high enough to melt lead, air pressure 90 times higher than Earth’s, and a cloud layer of sulphuric acid.
We could start with building shades and making it colder. The most difficult part would be removing excess air, which on Venus is chiefly composed of 95% carbon dioxide and nitrogen 3.5%. Once this main gas is removed, there would be enough nitrogen to make the gaseous envelope similar to Earth’s. Carbon dioxide can be locked into the crushed basalt rocks of Venus' surface. On Earth, it is similarly removed from the atmosphere when new mountains form.
Some reactions with hydrogen that can be obtained by hauling water-rich asteroids could remove carbon from carbon dioxide, with water as a product. Alternatively, Venus could be completely shaded for a while so that it becomes so cold that carbon dioxide liquifies or even freezes on the surface.
Some water would remain as a byproduct of carbon dioxide removal, and the rest could be hauled again in asteroids from within our solar system, giving Venus seas or even oceans. Some asteroids are rich in ammonia, which would help in removing sulphuric acid that forms a layer of clouds.
Some remaining carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be useful to make plants more productive. They will then release oxygen via photosynthesis over thousands of years. To speed up this process, some water molecules from water reaching asteroids could be destroyed with electricity, similarly to the school experiment in which a battery is used to release hydrogen and oxygen from water.
Venus rotates counterclockwise and very slowly, making its day 117 Earth’s days long. It would be too difficult to change the rotation speed. Maybe it would be better to use more complex shades that would rotate and recreate day and night cycles. An artificial magnetic field could also be produced in space to shield the surface from some harmful radiation and prevent loss of the atmosphere, whose molecules otherwise would be more likely than on Earth to be destroyed and knocked out by charged particles. On our planet, the magnetic field prevents some of this, and Venus currently has no magnetic field.
After that, biologists would work by creating genetically modified organisms that could make the soil and the whole planet more habitable for other more complex organisms.
The whole terraforming process would not be complete in a human lifetime, but it would take at the very least tens of thousands of years. However, in the end, we would get a planet that would have a gravity strength similar to that of Earth. Terraforming Mars might be easier, but it will always only have 38% Earth’s gravity, which might be detrimental to our health long term.
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