NASA Considers Putting an Asteroid Into Orbit Around the Moon

Mars already has a large extant of iron and oxygen on its surface. It is why it is red. (Iron III oxide.)

For venus, I could see it dropping to "still bitching hot, but cool enough to work with on the surface with robots" in about 2000 years.

Venus' surface temp is just a few degrees centigrade below the thermal decomposition temperature of aramid plastics. (Related to kevlar and pals.) Venus has a similar overall quantity of nitrogen in its atmosphere as earth does, just diluted by considerable excess of carbon dioxide.

The secret to venus is to sequester the carbon.

Engineering an extremophile atmospheric microbe to colonize the tops of the sulfuric acid cloud layer (were it's a nice, sunny 70F or so, at earth sealevel pressures.) That uses a stable sulfur cycle based derivitive of photosynthesis, that is engineered to produce aramid plastics, would do just that.

Lacking any natural predators, and having a huge petri dish to colonize, with an excess of "food", the little bitches would rapidly "snow" out thermally stable plastic molecules and deplete the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thereby puncture the thermal equilibrium of the planet.

The issue is the hydrogen scarcity. The microbes would have to be able to produce their own water from their sulfur based respiration cycle from sulfuric acid, excrete sulfur dioxide, and sequester the water inside their cellular membranes. This means they would have to be extraordinarily robust in the face of anhydrous sulfuric acid. That alone is a pretty impressive feat to accomplish with engineered biology. I was thinking that the microbes could use a heavy metal complex with lead to reduce the chemical activity of their cellular membranes, and use of the aramid plastic as internal skeletal structures might work. (One of the interesting features on venus is lead sulfide snow. It volatizes on the surface, then crystalizes in the atmosphere. This makes it a potential raw material for the microbes to use. Lead is very resistant to acidic attack.)

Releasing such microbes on venus would cause a runaway reaction in the atmosphere, transforming venus from a cloudy hot furnace, into a hellish sea of acidic gel oceans, and do so very quickly.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/aOXm2aAmWoM/story01.htm

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