Chapter 12 Chapter Seven The Plan to Transform Venus

Shagang, an American scientist, believes that placing a large number of blue-green algae on Venus will turn Venus into a second earth.After the oxygen was formed, it produced heavy rain, created rivers and seas, and then became a planet whose geographical environment is exactly the same as that of the earth. There are some small islands in the Mediterranean Sea that lack natural spring water, and these small islands are very remote and rarely inhabited.In order to bring drinking water economically to where they live, residents are forced to live together and store drinking water in tanks.To keep the water pure, live eels must be kept in the tanks.Since the rainwater contains microorganisms after it falls, the eels can only eat the microorganisms when they swallow the water, otherwise the water in the tank will become smelly.But when the eel is dead, an unpleasant smell will occur, which will tell people that the microorganisms in the water have overgrown, and the pool water has rotted and cannot be drunk.The tank had to be rescrubbed and refilled with live eels.

Microorganisms are the oldest living species in the world.Although there are many types of it, it can be included in the category of seaweed, which includes pond scum and grows into various huge tree grasses.Seaweed is a microbe that is famous and best suited to grow in harsh environments with little water.Some algae have been found to thrive in jet fuel tanks, and in oil, even under extreme changes in temperature and pressure.Another kind of seaweed was found to grow in the cooling water flow of the atomic furnace core. If human beings were in this position, they would have been killed by radiation very quickly.There is also a species that grows on the barren wilderness of the Antarctic continent, which is a world of ice and snow, frozen up to thousands of feet, and the temperature is minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.Others have grown in the ice for years.Some of them grow in hot springs with temperatures as high as four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Among all seaweeds, blue-green algae are the most suitable for survival.There is no doubt that the way of life of blue-green algae will be the earliest and the source of all organisms in this world.It is neither a plant nor an animal, but it is both plant-like and animal-like.Although it is a small thing, they are not the same as bacteria (bacteria are usually included in plants), but it reproduces rapidly, is asexual, and lacks a nucleus.They are all single-celled bodies, like their descendants protozoa Protozoa are the first creatures that zoologists believe to exist in the world.Blue-green algae may be the ancestors of bacteria and protozoa. After derivation, the circle of life in this world was completed.

Three hundred million years ago, the atmospheric pressure on the earth was very small, and it was different from the current mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.There are a lot of carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane in the air, and then absorb the slight sunlight on the sea surface, decompose carbon dioxide to obtain carbon and make glucose and other carbohydrates.The oxygen decomposed from carbon dioxide is released to the sea surface and air, destroying ammonia and methane (ammonia becomes ammonia hydroxide, and methane is burned to form water and carbon dioxide).Oxygen is absorbed by animals to sustain life, and is converted into carbon dioxide and released into the environment.The increase in carbon dioxide thus increases the nutrients for plants, and thus complements each other to form a food chain.Blue-green algae are arguably our direct ancestors.Their tenacity, astonishingly high reproduction rate, high availability, and aggressiveness to carbon dioxide have convinced Shagang and his colleagues that blue-green algae are the perfect substance to put into Venus' atmosphere to produce oxygen .

The characteristics of this plan are based on its simplicity, relative cheapness, and short time-consuming, perhaps as long as two or three years, and the results can be received.At that time, there will be more than a dozen spacecraft, which will be arranged in the criss-crossing orbit of Venus.Each spacecraft will carry a large number of small torpedo-like rockets on board.Every 90 seconds, at points about 500 miles apart, each spacecraft will fire one of its rockets into Venus' atmosphere.Each rocket's hatch cone contains a colony of blue-green algae.A few ounces of dynamite will blow open the hatch cone, and as it enters the carbon dioxide cloud, blue-green algae begin to inhale carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and multiply.As long as it starts, it can reproduce very quickly, and the carbon dioxide will be destroyed very quickly, so maybe only one year later, the part of the surface of Venus can be seen with a telescope from the earth.The reproduction rate of blue-green algae is the main key to the success of this project.The original blue-green algae were so rare on Earth that it took 200 million years to evolve from the primitive atmosphere to advanced animal and plant life.No matter how fast the geometric progression rate is, if the starting organisms are so small compared to the environment, it will still take millions of years for the density to arise.But if the reproduction rate is increased to a critical size, the reproduction rate will quickly become very large.Therefore, the blue-green algae that landed in the atmosphere of Venus are by no means one or two, but tens of billions, and they can be replenished or replaced whenever necessary. If there is any dissatisfaction with this plan, this will make the planet The time required for the living body to live has been shortened by as much as 200 million years.

We can be sure that blue-green algae will not only survive but also reproduce in an environment that is completely pure carbon dioxide.Until 1970, no one could be absolutely sure, because no one had done experiments to confirm this fact.But this year four biologists, bearing in mind Shagang's plan, conducted a series of experiments to see what kind of blue-green algae could survive in tanks of pure carbon dioxide.In order to make the simulated Venusian sky more realistic, they increased the pressure in the tank until it was almost unbearable pressure.The experiment yielded brilliant results and improved Shagang's plan.Algae begin to produce oxygen at a vigorous rate, and this rate is still increasing.Under a typical sequence test, the growth rate of oxygen production per million algae was shown to be 380% per day.And it was found that the species that reproduces most easily and is most suitable for Venus is a single-celled alga called Cyanidium caldarium in the earth's hot springs. If the proliferation rate of oxygen in the atmosphere of Venus can reach 380% per day, it will reach Spectacular changes don't take long.

In the not-too-distant future, a science fiction novel called Heavy Rain will be written by the personnel of Project Sand Hill.When oxygen replaces carbon dioxide, the sun's infrared rays will shoot into space, and the temperature of the lower atmosphere will drop suddenly.Water will be available by condensation from atmospheric vapor.Huge amounts of rain will calmly fall from the Venusian atmosphere across the entire surface of the planet. The waters of the final downpour will fall to that fiery, storm-swept surface that never rained.Initially the heavy rain will not touch the ground, the rain will not be able to fall to the surface where the temperature is as high as 900 degrees, while it is still thousands of feet above the sky, it will be vaporized into steam, and then rise to the upper atmosphere where the rain falls.At the instant when this extreme heat and cold water meet, the temperature of the ground will drop, perhaps by a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.At the same time, the temperature in the air is raised, and the destruction of carbon dioxide is accelerated so that oxygen can continue to be produced.Photosynthesis occurs when algae destroy carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and synthesize oxygen and carbon into carbohydrates, the production of carbohydrates that would allow complex organisms to live on the planet's surface.

Soon there will be another heavy rain.This time it will be much closer to the surface than the last time before being vaporized, and the temperature of the ground will drop again, perhaps by as much as five hundred degrees Fahrenheit.Each time this happens, the temperature of the ground will decrease even more and the carbon dioxide in the upper layers will be more completely destroyed.Finally, when the ground temperature reaches 200 degrees Fahrenheit, the downpour will fall on the ground.Under the blow of this powerful current, the desert will become muddy rivers and large lakes.Nearly all of the water seeps into the soil (if stony deserts can be called that), creating hundreds of millions of small subterranean channels for complex organisms to plant when they arrive.The rain was finally conquered by bringing the temperature of the ground down to seventy to eighty degrees Fahrenheit."When more rain falls, some of the cloud cover will disappear and it will become clear, and the temperature will be cold enough for hardy animals and plants to grow," Shagang explained.

The ocean will be created under this cycle, and the ocean will be the breeding ground for life.A final reaction will take place when the skies clear, and Venus will be the first to see the light of day in its long and monotonous history.The new oxygen will combine with sunlight to form a layer of ozone above the cloud roll layer, which can absorb dangerous ultraviolet rays, the sun's rays.The ozone layer is absolutely necessary for humans to survive on planets without space suits.It will protect all humans on Earth; without it, humans simply cannot live on Earth.Shagang's whole plan, which doesn't require much risk and involves only a dozen or more orbital spacecraft and thousands of tiny algae-loaded rockets, will make us upstarts with a second world.The simplicity of this plan makes it extremely attractive.Redesigns to terraform other neighboring planets have been planned since 1950.But these plans are too complex and costly.Either it has to rely on the plants that already exist on the planet, or it stops because they involve practical engineering problems that cost a trillion trillion dollars.But in the 21st century, for an industrialized country, it will be a small amount to spend 100 billion of the gross national product, and the needs of the society will push it to be realized.But that will be different in the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth century, as explained in chapters twelfth and thirteenth.In this distant future, people will find it necessary to engage in engineering projects and require such expenditures that the current fiscal unit considers fantasies.But in the second half of the 21st century, at least national or international space agencies or corporate guilds will limit space program spending to less than 100 trillion, perhaps with inflation.Shagang's Venus program and its fleet of medium-sized spacecraft, only a few of which depend on supplies, will be able to stay within this budgetary limit.

A moral question would arise that if found around the center of Venus, at about 40 miles (about 200,000 feet) from the surface, the temperature in this part of the atmosphere would be as low as 900 degrees Fahrenheit, which is so low , so that most astronomers believe that there will be a large number of ice crystals in the central cloud layer.Below this cloud cover will be warmer, perhaps composed of water droplets.In the lower half of the cloud cover, Shagang suggested that perhaps living things could survive. I am not implying that there is a vast civilization of gas, forever floating in the clouds.These creatures will be no more evolved than jellyfish.Shagang thinks they might resemble air bags, which would be somewhere between the size of a ping pong ball and a soccer ball.They will use the principle of jet propulsion to make themselves float in the air, and grab the air in front of them and rush forward.They will live like animals and feed on carbon dioxide.Algae destroying carbon dioxide will destroy its habitat, and humans are doing a murder that will make it extinct.This dilemma is described in Stapledon's The First and Last Man, in which he vividly speculates on the future history of mankind eons in the future.Part of Venus in Stapleton is made up of oceans, and it is easy to form land on Venus.In this scenario, an evolved race of humans known as the fifth generation would be forced to inhabit and migrate to Venus as the Moon and Earth would collide.

Other new problems will arise.Many electrolysis stations would fail on Venus, apparently due to explosions in submarines.There are also some fantastic explosions involving spaceships in ocean exploration.Obviously, there must be more intelligent life in the oceans of Venus.The Venusian crew were outraged at the steady depletion of their liquid universe and decided to stop it.All negotiations have completely failed, and no settlement has been achieved.The fifth generation will face major questions of conscience.Do human beings have the right to interfere with the world that creatures already have?In other words, must the migration to Venus be stopped or must humanity be destroyed? Just move the Venusian out of the unlucky place as quickly as possible and the problem is solved.As a result of the Holocaust, there are two opposite feelings in the human heart, one that disappoints it by abandoning it, and the other that arouses its elation.Horrific images of the Holocaust often surface in the human psyche.Abandon humanity for the sake of human self-preservation.But every now and then all kinds of thoughts would come up again; murdering the Venusians would be horrible, but right.It has nothing to complain about.This kind of no-remorse psychology is the so-called purification of human psychology. On actual Venus, as we've seen, intelligent life is rarely to be found.When it is prudent to cut down the intelligent aliens and replace them with human beings, it will be regarded as an atrocity.Hundreds of millions of creatures possess mental abilities, no larger than amoebas (amoebas) and jellyfish, and will not cause a crisis of consciousness. Living on Venus will be somewhat inconvenient.For reasons not yet understood, the rotation of this planet is extremely slow, so slow that one hundred and eighteen days pass on Earth and only one day passes on Venus.Each day and night is equivalent to sixty days on Earth.For two months the nights were extremely cold, like winter in the arctic regions.To avoid such all-nighters, colonists will need day tents and night tents, set at opposite extremes.And using orbit or spaceship to move back and forth between the two tents, traveling about 10,000 miles every two months, it will be possible to survive in perpetual daylight.This slow cycle of rotation, at first glance, makes one feel disappointed that a large and elegant city cannot be built.But according to Sir Crake's principles of civilization, its fixed and permanent character, it is obviously a durable civilization, because it shows the self-confidence of the race to build the future.But for this reason, and because the settlers of Venus will express, only to themselves, the permanence of their confidence and feeling, I will venture to predict that cities will be built in spite of the inconvenient seasons.The grand night of cheering will no doubt fill the streets with light and warmth.Geostationary satellites Satellites powered by nuclear reactors will allow artificial light to illuminate wherever we need it. I'm trying to paint a picture of a growing young world that includes adventurous colonial farmers, people determined to break away from Earth, fleeing environmental pollution, Earth wars, and overpopulated Venusian colonists.But even the new Venusian civilization, with its vision of ideal paradise and vast agricultural pastures, cannot be expected to flourish in two to two and a half centuries.Venus is not a place on the planet for a temporary cure for phobias.Problems on Earth will arise on Venus, an era without industrialization and machines, because settlers will bring 21st century skills to Venus.They are no longer only interested in growth control, since they first occupied and explored a small portion of the planet's vast surface, and because of the rapidly growing population, it seemed to them a best guarantee against any earthly call to them return.It is very likely that their attitude towards coming home will be the exact opposite of what it is today.Their leaders will call again and again: Let us multiply in this world!Most people will think their responsibility is to marry at eighteen or nine and have eight or nine children.A person will become a grandparent before he reaches thirty-five, and a great-grandparent before he reaches fifty-five.Suppose, for example, that the population of the initial settlers was a thousand, that there were equal numbers of both sexes, that there were advances in medical technology, that diseases were rare, and that they determined the greatest rate of population proliferation, as I said above .Their annual population growth rate is as high as 7%, and at this growth rate, the population will double in just seven years.We can calculate that the total population initially is 1000, after the second century the population will increase to 100 million, after the third century the population will increase to 101 trillion, which will be 330 times the world population in 1970 . No matter how noble the motives of the settlers, natural quarrels will soon arise.They will engage in people's wars against each other, and when their numbers increase, after hundreds of years, the concept of occupying this new open space of the universe will be shattered, and humans will still be all of these two worlds , and worry about the ever-increasing chores that are almost the same size. Unfortunately, Venus is the only planet in the solar system that is about the size of Earth and close to the sun, and it is very cheap to form land.Mars has one-thousandth the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus, as I mentioned earlier, so it is not suitable for growing algae.Shagang has proposed a plan to form land on Mars that would involve melting its north pole ice cap and redistributing the resulting water and vapor across the surface.But this plan needs to consider engineering activities on the surface of Mars, so this plan will be more difficult and expensive than the Venus project. As for the detection of the more massive planets in the solar system, it will take centuries and more costs, as developed in Chapters 12 and 13.That also seems to be necessary to migrate to nearby planets in planetary orbits.But such a planet is so remote to man that there is little hope of approach.As far as the nearest planet is concerned, Proxima Centauri is only 24 trillion miles from Earth.This great distance is as large as the diameter of the sun.If the sun is regarded as a point, the distance between the sun and the small ball of the earth is about 107 feet.The great Saturn is 560 feet from the sun, and its radius is 102 inches, and Pluto is a mile from the sun, and Proxima Centauri is, according to this calculation, 4,000 miles away.At the current speed of the Helios spacecraft at 25,400 miles per hour, it will take centuries to fly there.Even when speeds can be increased to numbers in the tens of millions of miles per hour, the flight journey would still take years.Fortunately, since the 1960s our knowledge of the universe has grown so much that our arguments about the universe have fundamentally changed, and the next chapter will tell us about taking shortcuts with our new space knowledge, while in Visit a planet a day in space.