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by pavel_lishin 3161 days ago
Someone replied mentioning that Titan has a denser atmosphere than Earth, despite being lighter than the Moon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531798
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Temperature is also a factor.

PV=nRT. T is temperature.

Titan is not only protected by Saturn's magnetic field, but it is also very cold. Some of the molecules that are gaseous on Earth are liquids on Titan. Cold gases have lower pressure, and less likelihood of bouncing a light molecule high enough up in the atmosphere that the solar wind can grab it and blow it away.

Earth has a hard time holding on to light molecules like H2 and He, but its He is replenished somewhat by alpha decay, and it takes a long time to get from the inside of a rock to the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Most of the hydrogen is attached to heavier molecules. But it happens eventually, and even the Earth's magnetic field and gravity can't keep them. Venus is almost as massive as Earth, but it is hotter than Mercury and has no core-generated magnetic field. So most of its water has already thermally dissociated (which happens slowly starting at around 800 degC) and the H, H2, He, and monoatomic O bounces high up into the atmosphere, ionizes, and blows away. So now Venus has about 90 bar of CO2 and barely any water left.

One of the terraforming proposals for Venus is to transport a large quantity of hydrogen from Jupiter to Venus, and use Fe catalyst to react it with the CO2, to get graphite C, H2O, and O2. That would strip off much of the greenhouse blanket, but the planet would still have to be cooled off and protected from the solar wind to keep all that hydrogen around on a geologic time scale.