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by indoordin0saur 741 days ago
The idea I've heard is to dump many gigatons of hydrogen into the atmosphere to make H2O and elemental Carbon via the Sabatier reaction which will occur immediately with Venus' temperature. This gets rid of some of the CO2. The water will be part of the atmosphere, the carbon will rain down on the surface of the planet.

There will still be a lot of CO2 around though. Now you shade the planet with a giant sunshade and the atmosphere will cool down to the point where CO2 will snow out as dry ice after a couple decades of cooling. What you'll have left is a layer of carbon, followed by a layer of water ice, followed by a layer of dry ice. The atmosphere will be 2 - 3 times as dense as Earth's with almost entirely nitrogen gas. You use autonomous robots and mass drivers to collect and launch the excess dry ice into orbit.

Once you've got most of the CO2 ice out you remove the sunshade and the planet will very quickly thaw out. The planet will be covered mostly in oceans at this point with a thick nitrogen and CO2 atmosphere. At this point use genetically modified algae and microbes which, using the plentiful sunlight, can quickly convert the high CO2 atmosphere into oxygen and organics for the soil. The planet may still need some minor solar shading to keep the temps down until the CO2 approaches earth levels. Introduce Earth life to build a natural biosphere and voila! You've got a whole new Earth whose biosphere should be able to sustain life for millions of years!

1 comments

Sabatier reaction is an equilibrium reaction, so it can only remove a part of carbon. You need to somehow continuously remove the generated carbon to keep the reaction from transforming it back into CO2.

The second issue is sourcing H2, water ice is common, you "just" need to redirect enough comets. Comets can be also used to build a solar shade, by placing them into a polar orbit around Venus inside the Roche limit. They'll naturally fall apart and form a cloud around the planet.