Terraformed Venus

[ascanius]

You say that Beta would have a low in both seasons? How do you figure? Geoff's cookbook (and other sources) mention continental highs in winter. Did I miss something subtle?.

Ignore that portion. I meant to delete it, I was thinking of something else.

[su_liam]

We need a name for that little inland sea cutting into Aphrodite Terra and communicating with the Zhibek Sea and Russalka Gulf. Feels like a good place for a Europe-ish upstart civilization! Not to say the Venus map doesn't provide lots of such opportunities. Is the equatorial region going to be shaded and cooler? Nice bit of alien color that would be!

This map is getting sexy. Is there going to be a political map?

[acrosome]

We need a name for that little inland sea cutting into Aphrodite Terra and communicating with the Zhibek Sea and Russalka Gulf. Feels like a good place for a Europe-ish upstart civilization! Not to say the Venus map doesn't provide lots of such opportunities. Is the equatorial region going to be shaded and cooler? Nice bit of alien color that would be!

This map is getting sexy. Is there going to be a political map?

The sea just north of the A in Aphrodite is a tough one- it isn't a named planitia as far as I can tell. The USGS geologic map of that region lists the surface as "Ceres, Bona, and Miralaidji coronae flow material." So I'm still thinking about that one, but it'll probably be named after whichever one of those seems most appropriate, once I figure that out.

The straight connecting that problematic area to Russalka is Dali Chasma, thus presumably the Dali Straight. The sea and straight running north to Zhibek is mostly the collapsed part of Atahensik Corona, thus possibly the Atahensik Sea. I'll add these for my next posted map, but the text will be quite small.

And, yes, one of the reasons that I settled on this particular sea level is how "interesting" it made this area. But I'm not going to have shades- I'm probably going to move Venus into a wider orbit instead. This is probably going to be a fusion area of the pseudo-African and pseudo-Asian cultures.

A political map is a long way off. I'm going to start with rough areas assigned to certain cultures and try to model (i.e. make up) migrations and histories running to the "present."

[su_liam]

Yeah. To do the politics right, you really need to get the physical attributes down. The OCD way I try to do it, that'll take forever.

At least with a RL planet, you have a plausible topography ready-made. And a nice set of names!

Frankly, if I was doing it, I'd prefer the shadow ring. If the Solar day on Venus wasn't so very inconveniently long, I'd divide the day into several ~24 hour segments and a long night. No reflectors lighting up the night 'cause we don't want to increase insolation! But this is your project, and the night is so long, it would play hob-holy-hell with any Earth-derived ecology anyway. Bugger all!

I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with this.

[acrosome]

Hey, All. I've started playing around with this project again. I was motivated by Azelor's climate method. I've thought about this project a lot, though.

I have decided not to use jonvanvliet's data, which is a shame because it is both beautiful and highly detailed. But it is not really elevation data- it's a combination of elevation and MIDR. MIDR was Magellan's maps that measured radar reflectivity, which is a measure of surface roughness- so very rough lava fields were bright, and smooth flows were dark. Averaging this with elevation data made rough areas seem artificially high, and smooth areas seem artificially low.

So I found the best Magellan elevation data that I could- which is not really very good, actually. The highest resolution available is 4.6km/pixel (which contrasts with tens of meters per pixel for some MIDR data). Also, there are a lot of missing areas and artifacts. Luckily, a large majority of artifacts were in low regions that would eventually be seas, so though it was tedious I was eventually able to fix it.

Here is the final Wilbur texture:



The snow line there is set at around 10,000 feet, and green changes to brown at about 5,000 feet. On behalf of my countrymen I apologize for the use of the archaic units of measure. But frankly, weird units sort of work better for fantasy, anyway. Perhaps I'll annotate my next map in stades.

Note that these images have been shrunk, so they are not 4.6km/px. My original is 8192 x 4096 px. Also of note- that large continent on the equator is split into two land masses by that knot of channels near it's middle. (This is one reason that I chose to go with this sea level.) This is where African and Asian biomes will meet.

Here is a topo map using Azelor's method and colors:



It's actually kind of handy that so much of that Asian continent is so high in elevation, as this will mitigate being on the equator somewhat. Presumably most of that lower, northern part of it around the crescent-shaped Artemis Chasma will be desert, since it is in the correct latitudes.

Recall that I have rotated these maps by 180 degrees from the orientation used by the astronomers. This is to keep the convention that east is "the direction where the sun rises" and then the other cardinal directions follow from there. Also, it helps to hide the identity of the world from RPG players who otherwise might recognize it (which is an even harder problem on Mars).

Here's that map again in Winkel Tripel:



Next will be currents (again), winds (again), and pressure zones (again). I have made a layer from Wilbur with some large lakes (there are a lot of deep chiasma on Venus) but I need a general idea of climate so that I know which are lakes and which are dry depressions... and then I'll have to re-do the climates to take into account the lake effect. Again.

Sigh.

I find myself repeating my work a lot...

[waldronate]

I had always considered Venus to be an odd choice for terraforming due to its unfortunate dry geology. Removing enough atmosphere, introducing enough water, and spinning up that sucker to get human-desirable characteristics will wreak all sorts of havoc as those minerals start to hydrate and that rigid crust shatters from the flexing. Not a nice place to be for a very long time after the initial burst of change...

[bandersnatch]

Rad project, subscribed.

[acrosome]

I had always considered Venus to be an odd choice for terraforming due to its unfortunate dry geology. Removing enough atmosphere, introducing enough water, and spinning up that sucker to get human-desirable characteristics will wreak all sorts of havoc as those minerals start to hydrate and that rigid crust shatters from the flexing. Not a nice place to be for a very long time after the initial burst of change...

I had always considered Venus to be an odd choice for terraforming due to its unfortunate dry geology. Removing enough atmosphere, introducing enough water, and spinning up that sucker to get human-desirable characteristics will wreak all sorts of havoc as those minerals start to hydrate and that rigid crust shatters from the flexing. Not a nice place to be for a very long time after the initial burst of change...

Not to mention that my backstory involves energies that damned near approach Kardishev II, so I could probably do whatever I liked with the surface, but kewlness dictates that I use the real topography. I like round numbers, so I spun the planet up to a 24-hour day, and nudged the orbit out to a 240-day year, meaning 20-day "months". At those energies the problem isn't "can we do it?" It's "can we do it without vaporizing the planet?" because even with 99% efficiency the waste heat can easily exceed the gravitational binding energy of Venus. So they had to move it slowly. Placing a soletta sunshade was trivial after that.

So, in practice, I stopped feeling bad about the low resolution of my heightmap.

The geology of Venus is actually kind of fascinating. Among other things a lot of metals that you wouldn't expect exist on Venus in elemental form in chondrules in the rock, like aluminum and titanium. So my low-tech pseudo-fantasy is going to have aluminum. Which means having incredibly corrosion-resistant aluminum bronzes. (Titanium, unfortunately, is simply too difficult to work with and really only exists in small concentrations mixed with aluminum or calcium, anyway.) These various metal chondrules might be found in hydraulic deposits left from the flood stage of the terraformation project. Yes, part of it would oxidize, but a lot wouldn't.

Happily, Venus is abundant with clay minerals, so building soils isn't as difficult as it might be.

One scheme to get rid of some of that hellish CO2 atmosphere involves precipitating the carbon into carbonates using calcium, magnesium, and potassium. Then the the calcium carbonate can be used as fill in some basins, leading to pseudo-limestone on a world otherwise nearly devoid of sedimentary rock (there are otherwise a few aeolian formations that qualify). Of course to do this you need excess oxygen but, as I said, Kardishev II.

The crust shattering is actually kind of helpful in one way. An astrophysicist figured that spinning up to a 24-hour day would flatten the world into a more oblate spheroid and add about 40 miles of equatorial circumference. Presumably this will manifest as new rifting, which I can use as justification to drain or connect to the sea some basins that otherwise would be inconveniently large lakes.

Sometimes sticking to real science leads to neat inspirations for a setting.

Rad project, subscribed.

Thank you. It has at least been fascinating learning about a planet in which I would otherwise not be very interested. I'm actually more of a Mars fanboi, but Mars's gravity and people's familiarity with it were undesirable.

[waldronate]

It's been a few years since I looked at Venus stuff, so bear with me a little. The fun part of dry rocks is that they are fantastically strong and melt at higher temperatures. Adding water will cause their volume to increase a bit, their strength to decrease dramatically, and they will melt much more easily. Venusian mountains look odd to us here on Earth because they are made out of things that we don't have: dry rocks. Those mountains would be unstable geologically and very chemically reactive at first. Nothing that can't be overcome with some work, but not terribly welcoming in the short term.

If you subscribe to the cataclysmic resurfacing idea for Venus to explain its uniform crater distribution and the apparent single age of its surface, then spinning it up and flexing it causes the entire surface to shatter and sink into the mantle over a few tens of millions of years. That's not a problem in the short term, but it would have the potential for stories about whole countries that just tipped up and disappeared into a great pool of magma.

Blocking the sun and gently lowering an ocean or two's worth of water ice comets onto it would certainly give an exciting result (dropping the comets at normal orbital speeds to spin up the planet would mess with the topography). It would be downright fizzy on that planet for while. Kickstarting a carbon cycle and water cycle at the same time in a massively oxidizing environment would be pretty fun!

[acrosome]

If you subscribe to the cataclysmic resurfacing idea for Venus to explain its uniform crater distribution and the apparent single age of its surface, then spinning it up and flexing it causes the entire surface to shatter and sink into the mantle over a few tens of millions of years. That's not a problem in the short term, but it would have the potential for stories about whole countries that just tipped up and disappeared into a great pool of magma.

The cataclysmic model seems well-supported, but I'm not sure about "shatter and sink into the mantle." First, I'm re-starting volcanism. Also, spinning Venus up would presumably change deep convection quite dramatically. This all might actually help preserve the current crust since the cataclysmic model- which relies upon uncontrolled heat buildup caused by a lack of convection or venting- might no longer apply. But, yes, things certainly would be rather sporty on the surface for a while.

Or, at least there is enough uncertainty on the issue for me to ignore it for the time being.

And you could argue that the Earth has issues on the tens of millions of years scale as well, what with our plate tectonics and all. Eventually Bavaria is going to subduct under the Alps and get recycled...