Venus rotating at the speed of Earth, a moon, oceans, life? (Hint: To me, "No way" is the wrong answer!)

Question

As the gravity of the moon gives Earth its magnetic field and its tidal cycles, both vital factors in evolving earth-type life, a moon, left out of most Venus terraforming schemes, seems essential. Mercury has 150% the diameter of the earth's moon, is much more massive, and planets are set in their ways anyway, but we could capture small asteroids and make a moon out of them, couldn't we? Use watery comets to cool the place down and make an ocean? But how do you speed up the rotation? That'd be even harder to do than drafting Mercury and demoting it to a moon-- but, with the help of science, can't we make the dream of Venus as "Earth's twin" come true? C'mon! I want to move to Venus and get a nice beach house as soon as possible.

Answer 1

Hinting that you won't like the correct answer only encourages people to lie to you.

1) Venus is a lot closer to the Sun than Earth. Earth at 1 AU receives 1370 W/m^2 from the Sun. Venus, at 0.723 AU receives 2621 W/m^2. The flux at Venus is 1.913 times greater than at Earth.

Heat is captured as the cross-section of the planets. Heat is radiated away as the total surface area of the planets. Both are function of the square of the radius. Each works inversely to the other: Smaller planet captures heat less rapidly, however, smaller planet radiates heat less rapidly.

Influx and emission must match for temperatures to be balanced.

Heat is radited as a function of the fourth power of the temperature. If we set Earth's average temperature as almost 7 C (280 K), then Venus's Temperature would be close to:
T = 280* Fourth root of (1.913) = 329 K = 56 C

If we were able to make Venus the same as Earth (atmosphere, albedo, rotation rate...), the average temperature on Venus would still be 56 C higher than what it is on Earth.

(See PS at the end)
2) The Moon has very little to do with Earth's magnetic field. Our rotation does. Let us assume that giving Venus a 24 hour day would solve any "magnetic field" issue. The number of charged particles that arrive on Venus, from the Sun, will be 91% more than what we get on Earth (same calculation as for the flux). Plus: each charged particle will be just a tiny bit more energetic than the ones we get on Earth.
More roasting for your beach house.

3) We could give Venus some rotation AND provide it with a Moon by causing a (very precisely calculated) collision: send Mercury onto Venus.
I'm sure some Mercurian Protection Group would oppose the idea (more red tape = more delays). However, the disruption from the collision (e.g., added volcanism from the energy added into the crust by the collision) could be cleared up in less than a million years. I'd wait before signing the construction contract for the beach house. Prices may go down during the million years.

4) near the end of the million years, we could use comets to cool the place down and provide water. The total mass of comets available in our solar system is insufficient to shave a lot of time from the million years, but we could probably save a few hundred years near the end. This is like saving a few quarters on the price of a new house. However, despite the temporary cool down, the planet would eventually stabilise at its new equilibrium temperature, 56 C (100 F) higher than Earth's temperature. At that temperature, the water cycle would be different; more evaporation = more clouds = more rain = less days at the beach.

5) The tidal effect of the Moon on Earth is to slow down our spin rate. The lost energy goes as heat. Depending where Venus's new satellite (made from the remnants of the collision with Mercury) ends up, its tiday effect would almost certainly contribute to increasing Venus's temperature (albeit not by much). Do we really need that?

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Let's go with secretsauce. Move Venus out to Earth's orbit and place it 60 degrees ahead (or behind) us, at one of the stable Lagrange points. In this way, we reduce the possibility that one planet interferes destructively with the orbit of the other.

Then, let's not change its rate of rotation and let's not give it a moon. After the tens of thousands of years needed to terraform the atmosphere (with algae, perhaps), you build your beach house on one side, I build my observatory on the other. Every "day" we switch places. When the sun sets on your beach house, it rises on my observatory. We switch and I can continue my night-time observations and you can continue to bask in sunshine.

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PS:
I'll rethink my number 2: The Moon may have something to do with the magnetic field: The rate differential between the various layers (e.g., core-mantel interface) may be due to the fact that the crust is being slowed down by the tidal effect. The crust then slows down the mantle (but the mantle continues a tiny bit faster than the crust. The mantle then slows down the outer core (which, therefore is going a bit faster because it is now slowing down at the same rate as the mantle), and so on.

This may explain why the Earth's core is spinning a tiny bit faster than the rest of the planet (as was discovered a few years ago).

So, I give you the extra point for the Moon being somewhat responsible for the magnetic field.

However, we could cut the budget by installing a magnetic field generator over your beach house (or over the entire lake, if you prefer).

As for the rotation, the newly discovered uneven heating effect (whereby asteroid rotation rates are speeded up by solar heat) could be used.

Answer 2

Standard dynamo theory does not require the presense of a moon for magnetic field generation. Although, it has been suggested that if the moon-earth system shared a common planetery ancestor that was disrupted due an interplanetary collision then the latter would be a mechanism of kick-starting a differential rotation to generate a mangetic field. But that's not standard theory and differential rotation of terrestial molten interiors do not require collisions. Venus does not have mangetic field because it spins very slowly and in a retrograde direction. If the new theories about the formation of the moon-earth system are correct then take Mercury, and slam it onto Venus and wait to see if it will spin it up sufficiently. If the planet survives, then the core is heated enough to still be molten and thefore jumpstart a dynamo from which to generate a mangetic field. Of course the idea of capturing Mercury and slamming it onto Venus is as absurd as making it Venus' moon. Primarily because I know Mercury and he doesn't want to be anyone's bi*ch especially Venus'.

Answer 3

Any moons Venus would have gotten or will get will be stripped away by the humongus tide of gravity caused by being so close to the sun. And we couldn't use watery comets to cool it down because the massive heat being produced is only there because of it's clouds, Creating a green house effect that can only taken away with decades of work. Besides, we don't even have the technology to do that to our own planet. Getting it up to the rotation speed of Earth would be.... Virtually impossible. And besides, it's ethnically wrong, because all life that could possibly exist on Venus would be totally ruined. It could take hundreds, if not thousands of years to complete this, not mentioning getting the soil to posess the minerals and bacteria on Earth would be a problem as well. Then there is the geological activity, destroying a settlement after only a couple years of work. Then all the millions of trillions of gallons of water. If we took just enough water to sustain Venus, the effects here on Earth could kill us all, leaving no supplies to help the Venusians survive. And all that gas! Argon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide, there's no end to it! And if we put in to much oxygen, the humans on Venus would hyper ventilate and kill them. If you want a nice beach house on Venus, It's not gonna be there for you or your great-great-great-grandchildren's children. It's just not possible!

Answer 4

Hi. If you start out with "As the gravity of the moon gives Earth its magnetic field..." you will lose a great many good ideas for Terra-forming Venus. If we found that there really was no life there (and only if) then genetic engineering could produce an organism that could use the hot sulfur gas and gradually produce a breathable (by other genetically engineered creatures) atmosphere. As the clouds got thinner and the runaway greenhouse effect slowed and reversed then we could look at ways to make it more Earth-like. Of course by then we may have evolved to a more heat tolerant creature.

Answer 5

No. Although Venus has 90% the diameter of Earth, it is far less dense. Earth and the Moon were likely formed when a Mars-sized body slammed into Earth. Many lighter components were lost, explaining the high density of Earth.

Now if you were to slam Mercury into Venus at the right speed, you might get what you want after it cools for 500,000,000 years. Remember, you need to get a permit to do that.

Answer 6

If you had the technology to move Mercury out of its own orbit and into orbit around Venus, then changing the period of rotation of Venus would be a piece of cake. And as long as we're at it, you might as well move Venus out to a wider orbit as well in order to cool it down a bit (although you'd have to be careful not to disturb Earth's orbit in the process).

But that's just the beginning of the headache. Just cooling the thing down, and adding water is going to need a *lot* of comets ... but you've also got an atmosphere of CO2 that is extremely dense ... (the atmospheric pressure at the surface is 90 times the atmospheric pressure at the surface of the earth).

And then you've got those hot Venusian women to deal with.

Answer 7

The moon does not give the earth a magnetic field; it does give us the tides. You cannot terra form Venus. It has largely a carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid atmosphere is over 700 degrees and is full of evidence of volcanic activity. It would be an impossible task.

Answer 8

The only reason that Venus is uninhabitable is it's atmosphere: It's unbreathable and it causes that terribly hot temperatures.

Figure out a way to introduce an algae or plant life capable of existing at the current temperature which would add oxygen to the air and reduce CO2 (thereby bringing the temperature down) and you will be on your way to making venus inhabitable.

Answer 9

Our moon has NOTHING to do with the earth's magnetic field. She stabilizes the tilt of our axis and raises tides, neither which are absolutely essential to life as we know it.

Answer 10

C'mon, we all know that Venus has nothing but hot women on it's planet!!