Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

The only feaseble way is to add mass to the planet, the only way to do this is push Venus into Mars and start from scatch. Cooking time will be about 3 billion years.

We’ve discussed the fun of planet moving and other super engineering before, in one of my favorite threads, “How to destroy the Earth”.
Working out the delta-v for a Venus-Mars transfer orbit gives 9485.4 m/s (5132.5 to start, plus 4352.9 to match orbits pre-collision, unless you’re keen on creating an Earth-mass debris belt in Earth-intesecting orbit ). Throwing in the mass of Venus gives an energy requirement of . Adopting the units of this post, that’s about 100,000 Great Pyramids worth of antimatter fuel, 4 days of the total energy output of the Sun, 250 billion years of the power consumption of our present day civilization, or 2/3rds the energy necessary to utterly destroy the Earth.

With that kind of energy, and the engineering needed to harness it, you could more easily surround Mars with heat lamps, manufacture an atmosphere from bits of gas giant planets, and while you’re at it, make some nice oceans, fuse that nasty Martian dust into some decent sand, and create a planet-size, 1/4th gravity beach resort (the volleyball alone might make it worth the effort )

This is realm of super technology (and science fiction), and showing off in the extreme, next to which O’neill cylinders and even interstellar colonization seem almost easy.