A Successful Mars Civilization/Prologue

= Moon Base ==
= Martian Base =
= Background =
Humanity took Venus, one of the most hostile and deadly places in the solar system and turn IT into a colony by creating a proper second earth. 
They installed a mirror consisting of many different pieces: Annular slats of angled mirrors can reflect sunlight from one set of mirrors to the next. Mirrors would be angled, reflecting light from one to another until the light is redirected to the back - balancing the force on the front and holding them in position. After a few years of getting the infrastructure in place, things start slowly and then escalate. 
For the first few decades, the atmosphere slowly cools down but stays dense and deadly. Until, after some 60 years it reaches the critical temperature of 31° Celsius. Suddenly, the Great Flood begins on Venus, as CO2 turns to liquid at this pressure and begins to rain down- a constant global rainstorm of unbelievable proportions lasting 30 years. The pressure and temperature suddenly begin to drop in unison. For almost a century, puddles turn into lakes and oceans. The surface temperature is now -56° Celsius and the pressure has dropped to only seven times the pressure on earth. Finally, at a really unpleasant -81°, the CO2 oceans begin to freeze and the rain turns into snow. This leaves us with a frozen Venus covered in oceans as hard as rock and gigantic CO2 glaciers. What remains of the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, at about 3 times earth’s surface pressure. If you don’t mind freezing and suffocating, you can now take a stroll over Venus' surface. 
Until we shoot it all out into space and collect it into a small moon for storage and future use via by using mass drivers instead of rockets on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, which has twice as much water as Earth’s oceans by cuting chunks of ice off Europa with an army of construction drones and shoot them at Venus using more of those mass drivers. Space tethers could save us a lot of effort and energy here as slings that can take a payload on both ends. On Europa, they do most of the work needed to catapult our ice to Venus. The ice hits the Venus tethers, which gently drop it into the atmosphere, where it falls down as snow. In exchange, the Venus tethers get to catch CO2 ice shot up from below and accelerate it into orbit. We can remove excess nitrogen using this same method to further lower our atmospheric pressure. 
After a few decades or centuries, Venus would be covered by a nice, shallow frozen ocean a few hundred meters deep. It would look extremely different from today. A few continents and countless islands have formed. This is beginning to look a bit like our planet! Now the last and most magnificent phase of terraforming begins: Making the atmosphere breathable and adding life. First we need light though and we need to heat the planet up again. A Venus day is 2802 hours long. More than 116 Earth days. So, The simplest way to create a day/night cycle and let some energy in again, is with another set of mirrors to illuminate our continents and melt our water oceans. Which would let us completely control how much energy we get and where it goes. The atmosphere is now mostly made up of nitrogen and basically devoid of oxygen. So the first inhabitants will likely be trillions and trillions of Cyanobacteria, which can get photosynthesising and release oxygen. 
We know that they can quickly turn around the atmosphere of a planet because billions of years ago, they were probably responsible for turning the toxic atmosphere of our young Earth into an atmosphere with enough oxygen for more complex animal life. But not only that – Cyanobacteria can fix Nitrogen from the atmosphere and turn it into nutrients that can be used by living beings. This way they will essentially fertilize our dead ocean water and prepare it for more complex organisms. On land, our colonists need to grind down some of the former venusian surface to make soil for nitrogen fixing plants to grow on. Eventually billions of trees would spread creating large forests, covering massive parts of the continents. Venus would turn green. First the oceans, then the land. To speed things up, CO2 would be strategically released to supply the plants and cyanobacteria. Areas already covered with plants could get extra daylight from our orbital mirrors, so the plants would be active for most of each day. Maybe, we won’t have to do this with the same plants and animals we know today. As genetic engineering matures and our understanding of genetics and the machinery of life expands, we might just engineer life as we need it. 
All in all, it would take several thousand years to make the atmosphere breathable by humans. In the meantime, you could stroll around with nothing more than regular clothes and an oxygen mask. Settlers would enjoy a vast new planet, filled with resources and bathed in sunlight. They might think of new ways to use the vast amounts of carbon dioxide ice and nitrogen orbiting in space above. Industrial processes, rocket fuel or even boosting the terraforming of another planet, like tiny Mars.
-= Aftermath ==
Venus is fully terraformed. Animals roam through vast ecosystems. Cities are being constructed.
Billions of settlers and their descendants make this world their home. They will see images of the past. How Venus was once the most hostile planet around. How it took hundreds of years to freeze hell and to ship in the oceans and another few thousand years to make it possible to breathe freely. They will barely be able to believe it.
= Terraforming Mars =
Category:Space Exploration
Category:Scenarios