Galilean terraformation

From: "Ed Minchau"
To:
Sent: Monday, February 05, 2001 7:00 AM
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: More Venus terraforming...Go Deep

How about this instead? Put up a big reflector in the L2 point of
Jupiter. Set it to reflect incoming sunlight on Europa, start a deep
melt...

In some ways, terraforming the icy Galilean moons is much easier than doing
the same with Venus. You "just" have to build the absurdly huge mirrors at
appropriate locations, melt the moons until uncover their subglacial oceans
and then seed them with adequate microorganisms to transform their brand new
atmospheres in something breathable. Then you would have nice oceanic worlds
and could colonize them using Savage's floating cities approach.

The plan above was outlined in "Padres de Contato", a science fiction book
from a Brazilian author, Jorge Luiz Calife. (Although Calife used
fusion-powered artificial suns instead of mirrors, in his book.) Of course
there is also the Galilean terraformation version used by K.S. Robinson (in
"Blue Mars") and Arthur Clarke (in "3001"): to put enough sunlight to raise
the temperature just to the melting point in the equator and leave the rest
of the world in deep freeze. I don't like this plan, perhaps because I'm
Brazilian and anything below 10 C (or 50 F) is unbearably cold for me. (In
fact, when I visited the United States during the winter, my hopes that
someday Humanity would colonize space were boosted: after all, there were
already people living in places that *I* consider uninhabitable! ;-)

:) ed
[snikt]

Lucio