This Week in Space: 2014 UR116 - Mountain Sized Asteroid

While 2014 UR116 doesn't appear to pose a risk to us, there are an unfathomable amount of similar objects zipping around the solar system (and possibly zipping THROUGH the solar system, in fact rogue planets may be hurtling between star systems) and this is one of the main reasons why we need to start colonies off-world, starting with either the Moon or Mars in habitats and then working toward either a faster than light travel device or start building large enough ships (from resources mined from asteroids) and use propulsion technology that already exists like Project Orion (nuclear propulsion that reaches worthwhile fractions of the speed of light) to start several decade long missions to nearby stars in hopes of finding habitable worlds or worlds/moons good for building more habitats on to repeat the process of mining resources for sending more ships out towards stars nearby those.

We HAVE to stop fighting each other, we have to stop operating as hundreds of independent nations and operate as humans. We can fracture back into independent nations when we've colonized other planets/moons. One day another asteroid will impact the earth and cause an extinction level event, one day another super volcano (like Yellowstone) will erupt and seriously disrupt life, one day either a supernova will sterilize Earth or our own star will cool and consume the planet... yes, these things might not happen for millions of billions of years but they COULD happen today, 5 seconds from now (with the exception of our own star cooling that fast, but it could do something terrible fact is we know very little about stars and their life cycles, we haven't been watching them long enough to have a good understanding of them, we won't for another billion or two years). 

My plan for Venus

http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2009/12/11/extremophile-bacteria-transform-co2-and-light-into-fuel-better-than-photosynthesis/

Culture a ton of that, load it onto a rocket with a dispersal system and disperse it into the atmosphere.

 

Better yet, set up a moon base for manufacturing rockets and helium 3 (in the soil, great rocket fuel) and send one ever 1-2 months for a decade or two, then go out to the asteroid belt and mine a ton more raw materials and get an automated production facility pumping out rockets full of that extremophile and just keep hurling them at venus... it'll eat up all the co2, and generate absurd amounts of bio-fuel... just collecting on the surface until the co2 is considerably reduced and you can just land.

 

Better yet, find/engineer one that eats up the carbon and just releases oxygen.... It'd be a super oxygen rich environment after a while (you'd have to do it way past the 20% that Earth has because you'd need to reduce the pressure and subsequent temperature the CO2 is making but meh)... Venus is 96.5% co2 and only 3.5% where Earth is 78% nitrogen 20.95% oxygen and CO2 is only .03% so you probably could go colonize it BUT if you could reduce the pressure and heat I'm sure there are depoits of all the ores you'd find on earth you'd need for construction. Also deuterium and hydrogen in the atmosphere in greater quantities than here.

 

Generate the oxygen, combine with hydrogen... water. Set up work colonies, mine, refine, fabricate metals and parts you could launch into orbit using oxygen rockets or even biofuel. Lots of sulfuric acid so you can make fertilizers for the work colonies also use it in production of explosives for the mining operations.

 

It'd give us excellent skill with working on a foreign planet, not to mention give us materials (while of course we are mining the asteroid belt too, more material out there than 100, hell 1000 earth's)... then I'm sure you find something in the soil you could convert to nitrogen and turn it into Earth 2 (if in fact Earth isn't Venus 2)... Mars will never be an option as the atmosphere is just gone.

 

As we continue to mine stuff in the asteroid field and work towards FTL propulsion or at least near speed of light (which we can already due with nukes, look at Project Orion)... we'd have materials to build massive ships, probes, sattelites etc to start spreading around our solar system and sending out of it. Not to mention we could jsut produce giant ships in orbit near Earth and the Moon, near Venus and Mars that could be life boats, as well as look like a giant navy in the event hostile ET's show up and see these massive ships parked around the planets that might make them think twice about attacking us (we could also load them with massive projectiles made from mined asteroids as massive impact weapons to use against invading enemies like in the Lost Fleet Series)...