The Postdiluvian World
January 14, 1986
A review of "The Postdiluvian World" by Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D..
Copyright © 1997 Property of Deborah K. Fletcher. All rights reserved.
Please forgive the construction of the equations in this paper. I am seeking the necessary code to display it properly.
This article was published in Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact. The
date of publication was November, 1985. The volume is a part of my personal science library.
The article was found beginning on page forty.
The Postdiluvian World dealt with the terraforming of a planet. It began
with a landscape of a planet in the earliest stages of terraforming, and moved in quickly to a
discussion of human terraforming on venus.
The first division, "The Near Term: Nova Terra," dealt with the erosion of the soil
and rock of the Venusian surface. It played down, to a certain extent, the difficulties caused by
this erosion by calling them "instabilities." However, this translates simply into "landslides."
The second division, "The Land," began with another landscape, cutting in to
discuss the shaping - carving and building - of the surface of the planet.
The third division, "The Climate," began, once again, with a landscape. This was
followed with a discussion of Venusian temperatures. The temperature was discussed as
follows.
The equation for the temperature of a rapidly rotating planet with no atmosphere
is:
.
In this equation, T is the temperature in degrees Kelvin, S is the solar constant, A
is the albedo of the planet, and s is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. The s constant is equal to
watts per square meter per degrees Kelvin to the fourth.
The solar constant of Venus is approximately 2560 watts per meter squared. The albedo is
20%.
The equation for the temperature of Venus, discounting the greenhouse factor for
the moment, would look like this:
.
That's quite a mess of numbers, but, reduced to conventional Fahrenheit, it comes
to about 95º. Adding 35ºC to this (or doubling it) brings you a balmy Venusian day of 190ºF.
This section goes on to discuss everything from clouds to Coriolis - climate-wise, at
least - including seasons (can you imagine seasons on a planet where cold days make our
hottest look frigid?).
The next division was "Interlude: The Geological Midterm." Once again, we
opened with a glimpse of the newly terraformed Venusian landscape. This discussed the
stability of the terraforming for a short hundred million years or so - on the geological calendar,
that is.
The next-to-last division was "And In Ten Million Years - and Beyond?" This time,
the opening landscape was reminiscent of adolescent Earth, still changing with violent quakes
and eruptions. The discussion began with the simple, but certainly noteworthy, fact that Venus
has no plate tectonics. It continued with a discussion of natural radioactive isotopes. These
isotopes should give Venus an internal heat similar to that of Earth.
The last division was "Notes on a Self-Sustaining Planetary Environment. This
section simply touched on the Gaia hypothesis whereby "terrestrial life actively maintains its
environment with a vastly intricate network of biologic feedback loops."
I chose this article because it was next on a list of randomly-chosen, self-assigned
topics for these papers. I had no idea what the article would be about, nor did I care; my interest
in science is such that almost any article will prove interesting.
I have here learned that building a new home for Earth's masses of humanity will
be far more difficult than we are led to believe, since our twin is so inhospitable.
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