Watch out NASA. British inventor Andrew Pike is aiming to terraform Venus.
Pike has applied for a patent on a space probe which carries tanks full of a
watery nutrient jelly containing blue-green algae, carbon dioxide, sulphur
dioxide and plant seeds (GB 2356382). The idea is that the seeds grow in the
nutrient jelly on the hostile Venusian surface while tough algae feed on the
gases. The algae supply the plants with nutrients once the jelly has run out,
and the photosynthesising plants produce carbohydrate for the algae and release
oxygen into the atmosphere. But Pike鈥檚 patent may not be granted: the Patent
Office is checking if his idea was pre-empted by an earlier article in the
Journal of the Interplanetary Society.
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