Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "How To Terraform Venus (Quickly)" video.

@Ezequiel Ciamparella You're absolutely right that the mirrors will have to be maintained over time, but thin sheets of metal foil won't shatter when hit by a meteoroid, the object will just shoot through it like a bullet and leave a hole behind. Now the size of the hole, and the amount of crinkling the metal foil will go through when it absorbs some of the kinetic energy of the impact, are things we can minimize with proper engineering. But over time sections of the mirrors will grow increasingly tattered and need to be replaced. There's a greater danger to the mirrors, though: the radiation from the Sun. Over many years and centuries the radiation constantly reflecting from the mirrors will turn the metal foil brittle and opaque, until it no longer reflects anything. This means that all of the mirrors will need to be replaced periodically, since the metal can only last so long. That would be a continuing expense that would have to paid as the price for living on Venus.
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@Ezequiel Ciamparella Totally, but there's no economic system where terraforming Venus turns a profit. Presumably this would be a project for a civilization that has tremendous wealth and a robust existing infrastructure in space. Like Kurzgesagt said, it would be the Great Pyramids of their time.
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I like it! And the whole exercise will help humanity develop the skills for terraforming extrasolar planets when we finally get out to other star systems, where things are usually not arranged perfectly to our liking. But the idea of a whole planet depending so utterly upon systems of huge space based mirrors is a little chilling. We'd have to make sure nothing ever happened to those gigantic structures!
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