Venus May Have Been the First Habitable Planet In Our Solar System, Study Suggests (theguardian.com) 125
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Venus is often referred to as Earth's evil twin, but conditions on the planet were not always so hellish, according to research that suggests it may have been the first place in the solar system to have become habitable. The study, due to be presented this week at the at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Pasadena, concludes that at a time when primitive bacteria were emerging on Earth, Venus may have had a balmy climate and vast oceans up to 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) deep. Michael Way, who led the work at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, said: "If you lived three billion years ago at a low latitude and low elevation the surface temperatures would not have been that different from that of a place in the tropics on Earth," he said. Crucially, if the calculations are correct the oceans may have remained until 715m years ago -- a long enough period of climate stability for microbial life to have plausibly sprung up. "The oceans of ancient Venus would have had more constant temperatures, and if life begins in the oceans -- something which we are not certain of on Earth -- then this would be a good starting place," said Way. With an average surface temperature of 462C (864F), Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system today, thanks to its proximity to the sun and its impenetrable carbon dioxide atmosphere, 90 times denser than Earth's. At some point in the planet's history this led to a runaway greenhouse effect. Way and colleagues simulated the Venusian climate at various time points between 2.9 billion and 715 million years ago, employing similar models to those used to predict future climate change on Earth. The scientists fed some basic assumptions into the model, including the presence of water, the intensity of the sunlight and how fast Venus was rotating. In this virtual version, 2.9 billion years ago Venus had an average surface temperature of 11C (52F) and this only increased to an average of 15C (59F) by 715m years ago, as the sun became more powerful. Details of the study are also published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
gets out popcorn (Score:5, Funny)
I'm making the popcorn right now.
Earth (Score:1)
Re:Earth (Score:5, Funny)
No, Venus was first, and had a thriving civilisation. At first, they never bothered to explore the rest of the solar system because it didn't make economic sense. When it became clear that their planet was rapidly warming up and would soon become uninhabitable, they made a last ditch effort to migrate to earth. The colony did not survive, but their bacteria and some other simple life forms did. The rest is history.
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Those were from Alpha Centauri.
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Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars.
Didn't you read the book?
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This whole article and the research conducted to produce it are from Uranus
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And of course that would be a once-in-a-lifetime of the Solar System opportunity. Venus and Earth are in many ways twin planets. There is no other candidate in which you could build a self-sustaining biosphere powered by the Sun yet protected from it.
Insofar as the future survival of the human race depends upon space exploration, the most likely scenario will in artificial space-borne structures. It's hard to see the advantages of living down inside the gravity well of a planet like Mars given that the
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Make Earth Great Again!
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Way and colleagues simulated the Venusian climate at various time points between 2.9 billion and 715 million years ago, employing similar models to those used to predict future climate change on Earth.
I'm making the popcorn right now.
These guys aren't credible enough to start a real internet fight. Venus has a lot of mystery, but we know the atmosphere wasn't merely the result of some runaway greenhouse effect. The crust of Venus melted, about 500 million years ago, from all the evidence available.
Venus is just a strange place. The surface very nearly doesn't rotate. The other planets in the Solar System have significant angular momentum, as any reasonable model of plant formation would suggest. Venus has a "solid" crust, no plates
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Not just the crust of Venus, but also the upper mantle (if that distinction is significant on Venus, a very open question) melts, AND the melt efficiently degasses into the atmosphere. Which is not easy. With a surface PP(CO2) approaching 90 bar, significant amounts of carbonate minerals are potentially sufficiently stable that it is just weird, again.
Venus and Mars are all right to-night! (Score:3)
"Like Ringo Said"
Wrong Beatle
Venus and Mars was the title track or the 1975 album by Paul Mcartney and Wings
Venus you sexy thing (Score:1)
Figures life would start there
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Hotel (Score:5, Interesting)
reminds me of the one-shot manga Hotel [mangareader.net] (where global warming on Earth turns it basically into Venus).
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Yes it was! (Score:5, Funny)
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It's worse than that, they smoked while driving SUV's! Probably with kids in the back too, if you can imagine such horror.
Probably no booster seats either!
Re:Yes it was! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, they either smoked a hell of a lot, or they had civilization and burned up wood and all their fossil fuels, leading to the runaway greenhouse effect the article mentions.
Wouldn't it be ironic if humanity is searching the vastness of space with the most powerful telescopes for extraterrestrial intelligence, all the while the remnants of a fallen civilization reside on the planet right next to us, somewhere under layers of dirt and dust?
What a gloomy, foreboding picture that makes.
Perhaps they sent probes and robots to Earth, like we do to Mars, and life on Earth is the descendant of the microorganisms that made the trip on them.
Re:Yes it was! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, they either smoked a hell of a lot, or they had civilization and burned up wood and all their fossil fuels, leading to the runaway greenhouse effect the article mentions.
While Venus serves as an interesting example of the greenhouse effect, the liklihood of that happening on earth is pretty slim indeed.
Wouldn't it be ironic if humanity is searching the vastness of space with the most powerful telescopes for extraterrestrial intelligence, all the while the remnants of a fallen civilization reside on the planet right next to us, somewhere under layers of dirt and dust?
It better be made of pretty tough stuff! Venus isn't a material friendly place. I think the longest lasting Venera probe made it for two hours. Pretty much anything that we make would be dissolved fairly quickly.
What a gloomy, foreboding picture that makes.
Perhaps they sent probes and robots to Earth, like we do to Mars, and life on Earth is the descendant of the microorganisms that made the trip on them.
While an interesting thought experiment about Venus harboring oceans and possibly life, What I would be interested in is working our way backwards to find out what caused the extremely dense atmosphere, and what made it the concentration that it is. I do not see that as the future of earth, because I don't think we have enough CO2.
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It better be made of pretty tough stuff! Venus isn't a material friendly place. I think the longest lasting Venera probe made it for two hours. Pretty much anything that we make would be dissolved fairly quickly.
On the surface, yes. But this ancient stuff would probably be under layers of dirt, sand, ash... whatever, perhaps even fossilized. It could have been buried under the planet surface before the surface got as hazardous as it is now.
Extremely dense is normal -- look at Titan (Score:1)
Titan's atmosphere is heavier than ours by 20% and it is the size of our moon. Venus and massive atmosphere is the norm. Just Earth got hit in a collision.
Remember, the geological evidence is that the Earth got hit by "Orpheus" and it blasted away our atmosphere and the debris belt later coalesced into the moon.
If not for Orpheus, Earth would be unhabitable too.
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Earth was habitable at that time too (Score:1)
It's what happened there (Score:5, Funny)
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Exile won't work on Trump because democrats are such idiots they'll let alone back in. If Dems could just do a decent job at making their people feel safe instead of taking away their self protection, inviting back convicted murderers and rapists, starting race wars etc... Trump would have never bothered to even run for leadership.
Pepe'! Crime is down, the economy and the stock market are up, private gun ownership is through the roof, and you live in fear as your way of life is changing as you and your folks have trouble adapting.
The problem is your's, not the rest of society's.
Adjective of Venus (Score:2)
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No, we say Martian.
So maybe we should say Venutian.
Re:Adjective of Venus (Score:5, Informative)
Looking on etymonline.com [etymonline.com] I see that Venerian was the older form of the word but has been displaced by Venusian. A pity.
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Also it's Venetian.
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I thought Venice was on Earth
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Re:Adjective of Venus (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, I'd say the much greater sin in planetary nomenclature was calling Uranus (please, no dumb jokes) "Uranus" (Greek) rather than "Caelus" (Roman) and thus sticking with the Roman nomenclature used with the rest of the planets.
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In that episode, inhabitants of a planet whose sun was about to go nova retreated into their own planet's past. So Venus isn't necessary for that scenario.
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If we can build (presumably) ships that are sealed enough to protect us from the great vacuum that is space, and that can last years in the great nothingness that is space, then we can certainly build habitats here on earth to survive the most extreme changes in climate.
At the end, a spaceship that will take us to another solar system is essentially a huge dwelling that contains everything we will need to restart life on another planet - there is no guarantee that we will find the necessary building blocks
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You could.... use a heat pump?
How do you think I cool my house and inside my car to a lower temperature than outside?
How does my fridge and freezer get colder than the inside of my house?
Satellites with radioactive material in them use the heat to generate electricity. The problem then becomes heat, so they need to be covered in reflective material so the sun doesn't melt them.
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Heat pumps are efficient when they aren't pumping against a large differential. Most heat pumps aren't at all efficient getting the inside temperature to about 25C when it's something like -20C out there, and that's a 45 kelvin spread, not a 60 kelvin spread. Trying to keep comfortable when it's 90C out is going to take an awful lot of power, which will release its own heat.
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If the compressor is built to work in a high temperature environment, it can be on the outside. The waste heat it generates can then be radiated or conducted.
I never said it was efficient either, the person I replied to said evaporative cooling was the only option.
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(just fire some fukken lasers at Jupiter, maybe we might even make a minor star in a few billion years)
Fraid not. Jupiter is too small to sustain fusion temperatures at its core. If you fire lasers at it, you'll heat it up, and increase its volume. You'd make it *less dense*. If you somehow made Jupiter more massive, it would become smaller, and eventually yeah it'll be a red dwarf. But you need about 8-10 times the current mass.
So yeah - that plan wouldn't work.
Re:Probably. As resource-rich as Earth. (Score:5, Informative)
The solar system is comprised of the sun, plus miscellaneous junk (0.14% the mass of the sun).
If you want to be more precise, the solar system is comprised of the sun-Jupiter binary system (barycentre outside the sun), plus miscellaneous junk (~30% the mass of Jupiter)
If you want to be more precise, the solar system is comprised of the sun, the gias giants, plus miscellaneous junk
If you want to be more precise, the solar system is comprised of the sun, the gas giants, the ice giants, and miscellaneous junk
No, the mass for making Jupiter a star just isn't here, unless you want to take it from the sun (which actually might be nice - extending its lifespan). Easier might be selective removal of gases from Jupiter - remove part of the 1H and 4He but leave the 2H, and you might be able to get it up to a sufficient D-D reaction rate to be considered a star (although I haven't done any simulations; the compression might be too low).
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It's pretty doubtful that any kind of pre-biotic organic matter could even survive where there is a large biosphere with thousands of species that eat such matter are around. As to not observing things, well, no one has observed a quark, or indeed, any elementary particle, and we can only infer their existence from other lines of evidence. Does that mean electrons are impossible, or does it just mean that direct observation is not the only way you confirm a theory?
Beyond that, other aspects of your post amo
Y'know... (Score:1)
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Okay, so Earth will be uninhabitably hot in a couple billion years. We already knew that, with or without AGW.
If someone figures out a way to extend my life into the billion year range, I'll start worrying about what Earth will be like in a billion or so years....
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It's almost as though putting that thought in your mind was the ENTIRE PURPOSE OF THE ARTICLE. Weird!
The problem with the "May have been..." articles (Score:2)
Parallels to *our civilization were strikingly sim (Score:3)
Except for a technological achievement that led to their utter and total extinction: the development of the Galaxy Note 7. If it weren't for the recall that is in effect today, we would have hurtled on toward our self-destruction. A disaster of Bibilical proportions.
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Guess... (Score:2)
It all leads to the impending climate change (Score:2)
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It really isn't all that amazing. People with three-figure IQ's understand why.
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That seems like the mother of all confirmation bias.
Seeing as how if it had happened, none of us would be here to have this conversation...
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It really isn't all that amazing. People who sublimate their own common sense to an imaginary scientific clergy say so.
Aha! An agenda emerges... (Score:2)
"Way and colleagues simulated the Venusian climate at various time points between 2.9 billion and 715 million years ago, employing similar models to those used to predict future climate change on Earth."
Finding a layer of golf clubs and municipal bonds on Venus would indicate the presence of primordial Republicans, marking the start of runaway greenhouse gas buildup.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:1)
"impenetrable carbon dioxide atmosphere"
Uhh, the Russians might disagree with that considering they successfully landed on Venus over half a dozen times.
Help! Where should I go? (Score:2)
Back in the day a story like this would spawn a few threads detailing various minutia of some bizzare chemical reaction or how the atmospheric density results in a superfluid on the surface (and all the cool stuff that superfluids do). There is a little of that here but this story is now a rare bird on /. - news for flamewars, stuff that incites.
If anyone is still out there that remembers the nerdy old days, is there any forum left on the internet to discuss this sort of stuff? Or have trolling and flamewar
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Great post. This is where the GRITS hit the PANTS, man!
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People like "spacenutter" guy, and the general "science is bad because it says my fixation on driving a hummer without justifiable cause" type idiocy has made it unpleasant to push discussion that direction. Endless postings about " your mom's superfluid" and the like.
In short, idiots outnumber the wise, and the wise, wisely remain silent.
Follow the Nitrogen (Score:3)
I was inclined to poo-poo this paper but it does make an interesting observation. Venus has a crushingly dense atmosphere now (mostly CO2) but it is 3.5% Nitrogen. The authors point out that the weight of Venus's Nitrogen is actually comparable to the Earth's (10^19 kg). The field of astrobiology runs off the rails in its endless focus on carbon and water when what you also need is nitrogen [wikipedia.org] (and reduced [wikipedia.org] at that). Since the sun was once cooler and Venus was once wetter there is good reason to investigate the possibility that conditions were once life favorable.
Too bad it is most assuredly dead now.
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> Too bad it is most assuredly dead now.
hmm... well, that would be a good test of this Evolution theory thing.
We can be #1 (Score:3)
Hang on though, we're working very hard to catch up [nasa.gov] and maybe we'll be #1 soon.
Why not seed Venus with extremophiles? (Score:2)
I often wonder if we can seed Venus with a large collection of extremophiles from various earth environments? Like various hyperbaric sulfobacteria etc at hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans and volcanoes. Some of them might survive and start the 'terraforming', even if the process takes several millions of years. Not that they can make it human-inhabitable anytime soon, but we can observe what microbes do survive, and figure out a way remove the sulfuric acid etc. And if any of them start thriv
CO2 didn't cause Venus' hellish conditions (Score:4, Interesting)
So Venus' CO2 was allowed to build up instead of being lost to space, eventually leading to the enormous pressures Venus has today. Mars's atmosphere has a similar composition (both are 96% CO2), but due to its weaker gravity and lack of water vapor, most of Mars' CO2 was lost into space giving Mars a surface atmospheric pressure only 0.6% that of Earth's. Venus' surface pressure by contrast is 92 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level. CO2's critical point [wikipedia.org] is at 73.9 bar (atmospheres) and 31 C, above which the difference between the gas and liquid phases disappears. So the CO2 "atmosphere" on Venus' surface is more like a sea of CO2 fluid (the Venera landers didn't even use parachutes for the final descent - they gently floated down using nothing but hull drag). You basically have the greenhouse effect of the CO2 gas, compressed into the higher density of liquid CO2. All made possible by excess water vapor early in Venus' early history.
Earth's early atmosphere was also nearly the same as on Mars and Venus [wikipedia.org]. But Earth retained liquid water, which was able to dissolve most of the CO2, creating the "habitable" conditions for life we have today. So it's actually liquid vs gaseous water which is the key difference, not CO2 levels. In fact Venus' present atmosphere is theorized to actually be much more hospitable. In the past when water vapor was still present, temperatures there were probably twice what they are today.
Re:CO2 didn't cause Venus' hellish conditions (Score:4, Interesting)
It's my understanding that Venus's closer proximity to the sun isn't the most significant reason for its heat up. For whatever reason, a proper carbon cycle didn't evolve or broke down, thus leading to increasing amounts of CO2. No doubt greater solar radiation played a part, but at least by current theories, Venus does lie within the "Goldilocks Zone", albeit close to the inner edge. By the same token, Mars lies towards the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone, and the chief reason it doesn't have any significant amount of liquid water is simply because its gravity isn't sufficient to hold on to a dense atmosphere, and the dense atmosphere it once had dissipated into space.
One theory I've read as to why the carbon cycle may have failed on Venus is that the lack of a satellite, in particular a large satellite like the Moon, meant that plate tectonics never developed, and thus you didn't have a carbon "conveyor belt".
Inevtitable (Score:2)
At our current rate of growth Earth has less than 400 years before a runaway effect will take hold here as well. Calculations show that the oceans will literally boil away by then. And these aren't climate models. They are basic thermodynamic models. No doubt we will curb our growth rate well before then, but will it be too little too late?
Robots to dig (Score:1)
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They don't last too long in the atmosphere.
It's hot, it's acidic and it's dense.
With the 400+ degrees, the sulfuric acid and being 90x higher pressure than earth, nothing we've sent there has lasted more than about 2 hours on the surface
The current record holder is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] with 127 minutes..
Venus might still have life (Score:2)
Venus could still have life like this life on Earth, which can survive any surface conditions.
A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria [princeton.edu] nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight. According to members of the team, the finding suggests life might exist in similarly extreme conditions even on other worlds.
Amazing (Score:2)
Amazing how nicely this theory dovetails with the whole Global Warming Armageddon / Endless Folly Of Mankind narrative. Apparently the Venusians didn't embrace global Marxism quickly enough and the rest of us can now bear witness to the results of their woefully greedy and misguided Capitalist ways.
Spinning up Venus (Score:1)
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How completely fucking absurd. Is this complete cretin fishing for a grant from, I don't know, the Retards Association?
Are you at odds with the calculation disclaimer? I sure as hell will accept a documented form of acknowledging human error over politicians blindly taking what scientists say as the gospel to write shitty policy with.
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How completely fucking absurd. Is this complete cretin fishing for a grant from, I don't know, the Retards Association?
I would hope he means "if the assumptions my calculations are based on are correct" rather than worrying if he made an arithmetic error.