Rivers of Lava on Venus Reveal a More Volcanically Active Planet (nytimes.com) 24
Witnessing the blood-red fires of a volcanic eruption on Earth is memorable. But to see molten rock bleed out of a volcano on a different planet would be extraordinary. That is close to what scientists have spotted on Venus: two vast, sinuous lava flows oozing from two different corners of Earth's planetary neighbor. From a report: "After you see something like this, the first reaction is 'wow,'" said Davide Sulcanese, a doctoral student at the Universita d'Annunzio in Pescara, Italy, and an author of a study reporting the discovery in the journal Nature Astronomy, published on Monday. Earth and Venus were forged at the same time. Both are made of the same primeval matter, and both are the same age and size. So why is Earth a paradise overflowing with water and life, while Venus is a scorched hellscape with acidic skies?
Volcanic eruptions tinker with planetary atmospheres. One theory holds that, eons ago, several apocalyptic eruptions set off a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, turning it from a temperate, waterlogged world into an arid desert of burned glass. To better understand its volcanism, scientists hoped to catch a Venusian eruption in the act. But although the planet is known to be smothered in volcanoes, an opaque atmosphere has prevented anyone from seeing an eruption the way spacecraft have spotted them on Io, the hypervolcanic moon of Jupiter. In the 1990s, NASA's spacecraft Magellan used cloud-penetrating radar to survey most of the planet. But back then, the relatively low-resolution images made spotting fresh molten rock a troublesome task.
Volcanic eruptions tinker with planetary atmospheres. One theory holds that, eons ago, several apocalyptic eruptions set off a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, turning it from a temperate, waterlogged world into an arid desert of burned glass. To better understand its volcanism, scientists hoped to catch a Venusian eruption in the act. But although the planet is known to be smothered in volcanoes, an opaque atmosphere has prevented anyone from seeing an eruption the way spacecraft have spotted them on Io, the hypervolcanic moon of Jupiter. In the 1990s, NASA's spacecraft Magellan used cloud-penetrating radar to survey most of the planet. But back then, the relatively low-resolution images made spotting fresh molten rock a troublesome task.
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That's not how this works. You have to prove yourself right. Proving things wrong is usually not possible because the set of things that are possible is near infinite. for example how do you know Venus was carefully put in its orbit by aliens?
For intelligent people to believe something, it has to be proven or capable of making predictions that don't have a simpler or more plausible explanation.
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Don't you have a false negative problem? Just because Aristarchus's heliocentric theory wasn't provable by observing parallax motion of the stars in his day, does that mean we should have rejected the theory for two more millennia?
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How would you know whether to believe that one or the one that says the sun is rolled around the sky by an invisible dung beetle?
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If your truth selection mechanism has false negatives (rejecting heliocentrism) and false positives (affirming that continents are fixed), how confident are you that any current scientific consensus will not be viewed as equivalent to the theory that a dung beetle rolls the sun around the sky, in time?
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Umm, I am not .. but our current models allow us to make predictions that have proven accurate. For example with Newton's law we can predict exactly where Venus will be in the sky 10 years from now. None of the previous models allowed that, the position of Venus would be slightly off. With the quantum theory we can build microchips with transistors that utilize quantum tunneling. The most important aspect of any theory is can it be used to build a mathematical model from which we can predict behavior or eve
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That doesn't contradict what I said, at all: "For intelligent people to believe something, it has to be proven or capable of making predictions that don't have a simpler or more plausible explanation."
Read each word carefully.
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You and I both know these planets have no future! [youtube.com]
Re: Another clear case of Climate Change (Score:2)
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Re: Another clear case of Climate Change (Score:2)
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What wouldn't change would be human ideas about what the world is/ how the world works. Without humans generating (and testing) new ideas on a faster-than-daily basis, then the rate of change in ideas would indeed be lower.
rsilvergun (Score:1, Funny)
There's no monetary incentive for anyone on earth do anything about these eruptions on Venus. Capitalism isn't built for dealing with problems like this. What we need is a unified government with goals and common interests and we can come up with a plan to deal with this. Capitalism, I'm afraid, won't be able to address Venus properly.
--
www.fark.com/politics
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If capitalism did focus on Venus, can you bet that things would get a whole lot worse very very quickly, as we can observe how capitalism has treated the environment of the western US, afflicting it with the blight of invasive humanity?
Venus is pretty cool (Score:2)
The idea, even remote, that there could be life in the atmosphere is worth exploring and it's nice to see it's getting some attention again, nobody has sent anything out there since Magellan but there's 6 under development probes in the next 6-ish years planned and the Russian and American missions are including landers. Hopefully they can get the lens caps off more reliably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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So one of those theories was that phosphine gas in the atmosphere was a byproduct of life (we know terrestrial microbes appear to make it, although not how). The team who published that said that it was unlikely that the phosphine was volcanic in origin, as Venus wasn't volcanic enough for that: they claimed Venus would need to have at least 200 times as much volcanic activity as Earth for that to make sense. The paper
This is bigger than you think. (Score:2)
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It wasn't because we couldn't map the surface. Last time I read about it (quite a while ago), the surface of Venus was seen to be consistent with long-period full-resurfacing rather than ongoing vulcanism altering small portions at a time.
To get to that point, there was no need for photography, I believe the conclusions were reached via radar imagery and that was sufficient.
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Did "we"?
You may have ; whenever I've thought about the question in the last few decades (hardly a daily event, but probably more than a yearly event. Hint : RTF-UID.), I've come to the conclusion that those damned clouds are a problem, and we really need better surveying.
The discovery of several visible changes in the landscape of Venus, on a tens-to hundreds of metres scale, was a big help in quantifying the rates of activity on the planet. But it's still r
Alternate link (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-a... [nasa.gov]