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Venus May Have Been Habitable, Says NASA (sciencedaily.com)
EzInKy writes: Science Daily has an article speculating that Venus may have been habitable which is suggested by NASA climate modeling, which proposes that Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to two billion years of its early history. Talk about global climate change run amok. Venus may represent a near Earth example of what is in store for the future of our world if we don't make it a number one priority to address. Science Daily reports: "Venus today is a hellish world. It has a crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere 90 times as thick as Earth's. There is almost no water vapor. Temperatures reach 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius) at its surface. Scientists have long theorized that Venus formed out of ingredients similar to Earth's, but followed a different evolutionary path. Measurements by NASA's Pioneer mission to Venus in the 1980s first suggested Venus originally may have had an ocean. However, Venus is closer to the sun than Earth and receives far more sunlight. As a result, the planet's early ocean evaporated, water-vapor molecules were broken apart by ultraviolet radiation, and hydrogen escaped to space. With no water left on the surface, carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, leading to a so-called runaway greenhouse effect that created present conditions."
in the clouds where it's more Earth-like.
And transmitted images digitally from the surface, in 1975. Cold War was a gift to mankind, that pissing match was legendary.
So women might actually have come from Venus...
Several posts in and not one Uranus joke among them...
Actually, these are mutually compatible myths.
Oh.. it's about the PLANET (scowl)
Leftist global warming myths again run amok but the facts are as follows:
"However, Venus is closer to the sun than Earth and receives far more sunlight. As a result, the planet's early ocean evaporated, water-vapor molecules were broken apart by ultraviolet radiation, and hydrogen escaped to space. With no water left on the surface, carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, leading to a so-called runaway greenhouse effect that created present conditions."
Nowhere in the article does it suggest that Earth could suffer a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. And indeed the vast majority of climate scientists do not believe that is possible on earth, even if we burn everything. We can make the planet unable to support a large human population, but we probably can't trigger a thermal runaway.
What with all the molecule splitting and heating up. I say we extinguish that motherfucker. Take that, man-made climate changers.
Are you saying they are wrong and Venus has always been as it is now? Are you a believer in some new sort of steady state universe I was previously unaware of where the planets are unchanging? That's an interesting theory, you should write it up for us all.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
I'm sorry but Venus is not tidally locked to the Earth. Or the sun. More info. The orbit is "normal" (it has to be or it would fall into the sun, or leave the solar system) but the rotation is both very slow, and in the opposite direction to all the other planets in the solar system.
The summary sucks for plenty of reasons. The original NASA article isn't loaded up with alarmist bullshit. Earth will eventually become as hot as Venus and there will be a runaway greenhouse effect. However, that's extremely unlikely to be due to human activities. The Earth has been significantly warmer in prehistoric times and didn't undergo a runaway greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide levels have been much higher, but it didn't cause the oceans to evaporate away, either. Humans are likely to eradicate themselves from the planet long before they can make that occur. It will happen as the sun becomes brighter and expands, which will eventually cause the Earth to heat irreversibly and evaporate the oceans. It damages the credibility of climate scientists to attribute ridiculous claims to them, especially when they said nothing of the sort.
Now, any study like this depends on the validity of the model and the assumptions made in its configuration. The manuscript was recently accepted to JGR, but hasn't yet gone through a copy editor. I'm not about to pay Wiley for an article that's still in preparation. Unfortunately, I can't comment on the validity of the model without reading the paper. That's said, the abstract says nothing about human activities causing this on Earth. Please leave alarmist bullshit out of stories. The submitter and the editor who posted it should be ashamed.
Maybe iIt did not get a proper kick the way Earth apparently got from Thea.
But also Earth has shellfish which turn carbon dioxide into limestone. Venus does not.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Is there any evidence to indicate that the surface temps were ever below the boiling point? If not, then the claim of oceans evaporating, um, evaporates, and the H2O was always in gas form.
Just another day in Paradise
The sun is slowly heating up. Regardless of what we do as a species, in a few billion years the sun will get too hot for any of the current negative feedback mechanisms in earths climate to offset and the oceans will start to evaporate away.
That said, I'm not too worried about a runaway greenhouse happening due to man made climate change. If a 6 mile wide asteroid 65 million years ago that set most of the terrestrial plant matter on fire couldn't manage it I doubt we will. What we will do however is make it unpleasently hot in the equatorial latitudes for ourselves.
Making money off climate change? How's this for making money - fossil fuel companies receive $14.5 billion in government subsidies every single day (IMF figure). Gee, I wonder who has more financial interest in pushing the climate change debate in a certain direction...
...the fuck?
Ok, I have to ask 'cause I'm running short on Flat-Earth bozos to laugh at, where did you get the "Venus tide-locked between Sun and Earth" bit from?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It works also for most feminists. Might have been agreeable once, turned into something fully toxic and no sane man will ever go there willingly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's over 5 trillion a year, a third of the US GDP, which is about 15 trillion. Global GDP is 75 trillion. That makes US GDP about 20% of global GDP, which would mean that the US is providing 1 trillion a year in subsidies, or 7% of GDP in fossil fuel subsidies.
I wonder how that figure is calculated and what counts as "subsidy".
This is a long and less funny version of The grapes are sour.
Venus is *ALMOST* tidally locked with the sun. Its rotation is slightly retrograde. The problem remains: It needs to rotate faster to even out solar heating.
227-3517
Read on on it. If I remember rightly, it's things like writing off expenditure as expenditure. It's a lie.
Where do people come up with this bullshit? I mean, it is actually easier to learn real physics and geology than it is to invent this stuff.
No wonder Hillary beat Bernie. She cheated and lied just like she has done her whole life and now the morons will vote for her anyway
Venus may represent a near Earth example of what is in store for the future of our world if we don't make it a number one priority to address.
No.
At least not unless we are talking billions of years and plans to address it include things like drastically changing the orbit of the earth.
Global warming may be bad for humanity but our planet and life itself will do just fine.
On the solid surface of Venus, you'd need instruments better than a human eye to tell if it were daytime (viz : sun above local horizon) or not. You'd probably get a little bit of dull red colour from the atmosphere temperature, but you'd not be seeing the Sun directly. The atmosphere does a fine job of evening out solar heating. It has some winds which go entirely around the equator far faster than the planet rotates.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
For a moment I was going to complain about injecting personal agenda opinions into headlines and then I saw it was our own resident "chicken little" who constantly cries about climate change and other liberal/social issues. BeauHD article... meh.
This is quite an interesting scenario. I never considered that the most logical way for another world war event to happen was simply for nation states to collapse into a form of global civil war. And as you describe, why couldn't this happen? Even if you are the wealthy elite who control what nuclear weapons are serviceable, you can hardly use them on the people at the end of your driveway.
Wow that is really scary.
"Venus may represent a near Earth example of what is in store for the future of our world if we don't make it a number one priority to address."
Dumb.
Wow you crammed a ton of incorrect information into a single post. Are you trolling or just too stupid to look things up?
On Earth it appears that the oceans put enough water into the crust as to make plate tectonics possible (the water lubricates fault lines. If Venus ever had plate tectonics, it probably stopped when the water evaporated.
Water is not and never has been a requirement for a planet to have plate tectonics.
And then there is the fact that Venus is tide-locked between the Sun and Earth (always has the save face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together)
Not only is Venus not tide-locked to earth, it doesn't even rotate in the same direction as earth. Venus has retrograde rotation (rotates clockwise when viewed from north pole) and it has the slowest rotation of any planet at 243 earth days for one rotation. It would be impossible for a plant to be tidal locked to another planet. Tidal locking happens in objects that orbit each other. Venus obviously does not orbit Earth.
Earth's magnetic field exists partly because of its rotation, and that magnetic field helps protect its atmosphere. Venus hasn't got the necessary rotation rate.
Earth has a dynamo in it's core whereas Venus does not. Simulations have shown that Venus' rotation is adequate to produce a dynamo but Venus doesn't have one because it has insufficient convection in the core. Venus does have a (comparatively) small induced magnetic field but it is too small to provide meaningful protection from solar wind.
I once speculated about a way to make Venus habitable.
Since you clearly have no idea what you are talking about I suggest you cease doing that until you learn considerably more than you are demonstrating.
I guess it must have been Venusians burning their fossil fuels and creating this disaster. What a piece of nonsense. No we, are not facing Venus future due to human activity. We are facing Venus future in about 2 billion years due to sun running out of hydrogen, growing in size and radiating more energy than today. Venus receives twice as much energy as Earth, has 40 times amount of gas in the atmosphere as Earth due to volcanic activity.
Maybe iIt did not get a proper kick the way Earth apparently got from Thea.
Venus is *ALMOST* tidally locked with the sun. Its rotation is slightly retrograde. The problem remains: It needs to rotate faster to even out solar heating.
Which is why the best theory is that it got it like Earth did but much, much harder.
Damned Venus-men and their damned Venus-man-made climate change!!!
You just described a planet that is tide-locked to the Sun ONLY. Pretty much by definition, when we're closest to Venus, it's directly between us and the Sun, and so we'll be looking at the dark side of Venus, which will always be the same, since it's tidelocked to the Sun.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
in the clouds where it's more Earth-like.
It's more "Earth-like" high up in the Venutian atmosphere in the same sense that being in the city of Chernobyl is safer than standing right in the reactor. Not exactly where you want to take your summer vacation either way.
Pretty much by definition, when we're closest to Venus, it's directly between us and the Sun, and so we'll be looking at the dark side of Venus, which will always be the same, since it's tidelocked to the Sun.
1) Venus is NOT tide locked to the sun.
2) The orbits of Venus and the Earth do not take the same period so we aren't stuck looking at it from one position.
3) Combining 1 and 2, even when we are closest to Venus we don't see the same side every time even when closest
Habitable temperature range != habitable planet. While nerds at NASA may be constantly arguing about the air conditioner thermostat setting, there are other quite important factors necessary to sustain life. Like oxygen in the atmosphere (there is none) and the lack of poisonous, corrosive chemicals like sulfuric acid
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
A change in a climate will invariably lead to extinction of species. Always has, always will.
That's not an excuse to induce climate change when it can be avoided. It's also not an excuse to do nothing about it once we recognize the problem.
But something always survives.
No, SO FAR something has always survived. It's entirely possible for the climate to change sufficiently for nothing to survive.
Earth has faced a lot of very difficult times in its existence and sometimes more than 95% of the species died out. But behold, life is still there.
Maybe you are a nihilist but personally I'd prefer to not rush human extinction along nor that of other species if it can be avoided.
NASA scientists need to learn the difference between evidence and simulation. There is almost no evidence to support this hypothesis -- the best that one can say for the simulation is that it shows that the hypothesis isn't overtly incompatible with the little evidence that there is. People need to read Jaynes' lovely book on the logic of science and Bayesian analysis so that they can quit confusing model consistency with model correctness. As it is, it is as if one has the hypothesis that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. One examines the grassy knoll and finds, sure enough, that the grass appears to have been stepped on -- there is evidence that "something" has been there. One does an elaborate computation demonstrating that yes, a sniper on the grassy knoll would have had to step on the grass in order to be there, so that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis, and then publishes the result in the National Enquirer as proven fact (and if possible, blame the presence of the sniper on the Clintons -- after all they COULD have done it, right?).
Never mind the possibility that the grass might have been pressed down by a passing giraffe, a sleeping hobo, the lawnmower that last mowed it, or that the grass actually WASN'T "pressed down", it just grew that way. Never mind that the Clintons were in middle school at the time and would have had to fund it with lunch money, which they (obviously) shook down from other students or accepted as a bribe so that they could intervene with the teachers to get the students who paid them off A's.
Alas, that science has come to this. National Enquirer, look out!
After all, the hypothesis that Mars has had liquid oceans dates back to science fiction authors and the earliest observations of "canals". It has its own wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But even in the case of Mars, with eyes in the sky looking down through a clear, thin atmosphere and multiple landers on the ground looking for a smoking gun, we lack anything like conclusive evidence that Mars once had a liquid ocean.
Venus, on the other hand, has an atmosphere with around 100x the mass of Earth's entire atmosphere, a pressure of 90 or so atmospheres on the ground, where the temperature is only a couple of hundred degrees too cool to melt lead. It contains nontrivial amounts of several acids in its predominantly CO2 base. It is corrosive, hot, and crushing. The average survival time for the landers sent there so far is around one hour (actually, a bit less). We have something less than around 3 hours of total observational time on the ground, IIRC, all taken from dying landers with some dysfunctional bits through air a bit over twice the temperature of boiling water, before the conditions killed the lander altogether.
We have almost NO evidence from the surface AT ALL, and the little that we have contains no direct evidence that could even be VAGUELY construed as a smoking gun for oceans.
This makes me suspect that this is a fundraiser for the proposed lander missions. "Hey, maybe Venus once had a liquid ocean! Life could have developed there! Never mind that the atmosphere even a few billion years ago if anything probably had a GREATER mass and HIGHER pressures at the surface (while still being enormously hot with 40% more incident solar radiation and an adiabatic lapse rate from hell down to the surface in the dense atmosphere). Give us money! We'll go find out!"
Sigh.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
...because Venus is closer to the sun, then how the hell did they form in the first place? This story is BS.
I am not sold on the whole man made climate change argument.
So you are saying you don't believe in science then. Fair enough. At least we understand where you are coming from.
If you have actual evidence rather than vague doubts that man is not substantially responsible for recent climate changes by all means bring it forth. Because so far the evidence seem to pretty clearly point the finger directly at us.
I think its a complex system we don't understand.
It IS a complex system AND we understand quite a bit about it. While there is much more to learn there are many things we are actually quite confident about. The fact that you can't wrap your head around it doesn't mean those who study it don't know what they are talking about.
There exists a good possibility there are drivers such as solar maximums and run away effect that may already have been triggered that are bigger than 'us' and simply cutting emissions might not do it.
Do you seriously think that idea hasn't occurred to climate scientists? There has been substantial research into that exact thing (and many other drivers) to try to determine whether or not their effects are significant. So far there has been no evidence supporting the conclusion that other drivers are more significant than man made pollution for recent climatic changes.
We must master climate engineering if we want to do more than survive and instead continue to thrive. Taking the gas out of economic engine does not seem to me to be the best way to get there.
Who says we have to shoot ourselves in the foot economically? There is massive economic benefit to be had with developing clean energy sources. Pollution costs money in health, maintenance, cleanup and disposal. You don't have to pay to deal with a mess you don't make in the first place. And fossil fuels are hugely polluting - it's not even debated by those who make their living from them. As the saying goes, "if you think the economy is more important than the environment, try counting your money while holding your breath".
The surface temperature varies little from day to night, and cloudtop day/night temperature differences are fairly earthlike. A thick atmosphere does a good job of transferring heat.
Rotation could be to blame for a lot of Venus's problems, however. It could explain Venus's lack of anything more than an induced magnetic field. Which of course leaves it vulnerable to erosion by the solar wind.
Interetingly enough, if you were to eject most of Venus's atmosphere at a couple dozen km/s (if I'm remembering the numbers right), you could impart enough torque to get the planet up to Earthlike rotation speeds. So in terms of "megaengineering" for terraforming, what you effectively need is a solar-driven rocket engine using the atmosphere as propellant, with the structure providing compression and the greenhouse effect (IR reflection / vis transmission), the atmosphere providing absorption inside the "chamber", and lofting from any combination of buoyancy and skin drag. Hydrogen could be returned to Venus via similar systems on gas giants. It's of course a lot more complicated than that in reality, and the concept of construction of such a massive structure is purely within the realms of sci-fi for the forseeable future.
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
Venetian Dinosaurs invented the automobile, set off global warming, and they, along with all other life forms, went extinct.
Terraforming Venus was shown back in the old Cosmos series. We humans made it rain or some such thing. Hurray! We are on our way to making another home!
The rains fell on Venus and out of the rocks emerged some sort of worm-like life form, which was promptly killed off by our helpful rain. The point the show was trying to make was that we don't understand all the consequences of doing things like that.
My additional point is that we humans don't OWN the Solar System, or even the Earth. We have no automatic right to do anything as we please. Sure, nothing is standing in our way but that does not give us right to do whatever the hell we want, terraforming Mars or Venus or plonking down bases all over the place.
And if we are exceedingly lucky and somehow manage to survive and actually become a space-faring race, we may eventually run across worlds where life already exists. Then what? We have even less right to do with it as we wish. And if we are really unlucky, we will run into some worlds inhabited by intelligent beings who won't particularly like human invaders. We sure as hell won't have any rights there.
This may sound all silly scifi but up to now in human history, everywhere mankind has gone, we have owned. The plants and animals and microbes have never objected. This doesn't extend out there. We may find, in fact, that the environment of space and other words presents a very strong objection.
Sig for hire.
Not true. The lighting on the surface of Venus during daytime is "gloomy", somewhat like being in a dust storm in the evening. But it absolutely is present during the day (and not at night). I even read one paper that showed that you could actually have solar-powered surface probes. You have to be very careful in your panel selection to find one that will generate anything under those temperatures and light conditions, but you can produce a trickle, for low-power scientific equipment.
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
Basically, picture dimly lighting your house with halogen lights (for a rough approximation of the visible spectrum curve)... that's basically what things would look like on the surface of Venus. With a relatively short (although not extremely short) visibility range (I don't remember the number off the top of my head, I want to say a few hundred meters).
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
And they too claimed that Global Warming was a myth! Drill baby drill! And look where they are now. Here on earth, trying to do the same damage.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"My additional point is that we humans don't OWN the Solar System, or even the Earth. We have no automatic right to do anything as we please. Sure, nothing is standing in our way but that does not give us right to do whatever the hell we want, terraforming Mars or Venus or plonking down bases all over the place."
Sure we do. We have the same right as all life. To spread as far as we can. What you are saying is like saying that pre native americans had no right to cross the land bridge to north america. Or that Arthropods had no right to come on land.
The function for life is to spread out. So how is it not right to change a planet to suit us. If it is life less all the better.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
fossil fuel because their conservatives believe more in money than life just like ours.
Mars' loss of water is not comparable to Venus's. A primary indicator of water loss is the deterium-hydrogen ratio. Mars's is 5-7 times that of Earth. Venus's is 150-250 times that of Earth's.
I stopped reading the rest of your post when I hit the words "politically correct physicists".
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
Gotta love jackasses. Hey Zippy, the point of the article was that: "Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to two billion years of its EARLY HISTORY..."
Over time Venus climate changed which gave rise to the current one. It's an interesting study. The implications for Earth have to do with the consequences of heat build up over-time. Earth's oceans could evaporate over time if heat builds up to such levels.
I'm sorry but Venus is not tidally locked to the Earth. .
You wouldn't think so, but, strangely, Venus very nearly is rotationally locked to the Earth: It presents the same face to the Earth on each closest approach.
(583.92-day interval between conjunctions to Earth ("synodic period") = 5.001444 Venusian solar days.
But this can't be a tidal effect, however: the tidal effects are way too low to have any possible effect on Venus' rotation. Best guess is that it is simply a coincidence.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm even more cynical. Who actually benefits from the global warming panic? Oh, wait, snap! Energy companies, all of which are "fossil fuel" companies simply because we cannot produce the energy we need to sustain civilization without using fossil fuels this decade, and probably won't be able to for the next two or three decades if not forever (where if fusion really does come home, deuterium is still a "fossil fuel", it's just been "fossilized" for a bit longer than coal). How do they benefit?
Well, let's see. Most energy companies are public utilities, which basically means that they cannot just raise prices arbitrarily, because they are granted a virtual monopoly on whatever part of whatever state they serve. We don't have multiple power lines and cannot shop for a company that sells electricity at the lowest price. The regulators basically permit them only to make money at a fixed margin relative to costs as reflected in a set retail price.
So how can you make MORE money if you are a public utility? Well, let's see. How about raising the set retail price by inflating costs? Yeah, that would work! If we double the price of coal (or coal burning plants) and we sell at the same commission-permitted margin, we make twice the real income! Everybody wins! The coal miner gets twice the money. The power company gets twice the money (same margin, but now they've increased their retail cost to reflect the higher upstream costs). The only loser is -- wait for it -- the consumer!
But then there is the pesky problem of the fact that we have a lot of coal, enough to fuel the US for what, a few centuries at least? Hard to create the illusion of scarcity in that kind of marketplace. So let's invent an entirely artificial scarcity by limiting how much coal we use! Let's ramp up the cost of the coal burning plants! Let's get laws passed that force us to build solar and wind generation systems that -- wait for it again -- generate electricity at an amortized cost that is even greater than coal, and requires huge capital investment to boot! Now we can perfectly legitimately ramp up the retail price of the electricity we sell because we can demonstrate higher costs, and since our profit MARGINS, not the dollar amounts, are fixed, the more expensive the energy the more money we make from it!
Power companies have been by far, overwhelmingly, the greatest beneficiaries of the global warming panic. They don't give a damn how they generate the electricity they sell us, and they have an interest so strong and obvious that it cannot reasonably be called "vested" in selling us electricity generated the most expensive way possible, because (as public utilities) they are PROTECTED from risk and have a damn monopoly!
Hence in California, electricity costs well over 50% more than it costs in the rest of the country. In NY it is even more costly.
Now, this cynicism isn't entirely justified. Some power companies probably do have a board-driven "conscience" within the bounds permitted by maintaining profitability, and large scale PV solar has, actually, come down in cost to where it one can amortize new solar construction in many states (including NC) in a reasonable time frame, making it a comparatively cheap alternative to building expensive new coal or nuclear or even natural gas burners to handle e.g. summer air conditioning overloads and eke out fuel generated sources. But make no mistake about this. Portraying greedy energy companies as being knee jerk opposed to solar or wind is absurd. They'll make electricity using rodents running in spinning wheels if consumers can be forced to pay for it at fixed marginal profit.
The only possible real solution to this is fusion, or maybe PV solar in a decade, when we have perfected cost efficient storage and long distance transport with e.g. HVDC transmission lines from the sunny states to Maine and Alaska. Lockheed-Martin claims to have fusion licked. Two or three other groups do too. Fusion would actually elimi
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Wow you crammed a ton of incorrect information into a single post. Are you trolling or just too stupid to look things up?
The same question could be asked of you. You just "corrected" two fact that were not incorrect.
On Earth it appears that the oceans put enough water into the crust as to make plate tectonics possible (the water lubricates fault lines. If Venus ever had plate tectonics, it probably stopped when the water evaporated.
Water is not and never has been a requirement for a planet to have plate tectonics.
This is not known. Hydration is driven into rocks by subduction, and water content does decrease the viscosity of magma. So it is a plausible, although unproven, hypothesis that water is needed for plate tectonics.
And then there is the fact that Venus is tide-locked between the Sun and Earth (always has the save face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together)
Not only is Venus not tide-locked to earth, it doesn't even rotate in the same direction as earth.
Nevertheless, Venus does has the same face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together. This is not likely to be due to tidal effects, but the quoted statement that Venus always has the same face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together is correct. Unexpected, but correct.
Since you clearly have no idea what you are talking about I suggest you cease doing that until you learn considerably more than you are demonstrating.
and, likewise, you might do research before correcting facts that aren't actually incorrect.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
... but now we're in this era where "leftist" is unanimously used as an insult and ...
"leftist" should be a unanimous insult considering how...
If the left started supporting scientific progress once again, ,,,
Sigh. Science is not be "left" or "right." The science is the science. Facts shouldn't be adapted to your ideologies; your ideologies should deal with whatever the facts are, not work at denying them.
The facts don't 'support' a left or right ideology: they just are what they are.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
How did those "transmitted images" help mankind? Had we spent the billions on cancer-research or longevity or what have you instead, our lives today could've been much better. Yes, the lives of everyone, not just hobbyists interested in conditions on unreachable space-rocks.
And, in due time, we would've reached those rocks too...
Why is my real account disabled?
Well, yes, or maybe not.
Did you get the bit about "insufficient evidence to even speculate out loud" in a public forum? Because building a model that shows that it could have been so is not, actually, evidence, and -- as I tried to point out, "Mr. Zippy" -- even if the model built doesn't CONTRADICT any of the limited collection of factual evidence we have on Venus, that at best raises the model hypothesis by only a paltry amount relative to models that AREN'T EVEN consistent with that evidence, and doesn't really help it at all relative to alternative hypotheses that might explain the evidence equally well.
Now -- and I'm going out on a limb here, just thinking out loud -- do you think there MIGHT be some TINY chance that a model based on the hypothesis that Venus never had a liquid ocean, let alone one that lasted two billion years, could conceivably explain the little evidence that we have equally well? Do you think that even if one argues that the model with the ocean is marginally a tiny bit better, the evidence ITSELF is so very weak that nobody sane would accept the conclusion as being anything more than science fiction masquerading as science ?
Don't get me wrong. Running models is a good, healthy passtime for physicists. Keeps 'em off the streets. Feeds them and clothes their children. And who knows! This model could end up (eventually) being proven right by actual evidence! And I say this as a physicist who built and ran large scale models for close to 20 years. And /. is even an appropriate venue for a repost.
It is the add-on bullshit, the veiled threat that This Could Happen To Earth if we don't mend our ways, along the lines of James Hansen's "boiling oceans" nonsense, that is inappropriate. It is presenting it as if it is a lot more "true" than it actually is that is inappropriate.
I repeat. A similar hypothesis exists for Mars, and is a lot older. The evidence for it is far, far stronger. And it is still considered to be unproven even with rovers on the ground looking directly for hard evidence that it was so.
If they find the evidence, then of course it should be reported and will be a big deal. In the meantime, somebody writing a paper that claims that a model computation shows that Mars could have once had a liquid ocean is bo-ring, because it is obviously true, and equally obviously unproven.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Terraforming Venus was shown back in the old Cosmos series. We humans made it rain or some such thing. Hurray! We are on our way to making another home!
The rains fell on Venus and out of the rocks emerged some sort of worm-like life form, which was promptly killed off by our helpful rain. The point the show was trying to make was that we don't understand all the consequences of doing things like that.
Actually the series was called "The Universe & I" The episode was called "Mind-Slaughter". I found it again not too long ago on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVj2mgrTtU8
It's about 20 minutes long and was certainly nostalgic to see it again.
and, likewise, you might do research before correcting facts that aren't actually incorrect.
Ahem. I have to point out a false equivalency here. The GP debunked major FACTUAL points the GGP got completely wrong, either because they relied on inaccurate memories of something they skimmed a while back, or just made it up out of whole cloth on the spot (this happens more often than you'd think).
You on the other hand nit-picked a couple of minor points that do not correct the substance of anything. You did not debunk his point that water is not a requirement, merely diluted it slightly by saying "this is not known." There is not much in science that is "known," (other than raw data), so that really doesn't say anything except "maybe it is a requirement, even though we probably think not," which is at best a nitpick. At best.
Ditto on Venus having the same face toward Earth at closest approach. That's interesting, but even you admit this is not due to tidal effects. Which means the GP's post your comment was meant to debunk is in fact completely accurate.
The same question could be asked of you. You just "corrected" two fact that were not incorrect.
Disagree. See below.
This is not known. Hydration is driven into rocks by subduction, and water content does decrease the viscosity of magma. So it is a plausible, although unproven, hypothesis that water is needed for plate tectonics.
Your going to tell me I'm wrong by telling me about ideas that you admit are "pausible although unproven" as if they were facts? Curious argument you have there. Water undoubtedly has some effect on the system but the evidence that water is a required factor for plate tectonics to occur is as you say unproven. It's equally plausible that it has little effect on the system. It certainly is not the major driver as that has to be other forces, particularly liquid magma, convection currents, tidal forces and others. The mere presence of water (liquid or frozen) doesn't cause plate tectonics.
Given that the only have a sample size of one planet with plate tectonics which just happens to have water (maybe two as Europa may as well), it would be silly to claim that water is required to make plate tectonics possible. At best we don't know and there is a better than likely chance that it isn't required at all.
Nevertheless, Venus does has the same face toward Earth when the two planets are closest together.
That doesn't mean they are tidal locked. Tidal lock is a very specific thing and it by definition cannot be happening here. It could be orbital resonance or mere coincidence but it definitely is not tidal lock.
and, likewise, you might do research before correcting facts that aren't actually incorrect.
I will as soon as it happens.
I guess this was all set into motion by man made global warming on Venus too?
You write it up, you just invented it.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
If we double the price of coal (or coal burning plants) and we sell at the same commission-permitted margin, we make twice the real income!
Actually yes, how about we do double the price of coal and other fossil fuels and see how much the % of energy generated from solar and wind changes?
But then there is the pesky problem of the fact that we have a lot of coal, enough to fuel the US for what, a few centuries at least? Hard to create the illusion of scarcity in that kind of marketplace.
The world coal association claims "There are an estimated 892 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide. This means that there is enough coal to last us around 110 years at current rates of production".
Notice that important stipulation at the bottom there? at current rates of production? Do you know what happens to that when you add a modest year on year increase in consumption? Please do explain how we can continue to sustain growing energy needs using fossil fuels.
Portraying greedy energy companies as being knee jerk opposed to solar or wind is absurd.
What do you mean "knee jerk"? This has been going on for decades, have you not been paying attention for the last 20 years?
and they ended up with ridiculous results.
It seems you don't understand what "may have had" means.
The world coal association claims "There are an estimated 892 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide. This means that there is enough coal to last us around 110 years at current rates of production".
Notice that important stipulation at the bottom there? at current rates of production? Do you know what happens to that when you add a modest year on year increase in consumption? Please do explain how we can continue to sustain growing energy needs using fossil fuels.
Then we are truly fucked if even coal will run out in the lifetime of people currently living.
Let's say some group had a press release *today* announcing they had managed sustained fusion reactions with net positive energies.
You're talking something like 2 years to outfit a lab to verify the results, another maybe 10 years to get a useful demonstration-size plant designed, sited and built, and probably another 10-15 after it goes online to build an actual utility-scale operational plant running. And that'd be one plant. Maybe if it all went 100% perfect, you'd get people bold enough to build multiple plants simultaneously after a couple of years of operation of the first utility scale plant.
But honestly, you're looking at a 30 year lead time before any kind of significant energy generation from fusion takes place, and that's if somebody comes up with all the answers *tomorrow*. Assuming they don't, we could theoretically run out of coal before we could get another long-term baseload power generation source built.
If time timeline for coal exhaustion is under 100 years, I don't think there's any way we could get by on solar and wind alone in that timeframe.
Look at Lockheed-Martin's announcements on this so far. They are predicting (again, who know if they will hit it) 5 years to deployment. Some of the technologies being investigated won't take forever to implement -- they could be drop-in replacements for coal furnaces in existing plants. There would be a SERIOUS advantage to converting, assuming that they can manage to burn Deuterium.
I agree that the large scale reactor projects are more like 20 years out, but I suspect they are going to be overtaken. I could be wrong, but some physics groups I actually respect are making noises that they are going to get there before e.g. ITER.
But you are right -- photovoltaics and wind won't do it in the foreseeable future, at least not without efficient high-density storage and low-loss long range transport. Solar isn't going to run Iceland or Finland or Siberia in the winter...
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I think the volcanoes had more to do with it than anything. How else do you explain all the sulfuric acid?
I think the darker problem is that even if we cut timelines significantly, energy abundance isn't the only thing we're running out of. We're also exhausting the political stability necessary for developing new energy technologies and deploying them.
I'd worry that we're possibly on the cusp of a new flavor of poverty, energy poverty where the ability to marshal and consume significant energy for any purpose.
We have no automatic right to do anything as we please. Sure, nothing is standing in our way but that does not give us right to do whatever the hell we want, terraforming Mars or Venus or plonking down bases all over the place.
Where does such a "right", or the lack thereof, come from?
There are basically two logically-consistent theories about the origin of "rights". Either they are social constructs, created by humankind in order to facilitate our ability to live well with one another, or they are imposed on us by some higher being. If we assume they are social constructs, then your comment is clearly nonsense. If they're imposed upon us by some higher being, e.g. God, then fine... but since you're now making an argument by appeal to authority, you ought to at least identify the authority and cite the text of the declaration.
Well, there is a third option: "right" is defined by what you, RubberDogBone, feel. That's well and good, but I see no reason to accept your feelings as in any way restricting what the rest of us can do.
up to now in human history, everywhere mankind has gone, we have owned. The plants and animals and microbes have never objected.
Never objected? Really? That's the most ridiculous thing I've read this year. They've objected in every way they could.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Come on, we are far, far from the highest CO2 levels after the Paleozoic. The earth has been habitable at much higher CO2 levels than we have now. We are still in an ice age and the earth has been much warmer in productive eras such as the Eocene.
That figure is pulled out of... thin air, and is usually forced to redefine the term "subsidy" to include every form of not-tax or not-government-owned, or price controls in nations like Iran, or every form of payment that the greenie pushing the claim thinks "Big Oil" should pay but isn't.
In the US, it's popular to claim that Big Oil gets "subsidies" for all the normal business expenditures and depreciation that every single business in the country gets.
More interesting and relevant scientific facts:
- For most of Earth's history it had no polar icecaps whatsoever. That is the most common state of this planet. The only reason we currently have polar icecaps is because we are still emerging from the most recent glaciation (i.e., ice age).
- Only 50 million years ago, there were thousands of ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere , and Antarctica was covered with lush beech forests. The subsequent decrease in CO2 caused the continent to become a barren wasteland of ice; it was not good for life. The current CO2 level is 403 ppm, and no scenario of fossil fuel usage is consistent with a return to thousands of ppm.
- The fossil record shows that polar bears have survived the comings and goings of multiple glaciations -- each one accompanied by a change in sea level that was about 120 times greater than climate models are predicting will occur in the next century.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
There's nothing wrong with being rich. The goal should be to reduce poverty, not eliminate the rich. Liberal establishment just likes the poor because they are inextricably dependent on the government for survival, and therefore trivial to control.
BEAUHD you will inhabit Hell. Believe that. Ask yo mama.
... are fantasy. If you didn't know it before you should know it now! The atmospheric pressure on Venus today is huge. In the past it was even greater. Nothing even remotely plausible could imply that Venus was just like earth is today, even if it shared our orbit it would still be completely different due to atmospheric pressure. Factor that in and tell me what that alone would do to temperatures on the surface. What would be the effect if that pressure was nitrogen instead of CO2? (Hint, partial pressures laws from high school)
The Drake Equation (wikipedia) attempts to estimate the total number of active inhabited planets in the milky way galaxy.
The Fermi Paradox (wikipedia) says, based on what we know, there should be lots of alien life out there. . . Why don't we see any of it?
One of the ways the Fermi paradox is resolved is by saying, "one of the factors in the drake equation must be off". . .
Stories about Mars and Venus being "once habitable" always make me wonder if it really takes 2 planets near each other with a certain combination of factors to create the combinations of chemicals ended to start life off. (need one planet approach uninhabitable due to greenhouse gases (Venus) just as another planet nearby is entering barely able to sustain life (Earth). . .
If so, that could be the factor missing from the Drake equation.