Slashdot Mirror
Venus May Have Been the First Habitable Planet In Our Solar System, Study Suggests (theguardian.com)
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.
I'm making the popcorn right now.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Venus and Mars are all right to-night!
Figures life would start there
reminds me of the one-shot manga Hotel (where global warming on Earth turns it basically into Venus).
But Venus inhabitants smoked too much, this explains the CO2 excess...
It is a miracle that life survived on Earth after it cooled down.
Now we can see what happened when Venusian politicians used climate change as a political tool.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
by spreading dust in its orbit to block sunlight?
Isn't it 'Venerian' not 'Venusian'? After all we don't say 'Marsian'.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If we can't get out of the solar system, and are facing extinction, we might consider an "all our yesterdays" to Venus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Our_Yesterdays_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
A philosophically interesting exercise would be to look for something there to see if that happened.
It almost certainly was at some period in time.
We know how easily life comes around given the right resources and the right amounts of energy, and the usual CHNO foundations.
Likewise with Mars as well. But, predictably, one is too hot and one it too cold.
The only way Venus could have survived beyond a certain threshold would be if an intelligent species were living on it.
Humans alone have developed amazing ways of wasting energy on massive scales.
Directing that entirely in to space is easily done. (just fire some fukken lasers at Jupiter, maybe we might even make a minor star in a few billion years)
Or putting out a huge reflective film in orbit.
Given we get out in to space, we could probably reverse the destruction to Venus and make it habitable for the next 10 billion humans.
Oh, that's on the assumption we will survive, which is looking less and less likely every month given current fighting between nations. Geopolitical instability and financial instability can easily lead to war.
Mars, Mars is a harder one to deal with since it simply lacks mass and is just outside the habitable zone.
We'd need to bombard Mars with almost all of the rocks in the asteroid belt for Mars to even stand a chance of being useful.
Better than the other solution of nuking Mars until it is hot enough. Asteroids would be both heat and mass.
Titan could be another place for life to evolve given a nudge or two.
Europa likewise. Probably already has some life. It has enough energy and most likely has the resources below that ocean. It isn't just a pure ball of water and ice. (at least, most likely isn't. the chances of that are extremely low)
I thought the Earth was the first.
It's much more likely that you're an ultracrepidarian than this guy is saying anything particularly absurd. Much. More. Likely.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
(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.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Wrong.
Try replacing "Venus" with "Earth" in the summary. Makes you wonder if Venus is going to be our future, particularly if this article's scenario comes to pass...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
There may have been little green creatures on the surface and they may have been using Windows... but they may not have just been doing that..
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.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Wrong.
Gee, thanks for the clarity, idiot.
That's right! I never blindly accept what so called experts say. I for one will not get my children vaccinated until I can verify myself that they do in fact work and are safe,
It's the same with GNU/Linux. I don't think it's secure so I am learning and verifying every line of code from version 1.1, and if it checks out, I'll be transitioning to it. I should be done in a few more years.
> How completely fucking absurd.
You tummy problems? Or depression? (BTW. for the last one I've got a super offer on my inbox right now, gotta check that out!)
They never had a great oxygenation event. Unfortunately that makes Venusian colonization somewhat more difficult.... But when you get down to it, Venus could be labeled "Instant Earth- Just Add Water".
How much mass is out there in the Kuiper belt? Just hoover up a bunch of larger KBOs and chuck them at Jupiter.
So if Earth's climate changes too much, we'll eventually have an atmosphere 90 times as denser ? How interesting... It's amazing how such thing as a runaway greenhouse effect never happened during 4.5 billion years of our fragile planet existence...
"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.
They aren't going to try to resurrect the preposterous claims of Immanuel Velikovsky are they?
"Like Ringo Said"
Wrong Beatle
Venus and Mars was the title track or the 1975 album by Paul Mcartney and Wings
Thanks!
The relative mass of the entire Kuiper belt isn't really all that much.
As everyone knows, Venus is younger than Earth. That's why there are still dinosaurs on Venus.
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).
The internet is not a series of tubes. It's more like a net. Or a network of computers. Or an internet.
Yeah, but computers got better and we have 3D printers, and they once said man would never fly. Therefore turning Jupiter into a star is scheduled to happen sometime in spring 2017.
You Luddite.
2,000 meters (6,562 feet)
Ffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuu
So you're saying that we could find a way to massively sequester carbon on Venus, and if we got it down to what it was before, we'd have a second Earth?
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.
"impenetrable carbon dioxide atmosphere"
Uhh, the Russians might disagree with that considering they successfully landed on Venus over half a dozen times.
> How completely fucking absurd.
You tummy problems? Or depression? (BTW. for the last one I've got a super offer on my inbox right now, gotta check that out!)
At least he's smart enough to know he's not on reddit anymore, a claim you can't make.
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 flamewars swallowed the entire internet?
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 (and reduced 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.
Hang on though, we're working very hard to catch up and maybe we'll be #1 soon.
I'm a 2000 man.
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 thriving, they can be surprisingly fast in colonizing the planet.
Venus doesn't have a magnetic field, so how does it stop the solar wind from blowing all the hydrogen into space? You can't have water without hydrogen.
Although that's certainly how some people will try to spin it. Venus' atmosphere is theorized to have begun much like Earth's. The crucial difference was its proximity to the sun caused its water to mostly turn into vapor, instead of remain as a liquid. This (1) contributed to the greenhouse effect - water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas contributor on Earth despite only a tiny fraction of our water being in vapor form, and (2) rose above heavier CO2 thus shielding it from being lost into space or being broken apart into its elements by solar radiation (Venus has almost no magnetosphere to protect it).
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 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. 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.
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?
:T:R:A:N:S:
Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together.... mass hysteria.
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.
Let's send robots to excavate to find any fossils. Maybe there is some sort of remnants of life on Venus?
May I ask what you are using in the meantime?
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 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 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.
**>>BELCH
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 amount to straw men. There's no reason to believe DNA was the first means of passing hereditable traits, or that the earliest self-replicating molecules were much like life we observe today.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What about spinning up Venus?, as this article describe: http://www.orionsarm.com/fm_st...
Venus Matrix mode Sensex- awake- Science to progress
Human Being in-depth-Milky-way Sensex-Aditya links -environment sensex, Earth Glow Sun-life significance,
Spinal column, Space cosmology vedas interlinks-see books at Lulu. vidyardhi Nanduri