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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."
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.
Isn't it 'Venerian' not 'Venusian'? After all we don't say 'Marsian'.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
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.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
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".
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.
"Like Ringo Said"
Wrong Beatle
Venus and Mars was the title track or the 1975 album by Paul Mcartney and Wings
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 there. So we would not only have to take our food, but the plants that can produce the food, the animals that would provide meat, the bacteria that all plants and animals depend on, the birds and the bees - everything needed to bootstrap another earth.
And this assumes that we can find a planet that contains the right ingredients to support life. All the minerals that are necessary to grow life e.g. the right quantities of magnesium to create chlorophyll. If we were doing this, we might need a thousand years to get it right.
Put it another way, if you were a weary space traveller, and you happened upon an earth who surface had heated to, say, 25 degrees on average, would you settle there and try to make it work, or would you travel on?
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.
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.
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....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
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?
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.
Yes, unless that extreme condition is heat. In order to make anything a tolerable 90f when it is 200f outside, you will have to vent heat. In space, this is done by infra red radiation, very slowly. Thankfully, space is mostly a very cold place, so the challenge is more often heating up the vessel. This is why they put radioactive material in satellites, as a heat source. Unfortunately, when you are talking about a habitable dome on earth, the question is, where do you vent the heat? Into the atmosphere that is already trapping that heat? Into the molten core of the planet? In the short term the oceans would work, but eventually they will simply evaporate (as will happen in 1 billion years anyway.) The one thing you could do is use evaporative cooling by developing a way to vent some of the earths atmosphere into space. So in short, it will literally be easier to cool the planet than to build a domed air conditioned city.
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 almost as though putting that thought in your mind was the ENTIRE PURPOSE OF THE ARTICLE. Weird!
**>>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...
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.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.