From its composition, to its potential for housing human life, and more!
Join me as I show you some facts and the history of Venus!
8.
The History Of Venus Before we get into the facts and figures and
the numbers behind the planet that is Venus, we probably should talk about how we discovered
it.
After all, Astronomy has been going on for a very long time, and people have found planets
like Venus like before you would expect them to.
In the Old Babylonian period, the planet Venus was known as Ninsi'anna, and later as Dilbat.
The name "Ninsi'anna" translates to "divine lady, illumination of heaven", which refers
to Venus as the brightest visible "star".
The ancient Greeks initially believed Venus to be two separate stars: Phosphorus, the
morning star, and Hesperus, the evening star.
Pliny the Elder credited the realization that they were a single object to Pythagoras in
the sixth century BCE, while Diogenes Laërtius argued that Parmenides was probably responsible
for this rediscovery.
Though they recognized Venus as a single object, the ancient Romans continued to designate
the morning aspect of Venus as Lucifer, literally "Light-Bringer", and the evening aspect as
Vesper, both of which are literal translations of their traditional Greek names.
When the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei first observed the planet in the early 17th
century, he found it showed phases like the Moon, varying from crescent to gibbous to
full and vice versa.
When Venus is furthest from the Sun in the sky, it shows a half-lit phase, and when it
is closest to the Sun in the sky, it shows as a crescent or full phase.
This could be possible only if Venus orbited the Sun, and this was among the first observations
to clearly contradict the Ptolemaic geocentric model that the Solar System was concentric
and centered on Earth.
Which was one of many theories about how about our world and our universe were at the 'center
of it all" when it fact that couldn't be further from the truth.
The atmosphere of Venus was discovered in 1761 by Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov.
Venus's atmosphere was observed in 1790 by German astronomer Johann Schröter.
Schröter found when the planet was a thin crescent, the cusps extended through more
than 180°.
He correctly surmised this was due to scattering of sunlight in a dense atmosphere.
Later, American astronomer Chester Smith Lyman observed a complete ring around the dark side
of the planet when it was at inferior conjunction, providing further evidence for an atmosphere.
Believe it or not, it wasn't until the 1900's when more details and research was done on
Venus, mainly because its shape, distance and phases didn't give a lot of clues as to
its various inner workings.
Radar observations in the 1970s revealed details of the Venusian surface for the first time,
thus giving scientists much more to work with.
The first robotic space probe mission to Venus, and the first to any planet, began with the
Soviet Venera program in 1961.
The United States' exploration of Venus had its first success with the Mariner 2 mission
on 14 December 1962, becoming the world's first successful interplanetary mission, passing
34,833 km (21,644 mi) above the surface of Venus, and gathering data on the planet's
atmosphere.
Since then, numerous probes and satellites have been taken to Venus to study it in some
capacity.
There has even been talks of putting a rover on the planet in the same style that NASA
has done with Mars, but that hasn't happened as of yet.
7.
Orbits and Rotations Venus is known as our "sister planet", because
in many ways it's like Earth.
It's only a little bit smaller, has an atmosphere that is full of gasses, and we do know that
it has a definitive surface like certain other planets in our solar system, but we'll get
to that more later.
Although it should be noted that despite the similarities to Earth, there are just as many
differences that we'll be covering a lot in this list for various reasons.
If you want to get really trippy on how different Earth and Venus are, you need to talk about
how Venus handles its days and years.
Because not unlike its own neighbor, Mercury, Venus has a VERY slow rotation, but to the
extent that it's actually longer than a year!
Yeah, that's right, a day is longer than a year on Venus.
Its orbital period, or how long it takes to make a full rotation around the sun, is about
225 Earth days, whereas a singular day on Venus is 243 days.
That's weird.
More than that though, it feels rather counterintuitive.
Because especially with how we live here on Earth, when it comes to years, they're the
longest basic measurement of time.
Many years make a decade and so on, but when you think about how we count our lives, it's
in years.
So for a single day on Venus to be more than a year on Venus...that's really weird.
And yet, that's exactly what happens on the planet, so if we are going to live there (more
on that in a bit as well), we're going to have to get used to some very funky things.
6.
Seasons When it comes to the seasons on Venus, it's
definitely not like Earth is in any measure.
In fact, it's kind of worse.
As you likely know, the temperature on Venus is extremely hot.
The average temperature is about 460 degrees Celsius due to the Greenhouse Effect that
essentially turned the planet into an oven.
That's a big reason why we don't dare try and colonize Venus, because anything we'd
make would have to be able to withstand that heat, and that's not easy.
A heat by the way that makes it the hottest planet in our solar system.
Even beating Mercury which is closer to the sun than Venus is.
Plus, the tilt of the axis on the planet is so minimal that the temperature honestly doesn't
change much on the surface of the planet.
So "seasons" as we know them would be mostly hot to very hot with little regard for things
like "cold" or "cool.
When you add that up, it means that Venus is a place that nobody wants to live on...unless
you're talking about in the atmosphere where it's technically possible for us to live...but
we'll get to that in a bit.
Before we continue to break down everything about Venus, be sure to like or dislike the
video so that we can continue to improve and make these videos better for you the viewer.
Plus, be sure to subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss ANY of our weekly videos.
5.
Greenhouse Effect Let's be honest here, when you think about
Venus, you no doubt think about how it's a Greenhouse planet.
Meaning that it has gasses within its atmosphere that trap heat at such a rate that it makes
it boiling hot.
And that's very, very true.
Studies have suggested that billions of years ago, Venus's atmosphere was much more like
the one surrounding Earth (further proving it to be our "sister" planet), and that there
may have been substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but after a period of
600 million to several billion years, a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation
of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its
atmosphere.
As a result, the planet is so hot that it can melt lead!
And to many, Venus is the perfect "example" of what will happen to Earth if we're not
careful with how we handle our own greenhouse gasses.
4.
Volcanic Activity When you think about Earth, it has many things
that can shape the land, and one of them is volcanoes.
They literally create islands when they erupt out of the ocean, and they can cause widespread
destruction when they're erupting above the waters like with Pompeii or Montana.
Yet did you know that Venus has a LOT of volcanoes as well?
What's more, it helped make the planet what it is today.
Much of the Venusian surface appears to have been shaped by volcanic activity in some way
shape or form.
Venus has several times as many volcanoes as Earth, and it has 167 large volcanoes that
are over 100 km (62 mi) across.
The only volcanic complex of this size on Earth is the Big Island of Hawaii.:154 This
is not because Venus is more volcanically active than Earth, but because its crust is
older.
Earth's oceanic crust is continually recycled by subduction at the boundaries of tectonic
plates, and has an average age of about 100 million years, whereas the Venusian surface
is estimated to be 300–600 million years old.
The volcanic activity is also believed to be a major reason that the atmosphere is what
is today, but more on that in a sec. 3.
Pop Culture Named after the goddess of love and beauty,
Venus has become nearly synonymous with "women" in popular culture, as referenced by the famous
relationship guide Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
Venus has also been used as the name for various beauty products, and lyrics in songs like,
"I'm your Venus".
As a solar system locale, Venus was a popular destination for early 20th century science
fiction writers; before we knew about what lay beneath Venus' mysterious cloud cover,
writers could speculate about a more hospitable planet and its possible inhabitants.
More recently, Venus has been a backdrop for video games such as Transhuman Space, Battlezone
and Destiny.
And in the Disney animated film The Princess and the Frog, Ray the firefly falls in love
with Venus, "the evening star," as he has mistaken it for another firefly.
Various other sci-fi television shows and movies have made their own stakes on what
Venus would be like as well, making it all the more curious to some that we're not trying
to colonize it, and instead going to Mars.
But there are many reasons for that.
2.
Atmosphere When it comes to planets, one of the first
things that people talk about in regards to "habitability" is that of the atmosphere.
Which is where we get a major problem.
Conditions on the Venusian surface differ radically from those on Earth because its
dense atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide, with most of the remaining 3.5% being nitrogen.
If you're keeping track, that means that the planet has virtually NO oxygen.
To be clear, Earth's atmosphere doesn't have all Oxygen eitehr, but its balanced with the
elements of Nitrogen, Carbon Dioxide and others in order to let us breathe.
But on Venus, that would be impossible for a whole host of reasons, not just that there's
no Oxygen in it for the most part.
For example, remember those volcanoes we talked about earlier?
They had a significant impact on the atmosphere because they added loads of sulfur into it.
The atmosphere is acidic because of it.
Sulfuric Acid if you're wanting the more scientific term.
There is literally a cloud layer on Venus that is comprised of it.
If that's STILL not enough for you...the mass of its atmosphere is 93 times that of Earth's,
whereas the pressure at its surface is about 92 times that at Earth's—a pressure equivalent
to that at a depth of nearly 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) under Earth's oceans.
Which means that any attempt to put a human on the surface of Venus would need a suit
to be specialized pressurized to combat the atmosphere.
1.
Cloud City...On Venus I want you to picture Star Wars for a second.
Specifically, Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back.
Remember how it was a city that was quite literally floating above the clouds?
Well, there are some scientists who believe that we could do something like this on Venus
and have a better life there than on the ground.
How does that work?
Simple, on the ground, the gasses of Venus are so dense and troubling that having a colony
there would be problematic.
However, the higher you go into the atmosphere, the thinner the gasses get, and scientists
have theorized that at about 30 miles above the ground there is a sweet spot that humans
could use to survive long term.
As well as a spot that is modest in temperature and pressure exerted.
And how do we get to be in a spot 30 miles above the surface?
With a floating city or colony of sorts.
I can hear the question in your mind, "But wouldn't it be hard to keep the floating city...afloat?"
Usually, yes, it would be, which is why barring anti-gravity technology we'll never have such
a city on Earth.
However, on Venus, the many gasses in the atmosphere could be used by the blimps or
however the colony is built to keep it afloat.
It's actually been proposed before by scientists, and is technically feasible with the technology
we have right now.
Plus, unlike a domed colony that we would have to have on Mars or the Moon, if something
were to happen to the blimp, say a small tear in the hull, it wouldn't crash the whole thing
or cause a series of catastrophic events that would kill everyone, as Venus' atmosphere
is thick, like Earth's, so we would have time to fix it before things got bad.
And as noted, the pressure and temperature of the spot in the atmosphere the colony would
be means that keeping it cool or warmed wouldn't take much energy or effort.
Now, can we definitively say that we're going to be colonizing Venus soon?
Of course not, that would be foolish.
But, whereas we were once very deterred from the notion, there is a chance and possibility
now that this COULD happen.
Which is not unlike where we were with Mars at the beginning of the new millennium.
And if we can get something working on Mars with its issues, something on Venus doesn't
seem so far-fetched.
Thanks for watching everyone!
What did you think of this look at Venus and its history?
Did you learn something new about Venus as a whole?
Do you think that we'll ever truly colonize it?
Let me know in the comments below, be sure to subscribe, and I'll see you next time on
the channel!