Sometimes we call the planet Venus “Earth’s Twin”, but that’s only because the two
planets are roughly equal in size.
After that, not much else is similar and because of the extreme temperatures on the so-called
planet of love, humans would not stand any chance of survival.
In the words of one writer, Venus is a “hellish world of infernal temperatures, a corrosive
toxic atmosphere and crushing pressures at the surface.”
We just couldn’t go there.
The temperature on Venus would melt anything that got near it.
But that might not have always been the case, and as you will see today, perhaps in the
past Venus might have been an altogether different kind of beast.
Let’s first give you a Venus 101.
It’s the second planet from the Sun, behind Mercury and in front of us.
It was named after the Roman goddess Venus, who among other things was the goddess of
love.
Sometimes you can see it without the aid of a telescope, but only during a specific time
in a specific place.
There are a few things you need to know about Venus and these relate to the reasons we just
can’t go there even if we had the technology to send people to the planet.
One thing we doubt you know is that Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system.
The temperatures on the surface might be around 863 °F or 462 °C. It stays around that temperature
never mind where you go on the planet.
You can’t exactly get a respite from the heat by taking a trip like you can on Earth.
You might now be thinking how come Venus is hotter than Mercury when Mercury is closer
to the sun.
The simple answer is Mercury has a very thin atmosphere and Venus has a very thick atmosphere
consisting mostly of carbon dioxide.
The atmospheric pressure on this planet is 92 times stronger than that on Earth, so it
would be like being 3,000 feet (900 meters) underwater.
In the words of NASA, if you somehow weren’t melted on the surface of Venus you would be
crushed.
It’s this thick atmosphere that traps the heat in, whereas Mercury lets the heat out
into space.
The heat dissipates on Mercury whereas in Venus the thick atmosphere prevents this.
Kind of like when you close the door to the bathroom and take a really hot shower!
You might be wondering how we got lucky here on Earth and got this nice atmosphere, and
some scientists have called this the Goldilocks phenomenon.
She got the right porridge, and it seems Earth was perfectly situated at a distance from
the Sun that we got the right atmosphere for life to happen.
We just got fortunate, but as you’ll see, Venus might not always have been such an extreme
place in the past.
What does Venus look like on the surface you might ask?
Well, it’s rocky like Earth, but very barren.
There are also lots of volcanoes there, although much of the surface is made up of plains.
There are some highland areas, and the highest mountain on Venus is called Maxwell Montes,
named after a Scottish scientist.
The mountain is 36,000 feet high, or about 11 km.
Just for a comparison, Everest is only 8.8 km high.
So, we’ve got this extremely hot place that can crush us.
NASA also said the surface would stink like rotten eggs, so that’s another reason to
cancel your trip there.
But perhaps it wasn’t always like that.
You see, Venus is 4.5 billion years old.
It’s mind boggling to think about just how long that is because even a few thousand years
is difficult to get into our heads.
Suffice to say, it’s a lot of time for changes to take place, and now some scientists are
saying Venus in the past might have actually been a bit more hospitable.
New research that was talked about in 2019, states that for around three billion years
Venus might have had a climate that could sustain water on the surface of the planet.
That the temperatures could have not been that high at all, with those scientists saying
Venus might have had temperatures only around 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius)
or as low as 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius).
But then there was climate change, according to these scientists, and things got hellish.
This change they believe could have happened around 700 and 750 million years ago.
But what happened?
We’ll let one of the study authors explain.
He said, “Our hypothesis is that Venus may have had a stable climate for billions of
years.
It is possible that the near-global resurfacing event is responsible for its transformation
from an Earth-like climate to the hellish hothouse we see today.”
Like Earth, Venus was hot and then cooled.
During the cooling phases there would have been lots of carbon dioxide, but that would
have come down and been trapped in the rocks.
This would have left room for a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere, similar to what we have
on Earth.
The scientists wrote that during this long period, some three billion years, Venus “had
surface liquid water, plate tectonics, and subsequently a stable temperate climate akin
to that of Earth.”
They believe this because they created simulations of how the planet evolved.
But then it all changed, and Venus experienced this event that made it the horror show of
a planet it is today.
“Something happened on Venus where a huge amount of gas was released into the atmosphere
and couldn't be re-absorbed by the rocks,” wrote the scientists.
They believe that volcanic activity might have been to blame for the Venus we have today,
with lots of magma being released.
Magma is molten rock, the stuff we call lava when it gets to the Earth’s surface.
The researchers believe that this magma could have released lots of carbon dioxide but when
it cooled it couldn’t reabsorb the stuff and so it stayed around, creating that terrible
hot house.
Imagine that, Venus could once have had an atmosphere and environment like Earth’s.
Does that mean life as we know could have happened there, too?
Could we have sent interplanetary text messages to each other if it had stayed that way?
Well, researchers said that in the past it might have been possible.
Those researchers concluded, “Our models show that there is a real possibility that
Venus could have been habitable and radically different from the Venus we see today.”
What do you think Venusian life could have looked like?
Could an intelligent species have once lived there?
Tell us in the comments.
Now go watch “Most Extreme Planets In The Galaxy!“
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