Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time for a Vault episode. This one originally aired December
Speaker 1: one and it was called Airships over Venus. I think
Speaker 1: it was sort of a grab bag of interesting stuff
Speaker 1: we've been reading about the clouds of Venus. Yeah, different
Speaker 1: proposed and um and in some cases executed missions to Venus.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty fun, especially if you're into Venus, and
Speaker 1: you should, because Venus is a really interesting planet. Uh,
Speaker 1: then this is a great episode for you. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of My Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, Robin,
Speaker 1: has been a while since we checked in on the
Speaker 1: air Frier Planet. So what do you say we talked
Speaker 1: about Venus today. Yeah, I think it is high time
Speaker 1: that we return to Venus. Uh. For for a few
Speaker 1: different reasons. First of all, even though we have covered
Speaker 1: Venus in the past, there's just so much weird and
Speaker 1: wonderful stuff to discuss about the planet that we had
Speaker 1: to return. Also, in the past, year, we've had some
Speaker 1: developments concerning Venus, and also there's a particular plan of
Speaker 1: a project in the in the works that I'd like
Speaker 1: to discuss in more detail. Really, just like Venus is
Speaker 1: just such a wild and wonderful planet, and our attempts
Speaker 1: to understand how we might might be able to further
Speaker 1: explore it, and also our history of exploring it is
Speaker 1: just fascinating. So we just had to return. Well, you
Speaker 1: know what we always say here with reference to Venus,
Speaker 1: I am the doorway. We are both the doorway. So
Speaker 1: let's open ourselves and and walk through into some thoughts
Speaker 1: about the second planet. Yeah, nice, Stephen King reference there
Speaker 1: are right. So, I guess one of the things with Venus,
Speaker 1: you know, that I've been thinking about recently is like
Speaker 1: the idea of of terra firma, you know, of the
Speaker 1: solid ground beneath our feet. And when I think about this,
Speaker 1: iten find it a bit weird, because, on one hand,
Speaker 1: the idea of firm earth beneath us is truly reassuring,
Speaker 1: and knowing that the Earth is round only makes it
Speaker 1: more so, at least to my mind, because in some
Speaker 1: respects it means that it's Earth all the way down
Speaker 1: underneath this. You know, like the Earth might not be
Speaker 1: the center of the universe or even the Solar System,
Speaker 1: but the center of the Earth is still a center,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Yeah, it can't. The Earth
Speaker 1: can't like collapse and fall through into a space beneath itself,
Speaker 1: because being a sphere, there is no space beneath it.
Speaker 1: You just you go down until you hit the center. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now the sky, of course, and if you're in the sky,
Speaker 1: that that's not terra firma. And the same goes for
Speaker 1: the surface of the ocean. Despite the fact that the
Speaker 1: ocean reminds us that terra firma isn't all it's cracked
Speaker 1: up to be. Much of of of Earth is crushed
Speaker 1: beneath an ocean, hidden in darkness, and other proportions are
Speaker 1: covered in ice or propelled so far up into the
Speaker 1: atmosphere by mountain peaks that it pushes beyond what is
Speaker 1: a reasonable environment for humans. Sure, and then when we
Speaker 1: think of other worlds, it gets even weirder. Right, gas giants,
Speaker 1: uh boast no terra firma at all. And then there's
Speaker 1: venus on venus terra firma or venus firma more accurately
Speaker 1: would be a high pressure, high temperature hellscape, but higher
Speaker 1: up in its atmosphere or you know, in or above
Speaker 1: the clouds of Venus. This is the region, ironically, that
Speaker 1: we might find metaphorical Terra firma on the planet that
Speaker 1: is Terra's strange sibling. M hmm, interesting thought. Okay, so
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about the atmosphere of Venus today. Uh, now,
Speaker 1: this is this is a subject that's not entirely new
Speaker 1: to us. We've visited this in uh some explorations before.
Speaker 1: We did one episode a couple of years ago about
Speaker 1: the possibility of life on Venus where we discussed the
Speaker 1: pros and cons and various scientific speculation about what form
Speaker 1: that could take if it were to exist. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that kept coming up there was about
Speaker 1: the difference between the surface of Venus and the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Venus um. And so, well, maybe we should just
Speaker 1: do a brief refresher on on Venus itself. Tell me
Speaker 1: about the planet, like I'm going on a blind date
Speaker 1: with Venus? What what what have you got to sell
Speaker 1: me on this? Alright, So, Venus is the second planet
Speaker 1: from the Sun, and it's just slightly smaller than Earth
Speaker 1: size and surface area is quite similar to our own world,
Speaker 1: and in many ways it can be seen as an
Speaker 1: alternative Earth. The two planets may have had very similar origins,
Speaker 1: but they parted ways long ago. Venus may have once
Speaker 1: had oceans, and may have once or even still we'll
Speaker 1: get into this supported life forms. But today it's this
Speaker 1: dully lit, high pressure world with volcanic mountains and ashen
Speaker 1: plains are runaway. Greenhouse effect boiled away the oceans long
Speaker 1: ago and they were lost to space. There are no
Speaker 1: plate tectonics that we know off on Venus and its
Speaker 1: volcanoes to spring up wherever instead of emerging along plate
Speaker 1: borders as they do on Earth. The high pressure, high
Speaker 1: temperature atmosphere is more than nine carbon dioxide and three
Speaker 1: point five percent molecular nitrogen, with trace amounts of other gases.
Speaker 1: If you're standing on the surface of Venus, it would
Speaker 1: be roughly ninety times the pressure of sea level on Earth.
Speaker 1: Um of course, it's going to vary depending on altitude,
Speaker 1: but that's sort of the ballpark. The clouds are often
Speaker 1: described as being concentrated sulfuric acid, or more specifically sulfur
Speaker 1: dioxide with drops of sulfuric acid within it. Yes, that
Speaker 1: that is what the mist is, So it's a carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide atmosphere. But the droplets that are suspended to make
Speaker 1: the clouds sulfuric acid have fun Batman. So when we
Speaker 1: we think about Venus, one of the cool things that
Speaker 1: we've touched on this before is that when we think
Speaker 1: about life on Venus, either life that could still reside
Speaker 1: there now, native life, or the possibility which we'll get
Speaker 1: into later in the episode, of of its sustaining our
Speaker 1: life in one way or another, we end up not
Speaker 1: looking to that hell hellish surface, to the actual Venus firma. Now.
Speaker 1: Instead we look to the clouds above, or even the
Speaker 1: space a little above the clouds. Yes, and this brings
Speaker 1: us to one of the main things that we wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about today, which was that there was what
Speaker 1: looks like some really major news on the subject of
Speaker 1: possible life on Venus just a couple of months ago.
Speaker 1: So the story turned out to be one of those
Speaker 1: cases of possible scientific whiplash. What we'll get into the
Speaker 1: complications as we move on, but but let's just take
Speaker 1: a look. If you're ready, let's do it. Okay, So
Speaker 1: for obvious reasons, the reasons we've just been talking about,
Speaker 1: the surface of Venus is just clearly sterile. There is
Speaker 1: no way you would expect to find any kind of
Speaker 1: organized life form living at I was gonna say sea level,
Speaker 1: not sea level. The surface level of Venus. You know, again,
Speaker 1: temperatures over nine degrees fair and it somewhere between like
Speaker 1: four hundred and five hundred degrees celsius. Extreme pressure, like
Speaker 1: you just had something like ninety or a hundred times
Speaker 1: the atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth. It's sort
Speaker 1: of equivalent to going like, you know, hundreds of meters
Speaker 1: down under the water, very very high pressure. Um. It
Speaker 1: is difficult to imagine under these conditions that any sort
Speaker 1: of organized, self replicating structures would be able to survive,
Speaker 1: and there are a few reasons for that. One thing
Speaker 1: is that you know, like, uh, information containing molecules tend
Speaker 1: to be pretty fragile, and they would be probably disrupted
Speaker 1: by heat of that kind. Also, you can't have water there,
Speaker 1: and it's hard for us to imagine what a life
Speaker 1: form that did not incorporate water would look like because
Speaker 1: water is a very water is the necessary solvent that
Speaker 1: makes the existence of cells possible, allows it allows the
Speaker 1: transportation of different types of nutrients and molecules across membranes
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Like you can't have life as
Speaker 1: we know it with water, and you can't have water
Speaker 1: on the surface of Venus. But as we've discussed on
Speaker 1: the show before, it is not impossible to imagine that
Speaker 1: life could exist higher up in the atmosphere of Venus.
Speaker 1: So this would be micro organisms floating in the clouds
Speaker 1: where at higher altitudes the climate is relatively temperate, And
Speaker 1: this would not even be without precedent and known biology.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about some kind of organism that is
Speaker 1: unimaginable from from the perspective of Earth life, because here
Speaker 1: on Earth there are bacteria such as a Pseudomonas syringy
Speaker 1: that are thought to be present at higher altitudes floating
Speaker 1: within clouds. I've even read about interesting speculation that these
Speaker 1: bacteria floating in the clouds could affect weather patterns by
Speaker 1: serving as ice nucleation points that lead to precipitation. To
Speaker 1: think about that, like, what if the weather is being
Speaker 1: affected by germs up in the sky, and the idea
Speaker 1: of microbes floating in the clouds of Venus would even
Speaker 1: explain if it were true some observed features of Venus
Speaker 1: that that we don't fully know how to explain otherwise. Uh.
Speaker 1: David Grinspoons has written about this, and he's a former
Speaker 1: show guest. We we've talked to him a little bit
Speaker 1: about the signs of life on Venus that that pre
Speaker 1: date the paper that was published this year, things like
Speaker 1: recurring patterns of darkening observed in the clouds. Do you
Speaker 1: remember any of the other specifics he gets into about that.
Speaker 1: I mean that that's one of the big one. That's
Speaker 1: one of the ones we ended up focusing on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this idea that it it almost thinks makes
Speaker 1: you think about oh, some sort of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: plankton type life form thriving in the in the atmosphere there,
Speaker 1: like atmospheric algal blooms or something. Yeah. Um. But the
Speaker 1: other thing is that there is evidence that Venus was
Speaker 1: quite possibly once more hospitable than it is now. You
Speaker 1: mentioned this earlier, the possibility of surface water. Now there
Speaker 1: is definitely not surface water on Venus right now would
Speaker 1: instantly boil, but the evidence makes it look highly plausible
Speaker 1: that v this once had liquid water at its surface.
Speaker 1: Even oceans, maybe as recently as a billion years ago
Speaker 1: or so. That's not ah, I believe that's not a
Speaker 1: known fact, but it seems highly plausible. So if there
Speaker 1: once was a full biosphere on Venus that was eventually
Speaker 1: wiped out at the surface level by the runaway greenhouse effect,
Speaker 1: it's possible that the last remnant of that archaic biological
Speaker 1: world is microorganisms that can live their whole lives floating
Speaker 1: in the clouds. Though it's worth noting that these clouds
Speaker 1: again consist primarily of suspended droplets of sulfuric acid, so
Speaker 1: these would need to be special kinds of extremophile type organisms. Now,
Speaker 1: while these possibilities are very cool, this has always been
Speaker 1: totally speculative right there. There has never been any actual, direct,
Speaker 1: strong evidence for the presence of life on Venus. There has.
Speaker 1: It's just been that we've observed things that could be
Speaker 1: consistent with the presence of life in interesting and surprising ways.
Speaker 1: That is their space for life as we know it,
Speaker 1: within what we know of Venus. Yeah, and the answer is, well,
Speaker 1: maybe more space than you might think. That we didn't
Speaker 1: have direct evidence that would say it looks like there
Speaker 1: is life. That picture got a little bit more complicated
Speaker 1: in September of this year. Uh, now, there's gonna be
Speaker 1: a very big caveat coming with this paper. But first
Speaker 1: I just want to present the evidence that we that
Speaker 1: emerged back in September. And so there was a paper
Speaker 1: published in Nature Astronomy in September twenty by Jane S. Grieves,
Speaker 1: Anita MS Richards, William Baines, Paul by Rimmer, Hideosagawa, David L. Clemens,
Speaker 1: and Sarah Seeger at All called Phosphine Gas in the
Speaker 1: Cloud Decks of Venus. Now, this paper deals with uh
Speaker 1: analysis of spectral data collected through a couple of telescopes.
Speaker 1: So the lead author, Jane Grieves of card University and
Speaker 1: colleagues collected data through two major telescopes, the James Clerk
Speaker 1: Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array
Speaker 1: in Chile. And what the study reported was that they
Speaker 1: had used spectral analysis of Venus to find something really
Speaker 1: intriguing about the gas is present in the atmosphere. And
Speaker 1: what they found was at an altitude of roughly fifty
Speaker 1: kilometers above the surface. I think it was like fifty
Speaker 1: five kilometers in a concentration of about twenty parts per
Speaker 1: billion a gas called phosphene or pH three. That's one
Speaker 1: phosphorus atom with three hydrogen atoms. Now, the chemistry nerds
Speaker 1: out there, or the breaking bad nerds out there will
Speaker 1: alike know that phosphine is just nasty, highly flammable, extremely
Speaker 1: toxic gas. Uh. It's often found in conjunction with traces
Speaker 1: of die phosphine or P to H four, which makes
Speaker 1: it pyrophoric, so fond of all atomatically catching fire upon
Speaker 1: exposure to air at room temperature, lovely um. It is
Speaker 1: sometimes a product of human industry, for example in the
Speaker 1: manufacture of semiconductors, or also in the manufacture of methamphetamine. Now,
Speaker 1: no one is alleging that there are meth labs on Venus,
Speaker 1: but whatever the cause, this was a much higher level
Speaker 1: of phosphine gas than you would expect to find. At
Speaker 1: about twenty parts per billion, this is something like three
Speaker 1: orders of magnitude more phosphine than you would find in
Speaker 1: Earth's atmosphere. Now, why is it interesting to find phosphine
Speaker 1: at that concentration. You know, different planets have gases in
Speaker 1: their atmosphere at different levels. You know, Venus has much
Speaker 1: more carbon dioxide and its atmosphere than Earth does. So,
Speaker 1: so what what's the deal with phosphine Why would that
Speaker 1: catch our attention? Well, in short, the presence of high
Speaker 1: levels of phosphine gas represent a dis equilibrium. Phosphine gas
Speaker 1: is something that's kind of inherently unstable and digestible by
Speaker 1: physical processes, you know, exposure to ultra violet light and
Speaker 1: chemical reactions with other things. Phosphine gas should just naturally
Speaker 1: sort of get eliminated from atmospheres. And this ties in
Speaker 1: with something we talked about in one of our recent
Speaker 1: Anthology of Horror episodes, when we were talking about looking
Speaker 1: for signatures of a shadow biosphere on Earth. Some of
Speaker 1: the researchers there, for example, I think the planetary scientist
Speaker 1: or I can't remember she's a planetary scientist or an astronomer,
Speaker 1: but the scientist Caroline Porko, I was talking about how
Speaker 1: if you were looking for signs of a shadow biosphere,
Speaker 1: you would want to find environments that are at a disequilibrium,
Speaker 1: things that are out of whack with like quantities of
Speaker 1: chemicals that don't seem like they would just naturally settle
Speaker 1: at that level. And I was trying to come up
Speaker 1: with a good analogy to explain why it's weird. Defined
Speaker 1: phosphine like this on on venus. And so here's what
Speaker 1: I came up with. I hope this is somewhat appropriate.
Speaker 1: Imagine and you live in Florida, and you go out
Speaker 1: for a walk on a hot summer day in July.
Speaker 1: It's degrees out a hundred percent humidity, and you're walking
Speaker 1: your dog along the sidewalk, and you notice that every
Speaker 1: twenty feet or so down the sidewalk there's just a
Speaker 1: big old hunk of ice sitting on the pavement. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: that that would be suspect, I think, yeah, exactly, Florida
Speaker 1: weird but weird. Right, Yeah, the ice could be the
Speaker 1: result of a Florida man. That that would explain it.
Speaker 1: It would not make a lot of sense, even though
Speaker 1: not ice does form naturally in the environment on Earth,
Speaker 1: it would not make sense given the conditions outside in
Speaker 1: this Florida neighborhood to assume, oh, this is a chunk
Speaker 1: of polar ice that happens to be left over from
Speaker 1: the last glacial maximum period, right, because like the the
Speaker 1: environmental conditions would have already like digested and recycled that ice.
Speaker 1: The ice is unstable enough given the surrounding conditions that
Speaker 1: you wouldn't expect it to be there from a previous
Speaker 1: freeze over right. It Also, it wouldn't even make sense
Speaker 1: to say, well, it hailed one time last winter, so
Speaker 1: the ice is just sitting here left over from that. No,
Speaker 1: it would mean somebody he's going around spilling ice all
Speaker 1: over the place, or or leaving ice on purpose on
Speaker 1: the sidewalk. Yeah, there's something that there's gotta be some
Speaker 1: kind of anomalous process that's putting the ice there. And
Speaker 1: so back to Venus, if phosphine gas were truly present
Speaker 1: at something like twenty parts per billion, you would have
Speaker 1: to assume that something was continuously putting that phosphine there.
Speaker 1: And while it's possible the explanation was some geochemical or
Speaker 1: photochemical process that we don't understand yet, a very interesting
Speaker 1: candidate explanation was microbial life, because here on Earth, phosphine
Speaker 1: is when it's not made by humans, it is almost
Speaker 1: always the byproduct of microbial life, especially anaerobic microbial life.
Speaker 1: In fact, if you go way back to you know,
Speaker 1: I don't remember how many years ago this is now
Speaker 1: like five or six years ago, we did some Halloween
Speaker 1: episodes on the Will of the Whisp. Remember that there
Speaker 1: would be you know, the legend of there's a light
Speaker 1: in the bog that leads a traveler off the path,
Speaker 1: and it's often attributed to a spirit or a devil.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a visual leshy. It's fairy fire, it's
Speaker 1: the the elf fire, the Hinky Puck or Heinky Punk.
Speaker 1: Is it Punker Puck? I don't remember. I can't remember
Speaker 1: if it's Punker Puck. Yeah, I remember the Will of
Speaker 1: the Whisp. Basically, the idea of the Will of the
Speaker 1: Wisp has so many strange and curious names. It's that
Speaker 1: it's been given over the years in different cultures. That
Speaker 1: episode was a lot of fun, by the way, and
Speaker 1: we have to go back and revisit that sometime. But
Speaker 1: so people have tried to offer plausible physical explanations for
Speaker 1: sightings to the Will of the Whisp. Why is it
Speaker 1: that so many people reports seeing, you know, a blue
Speaker 1: or green light in the swamp that's dancing around as
Speaker 1: if it's a lantern carried by a ghost, And a
Speaker 1: lot of these physical explanations for that phenomena involve phosphine gas.
Speaker 1: Often the explanation is some variation on well, there's the
Speaker 1: bog or a bunch of mud, and there's rotting vegetation,
Speaker 1: and and maybe bones from animals down there that are
Speaker 1: being consumed and metabolized by anaerobic bacteria, which produced phosphine
Speaker 1: gas is a byproduct. And then this phosphine gas and
Speaker 1: the presence of die phosphine or p to H four
Speaker 1: is sort of burping up out of the earth and
Speaker 1: is sometimes spontaneously ignited on contact with the air, or
Speaker 1: maybe it's just producing a sort of cool blue or
Speaker 1: green glow without necessarily catching on fire. But it's in
Speaker 1: the presence of some of some of the pyrophoric gas,
Speaker 1: and whatever is going on here, this glowing or chemoluminescent
Speaker 1: luminescent cloud or this flame becomes the will of the wisp.
Speaker 1: But whether or not that is the the actual explanation
Speaker 1: for will of the whisp sightings, it is absolutely true
Speaker 1: that anaerobic bacteria deco imposing organic matter down in the
Speaker 1: bog will produce phosphine gas. That's just something that's known
Speaker 1: that they're known to do. Another interesting coincidence, the authors
Speaker 1: proposed that the phosphine gas detected in Venus's atmosphere was
Speaker 1: that altitudes of around fifty kilometers or like fifty kilometers.
Speaker 1: This also happens to be an altitude where environmental conditions
Speaker 1: are much more tolerable on Venus around thirty degrees celsius
Speaker 1: or something like eighty something degrees fahrenheit and a pressure
Speaker 1: similar to Earth's atmosphere. Yeah, this is one of the
Speaker 1: key um layers on Venus that we're often looking at
Speaker 1: when we're actually sending some sort of a probe there
Speaker 1: or planning for possible missions to Venus in the future. Right,
Speaker 1: and so, if this phosphine gas was a byproduct of
Speaker 1: the metabolism of some type of microbe, one possibility that
Speaker 1: was discussed in this was quoted in an m I T.
Speaker 1: Tech Review article I was reading. This is from Jane Grieves,
Speaker 1: the lead author on the study. She said, quote that
Speaker 1: suggests it's part of the global circulation pattern of the
Speaker 1: atmosphere where gas sinks before it travels as far as
Speaker 1: the polls. So I guess a question would be, well,
Speaker 1: could something else be putting the phosphine gas there? Like
Speaker 1: with the Florida example, Uh, is there something else that
Speaker 1: could account for chunks of ice being found along the sidewalk,
Speaker 1: and you could come up with explanations. You could say, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe I don't know, maybe there was some kind of
Speaker 1: upper atmosphere phenomena, some kind of weird anomalous hail storm,
Speaker 1: and these things fell even though it's hot outside. It
Speaker 1: just happened recently. You could come up with things. Uh.
Speaker 1: For example, we know that some amount of phosphine gas
Speaker 1: is generated by a biotic you know, non organic processes
Speaker 1: deep in the atmosphere of Jupiter. But Jupiter is a
Speaker 1: gas giant, and the phosphine there is produced under conditions
Speaker 1: that do not seem to be possible on Venus, at
Speaker 1: least as far as we know. So could it be
Speaker 1: produced by lightning or space impacts or Vulkar Haino's or
Speaker 1: some other high energy phenomena like that. Well, again, this
Speaker 1: was analyzed by the authors of the paper, and it
Speaker 1: looks like no, not as far as we know nothing. No,
Speaker 1: a biotic process we're aware of seems capable of explaining
Speaker 1: the amounts of phosphine found. So basically, if if the
Speaker 1: findings in this original study from September are correct, there
Speaker 1: is anomalous gas present in the atmosphere of Venus, and
Speaker 1: we don't know of any photochemical or geochemical process that
Speaker 1: could have put it there in the amount that we
Speaker 1: find it. And on Earth the same gas is often
Speaker 1: the byproduct of microbial life. So this is not by
Speaker 1: any means proof of alien life, but it is extremely
Speaker 1: tantalizing from an astrobiological point of view. Again, kind of
Speaker 1: widens the space possible for life to exist in. Well,
Speaker 1: would say more than that. I mean it says, here's
Speaker 1: something we observe and we know it could be explained
Speaker 1: by life, and nothing else that we know of would
Speaker 1: seem to explain it very well. Yeah, but to be
Speaker 1: very clear, this is not proof. And I was reading
Speaker 1: an article in Chemical and Engineering News by Arianna Remmel
Speaker 1: who quotes an astro chemist who who had some good
Speaker 1: thoughts here. So I just want to read a quote
Speaker 1: from this article. Anthony Remission, and astro chemist to the
Speaker 1: National Radio Astronomy Observatory who is not involved in the study,
Speaker 1: says the team did a fantastic job presenting their findings,
Speaker 1: but he remains skeptical. Scientists need more spectral data to
Speaker 1: verify that the signal comes from pH three remission, says quote,
Speaker 1: but it's a first good step in that direction. As
Speaker 1: for what could produce phosphine on venus, he says, we
Speaker 1: need a better understanding of the fundamental chemistry forming these
Speaker 1: types of molecules before calling it a biosignature. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, so praise for the study, but you know,
Speaker 1: caution tempering the optimism. It's not like we know there
Speaker 1: are aliens there now. And when this study was first
Speaker 1: published in September, people got really excited. A lot of
Speaker 1: listeners asked us directly to cover this on the show,
Speaker 1: especially since we've done episodes on the possibility of life
Speaker 1: on venus before and it was really cool. But I
Speaker 1: figured we should wait for the experts to chew on
Speaker 1: this a little more before we did an episode about it.
Speaker 1: And I'm glad we did wait, because while this finding
Speaker 1: remains very interesting and is by no means totally overturned,
Speaker 1: subsequent research is making the picture look more complicated and
Speaker 1: less clear. So there are reports of at least three studies,
Speaker 1: at least one of which involves one of the same
Speaker 1: authors as the original study, and this uh, they tried
Speaker 1: to confirm the presence of phosphene, and of these three,
Speaker 1: all three failed to confirm it. Now, I don't know
Speaker 1: if all of them are published yet. I think at
Speaker 1: least one of them is. But these are media reports
Speaker 1: I was reading in for example, the m I. T.
Speaker 1: Tech Review and in National Geographic that we're based off
Speaker 1: of reports from pre print versions of these studies. So
Speaker 1: you know, maybe not fully confirmed yet, but there are
Speaker 1: at least some questions that are arising. And the basic
Speaker 1: issue is they're looking to confirm the signs of phosphine
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere and they're not necessarily finding it. So
Speaker 1: one tried to look for signs of phosphine and older
Speaker 1: archival observations of venus and didn't find it. A couple
Speaker 1: of others processed the same raw data from the September study,
Speaker 1: just using a different mathematical analysis method, different method for
Speaker 1: crunching the numbers, and they didn't find the same strong
Speaker 1: indications for the presence of phosphine. Now, these differences could
Speaker 1: be because the initial study was mistaken, or there could
Speaker 1: be other reasons. For example, in the one where they
Speaker 1: look at the archival data and don't find the same thing. Well,
Speaker 1: it could be that maybe there are cycles in which
Speaker 1: the presence of phosphine gas spikes at certain times in
Speaker 1: certain places in history on Venus. So from what I've
Speaker 1: been reading now, it's not as simple as yes there
Speaker 1: is phosphine or no there is not. It looks like
Speaker 1: at this point it remains a complicated, unsettled question, and
Speaker 1: we need more research. So what would be really great
Speaker 1: would just be, like, you know, go to Venus and
Speaker 1: settle this whole thing. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, and of
Speaker 1: course they're there are two ways of considering that. One,
Speaker 1: of course, is send more missions to Venus uh. And
Speaker 1: of course there are a number of those either planned
Speaker 1: or in sort of aplete pre planning pre approval phase.
Speaker 1: And then of course there's the the ultimate dream, right,
Speaker 1: the idea of sending human explorers to Venus uh, perhaps
Speaker 1: even as a first human venture to another world. UH.
Speaker 1: And it's just impossible not to be excited by these
Speaker 1: these ideas. Thank thank thank so. For the rest of
Speaker 1: the episode, I thought we might talk about some of
Speaker 1: the more exciting concepts out there involving humans visiting or
Speaker 1: even staying for an extended amount of time in the
Speaker 1: atmosphere of Venus. And to kick this off, I want
Speaker 1: to read a quote from David Grinspoon in his book
Speaker 1: Venus Revealed. This is from chapter six, and you can
Speaker 1: actually read this entire chapter, I believe at his website
Speaker 1: Funky Science dot net um because he's dr what was
Speaker 1: his his his spoon. Yeah, come on, David, I love
Speaker 1: your work, but that's Oh I think Funky Funky Spoon works.
Speaker 1: You're done without branding. Okay, yeah, yeah, I think it works,
Speaker 1: so so anyway, grin Spoon writes the following quote, I
Speaker 1: have a fantasy of cloud cities on Venus, huge and
Speaker 1: closed habitats suspended from giant balloons at a certain altitude
Speaker 1: where the temperature and pressure would be comfortable for us.
Speaker 1: We would mostly just have to keep the air fresh,
Speaker 1: maybe by collecting solar energy to make oxygen from C
Speaker 1: O two or better yet, growing to do the job
Speaker 1: for us. Why should we bother to do such a thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know. These could be research stations, or maybe
Speaker 1: there will be some economic incentive, something rare or beautiful
Speaker 1: found only on Venus. Or maybe in the very long run,
Speaker 1: after we have solved all our major problems here on Earth,
Speaker 1: we will go just for the hell of it, because
Speaker 1: it is there. I'm hoping the reason that we set
Speaker 1: up colonies on Venus does not become a phosphene harvesting
Speaker 1: enterprise where we're that's trying to get as much poison
Speaker 1: gas as we can. Yeah, I mean maybe the secret
Speaker 1: math reserves, so the reason we go there, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: but but I think this is a wonderful quote from
Speaker 1: from Grimsman because he's you know, he's he's he's very
Speaker 1: much a scientist, but he also has this this this
Speaker 1: just raw uh you know, wonder and sound of science
Speaker 1: fictional curiosity too, you know, just like like imagine what
Speaker 1: it would be like if we were there, and and
Speaker 1: we've we've had various versions of this in our science
Speaker 1: fiction over the years. And you see other spins on
Speaker 1: this too, right, I mean even Star Wars you have
Speaker 1: the best spin, which I believe is a gas giant
Speaker 1: in the Star Wars universe. But you have a cloud
Speaker 1: city there. You have a city floating in the sky.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a few things more amazing. It seems
Speaker 1: hard to imagine that you could actually have a city
Speaker 1: floating over a gas giant, because I would think a
Speaker 1: gas giant would tend to admit levels of radiation that
Speaker 1: would kill everybody in the cloud city Lando has it
Speaker 1: cleaned up rather nicely though it looks looks pretty swank. Well. Um,
Speaker 1: all this made me wonder. I was thinking to myself,
Speaker 1: what is the earliest example of science fiction pondering, um,
Speaker 1: habitats within the clouds of Venus or something like that,
Speaker 1: And I was looking around. I didn't I didn't find
Speaker 1: anybody doing the work for me on this, like conclusively, Um,
Speaker 1: trying to answer this question. Maybe I just missed it. Uh,
Speaker 1: in all things, isn't all things? I'm happy to be
Speaker 1: corrected on this if I'm wrong, But it seems like
Speaker 1: a possible answer comes from astronomer and scive author Garrett P. Service,
Speaker 1: who wrote a book in nineteen o nine titled A
Speaker 1: Columbus of Space, which I think you know in nine
Speaker 1: would have had nicer connotations for the historical reassessment of Columbus. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: basically this is about a human explorer who travels to
Speaker 1: Venus in an atomic spaceship to explore the planet, and
Speaker 1: there he encounters two different psychic species, a sort of
Speaker 1: morlock species that lives on the planet's surface and another
Speaker 1: species that lives in the clouds that are are basically
Speaker 1: humans or englishmen. Uh. You can find this. This full
Speaker 1: book is available on Project Gutenberg if you look it up.
Speaker 1: But I just want to read it. Just a quick
Speaker 1: exchange here between two characters. This is after they have
Speaker 1: arrived in their atomic rocket ship on into the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Venus, and one says to the other, those are airships. Airships. Yes,
Speaker 1: surely an exploring expedition. I shouldn't under I anticipated something
Speaker 1: of that kind. You know already how dense the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Venus is. It follows the balloons and all sorts
Speaker 1: of machines for aerial navigation can float much more easily
Speaker 1: here than over on Earth. I was prepared to find
Speaker 1: the inhabitants of Venus skilled in such things, and I'm
Speaker 1: not surprised by what do we see. So I also
Speaker 1: just love the spirit of that. It's like, yeah, just
Speaker 1: as I imagined, they are flying ships on Venus full
Speaker 1: of englishmen. Um, this is exactly as I thought I
Speaker 1: it would it would This is exactly how I thought
Speaker 1: it would pan out. I like your Venus voice too.
Speaker 1: Now why is he saying that they can float much
Speaker 1: more easily on Venus than over the Earth. Is that
Speaker 1: because it was understood at the time that the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Venus was denser than Earth's atmosphere. Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: that's the case here. Like I said, it doesn't it
Speaker 1: certainly doesn't hold up too much, um, modern scrutiny. It's
Speaker 1: very you know, it's it's very much old timey science fiction.
Speaker 1: And I think the thing is, you see a lot
Speaker 1: of that. The the Golden Age of science fiction is
Speaker 1: the time where yes, we were gazing at at Mars
Speaker 1: and and Venus and wondering what was their dreaming of
Speaker 1: canals on Mars and so forth. Um. But at the
Speaker 1: same time it was a period in which we were
Speaker 1: enraptured by the technology of flight, of powered human flight.
Speaker 1: And so even in is it was even as we
Speaker 1: see modern retreatments of of this idea, we see that
Speaker 1: Golden Age enthusiasm, uh, kind of creep in. For instance,
Speaker 1: there's a short story that I ran across that I
Speaker 1: haven't read, but it was published in two thousand ten
Speaker 1: and Asimov science Fiction by Jeffrey A. Landis, who's not
Speaker 1: only a hard science fiction author but a NASA aerospace engineer,
Speaker 1: and he wrote of what is apparently a kind of
Speaker 1: like Golden Age um flavored sci fi tail about there
Speaker 1: being habitats and ships uh in the atmosphere of Venus,
Speaker 1: like I think, as princesses and all. So it's you know,
Speaker 1: very kind of Edgar Rice Burrows and its presentation. Okay,
Speaker 1: cool swashbuckling, Maybe I would hope for swashbuckling. Buckling. You know,
Speaker 1: that's gotta be a sword fights on a platform over
Speaker 1: the atmosphere of Venus. That's bad news. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's all part of the Golden Age zeal The atmosphere
Speaker 1: is piranhas. Now. The cool thing about balloons on Venus
Speaker 1: is you don't have to go to science fiction to
Speaker 1: to think about them and to read about them. All
Speaker 1: you have to do is look into space exploration history,
Speaker 1: because we have sent balloons to Venus. So back in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union sent its Vega mission uh to uh
Speaker 1: to Earth's hot neighbor here. So, in addition to a lander,
Speaker 1: Vega featured two instrumental balloons that traveled roughly thirty of
Speaker 1: the way around the planet at an altitude of around
Speaker 1: fifty four kilometers. Sensors in a gondola attached to these
Speaker 1: balloons recorded such stats as pressure, temperature, vertical wind velocity
Speaker 1: like that was apparently one of the the interesting findings
Speaker 1: from that they got within these vertical h uh you know,
Speaker 1: wind columns, and then you had clown particle back scatter,
Speaker 1: ambient light level, and lightning frequency. These were essentially aerobots. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: they only made it thirty of the way around because
Speaker 1: they ran out of batteries, but they provided battery power.
Speaker 1: But they provided some interesting data before they went offline. Now,
Speaker 1: there were other atmospheric probes from the U S and
Speaker 1: the U s s are prior to this, but for instance,
Speaker 1: the Pioneer Venus multiprobe, it didn't even use a parachute.
Speaker 1: It was just like, you know, cutting down through the
Speaker 1: atmosphere and collecting data on the way down. And we've
Speaker 1: talked about on the show before. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: collections of images from from space exploration is the surfaces
Speaker 1: of Venus that were sent back by the Soviet Venera Lander.
Speaker 1: Did the Venera Lander use a balloon to descend I was.
Speaker 1: I don't believe so. I believe that the Vega was
Speaker 1: the first use of balloons on on Venus. Now in
Speaker 1: looking now, of course, parachutes are kind of an additional
Speaker 1: um category, uh to consider. So I was looking around
Speaker 1: for what are some of the proposed Venus missions Venus
Speaker 1: missions that may be undertaken in in the near or
Speaker 1: eventual future that will feature balloons or parachutes. So I
Speaker 1: thought I might mention a few before getting to the
Speaker 1: one that really excites me. So, first of all, there's
Speaker 1: not to say that these are these are these are
Speaker 1: not all exciting because they are exciting any kind of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, future exploration of venus is it just inherently amazing.
Speaker 1: But you have NASA's DA Vinci this is the Deep
Speaker 1: Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging UM.
Speaker 1: And this one is currently shortlisted. So it's it seems
Speaker 1: like it it may well come to pass, and and
Speaker 1: if it does, it will entail a parachute probe that
Speaker 1: descends through the atmosphere and collects data on the way down. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that that one should be a big one. There's
Speaker 1: also the Venus Inset to Explore or Vice. This is
Speaker 1: a proposed lander that would then release a meteor a
Speaker 1: loot meteorology balloon I believe from the surface so the
Speaker 1: meteorology balloon would be released once the lander has made
Speaker 1: it down. I might be wrong on that, but that's
Speaker 1: the the basic idea that I'm getting from what I
Speaker 1: was reading about it. Uh. This has been proposed since
Speaker 1: two thousand three by the Planetary Science UH Decadel Survey.
Speaker 1: It hasn't made the cut yet, but in the future
Speaker 1: it may. There's also chakra in one, a proposed Indian
Speaker 1: Space Research Organization i s r OH mission to Venus
Speaker 1: that would likely feature a Vega esque probe. UH Schokra,
Speaker 1: by the way, is the name for Venus in Sanskrit,
Speaker 1: so that's where they get it. I think the name
Speaker 1: like literally means uh Venus craft or something to that effect. Interesting.
Speaker 1: Another really cool one is and I think this one
Speaker 1: may have come upon the show before is uh Northrop
Speaker 1: Grumming and l guards proposed mission, and it is the
Speaker 1: Venous Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform or VAMP. It looks like a
Speaker 1: futuristic well I would say, actually kind of best been
Speaker 1: cloud city type airplane with with big wings going out
Speaker 1: on the sides. Yeah, it's it's basically the cool thing
Speaker 1: is it's kind of a an update of an idea
Speaker 1: that Northrop Grumman has been putting out for decades, and
Speaker 1: that is the flying wing. It is an inflatable The
Speaker 1: concept is an inflatable flying wing aerobot that would also
Speaker 1: boast solar arrays on the top and it would uh
Speaker 1: and it would use those for its power, along with
Speaker 1: some combination of batteries and a generator that I think
Speaker 1: have maybe not quite been developed yet. It would be
Speaker 1: propeller driven and it would be fully controllable, though not
Speaker 1: in real time. Uh. And this would be during the day.
Speaker 1: So during the day when the sunlight is able to
Speaker 1: power it up to full power. Uh, it would be
Speaker 1: soaring up to altitudes of seventy kilometers above the surface,
Speaker 1: taking advantage of the solar intensity above the clouds. And
Speaker 1: then at night it would power down and dip down
Speaker 1: to a cruising floating altitude of around fifty six kilometers. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's funny. So it's nighttime floating altitude might be right
Speaker 1: around where the phosphene was allegedly found if it wasn't found. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and at that point it would just be cruising or
Speaker 1: just floating. Now. Also interesting, the vamp would actually the
Speaker 1: idea is that the VAMP would probably inflate in space
Speaker 1: and enter the atmosphere without an aero shell, so without
Speaker 1: this kind of sarcophagus to hold it to protect it.
Speaker 1: Uh quote, large surface area produces benign heating loads during entry,
Speaker 1: and this would of course all be supported by an
Speaker 1: accompanying satellite, and the VAMP would last four months to
Speaker 1: possibly a year, eventually losing out to the gradual loss
Speaker 1: of the buoyant gas inside it. But wait, I think
Speaker 1: we're about to get to your to your real baby here, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is the one that I read a little bit
Speaker 1: about and then I got excited and I was like,
Speaker 1: oh man, this we got to go back to Venus.
Speaker 1: And that is havoc h A v O C. This
Speaker 1: is what's got you sending your your harassing letters to NASA,
Speaker 1: Like do that, I do havoc now, havoc is this?
Speaker 1: This is one of those proposed missions where you read
Speaker 1: about it and it's is it's it's it's as exciting
Speaker 1: as any movie or or television show or sci fi
Speaker 1: short story you might come across, because it's it's unique
Speaker 1: and thrilling, and it's hard to imagine the type of
Speaker 1: person who would do it. But you know, they exist.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the type of of of of
Speaker 1: human being that goes on on a space mission. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the Havoc High Altitude Venus operational concept, and
Speaker 1: there are essentially two different versions of it. One is
Speaker 1: the robotic version that would be the the necessary precursor
Speaker 1: to the second variety, which would be a crude NASA
Speaker 1: venous mission. So to be clear, this is a this
Speaker 1: is a mission concept. It's not something that's like on
Speaker 1: track to to actually launch or be produced right now,
Speaker 1: but it's sort of like it's on the menu of
Speaker 1: things that could be selected for future missions. Right We
Speaker 1: would the habit project itself, if it were to come
Speaker 1: to pass, there would be like two or three There
Speaker 1: would be multiple missions which I'll get into leading up
Speaker 1: to humans actually going. But also it would not be
Speaker 1: our next Venus mission. Uh. You know, under any circumstances
Speaker 1: like this, this is something we might be able to
Speaker 1: do in the future. You know, I'm embarrassed to say
Speaker 1: I while I was reading about this, I couldn't help
Speaker 1: but keep thinking about There was this terrible video game.
Speaker 1: Do you remember the Command and Conquer first person shooter? Oh?
Speaker 1: I don't know that. I do what what what system
Speaker 1: era was this? I think it was. I think I've
Speaker 1: played it on PC and many many years ago. So
Speaker 1: Commanding Conquer games are like real time strategy games. You
Speaker 1: move all these local troops around and stuff. But they
Speaker 1: made one game in the series that's set in the
Speaker 1: same universe. But you play this like marine guy who
Speaker 1: it's the first person shooter and the guy you play
Speaker 1: is named Havoc, very cool, and everybody's like Havoc. You
Speaker 1: you don't go off mission, you do as you're told.
Speaker 1: It's like shoot thing general. Oh man, were you Were
Speaker 1: you good at the real time strategy games? No? No,
Speaker 1: because I was horrible at him. Like I wanted to
Speaker 1: love them. They put out these these really well put
Speaker 1: together Donald war games based on forty K stuff, and
Speaker 1: I really wanted to love them, but I was just
Speaker 1: terrible at them. It was just like chaos and loss
Speaker 1: by the time I tried to play it at any level,
Speaker 1: just weeping and just watching the destruction of your forces
Speaker 1: and your empires. Yeah. I've never been an elite gamer
Speaker 1: of any kind whatsoever, So no, I'm not good at
Speaker 1: that or any other type of game. It just felt
Speaker 1: like too much multitasking. Like I. I like games where
Speaker 1: I can be specific and strategic, where I can pause
Speaker 1: and think, I get. That's why I'm I'm more of
Speaker 1: a a turn based strategy versus real time strategy. It's
Speaker 1: just I'll take the turn based anytime. You're a magic
Speaker 1: the gathering warlock. Yeah yeah, yeah not not then whatever
Speaker 1: real time magic is. That's just too too much pressure,
Speaker 1: all right, So so back to Havoca. Sorry, if that
Speaker 1: was a terrible digression, we could come down. No, no,
Speaker 1: it stays in um so basically, in essence, havoc entails
Speaker 1: the use of human exploration in the upper Venusian atmosphere
Speaker 1: aboard a helium airship. So this airship would be about
Speaker 1: a hundred or four three ft long thirty four ms
Speaker 1: or a hundred and eleven feet tall. So as the
Speaker 1: as it's as it's presented in one of the the
Speaker 1: PDFs that I came across, uh from, from the people
Speaker 1: putting it together, it would be about half the size
Speaker 1: of the Hindenburg, but twice as long as sort of
Speaker 1: your average goodyear blimp. I love that they're just reminding
Speaker 1: people of the Hindenburg in the proposal. Yeah, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say a zeppelin, so so very much like whatever you're
Speaker 1: picturing in mind for like a blamp or a zeppelin
Speaker 1: or airship like that's basically the initial look of what
Speaker 1: they've proposed, but they're gonna be some key differences as well.
Speaker 1: So I propel propeller driven gondola on the bottom. You know,
Speaker 1: this is the habited habitable portion of it would contain
Speaker 1: both an atmospheric habitat for two crew members over twenty
Speaker 1: eight days, along with an ascent vehicle essentially a rocket
Speaker 1: with an ascent habitat on the front of it that
Speaker 1: would at the end of its time in the atmosphere
Speaker 1: allow the two crew members to rock it back to
Speaker 1: the transit vehicle in low of the Venusian orbit for
Speaker 1: the return trip. Oh that's interesting because so one of
Speaker 1: the big questions about crude missions to other planetary bodies
Speaker 1: like Mars or something like that is, you know, how
Speaker 1: are you going to leave the planet? Do you get
Speaker 1: back up off? So you'd probably need to take some
Speaker 1: kind of rocket with you that would need to be
Speaker 1: able to attain escape velocity. I wonder is it easier
Speaker 1: to leave a planet if you're in the atmosphere as
Speaker 1: opposed on the surface. Of course it would be easier, right,
Speaker 1: You need less force less thrust to escape from there
Speaker 1: than you would from the surface. Yeah, but it's a
Speaker 1: different just a different scenario than you encounter thinking about
Speaker 1: these other planets or like Mars, or are thinking about
Speaker 1: traveling to Earth's moon for example. Because again this is
Speaker 1: one of the crazy things. A trip like this to
Speaker 1: Venus would not entail actually setting foot on the planet.
Speaker 1: You would never go down to the true Venus firma. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know you would. You would only be going into
Speaker 1: the upper atmosphere, hanging out there for like, you know,
Speaker 1: against some of like twenty eight days, and then returning
Speaker 1: to low orbit from there. Yeah. It's something that's not
Speaker 1: usually considered. Are we think of visiting other planets in
Speaker 1: a binary You've got orbit and then you've got surface activity,
Speaker 1: and this would be in between. It's like if you
Speaker 1: were planning a visit to New York City, but you're
Speaker 1: you're you aren't gonna actually travel to Times Square. You're
Speaker 1: gonna only limit yourself to the very outer burrows, right
Speaker 1: and then return home. Yeah, I just went on vacation
Speaker 1: to Queens. No, no disparaging Queens by the way. No. No,
Speaker 1: if anything, we should be disparaging times square like that.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't land Landing in times square is like landing
Speaker 1: on the surface of Venus. What were you thinking going
Speaker 1: in that deep? You need a rocket to escape the
Speaker 1: bubba gum shrimp. So I recommend you know, everyone look
Speaker 1: up pictures of the concept, the models they've put together
Speaker 1: for this, because it is great. It's like this, the
Speaker 1: gondola with the propellers. The ascent vehicle again looks very
Speaker 1: much like a cool rocket um harnessed behind it. It's
Speaker 1: very neat. We In essence, we'd be talking about sending
Speaker 1: three habitats on the Havoc mission. So there'd be the
Speaker 1: transit habits habitat that the crew members would be on
Speaker 1: the way to and from the planet Venus. This would
Speaker 1: be the space habitat. There would be the and then
Speaker 1: there would be the atmospheric habitat on the gondola that
Speaker 1: would be where they'd spend in their twenty eight days
Speaker 1: and then or less, depending on how it goes. And
Speaker 1: then the ascent habitat is the one on the front
Speaker 1: of that rocket, just to get them back up into orbit,
Speaker 1: so they can get back into the transit habitat and
Speaker 1: return home. Well, I gotta say that does sound complicated.
Speaker 1: I think that I have a lot of moving pieces
Speaker 1: like that. You introduce increasing difficulty into the mission, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: because in all the mission would see the ship arrive
Speaker 1: at Venus, then drop an airship from low Venusian orbit
Speaker 1: on a parachute, okay, parachutes in towards the upper atmosphere.
Speaker 1: It's gonna drop its aeroshell, it's protective sarcophagus. It's gonna
Speaker 1: then unferral and inflate the helium blimp. It's going to
Speaker 1: drop the parachute altogether and um, and it's going to
Speaker 1: carry out atmospheric activities are up to twenty eight days.
Speaker 1: Then when the time comes to leave, the two crew
Speaker 1: members hopping the ascent vehicle returned to low Venusian orbit,
Speaker 1: leaving the airship to continue on for the duration of
Speaker 1: its life. Uh in the Venusian atmosphere. They get back
Speaker 1: in the transit vehicle and they return back to Earth.
Speaker 1: I hope the airship would get to send pictures back
Speaker 1: as it sinks down into the atmosphere gradually over time.
Speaker 1: I assume that would be part of it, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of using every part of the buffalo on the mission,
Speaker 1: you know, like planning out exactly what it's going to
Speaker 1: do for the rest of its life. Now they see
Speaker 1: this being ultimately there being five phases to this branch
Speaker 1: of of Venus exploration. So Phase one would be a
Speaker 1: robotic version of the same concept, just obviously do it
Speaker 1: without people and see how feasible it is. Phase two
Speaker 1: would be a thirty day mission to bring the crew
Speaker 1: to orbit around Venus, but then not deal with the
Speaker 1: atmosphere at all. Phase three would be a thirty day
Speaker 1: mission to bring the crew to the atmosphere, and this
Speaker 1: would be the model we just discussed. Phase four, they
Speaker 1: touch on, would be a version that entails a one
Speaker 1: year voyage in the atmosphere, so like the next this
Speaker 1: is like the stretch goal for this particular project. And
Speaker 1: then ultimately Phase five would be the Grinspoon Special, a
Speaker 1: permanent human presence in Gondola habitats um up there in
Speaker 1: the upper atmosphere of Venus, hopefully small enough that you
Speaker 1: don't fall under the jurisdiction of the Empire at all.
Speaker 1: So so advocates of this mission, and just Venus missions
Speaker 1: in general, they point out that the Venus has an
Speaker 1: induced magnetosphere from the interaction of its thick atmosphere with
Speaker 1: the solar wind, and it's nearer proximity to the Sun
Speaker 1: brings it further within the Sun's magnetic field, so there's
Speaker 1: arguably less of a cosmic radiation risk compared to Mars.
Speaker 1: It's also easier to get to, making it, by some estimates,
Speaker 1: an ideal first step in reaching Mars Um. Now this,
Speaker 1: I don't know. You may be getting into a little
Speaker 1: like Team Venus versus Team Marsh competition here, something that
Speaker 1: Grinspa was talking about. You know, the legitimate rivalries there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but um, you know, but the shortest possible distance from
Speaker 1: Earth to Venus is something like thirty eight million kilometers
Speaker 1: versus fifty six million kilometers for Mars, and a year
Speaker 1: on Venus is much shorter, so you know, Christmas comes
Speaker 1: earlier there. Yeah. The again we have to do have
Speaker 1: to stress though HAVOC as well as stuff like VAMP
Speaker 1: very much just mission concepts at this point. It's nothing
Speaker 1: on the books. Da Vinci I think is gonna probably
Speaker 1: be the project that gets the NOD next We'll see
Speaker 1: how it goes. But either way, Venus missions are only
Speaker 1: an option every nineteen months, because I mentioned that the
Speaker 1: closest distance we've touched on this before. Like, if you're
Speaker 1: talking about going to know to another planet, it depends
Speaker 1: on where Earth is in relation to that planet, how
Speaker 1: long of a journey you're talking and you want, of course,
Speaker 1: uh calculated so that you're making the shortest voyage possible
Speaker 1: to reach that other planet. Yeah. Yeah. So as somebody
Speaker 1: who feels a lot of sympathy for the Venus partisans
Speaker 1: and the rivalries between the planetary scientists, I uh, I
Speaker 1: hope that the study from September of this year and
Speaker 1: and all the subsequent research, whether it turns out that
Speaker 1: there's good evidence for the presence of the phosphine gas
Speaker 1: or not, I hope this at least spurs more attention
Speaker 1: to Venus, Like it gets more unscrewed admissions there at
Speaker 1: least um to awaken the hunger for Venus knowledge among
Speaker 1: the people generally. Yeah, yeah, just to build public interest
Speaker 1: in Venus, like it's a strange and and exciting planet
Speaker 1: and and missions like I feel like Havoc Alone should
Speaker 1: be one of these programs that everyone should look at
Speaker 1: because it makes me more excited about about Venus to
Speaker 1: just even think about people, can you can you imagine
Speaker 1: can you imagine the footage much less being there like
Speaker 1: that's that's a step too far from me to be
Speaker 1: imagine being aboard this vessel in the within the skies
Speaker 1: or kind of over the clouds of an alien world.
Speaker 1: But just see the footage of that, that journey, that
Speaker 1: would be amazing. Totally agree. I can't wait to see
Speaker 1: where we where we go from here? Yeah? Is that
Speaker 1: the end? If we're if we're the doorways? Is it
Speaker 1: time to close ourselves on the way out? I guess
Speaker 1: it is. Yeah. Obviously we could talk more about Venus
Speaker 1: and and I hope we do talk more about Venus. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe maybe we can we can get get
Speaker 1: Grinspin back on the program to talk about it. I
Speaker 1: know he discussed potentially writing more about Venus. That book
Speaker 1: that he wrote about Venus came out many years ago,
Speaker 1: so he's probably overdue for re exploration totally. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear from everyone out there, Um, what
Speaker 1: are your thoughts about Venus Venus Exploration or some of
Speaker 1: the missions we've talked about here. What are your thoughts
Speaker 1: about the possibility of life in Venus. Do you have
Speaker 1: other examples of of early science fictional visions of balloons
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere of Venus? Uh? Let us know. We'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from you. Likewise, just space science in
Speaker 1: general and other planets. Uh. Would you like us to
Speaker 1: do more episodes like this in the future. Is there
Speaker 1: a particular planet that we have not journeyed to that
Speaker 1: you would like us to visit? Reach out to us
Speaker 1: and let us know. Uh. In the meantime, just rate,
Speaker 1: review and subscribe the show wherever you get the ability
Speaker 1: to do so. And if, oh, if you go to
Speaker 1: stuff to bow your mind dot com, that will take
Speaker 1: you over to our I heart listing for the show.
Speaker 1: And there's a button there or listing there somewhere you
Speaker 1: can click on store and that will take you over
Speaker 1: to our T shirt shop. You can get some T
Speaker 1: shirts or stickers or toe bags or what have you
Speaker 1: with our logo on them, or some cool designs like
Speaker 1: a monster or a basilisk or a you know, Pandora
Speaker 1: opening up a box full of all the problems and
Speaker 1: the challenging ideas in the world. It's all there for
Speaker 1: you to consider. Still waiting on our Weird House Cinema,
Speaker 1: Mad Love Sausage Man t shirt, so I'm hoping that
Speaker 1: will happen soon. All right, okay, huge thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, just to say hello, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my heart radio, this is the
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Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.