Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
Speaker 1: McCormick and Robert. I've got a question for you today.
Speaker 1: Hit me in your opinion. What is the creepiest image
Speaker 1: photograph produced by human space exploration. Well, since we're talking
Speaker 1: about exploration, I imagine this rules out weapons tests. No, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, I'm not interested in any clear bombs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we have some pretty creepy new test footage such
Speaker 1: as nineteen sixties Operation UH Dominique, which was involved the
Speaker 1: atmospheric sort of slash space detonation of nukes. I don't
Speaker 1: think I've ever seen that. Oh yeah, it's a For instance,
Speaker 1: there was the Starfish Prime event in which a one
Speaker 1: point for megatun bomb detonated two hundred and fifty miles
Speaker 1: or four two kilometers above the planet. And that's above
Speaker 1: the the Carmen line. So like that's pretty disturbing when
Speaker 1: you when you think about it, like a Cold War
Speaker 1: UH space detonation test. But as far as like pure
Speaker 1: space exploration goes, I'm always a sucker for stuff like
Speaker 1: the you know, the so called Martian face, or even
Speaker 1: something like the Hexagon of Saturn, something that just inspires
Speaker 1: this sense of mystery where you're asking, like, what what
Speaker 1: is this place? Really? Oh, the hexagon on the I
Speaker 1: believe it's the north pole of Saturn. It's either the
Speaker 1: north or the South pole. I can't recall. I believe
Speaker 1: I believe it's north. We we talked about it in
Speaker 1: one of our previous episodes, Haunted Geography and Haunted Geometry,
Speaker 1: very love craft in Yeah, I guess they're forbidden. Geometry
Speaker 1: is all through the Lovecraft cosmos, right, you know it.
Speaker 1: But I've got a different answer my and for a
Speaker 1: long time this has been my answer. My favorite creepy
Speaker 1: space images have got to be the photos taken by
Speaker 1: the Venera thirteen lander Robert. I've got them in the
Speaker 1: notes here. But have you ever looked at these before? Yes,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not sure I've seen the color corrected ones,
Speaker 1: but but certainly I've seen the the the other ones
Speaker 1: that have that that deep kind of reddish orange tinge
Speaker 1: to them. Yeah. I mean, it's funny to try to
Speaker 1: explain what's disturbing about them, because they're just pictures of
Speaker 1: some rocks you know, it's just you're you're looking at
Speaker 1: some rocks and soil. Now what the Venera Landers were.
Speaker 1: It was a series of space missions to the planet
Speaker 1: Venus that was done by the Soviet Space Program. They
Speaker 1: launched these missions to put landers down on the surface
Speaker 1: of Venus for the first time. There had mid Landers
Speaker 1: sending things back from Venus or the surface of Venus
Speaker 1: before this, but they sent a bunch of missions in
Speaker 1: the seventies and the eighties. And one of the things
Speaker 1: about landing on Venus, and we'll definitely get more into
Speaker 1: this in the episode, is that you've got a very
Speaker 1: short window of time to send stuff back because Venus
Speaker 1: is a death trap. Yeah, it will destroy you, even
Speaker 1: for highly shielded, powerful machines. You put a machine down
Speaker 1: there and it's a suicide mission. The machine is gonna
Speaker 1: gather some data and transmit as long as it can,
Speaker 1: but eventually the crushing heat and pressure of the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Venus will kill that robot and it will only
Speaker 1: have this last sort of death note to send back
Speaker 1: to Earth. And one of these missions managed to send
Speaker 1: some really striking pictures as that last death note. Specifically,
Speaker 1: it was the Venera thirteen lander, which was launched on
Speaker 1: October one, and it landed on Venus on March first night.
Speaker 1: So even the idea of a lander setting down on Venus,
Speaker 1: if you know anything about the Venusian atmosphere, is kind
Speaker 1: of creepy to imagine, because first you're going into this
Speaker 1: haze of sulfurous clouds. But as you go further and
Speaker 1: further down, the atmospheric pressure gets so much and so
Speaker 1: dense and so thick that it's almost more like sinking
Speaker 1: into a liquid uh. And so you've got to imagine
Speaker 1: this lander sinking down into this atmospheric ocean surrounding Venus,
Speaker 1: this boiling hot, lead melting atmospheric ocean of of carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide and nitrogen, with all this sulfur everywhere. And then
Speaker 1: finally it sets down on the surface and takes these
Speaker 1: images and sends them back to Earth. And there's almost
Speaker 1: nothing in the images. You just see the edge of
Speaker 1: the lander in the foreground, and it has some appropriately
Speaker 1: creepy looking triangular teeth all around it, and then beyond
Speaker 1: that there's some soil and some flat rocks. But nevertheless,
Speaker 1: something about these images messes with me. I find them
Speaker 1: absolutely creepy. And haunting. They have this dirty grindhouse kind
Speaker 1: of yellow film effect to them. Uh. And that's of
Speaker 1: course the atmospheric effects that we see from from the
Speaker 1: glow of Venus. Uh. It's almost as if we're looking
Speaker 1: at everything through an evil haze. For me, I think
Speaker 1: it's because it's the it's like the last known photograph
Speaker 1: from from from the from the very you know, borders
Speaker 1: of the known world. Yea. Um. It's like if somebody
Speaker 1: went to the Texas Chainsaw mascre house and took a
Speaker 1: picture of their feet by accident, and then that's all
Speaker 1: you had to go on, right, so you know, do
Speaker 1: you know something terrible happened afterwards? You don't have a
Speaker 1: lot of details, but you have this picture of somebody's
Speaker 1: feet on a front porch in Texas. That's exactly right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it feels like that. And another creepy thing about them
Speaker 1: is that you notice a difference that unlike Mars, where
Speaker 1: if you see images back from the surface of Mars,
Speaker 1: they can sometimes look kind of creepy, but it can
Speaker 1: also just look kind of like, I don't know, a
Speaker 1: desert on kind of an overcast day, it was just
Speaker 1: a very bare in area with sand and rocks and
Speaker 1: kind of a gray white sky. But unlike on Mars,
Speaker 1: one thing you'll notice is the effects of sunlight and
Speaker 1: the directionality of the sunlight, where if there's a thing
Speaker 1: sticking out of the rover, you can see it casting
Speaker 1: a shadow on the ground. These these pictures have no
Speaker 1: indication of shadows really, you know, looking at them again,
Speaker 1: as we podcast here, I do think there is a
Speaker 1: sense of one taking a picture of one's own feet here,
Speaker 1: So there's an incompleteness to it. No, it's that just
Speaker 1: that just gets at you. Whereas at least with it
Speaker 1: with the Mars images, we have more of a true,
Speaker 1: uh you know, panoramic vision of what's going on there. Well,
Speaker 1: Mars has been thoroughly explored on the surface at this point.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have all kinds of pictures of what
Speaker 1: Mars looks like at different times of day, different times
Speaker 1: of the year, you know, from multiple different landers and rovers.
Speaker 1: Mars almost feels like, I don't mean to pooh pooh Mars.
Speaker 1: I mean, Mars is still fascinating and mysterious and wonderful,
Speaker 1: but it's it's very much more explored territory at this point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we know As we've mentioned before, we have more detailed
Speaker 1: information about the surface of Mars than we have about
Speaker 1: the bottom of the ocean. In some ways, that is
Speaker 1: definitely true. Um, but the surface of Venus is like,
Speaker 1: it's this mystery hell, you know, it's this hazy mystery
Speaker 1: that's beyond the gate. And because it feels like this
Speaker 1: hazy mystery that's beyond the gate, for some reason, the
Speaker 1: idea of life on Venus has always seemed more creepy
Speaker 1: and interesting and tantalizing a possibility to me than the
Speaker 1: idea of life on Mars. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: feel the same way. Yeah, I definitely think so. I
Speaker 1: think it's kind of a shame that Venus doesn't get
Speaker 1: more attention, especially in terms of our our science fiction,
Speaker 1: because when you think of life on another planet within
Speaker 1: our Solar system, you think of really the rich history
Speaker 1: of imagining life on Mars, both in the future and
Speaker 1: the past, because you have everything from of course the
Speaker 1: old Edgar Rice Burrows novels to uh Total to Total Recall.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's there's so much great stuff there. But
Speaker 1: when you start looking for really cool examples of life
Speaker 1: on Venus, there are some great examples, but there there
Speaker 1: aren't as many. It's not it's not the place that
Speaker 1: the human imagination instantly goes to. But as we'll discuss
Speaker 1: in this episode, we really should because there's a there.
Speaker 1: There are some strong cases to be made for life
Speaker 1: on Venus, either now or in the past. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so that's going to be the main subject of today's episode.
Speaker 1: If there are, or if there have been, creatures of Venus,
Speaker 1: what are they like and how would we know about them? Now?
Speaker 1: If we just turn to fiction for if you examples? Uh,
Speaker 1: we don't have time to catalog everything, but I wanted
Speaker 1: to mention a few that came to my mind. Anyway.
Speaker 1: There is an HP Lovecraft story from ninety nine that
Speaker 1: he wrote with Kenneth Sterling titled In the Walls of Erics,
Speaker 1: which features a muddy jungle Venus and a maze with
Speaker 1: invisible walls. That feels about right. Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1: I remember I remember dating that story when I read it. Uh. C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis took us to Venusian Paradise in his novel Peralandra. Uh.
Speaker 1: This involves an alien Adam and Eve and there and
Speaker 1: then of course you have the Devil Show up as well,
Speaker 1: possessing the body of a character by the name of
Speaker 1: Professor Weston. Professor Weston, I wonder if that's named after
Speaker 1: Jesse Weston, who wrote the book about the Grail legend
Speaker 1: that was so popular in the early twentieth century. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't remember, but U but it's a
Speaker 1: Paralalandro was was a book I really loved when I
Speaker 1: was younger, and we'll probably read again at some at
Speaker 1: some point. I've never read it, but that seems interesting
Speaker 1: to explore, especially because you've got, I mean, you've got
Speaker 1: multiple mythic associations with Venus throughout history. You know, you've
Speaker 1: got the god of love and the Eros and the
Speaker 1: Venus aphrodite kind of association. But you've also got the
Speaker 1: lucifer association. Yeah, yeah, and both are explored in Peralandra.
Speaker 1: In Perilandro, Venus is also a water world. They're like
Speaker 1: these kind of floating wraths of land that everyone is everyone.
Speaker 1: It's like three or four people, three or four individuals
Speaker 1: anyway they lived there. But yeah, it's it's a it
Speaker 1: is an interesting take on Venus as well. Stephen King
Speaker 1: took us to Venus twice as it turns out once
Speaker 1: in a nineteen sixties self published short story titled The
Speaker 1: Cursed Expedition, which I have not read. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that's one that's actually readily available or it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a you know, a vault story of kings. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then there's of course his short story I Am
Speaker 1: the Doorway, which doesn't actually visit the planet, but a
Speaker 1: character is takes part in a manned Venus fly by
Speaker 1: and comes back in centially infected with an alien organism. Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to think about that this is a time
Speaker 1: period at which the Venera missions were underway. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: also a similar Outer Limits episode from nineteen four titled
Speaker 1: Cold Hands, Warm Heart that actually stars William Shatner. So
Speaker 1: Shot goes to Venus or he's from Venus or what.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen this episode, but he is involved in
Speaker 1: some sort of space mission involving Venus. So you can't
Speaker 1: give me the deets on the chat. I mean, things go,
Speaker 1: you know, weird. That's that's the Again, this is not
Speaker 1: an Outer Limits episode that I've seen, but perhaps we
Speaker 1: have listeners you can chime in on it. And then,
Speaker 1: of course Venus plays an important role in the expanse
Speaker 1: uh TV series adaptation of the novels. No spoilers, but
Speaker 1: it does have a pretty cool plot line involving Life
Speaker 1: and Venus. And there's also early mentioned in the books
Speaker 1: and perhaps the TV series as well, about a failed
Speaker 1: attempt by humans to establish cloud colonies there. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that is an intra sting idea. I've read about the
Speaker 1: idea of trying to create um I don't know whether
Speaker 1: you call them aerostatic or hydrostatic, basically floating colonies. That
Speaker 1: would be not too hard to do, actually, because of
Speaker 1: how dense the atmosphere is. Yeah, cloud City right out
Speaker 1: of Empire. Yeah, except I don't know, best Bin didn't
Speaker 1: look all that cloudy compared to Venus. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean they were up there, right, It's been a long
Speaker 1: time since they've seen Empires. I don't remember how cloudy
Speaker 1: was or if it became more cloudy in the special
Speaker 1: editions that came out. Who knows. Oh yeah, they're really
Speaker 1: cged some more clouds in there. It's uh, it was
Speaker 1: worth it. Uh No. I think it's interesting that Venus
Speaker 1: doesn't get as much attention as Mars does in terms
Speaker 1: of the possibility of finding microbial life forms. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, way back in the day, people used to think,
Speaker 1: before we'd explored Mars that there, you know, there might
Speaker 1: be whole civilizations there. People would look through telescopes and
Speaker 1: see what looked like canals on Mars, and they'd say, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, there are people on Mars, just like there
Speaker 1: are people here. Now we pretty much can rule that out.
Speaker 1: I wonder of part of it is because we went
Speaker 1: from being so geocentric, the idea that the Earth is
Speaker 1: the center of all things, and then we went to
Speaker 1: a heliocentric model, and then of course we expanded beyond that.
Speaker 1: But if if we're still kind of thinking heliocentrically, so
Speaker 1: the Sun is the center of of our solar system,
Speaker 1: and therefore it's kind of a center of order and
Speaker 1: and the known. And this is not doesn't something not
Speaker 1: not something that actually matches up necessarily with our our
Speaker 1: scientific understanding of everything. But it is. It is a center.
Speaker 1: And therefore Venus is closer to the center. It's closer
Speaker 1: to the center of the known, whereas Mars is a
Speaker 1: little beyondest, like Mars is a little more on the outskirts.
Speaker 1: And therefore it makes this more it makes more sense
Speaker 1: that it would have more mystery to it. That's where
Speaker 1: the that's where the ghosts and goblins are going to live, right,
Speaker 1: They're not gonna live in the middle of the city.
Speaker 1: They're gonna live on the outskirts of town. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the outer limits. You don't talk about the inner
Speaker 1: limits though, I do. Really eno always science fiction that
Speaker 1: that goes inward instead of goes outward. Actually, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is something I really liked about that movie Sunshine
Speaker 1: that came out, which you know, I had a lot
Speaker 1: of problems. I think some of the writing kind of
Speaker 1: fell apart in the third part of the movie, but
Speaker 1: it explored the idea that there was this deep, kind
Speaker 1: of ghostly mystery to the sun, and as you come
Speaker 1: closer and closer to the Sun, it's sort of activates
Speaker 1: these instincts within you that are sort of borderline supernatural,
Speaker 1: but at least seemed to go deeper than the human
Speaker 1: or mammalian parts of your nervous system. Where you know,
Speaker 1: where the Sun is the closest thing to a literal
Speaker 1: god there is in the physical universe, right, it's the
Speaker 1: creator of us. Yeah, yeah, I think that ye coupled
Speaker 1: with the fact that every humans just want to keep
Speaker 1: going out. It's one of the reasons probably that more
Speaker 1: people have been to the Moon than to the bottom
Speaker 1: of than to the deepest portions of the ocean. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we should ignore this impulse to go out
Speaker 1: and we should go in. Let's go in towards Venus,
Speaker 1: get closer to the Sun, move one orbit in and
Speaker 1: are looking at this hothouse planet. Yeah, why go to
Speaker 1: a planet that doesn't have enough atmosphere when instead you
Speaker 1: can take your your dreams and your imagination to a
Speaker 1: place that has more atmosphere than you can handle. Let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break and when we come back, we
Speaker 1: will explore the surface of Venus. Thank you, thank you. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back now. You're probably familiar with some of the
Speaker 1: most basic features of Venus as a planet, right that
Speaker 1: it's very much known as an Earth analog, and that
Speaker 1: is a fair way to characterize it. It's very close
Speaker 1: to the size and mass of the Earth. It's gonna
Speaker 1: you know, it was created around the same time and
Speaker 1: the accretion disk of the inner rocky planets um so
Speaker 1: in many ways it is a lot like the Earth
Speaker 1: until you get down into the atmosphere. So, Robert, can
Speaker 1: you take me on a tour of the surface of Venus. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Actually chatted with astrobiologist David Grinspoon about the surface of
Speaker 1: Venus several years back, as well as with JPL scientists
Speaker 1: Susanne smrit Car. So I want to run through some
Speaker 1: of the attributes of the planet ended here that they
Speaker 1: stressed to me. All right, let's take a stroll through
Speaker 1: the toxic soup. Alright. So, so Grinspoon pointed out that
Speaker 1: first and foremost, this is a planet that's very rich
Speaker 1: and volcanoes and mountains and tech tonic features. Now not
Speaker 1: to be confused with tectonic activity. We'll get back to that.
Speaker 1: You won't find signs of a water erosion. Uh, probably
Speaker 1: unless they're very very ancient. And a lot of the
Speaker 1: topography is dominated by a sort of low aligning rolling
Speaker 1: planes that are largely ash. And this is punctuated by
Speaker 1: some high volcanic mountains and some other sort of high
Speaker 1: plateaus of titanically disrupted areas with with flows of ash.
Speaker 1: So this is a planet surface that has been sort
Speaker 1: of like hit and paved by volcanic activity. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're also he says they're seemingly steady slow winds, always
Speaker 1: blowing east to west, and uh as we've already touched on.
Speaker 1: The atmospheric pressure is very high. Now. One interesting thing
Speaker 1: about the directionality of the movement of the atmosphere there
Speaker 1: is that Venus rotates opposite of the way that most
Speaker 1: of the planets in our Solar system rotate. It rotates
Speaker 1: in a retrograde way to its orbit. So the sun
Speaker 1: actually rises in the west and sets in the east
Speaker 1: on Venus. Yeah, it's it's interesting. It has also has
Speaker 1: an extremely slow rotation two forty three terrestrial days, that's
Speaker 1: how long it takes, but its atmosphere only needs four
Speaker 1: days to write to rotate. So yeah, there's already you
Speaker 1: can tell there's a lot of a lot of by
Speaker 1: the from a terrestrial standpoint, a lot of screwy things
Speaker 1: going on with Venus. If you were approaching the this
Speaker 1: is like approaching the Texas chainsaw mask er house and
Speaker 1: finding all sorts of bone based you know, voodoo doo,
Speaker 1: Dad's hanging in trees and bushes, right, some skull furniture.
Speaker 1: So the pressure is high, roughly ninety times the pressure
Speaker 1: at sea level on Earth. That's a lot of pressure.
Speaker 1: Of of course it's going to vary though depending on
Speaker 1: you know exactly what al to you're at Venus. We've
Speaker 1: already touched on the light a little bit. You'd find
Speaker 1: very dull light. Grinsman says that if you were suddenly
Speaker 1: transported to Venus, you would notice that the light is
Speaker 1: very different. It's always cloudy, and there's a very thick uh,
Speaker 1: the very thick atmosphere. So light is, he says, is
Speaker 1: kind of diffused and gathered so so much that it's
Speaker 1: a it's kind of reddish, and there are, as you said,
Speaker 1: no shadows because there's no direct sunlight. It's all just
Speaker 1: clouds and scattered light. He says that there would be
Speaker 1: enough daylight to see, but it will be like a
Speaker 1: heavily overcast day on Earth. And of course on the
Speaker 1: night side it would be dark. Aside from whatever kind
Speaker 1: of like you, you would probably notice the dull red
Speaker 1: glow of the red hot rocks in the ground lighting
Speaker 1: things a bit creepy. And he pointed out that it
Speaker 1: is pretty much Earth's alter ego. It's the only Earth
Speaker 1: sized planet in our Solar system only uh, and the
Speaker 1: only other roughly Earth sized planet that we can send
Speaker 1: a spacecraft too and study in detail. Uh, that will
Speaker 1: and that's going to be true for a long long time.
Speaker 1: And Uh, indeed, Earth and Venus probably had similar origins. Uh,
Speaker 1: it could have been and they could have been a
Speaker 1: nearly identical states in the beginning, and yet we have
Speaker 1: gone down very difficent routes in terms of how our
Speaker 1: climates and surface conditions have turned out. So, yeah, if
Speaker 1: we started in similar states, what happened to Venus to
Speaker 1: make it so different from us? Well, runaway greenhouse effect
Speaker 1: boiled away the oceans long ago and they were lost
Speaker 1: to space, and then it it became essentially stuck with
Speaker 1: its present climate. It's so it's it's often touted as
Speaker 1: kind of a worse case example of what climate change
Speaker 1: on Earth could amount to. Yeah, now you might have
Speaker 1: heard of this idea of the runaway greenhouse effect invoked.
Speaker 1: But if you're wondering exactly how that works, Basically, what
Speaker 1: happens is you've got some liquid on the surface of
Speaker 1: your planet. You've got like liquid water oceans, and if
Speaker 1: you heat the oceans up too much, they begin to
Speaker 1: evaporate a lot of water very bur into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: But of course, water vapor is an excellent greenhouse gas.
Speaker 1: And then when there's a lot of water vapor in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, because it's a greenhouse gas, sunlight can pass
Speaker 1: through it one way, coming in to heat the Earth
Speaker 1: or heat the planet, but then it does not allow
Speaker 1: as much energy to reflect back off of the planet
Speaker 1: and radiate back out into space. So like other greenhouse gases,
Speaker 1: this water vapor let's energy in but not back out,
Speaker 1: and this warms the planet even more. As the planet warms,
Speaker 1: the water vapor just keeps evaporating even more because it's
Speaker 1: getting hotter and hotter, making the effect worse and worse
Speaker 1: in this net positive feedback loop. So there's sort of
Speaker 1: these tipping points for planets with liquid on the surface.
Speaker 1: You don't want to get the water hotter than a
Speaker 1: certain level because if you do, it's just going to
Speaker 1: create this runaway effect that you kind of can't stop. Now.
Speaker 1: I mentioned plate tectonics earlier. There are no plate tectonics
Speaker 1: that we know of on Venus of all, but the
Speaker 1: certainly there's a lot of volcanic activity. The volcanoes, though,
Speaker 1: don't spring up along plate borders like they do on Earth.
Speaker 1: They just pop up all over. So there's just kind
Speaker 1: of surprise volcano. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's a different
Speaker 1: pattern of convection. Uh, or so it seems according to Grinspoon. Now,
Speaker 1: in addition to the greenhouse gas issue, uh, he did
Speaker 1: drive home that a lot of the differences may also
Speaker 1: just be due to orbit. You know, obviously Venus is
Speaker 1: more of an inner planet than Earth, and and they're
Speaker 1: just going to be uh, certain differences in place just
Speaker 1: on where you are in relation to the Sun. Right,
Speaker 1: So it is closer to the Sun than Us, but
Speaker 1: that's that's not the only thing that plays a role, because,
Speaker 1: for example, the surface of Venus is hotter than the
Speaker 1: surface of Mercury, which is closer to the Sun than
Speaker 1: Venus is. Uh So, definitely the atmosphere plays a huge
Speaker 1: role in what surface conditions are like. Right, and uh
Speaker 1: we already hit on the fact that the the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Venus is pretty incredible. The clouds of Venus uh
Speaker 1: are concentrated sulfuric acid. Yeah. Uh yeah. Now that's not
Speaker 1: to say that the atmosphere is concentrated sulfuric acid. The
Speaker 1: atmosphere is about ninety eight point five carbon dioxide five
Speaker 1: percent carbon dioxide with like three point five percent nitrogen
Speaker 1: or so, and then it's got these aerosol ized sulfuric
Speaker 1: acid particles like colloidal sulfuric acid suspended in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, you wouldn't want to breathe it. Noddy,
Speaker 1: we we touch on exactly how hot the surface is,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure we did. That's worth mentioning because it's
Speaker 1: it's it's hotter than you think, Dad, hotter than you think. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Susan Spreaker pointed out that the surface temperature is around
Speaker 1: nine hundred degrees fahrenheit or four and eighty two celsius.
Speaker 1: That is, it's an often sided fact hot enough to
Speaker 1: melt lead. These are almost like metal works kind of conditions. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And another cool thing that she pointed out is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: assume you're on the on the surface, You're wearing some
Speaker 1: sort of high tech suit that prevents you from having
Speaker 1: to worry about melting or being crushed. Uh. And she
Speaker 1: she points out that walking on the surface would be
Speaker 1: really weird because it would be like walking It would
Speaker 1: be more like walking through a fluid than what we
Speaker 1: think of as as an atmosphere and This is again
Speaker 1: due to that high pressure super critical c O two,
Speaker 1: So in some aspects some aspects of a fluid would
Speaker 1: be present as well as some aspects of a gas.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that atmospheric density is part of what
Speaker 1: contributes to the creepiness of those photos taken by the
Speaker 1: Venera thirteen lander. I don't know, Like, is that queuing
Speaker 1: something in my eyes? Does somehow the air look wrong,
Speaker 1: like it looks heavier or something? Yeah, I wonder now.
Speaker 1: Smart Car also pointed out that one of the biggest
Speaker 1: mysteries about Venus is why it doesn't have plate tectonics. Uh.
Speaker 1: And she says that the planet completely resurface sometime in
Speaker 1: the last billion years, and so we have no record
Speaker 1: of what happened in those first three and a half
Speaker 1: billion years. Now. This is premised on the fact that
Speaker 1: Venus is basically the same age as the Earth, that
Speaker 1: they were created in this planetary accretion process, and both
Speaker 1: planets are about four and a half billion years old.
Speaker 1: But something happened about a billion years ago on Venus
Speaker 1: that resurface most of it, uh, and hit the evidence
Speaker 1: that they were like, we gotta get this redone, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm sick of this old pattern. We gotta get it repaved.
Speaker 1: But you pointed out that we really don't know if
Speaker 1: if it was some sort of catastrophic event that caused
Speaker 1: a huge amount of of of volcanic activity to made
Speaker 1: it occur within a relatively short period of time, or
Speaker 1: if it's just been a steady process over the last
Speaker 1: billion years where volcanic activity has just been accumulating. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the things we often talk about when considering
Speaker 1: whether or not a planet can sustain life is what
Speaker 1: the sort of the geomagnetic properties of the planet are. Now,
Speaker 1: we know that Venus does have an iron core like
Speaker 1: Earth does, but the question is if it's going to
Speaker 1: sustain life on its surface or within its atmosphere, does
Speaker 1: it have a magnetic field to shield it from radiation
Speaker 1: coming from space. Well, yeah, the answer here is really
Speaker 1: interesting because no, it does not have an internally generated magnetosphere.
Speaker 1: The solar wind can slam directly into the atmosphere. However,
Speaker 1: it does benefit from partial protection due to its induced
Speaker 1: magnetic field. Now what's that. So you have solar ultra
Speaker 1: violent radiation removing electrons from atoms in the upper atmosphere,
Speaker 1: creating the electrically charged gas of the ionosphere. As on Earth,
Speaker 1: it slows and diverts the flow of particles around the planet. Now,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, But so far, I guess we should say
Speaker 1: we've just been sort of talking about the planet in
Speaker 1: general and kind of spitballing about what life there could
Speaker 1: be like or or you know, things that occurred to us.
Speaker 1: What do the experts actually have to say about the
Speaker 1: possibility of life on Venus, either in the past or now.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's hard to imagine life on the surface
Speaker 1: of Venus now, given how hot and high pressure it is.
Speaker 1: But let's not pre judge the question what what what
Speaker 1: would for example, David Grinspoon have to say about life
Speaker 1: on Venus. Well, he's very clear about the fact that
Speaker 1: there's nothing controversial at all about speculating, uh, that that
Speaker 1: ancient Venus might have boasted life, because he says, if
Speaker 1: you go back four billion years, you'll find an environment
Speaker 1: very similar to Earth. Yea, And so much of our
Speaker 1: speculations of regarding life on other worlds, you know, it
Speaker 1: centers around the question how much like Earth is it
Speaker 1: or was it? Yeah? Now, of course that's premised on
Speaker 1: the fact that we basically know of one way biochemistry
Speaker 1: can work, and that has certain physical tolerances built into it.
Speaker 1: Biochemistry can work in a carbon based way with water
Speaker 1: as a solvent, and so we know that can only
Speaker 1: happen in a place where there's the right kind of
Speaker 1: temperature to have liquid water, where it doesn't freeze or
Speaker 1: boil um and you've got you know, you've got the
Speaker 1: right kind of organic molecules present, so that sets these
Speaker 1: tolerances there. But then again, there are other ways we
Speaker 1: maybe aren't even imagining that biochemistry could work. Just don't
Speaker 1: based on our limited imagination, but still based on what
Speaker 1: we know, there's nothing wrong with saying, well, life could
Speaker 1: have existed on Venus. I mean, you know, a place
Speaker 1: like Earth can have life, And Grinspoon says it's even
Speaker 1: conceivable that life could have begun on Venus, and then
Speaker 1: we're all essentially Venusians. Uh. You know, it points out
Speaker 1: that you have rocks being blasted between the planets, so
Speaker 1: there was contact, So some form of pants burmia is possible, uh, possible, Uh,
Speaker 1: concerning life on Earth and possible life on Venus, now
Speaker 1: that's something people bring up as a possibility, but not
Speaker 1: to say that there's a strong reason to favor that
Speaker 1: hypothesis right now. Some of are really a lot of
Speaker 1: the key theories regarding life on Venus do in the
Speaker 1: past revolve around the idea that there may have been
Speaker 1: oceans there in the past, right and we still don't
Speaker 1: have definitive proof. I think that there were oceans on
Speaker 1: Venus in the past, but there's there are pretty strong
Speaker 1: reasons to think that it at least might have had oceans.
Speaker 1: I was looking at one study by our No Salvador
Speaker 1: at all from the Journal of Geophysical Research arch Planets
Speaker 1: in and this was kind of interesting. So the background
Speaker 1: on the study is that they talk about how early
Speaker 1: in the history of a solar system you've got young
Speaker 1: inner planets and they get bombarded by lots of impacts
Speaker 1: from rocky objects orbiting the Sun. Right the early the
Speaker 1: early Solar system is very dirty and it's very full
Speaker 1: of stuff, and over long periods of time, eventually it
Speaker 1: gets kind of cleaned up. But early in the Solar
Speaker 1: system you've got big rocks slamming into young planets, and
Speaker 1: they slam into them from space and can actually heat
Speaker 1: planets up a lot, and big enough impacts can even
Speaker 1: melt large portions of the mass of the planet which
Speaker 1: surrounds it in this ocean of melted rock. But after
Speaker 1: this happens, the molten ocean cools and then releases volatile
Speaker 1: compounds to create the atmosphere. And in this study, the
Speaker 1: authors create a model where they can sort of play
Speaker 1: with model planets in this state. Right, you've got model
Speaker 1: planets in early stages of formation that are releasing certain
Speaker 1: out of C O two or water onto their surface,
Speaker 1: and that's affecting, you know, what, whether it has oceans
Speaker 1: or what the atmosphere looks like. And so that you
Speaker 1: can place a model planet like that in orbit at
Speaker 1: different distances from a host star and then predict what
Speaker 1: kind of surface the planet will evolve in its geohistory.
Speaker 1: And their models suggests, based on what we know about
Speaker 1: Venus today, that it could have had water oceans earlier
Speaker 1: in its history. That it's consistent with what they've found
Speaker 1: now the presence of some sort of an alien Adam
Speaker 1: and Eve that there's no proof for that. You have
Speaker 1: to leave that to C. S. Lewis. Even though it
Speaker 1: might be hard to know for sure whether there was
Speaker 1: life on Venus a long time ago, we can at
Speaker 1: least get good clues about whether there would have been
Speaker 1: windows of opportunity for it. Right. Yeah. According to a
Speaker 1: Sanjay Limay and co authors in a two thousand eighteen
Speaker 1: astrobiology paper, Venus could have boasted a habitable climate and
Speaker 1: liquid water for as long as two billion years. That's
Speaker 1: that's that's longer than it might have occurred on Mars.
Speaker 1: So you have a pretty pretty long period of time.
Speaker 1: I'm there. Uh, that is enough time based on our
Speaker 1: terrestrial model, for at least simple life to emerge. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now if you look at that period of time on Earth,
Speaker 1: you're not really getting beyond single celled organisms. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean to put that in perspective, two billion years of
Speaker 1: life on Earth was enough to get us from the
Speaker 1: deep sevent life to single cell life, you know, be
Speaker 1: able to get us to photo since this and atmospheric oxygen.
Speaker 1: But you'd need another one point five billion years of
Speaker 1: Earth life to get to like multicellular life and sexual reproduction.
Speaker 1: So is there based on the Earth model, was their
Speaker 1: life on Venus? Maybe? Was there sex on Venus? Probably not,
Speaker 1: but maybe maybe? Okay, imagine on Venus for some reason,
Speaker 1: life evolves faster. Maybe there's maybe there's a faster mutation
Speaker 1: rate something like that. I want to by the end
Speaker 1: of this episode, I want to be imagining what it
Speaker 1: could have been like if there was fully evolved, intelligent
Speaker 1: civilization on Venus that is now just paved over by
Speaker 1: volcanic activity, and we and see any trace of it. Well,
Speaker 1: it would be a shame, wouldn't that the planet name
Speaker 1: for the Goddess of Love would have never known sexual
Speaker 1: reproduction it was just all a sexual That would be
Speaker 1: a cruel irony. Well, anyway, so we've been exploring this
Speaker 1: question of whether whether life could have existed on Venus
Speaker 1: in the past, but we should transition to talk about
Speaker 1: whether life exists on Venus today. Yeah, because this is
Speaker 1: where we really get into the uh, the the imagination
Speaker 1: capturing aspects of of of exploring Venus, the idea that
Speaker 1: we could send something there, some sort of probe and
Speaker 1: discover life like actually harness and study an example of
Speaker 1: of life on another world. Now you're probably thinking, no,
Speaker 1: wait a second. Earlier, didn't you say that the surface
Speaker 1: of Venus had ninety times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere
Speaker 1: at the surface and was like five hundred degrees celsius
Speaker 1: or like nine hundred degrees fahrenheit. So you may be
Speaker 1: thinking skeptically, you're not suggest sting that life exists on
Speaker 1: the surface of Venus, or are you? Well, not on
Speaker 1: the surface. We've got to get our heads in the clouds.
Speaker 1: That's where things become more tolerable, at least in terms
Speaker 1: of modern Venus. All right, we will explore that when
Speaker 1: we come back from this break. Than alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about the conditions on Venus as we
Speaker 1: know them today, conditions on Venus in the ancient past,
Speaker 1: and the big question was their life on Venus and
Speaker 1: is their life on Venus. So we've speculated on the
Speaker 1: possibility that there could have been life on Venus in
Speaker 1: its ancient oceans, should if they existed. But when we
Speaker 1: look at the planet today, the surface again is just
Speaker 1: an intolerable hellscape. But when we get up into the clouds,
Speaker 1: that's where we start seeing, uh, conditions that makes sense
Speaker 1: for life as we know it now, to be fair
Speaker 1: to the surface of Venus. Of course, the surface of Venus,
Speaker 1: like the surface of Earth, is not exactly the same
Speaker 1: from equator to poll right. Yeah. In fact, it has
Speaker 1: been proposed that Venus might boast acidic polar seas. Back
Speaker 1: in nine seventy, Joseph sec Bach and W. F. Libby
Speaker 1: suggested that photosynthetic life could exist in such an environment,
Speaker 1: based on experiments with algae grown in pure C O
Speaker 1: two under pressure with an acidic nutrient medium at elevated temperatures.
Speaker 1: And I mean, we've seen extreme aphile organisms on Earth
Speaker 1: that survive in in highly pressurized environments and very very
Speaker 1: hot environments, that live in geysers or around geothermal vents.
Speaker 1: You know, these are conditions of life that US surface
Speaker 1: dwelling land lovers can't really imagine. But certain single telled
Speaker 1: organisms are simpler life forms have evolved to specialize in
Speaker 1: these types of extreme conditions. They're usually called extreme aphiles.
Speaker 1: Now we don't know if that's actually possible in the
Speaker 1: surface of Venus. I mean, the surface of Venus is
Speaker 1: maybe too extreme for even the most extreme extreme of
Speaker 1: file you can imagine. But the tolerances of life, if
Speaker 1: you expand your definition of life so far beyond what
Speaker 1: you might imagine just looking at the life forms that
Speaker 1: inhabit You're nearby forests, are looking into a tide pool. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly when you start looking at a deep
Speaker 1: hydrothermal vent uh environments, you start looking at the creatures
Speaker 1: that thrive there. It does shift your expectations a little.
Speaker 1: And then also when you get outside of because when
Speaker 1: you look at those vents. I think one of the
Speaker 1: things about deep hydrothermal vent environments that are really captivating
Speaker 1: is you get to see things like the hoff crab,
Speaker 1: you know, the it's not really a crab, it's more
Speaker 1: a variety of lobster. But these pale crustaceans that that
Speaker 1: swarm around these vents. UM Like that captures our imagination
Speaker 1: because we can say we can look at that and
Speaker 1: we can say, okay, it's a crab, it's an animal. Uh,
Speaker 1: I can I can relate to that more. But when
Speaker 1: you're just breaking it down to to to to microbes
Speaker 1: and simpler life forms, then it's um, it's it's life,
Speaker 1: but it's not the it's not the kind of of
Speaker 1: life that we necessarily dream about discovering on other worlds.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry I haven't heard your last couple of sentences, Robert,
Speaker 1: because you got me googling half crabs. Yeah, the half
Speaker 1: crabs are incredible. There's like squat little lobster creatures. It
Speaker 1: looks like a mountain of skulls. Is like on a
Speaker 1: mountain of skulls in the Castle of Pain, I sat
Speaker 1: on a throne of blood. Yeah, basically they're there. If
Speaker 1: you look at pictures of these guys, they're jocking position
Speaker 1: for their jocking for position in order to get closest
Speaker 1: to the superheated water, because that's where they're going to find. Uh,
Speaker 1: the little creatures that they eat. This is crazy. I've
Speaker 1: never seen that. Well anyway, I'm sorry, but yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I should acknowledge your point. The more willing we are
Speaker 1: to think of organisms less and less inherently like us,
Speaker 1: the farther out into the extremes of of physics and
Speaker 1: of nature, that life can extend. Yeah, as they said earlier,
Speaker 1: we really have to look at the clouds that the
Speaker 1: the atmosphere of Venus. That is where you can get
Speaker 1: away from those hellish surface conditions and you encounter conditions
Speaker 1: that are are far more in line with what we
Speaker 1: typically think of as life sustaining conditions. Grinspoon has written
Speaker 1: a number of papers on this. He points out that
Speaker 1: there are pockets of Venus that you quote can't completely
Speaker 1: rule out his habitats for life based on what we know,
Speaker 1: and in particular, the clouds of Venus are really interesting
Speaker 1: environments because unlike the surface, they are not particularly hot,
Speaker 1: and they are a continuous and sort of chemically and
Speaker 1: energetically lively environment in terms of the sort of availability
Speaker 1: of possible nutrients and availability of energy sources and liquid
Speaker 1: media and the biogenic elements. And he also pointed out
Speaker 1: this is this I found super interesting. In his book
Speaker 1: Venus Revealed, he proposed that a photosynthetic pigment may serve
Speaker 1: as the quote unknown ultra violent absorber. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: is this is what may represent one of four possible
Speaker 1: signs of life on Venus, along with absorption of solar
Speaker 1: energy by micro organisms as a driving force for super rotation,
Speaker 1: the presence of larger and irregularly shaped cloud particles that
Speaker 1: maybe quote unquote creatures, and the presence of of bright
Speaker 1: radar signatures on the mountaintops which may be covered with life.
Speaker 1: So that's another thing to keep in mind when you're
Speaker 1: talking about the hellish surface of Venus. There are there
Speaker 1: are peaks, there are places that are gonna be be
Speaker 1: elevated from the from the truly like pressure cooker environment
Speaker 1: that you find find lower down. Absolutely, and I think
Speaker 1: in your talk with the Susanne Smurkar she also mentioned
Speaker 1: that the cloud environments of Venus could host microbes, right, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing is this isn't crazy, Like we don't
Speaker 1: often stop to consider this, but here on Earth life
Speaker 1: is actually not confined strictly to the surface of the
Speaker 1: planet and the water that's beneath the oceans. You know.
Speaker 1: Of course, we know we've got flying birds and so forth,
Speaker 1: but there's plenty of evidence that if you were to
Speaker 1: fly up up into the clouds and sort of take
Speaker 1: a bite out of a cloud, you would probably end
Speaker 1: up with some life forms in your mouth. Yeah, breathe deep, yeah,
Speaker 1: dirty clouds. Uh. There's a great article by Leslie Evans
Speaker 1: Ogden called Life in the Clouds in the October issue
Speaker 1: of Bioscience. Uh. This is a fun read and it
Speaker 1: talks about clouds full of bacterium called Pseudomonas syringe a.
Speaker 1: It's bacteria that seemed to float up into the clouds
Speaker 1: and perhaps spur ice nucleation, which gives them enough weight
Speaker 1: to come falling back down to the surface. And the
Speaker 1: article discusses the idea that micro organisms living in clouds
Speaker 1: might play a major role in weather and rain cycles
Speaker 1: on Earth, and this is known as the bio precipitation theory. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people often forget that when you're dealing with drops, the precipitation, rain, snow, frost,
Speaker 1: et cetera. It has to form around something, it has
Speaker 1: to condense around something. There has to be a starting point,
Speaker 1: and that point can be a microbe. Yeah and yeah,
Speaker 1: and so it's obviously the case that with very light microbes,
Speaker 1: they contend to be boy within the atmosphere. Like a
Speaker 1: turbulent air current can churn up a bunch of dust
Speaker 1: that has microbes living within it, and that can get
Speaker 1: sent up into the atmosphere. And suddenly you are a
Speaker 1: macro organism that is miles above the ground and you're
Speaker 1: up here in the cloud. How are you going to
Speaker 1: get back down to a place that's better for you
Speaker 1: in terms of reproduction, because the upper atmosphere of Earth
Speaker 1: is probably not a good home for micro organisms on
Speaker 1: a permanent basis. Right high up in the atmosphere is
Speaker 1: often very cold, it can be very dry. You can
Speaker 1: get desiccated if you're a cellular organism that needs liquid water,
Speaker 1: and there's exposure to high levels of UV radiation from
Speaker 1: the sun, which of course can burn your life away.
Speaker 1: But it's a great plate way to get from one
Speaker 1: place to the other. Right, it's kind of like when
Speaker 1: humans fly up into the upper atmosphere. It's it's it's
Speaker 1: about getting from one point on the surface to another
Speaker 1: point on the surface. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. It's
Speaker 1: been sort of hypothesized that what if air currents like
Speaker 1: the jet stream in a way, can could function to
Speaker 1: train in support interesting bacterial mutations from one population of
Speaker 1: of bacteria somewhere to another, sort of like a gene
Speaker 1: conveyor belt. But even if it is useful for for
Speaker 1: the genetic diversity of a bacterial population around the world,
Speaker 1: like that, microorganisms that travel in the Earth's clouds don't
Speaker 1: generally want to live there forever. But Venus's atmosphere is
Speaker 1: actually not the same as Earth's, as we've been discussing,
Speaker 1: and despite how hostile Venus is, in many ways, Venus's
Speaker 1: atmosphere might be a better place for organisms than Earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Organisms that might dwell within it, of course, are also
Speaker 1: different from the organisms that live on Earth and might
Speaker 1: make their living in a different biochemical way. So, Robert,
Speaker 1: you mentioned a paper earlier by Sanjay Lemia at all,
Speaker 1: the one that's in astrobiology this year, and that the
Speaker 1: earlier thing that we talked about from that paper was
Speaker 1: the conclusion that Venus might have had oceans for two
Speaker 1: billion years, which you give plenty of time for organisms
Speaker 1: to possibly evolve there. But the authors of this paper
Speaker 1: also talk about the possibility that there are organisms living
Speaker 1: in the clouds of Venus today, just like a grinspoon
Speaker 1: is talking about. So the authors note that there are
Speaker 1: lots of good reasons to look for life forms in
Speaker 1: the lower cloud layer of Venus, which is about forty
Speaker 1: seven point five to fifty point five kilometers from the surface. Now,
Speaker 1: if you look at this layer of the atmosphere, it's
Speaker 1: got very moderate temperatures roughly sixty degrees celsius, which is
Speaker 1: about a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit. It's got moderate pressure,
Speaker 1: it's like one Earth atmosphere roughly, it's got moderate radiation exposure.
Speaker 1: They write that the UV levels in the upper atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Venus are probably similar to the UV levels of
Speaker 1: the archaean Earth's surface, where of course we know micro
Speaker 1: organisms thrived without being destroyed by radiation, and they mentioned
Speaker 1: that it has quote micron sized sulfuric acid aerosols, which
Speaker 1: are water droplets containing sulfuric acid dispersed throughout the clouds. Yeah. Really,
Speaker 1: when you when you think about it, the the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of Venus is kind of it's more it's more like
Speaker 1: the surface of Earth in many respects, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: or at least what we thought without a ground. Yes,
Speaker 1: but but really when you when you think of Earth, though,
Speaker 1: I think of the fact when if you're dealing with
Speaker 1: the hard surface of Earth, most of the hard surface
Speaker 1: of Earth is a is it is it is a cold,
Speaker 1: lightless desert environment. Uh, that is underneath the ocean. That's
Speaker 1: a very good point. Maybe you should think about the
Speaker 1: atmosphere of Venus being less like the atmosphere of Earth
Speaker 1: and more like the waters of the oceans on Earth.
Speaker 1: But anyway, all of this that we've been saying so
Speaker 1: far is just to the point that it's not impossible
Speaker 1: that there could be microorganisms living within the clouds in Venus.
Speaker 1: You know, there there are some favorable conditions. Are there
Speaker 1: any positive reasons to think that there might be organisms there. Well,
Speaker 1: this comes back to the unknown you the absorber that
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier. Right, So there's this thing that
Speaker 1: we have observed embedded within the Venusian clouds. So let
Speaker 1: me think that, Yeah, there could be alien bacteria in
Speaker 1: the clouds and and when we were looking at the
Speaker 1: unknown UV absorber, this could be it. So NASA has
Speaker 1: studied the unknown UVY absorber for some time and basically
Speaker 1: we're talking about an atmospheric anomaly that where we see
Speaker 1: UV light being absorbed by something. Right. In general, Venus
Speaker 1: is highly reflective. It's a bright planet, like it shines
Speaker 1: things back out into space when the sun shines on it,
Speaker 1: and the clouds that surround it reflect a lot of sunlight.
Speaker 1: But there is this weird, mysterious UV absorption then creating
Speaker 1: this contrast within the clouds. They're dark patches and patterns
Speaker 1: within the reflective clouds. And the question is what could
Speaker 1: that be? Now we can say what it almost certainly
Speaker 1: is not. It's not going to be say, giant atmospheric
Speaker 1: like Manta rays or anything like that. You know, it's
Speaker 1: not going to be space whales in the atmosphere of Venus. Uh.
Speaker 1: But it could potentially be like clouds of microorganisms, like
Speaker 1: colonies of microorganisms, kind of uh, you know, not not
Speaker 1: to exaggerated too much, but kind of like the krill
Speaker 1: of Venus, but with no whales coming around to scoop
Speaker 1: them up. No, that's a very very good point of comparison, actually, people,
Speaker 1: in fact, the scientists who worked on this have compared
Speaker 1: it to the way you would look at algal blooms
Speaker 1: and bodies of water here on Earth. Uh. That that's
Speaker 1: a good point of comparison because one of the most
Speaker 1: interesting things about these dark patches is that they have
Speaker 1: this kind of shimmering, moving kind of quality to them. Uh.
Speaker 1: A quote from Lemo which he gave in a uh
Speaker 1: in a press releases, he said, quote, Venus shows some
Speaker 1: episodic dark sulfuric rich patches which contrasts up to thirty
Speaker 1: in the ultra violet and muted in longer wavelengths. These
Speaker 1: patches persist for days, changing their shape and contrasts continuously
Speaker 1: and appear to be scale dependent. So yeah, they're they've
Speaker 1: got this weird dynamic quality to them, just like a
Speaker 1: bloom of organism in ocean water. Might. Now I know
Speaker 1: some of you are probably remembering, well, you said that
Speaker 1: there are sulphuric acid clouds up there. How is life
Speaker 1: thriving up there? What? One of the points that the
Speaker 1: lamait makes is that, well, if you consider the fact
Speaker 1: that life on Earth as we know it can thrive
Speaker 1: in acidic conditions, that it can feed on CO two
Speaker 1: and produce sulphuric acid. Uh, it all lines up with
Speaker 1: the environments that we we we know to exist in
Speaker 1: the in the atmosphere of Venus. Yeah. Now, to be clear,
Speaker 1: we're not saying that this is evidence that there is definitely,
Speaker 1: you know, life in the clouds of Venus. It's just
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of interesting evidence that would line
Speaker 1: up with their being patches of micro organisms in the
Speaker 1: clouds of Venus that are making their living this way. Now,
Speaker 1: there there are other options too. It could be chemical, right,
Speaker 1: maybe you've got patches of sulfur dioxide and iron chloride
Speaker 1: absorbing u V in the atmosphere. But that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: seem to explain everything we observe, at least not to
Speaker 1: Lama and the co co authors. So there are these
Speaker 1: light absorbing particles dispersed in clouds, and we don't know
Speaker 1: for sure what they are. The idea that their microorganisms
Speaker 1: is a very elegant and exciting hypothesis. But is there
Speaker 1: any way we could test this to see if it's true?
Speaker 1: There is, uh, And we should note we haven't gotten
Speaker 1: detested because anything we've sent through has just has not
Speaker 1: has not had the the the equipment, or or it
Speaker 1: has not spent the necessary amount of time in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: But there is at least one really awesome proposal for
Speaker 1: studying the atmosphere of Venus, and it involves Shatner. No,
Speaker 1: it involves vamps. Vamps. Yes, and by vamps I don't
Speaker 1: mean the space vampires of of our favorite Toby Hooper
Speaker 1: movie Life for Life Force. Yes. Oh I thought you
Speaker 1: were gonna say Planet of the Vampires. No, No, it
Speaker 1: doesn't involve those space vampires either, though that is that
Speaker 1: is also a good one. Man. I love Planet of
Speaker 1: the Vampires. They've got the best space suits, and they do.
Speaker 1: They're so style leather space suits. But this this is
Speaker 1: pretty stylish too. I think, if if you'll, if you'll
Speaker 1: allow me here to discuss the venous atmospheric maneuverable platform
Speaker 1: or vamp please do Robert, which is a proposed Northrop
Speaker 1: Grumman planetary exploration vehicle, and you should you used to
Speaker 1: look up images of this at home. It looks kind
Speaker 1: of like a flying wing, which is interesting considering that
Speaker 1: Northrop Grumman made the original flying wing aircraft, the experimental
Speaker 1: y B thirty five and YB forty nine, the former
Speaker 1: with propellers the ladder with the jets uh from the
Speaker 1: from the mid to late nineteen forties. I don't think
Speaker 1: I know what those are? What are what are they like?
Speaker 1: They essentially imagine a big boomerang as a nineteen forties bomber,
Speaker 1: and that's what you have with the YB thirty five
Speaker 1: and the YP forty nine. These are military air yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were designed to be big bombers, and Northrop Grumman
Speaker 1: later came back and did the B two Spirit stealth bomber.
Speaker 1: So if you've seen images of the stealth bomber, then
Speaker 1: you have seen a flying wing aircraft. Yeah. So they
Speaker 1: really like the idea of a of a flying wing.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this the VAMPS concept involves sending one
Speaker 1: to Venus, So we're talking about a propeller driven flying
Speaker 1: wing UH type of craft. That's solar powered and also
Speaker 1: semi buoyant, So it's kind of a blimp plane hybrid,
Speaker 1: but it's a prop plane in Venus. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a prop plane. That's this. Yeah. I love the idea
Speaker 1: that that one day we could have a propeller driven
Speaker 1: vehicle in the atmosphere of Venus. Uh. It would have
Speaker 1: about a hundred and eighty foot or fifty five wing span,
Speaker 1: It would fly at a mac speed of about thirty
Speaker 1: per second or sixty seven miles per hour, and that
Speaker 1: it's desired altitude would would be something about fifty to
Speaker 1: seventy kilometers or thirty to forty five miles above the
Speaker 1: hard surface of the planet. All right, So that would
Speaker 1: put it within access to that nice range that La
Speaker 1: Maya and colleagues were talking about, right. I should also
Speaker 1: point out that this is what's categorized as a lifting
Speaker 1: entry atmospheric flight system or a LEAF system, which has
Speaker 1: also been proposed for explorations on Mars and Titan. Uh.
Speaker 1: But here's here's just a quote from the material that
Speaker 1: North of Grumman has on the VAMP project. The VAMP
Speaker 1: is quote, an aeroshell less hypersonic entry vehicle that transitions
Speaker 1: to a semi buoyant, maneuverable solar powered air vehicle for
Speaker 1: flight in Venus's atmosphere. So it's an atmospheric rover and
Speaker 1: it could last for up to a year in Venus's atmosphere,
Speaker 1: just flying through the upper and mid cloud layers, equipped
Speaker 1: with with with the atmospheric sampling equipment, including equipment that
Speaker 1: could help us determine if there are signs of microbial
Speaker 1: life within the skies of Venus. Loving this for multiple reasons.
Speaker 1: Number one, I of course always just love good space exploration.
Speaker 1: Uh and and let's look for life. Come on. But
Speaker 1: on top of that, since it's a prop plane, I'm
Speaker 1: imagining it's got to also have a surly mechanic with
Speaker 1: a big wrench sticking out of the overalls. That's like
Speaker 1: working on it. Yeah, one would imagine, um but kind
Speaker 1: of yellow and sulfur stand right. Yeah. I do have
Speaker 1: to point out that it's very early days still for
Speaker 1: for VAMP, but it is one of the options. It's
Speaker 1: very much on the table for future exploration of Venus.
Speaker 1: I like it, man, Yeah, And until we send something
Speaker 1: like that, we just we can't say for certain. When
Speaker 1: it comes to the question of microbial life in the
Speaker 1: clouds there. Well, I guess we'll just have to wait
Speaker 1: and see. No, wait, we don't have to just wait
Speaker 1: and see what we can We can publicly encourage space exploration.
Speaker 1: Come on now, yeah, yeah, Now. Earlier on we were
Speaker 1: talking about the possibility of life in Venus and you
Speaker 1: you want to step further, and you said, well, what
Speaker 1: about intelligent life? Now, I know that's kind of hard
Speaker 1: to imagine because let's say, according to these predictions based
Speaker 1: on the papers we've been talking about today, that maybe
Speaker 1: Venus had oceans for two billion years before the runaway
Speaker 1: greenhouse effect killed all that we know from experience in
Speaker 1: the history of the Earth that two billion years of
Speaker 1: access to oceans is not enough time to evolve complex
Speaker 1: multicellular organisms with brains and the ability to build civilizations
Speaker 1: and all that. But let's just imagine things went different
Speaker 1: there for some reason. Maybe evolution happened faster. We don't know. Um,
Speaker 1: what would things be like if say, you have an
Speaker 1: intelligent civilization on a planet, maybe at the level of
Speaker 1: technological achievement that human civilization is at right now, and
Speaker 1: you realize all your scientists tell you, okay, we've got
Speaker 1: runaway greenhouse effect going on. We've got a couple hundred
Speaker 1: years before things get intolerable on the surface of this planet.
Speaker 1: What are you gonna do? And I wonder, well what
Speaker 1: could be done? I mean, is that just definitely the
Speaker 1: end for the species? Or can you somehow try to
Speaker 1: come up with some sustainable way to retreat to the
Speaker 1: subterranean realm? Can you get can you get geothermal power? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know, making lightbulbs for you to
Speaker 1: grow plants down there? I just like wonder what's possible?
Speaker 1: How long can you survive on a planet that doesn't
Speaker 1: want to host life on its surface anymore? Oh? Wow?
Speaker 1: I mean, well, this is this is a wonderful sci
Speaker 1: fi question. And in fact, you have some some fairly
Speaker 1: old works that kind of explored a bit there. The
Speaker 1: old William Hope Hodgson book The Night Lands. Oh. I
Speaker 1: haven't read that. It's um it's tremendous work of early
Speaker 1: essentially post apocalyptic literature in which the earth has grown dark.
Speaker 1: It's it's the night Lands now. And there's this place
Speaker 1: called the Last Red Doubt, and so it's like a
Speaker 1: pyramid and artificial uh structure created by humans and it's
Speaker 1: powered by hydrothermal power. And this is where essentially the
Speaker 1: last remnants of humanity have have have assembled themselves and
Speaker 1: tried to sort of hold on to life against the
Speaker 1: darkness and the cold. Sounds bleak, Robert, it's pretty bleak.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's kind gorgeous in its own way. But well,
Speaker 1: but we're talking about oblique concept. We're talking about a
Speaker 1: life form losing its environment and having to adapt to
Speaker 1: some sort of new take on life, either by retreating
Speaker 1: into the darkness or finding a way to live up
Speaker 1: in the clouds. Yeah. And then of course this is
Speaker 1: premised on the idea that if the scientists of Venusian
Speaker 1: civilization did come to them and say, look, we've only
Speaker 1: got a couple hundred years before, you know, it's too
Speaker 1: hot to live on this planet anymore, would people actually
Speaker 1: pay attention to them and do anything right? It would
Speaker 1: kind of depend on what's the lifespan of of of
Speaker 1: the Venusian uh beings here. If it's like humans, then
Speaker 1: if when you tell a human all right, we need
Speaker 1: to do something because something bad happens in two hundred years,
Speaker 1: they're going to say, well, I'm not going to be
Speaker 1: alive for that, right, what's what's happening tomorrow? What's happening, Uh,
Speaker 1: the week after next, what's happening maybe next year? Because
Speaker 1: we as a species don't have a great track record
Speaker 1: for long term planning, we can maybe think maybe thinking
Speaker 1: to the next generation, if we're being generous. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: I don't think the human model, uh leaves much hope
Speaker 1: for for what a Venusian life form might have accomplished. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can imagine there was a lot of oh, these
Speaker 1: you know, runaway greenhouse effect alarmists. Yeah, yeah, or two
Speaker 1: hundred years. Well, in the next generation, they'll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the technology will come online and they'll just fix everything. Uh.
Speaker 1: And while they're off chatting about it, the the oceans
Speaker 1: boil away, and then they boil away as well. But
Speaker 1: maybe a few are able to crawl down into their crips,
Speaker 1: you know, and maybe a few were able to make
Speaker 1: it up into their cloud cities. I don't know if
Speaker 1: they can keep the others from from dragging them out
Speaker 1: or dragging them back down. I guess this maybe deserves
Speaker 1: a whole episode. Someday we should come back and examine
Speaker 1: the idea of how long could a say, an ecosystem
Speaker 1: be maintained purely in a subterranean existence. Could you go
Speaker 1: on indefinitely if you had incoming energy sources? Yeah. I
Speaker 1: love talking about subterranean life, so that would be a
Speaker 1: great topic to discuss in the meantime. Uh, we thank
Speaker 1: everybody for joining us on this trip to Venus and
Speaker 1: UH if you if you enjoy this episode, let us know,
Speaker 1: let us know what other planets, so, what other moons
Speaker 1: even you would like us to explore in future episodes.
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