Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Picture the most hostile, unforgiving environment you can possibly imagine.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we're talking about a world where the surface
Speaker 2: temperatures soar to several hundred degrees celsius, like hot enough
Speaker 2: to melt lead on contact.
Speaker 3: Right, it's completely toxic, exactly.
Speaker 2: It is a completely dry hellscape, devoid of any oceans,
Speaker 2: no water whatsoever, just endless stretches of searing rock crushed
Speaker 2: under an atmosphere so thick it would literally feel like
Speaker 2: being a mile underwater on Earth.
Speaker 3: It's immense pressure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is Venus. And for decades, the scientific consensus
Speaker 2: was just entirely settled on one thing, that Venus was
Speaker 2: a dead planet, completely dead, geologically dormant, locked in time,
Speaker 2: just a static baking rog floating in the inner Solar System.
Speaker 3: Right, I mean it served as the ultimate cautionary tale
Speaker 3: of planetary evolution.
Speaker 2: For a long time the warning label.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, a world that had supposedly shut down its
Speaker 3: internal engines a long long time ago, you know, leaving
Speaker 3: behind a sterile, unchanging monument to a runaway greenhouse effect.
Speaker 2: But what if that supposedly dead planet actually has a
Speaker 2: beating geological heart.
Speaker 3: Well, that changes everything, right, what if.
Speaker 2: Beneath that hellish, crushing surface venus is actually still geologically alive.
Speaker 2: Today we are talking about vast tectonic activity, shifting crusts,
Speaker 2: and you know, even active volcanoes right next door to
Speaker 2: us in the Solar System, which is.
Speaker 3: Wild because it forces a complete rewrite of the planetary
Speaker 3: science textbooks. I bet in this field, I mean long
Speaker 3: held assumptions like a permanently dormant venus. They are frequently
Speaker 3: just hypotheses waiting to be challenged by better.
Speaker 2: Data, right, waiting for the tech to catch up.
Speaker 3: Exactly, we get comfortable with our established narratives until, you know,
Speaker 3: a massive leap in computational capability forces us to wake
Speaker 3: up and look at the evidence with totally fresh eyes.
Speaker 2: So we are going to explore how groundbreaking new three
Speaker 2: D technology unlocked this colossal secret. We'll examine how the
Speaker 2: surface of Venus is actively shifting right now, how a
Speaker 2: really bizarre physical process is constantly reshaping its mountains, and
Speaker 2: how this revelation completely changes the trajectory of future space exploration.
Speaker 3: Because looking at old mysteries with new tools proves that
Speaker 3: our closest cosmic neighbors still have the capacity to completely
Speaker 3: surprise us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they really do. So to really understand why this
Speaker 2: shift in thinking is so monumental, we first need to
Speaker 2: look at the physical scars on Venus itself.
Speaker 3: The terrain is fascinating.
Speaker 2: It is. If you were to look at a topographical
Speaker 2: map of the planet right now, you would see these
Speaker 2: enormous rift valleys, massive ones. Yeah, if you're familiar with
Speaker 2: like the African rift valley here on Earth, it is
Speaker 2: structurally similar to that. But the scale on Venus is
Speaker 2: just staggering. We are talking about sprawling trenches spanning up
Speaker 2: to ten thousand kilometers getting straight across the planet's surface, right.
Speaker 3: And these are colossal, defining features of the planet's entire crust.
Speaker 3: They aren't just you know, surface scratches. They are deep,
Speaker 3: tantonic wounds that speak to the fundamental mechanics of the
Speaker 3: entire planet.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this. Okay, because if you have a
Speaker 2: massive ten thousand kilometer trench on a planet, my mind
Speaker 2: instantly goes to planetary stretch marks.
Speaker 3: That's a good way to picture it.
Speaker 2: It looks like the globe is actively expanding or tearing
Speaker 2: itself apart. But for years, geoscientists were firmly convinced that
Speaker 2: these features were ancient and just entirely inactive, totally frozen. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they assumed these rifts originated over one hundred million years
Speaker 2: ago and were just frozen remnants of a long dead past.
Speaker 2: So why were we so stubbornly convinced that they were
Speaker 2: ancient history?
Speaker 3: Well, it really comes down to a fundamental bias in
Speaker 3: how we understood geodynamics.
Speaker 2: Geodynamics being like the study of how a planet's interior
Speaker 2: heat moves.
Speaker 3: The surface exactly how it deforms and moves the outer crust.
Speaker 3: So we knew Venus was roughly the same size, mass,
Speaker 3: and composition as Earth, right right, our twin, but it
Speaker 3: visibly lacks Earth's system of plate tectonics.
Speaker 2: Oh okay.
Speaker 3: On our planet, the crust is broken into these distinct
Speaker 3: plates that constantly shift they slide past each other, they subduct.
Speaker 2: Under each other like puzzle pieces moving around.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and that movement is what efficiently releases Earth's internal heat.
Speaker 2: But Venus doesn't have those puzzle pieces. It just has
Speaker 2: one solid, continuous outer shell, right.
Speaker 3: And because it lacks that jigsaw puzzle crust, the prevailing
Speaker 3: assumption was that its interior engine had just essentially choked.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: The old models suggested that without plate tectonics to release
Speaker 3: the heat dynamically, Venus just slowly cooled down by conduction
Speaker 3: over billions of years.
Speaker 2: It was baking and coolid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and its crust seized up entirely. So when scientists
Speaker 3: looked at those sprawling rift valleys, they didn't see an
Speaker 3: active process.
Speaker 2: This saw a fossil exactly.
Speaker 3: They logically assumed, based on the geodynamic models of the time,
Speaker 3: that the kinetic energy required to tear a crust like
Speaker 3: that simply didn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2: That's wild. We basically looked at the geological equivalent of
Speaker 2: a giant footprint and assumed the dinosaur that made it
Speaker 2: died one hundred million years ago, like, without even checking
Speaker 2: to see if the mud was still wet.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect analogy. We were viewing the physical
Speaker 3: evidence entirely through the lens of a rigid, preconceived assumption.
Speaker 3: Because of the models, right, we simply lacked the computational
Speaker 3: power to simulate anything more complex than a dormant cooling rock.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the technological revolution that changed everything.
Speaker 3: Yes, the three D models.
Speaker 2: Because the leap from seeing these rifts as ancient fossils
Speaker 2: to realize they're actually fresh, actively moving features. It didn't
Speaker 2: come from launching a new telescope nope. And it didn't
Speaker 2: come from sending a new probe to physically sample the
Speaker 2: rocks either. It came from a total revelation in how
Speaker 2: we mathematically model planetary surfaces.
Speaker 3: This is where computational geophysics steps in, specifically through a
Speaker 3: team of researchers at ETH Zurich.
Speaker 2: Right Professor Taras Geria and lead author of the study,
Speaker 2: she Yang.
Speaker 3: And Yang remarkably conducted this research during his master's degree.
Speaker 2: By the way, wow, just during his masters that's incredible,
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: They utilized a highly advanced, high resolution three D computer model,
Speaker 3: and the.
Speaker 2: Jump to three D here is the entire lynch pin
Speaker 2: of the discovery, isn't it? Because the previous models that
Speaker 2: gave us that whole dead planet theory, they were fundamentally
Speaker 2: limited because they were mostly two.
Speaker 3: Dimensional, right, very limited.
Speaker 2: They relied on highly simplified assumptions about the material of
Speaker 2: the planet. I picture it like trying to understand the
Speaker 2: structural mechanics of a vast suspension bridge by only looking
Speaker 2: at a flat two D line drawing on a piece
Speaker 2: of paper.
Speaker 3: You'd miss so much?
Speaker 2: Do you just miss all the physics of how the
Speaker 2: tension and weight actually interact in the real world?
Speaker 3: Exactly? A two dimensional model is essentially just a single slice.
Speaker 3: It's a flat cross section. It cannot accurately capture the
Speaker 3: complex geometries of how rocks bend, break, and you know,
Speaker 3: stretch across a curved planetary surface over time.
Speaker 2: Because a planet is a sphere obviously.
Speaker 3: Right, obviously, But more importantly, two D models just couldn't
Speaker 3: handle the thermodynamic complexity. When Yang and his team upgraded
Speaker 3: to this high resolution three D simulation, they had to
Speaker 3: break the planet's crust and mantle into a digital mesh
Speaker 3: made of millions of tiny interconnected cubes, well millions of cubes.
Speaker 2: So they are calculating the physics for every single one
Speaker 2: of those cubes simultaneously.
Speaker 3: Every single one, they are running equations for thermal expansion,
Speaker 3: material density, and mantle convection for millions of spatial coordinates
Speaker 3: all at once. That is yeah, that requires immense supercomputing
Speaker 3: power that simply wasn't available when the older theories were established.
Speaker 2: So they just didn't have the hardware back in the day.
Speaker 3: Right, But by applying that raw computational muscle, now they
Speaker 3: could accurately replicate the rift structures in their entirety for
Speaker 3: the very first time.
Speaker 2: And when they let these three D simulations run, something
Speaker 2: entirely new emerge from the math. They discovered that when
Speaker 2: these huge rifts are geologically young, meaning they're you know,
Speaker 2: either actively moving right now or they just recently stopped,
Speaker 2: they formed these very specific topological features called rift flanks.
Speaker 3: Yes, the rift flanks are key.
Speaker 2: Which are basically broad, towering ridges that run all along
Speaker 2: the edges of the valleys. But here's what I want
Speaker 2: to push you on. How does upgrading from two D
Speaker 2: to three D suddenly allow us to see the true
Speaker 2: age of these formations.
Speaker 3: It's all about how force distributes.
Speaker 2: Right, But why does adding that third dimension act like
Speaker 2: a geological plock.
Speaker 3: Well, it comes back to how volume and stress distribute
Speaker 3: in a three dimensional space. In two D, you are
Speaker 3: forcing the math to behave in a straight line left
Speaker 3: or right exactly, assuming the rock only moves left or right.
Speaker 3: But in three D you can finally model how the
Speaker 3: crust acts as a continuous, unified sheet across a sphere.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 3: I see when the crest pulls apart to form a rift.
Speaker 3: The material doesn't just cleanly.
Speaker 2: Separate, like snapping a cracker.
Speaker 3: Right, it's not a clean break. The intense heat and
Speaker 3: pressure welling up from the mantle beneath the tear push
Speaker 3: the surrounding rock upward and outward.
Speaker 2: Like pressing your thumb into the bottom of a tight
Speaker 2: sheet of plastic m The edges around your thumb bow upwards.
Speaker 3: Yes, that upward bowing creates those towering ridges the rift flanks.
Speaker 3: And because the three D model calculates the flow of
Speaker 3: that underlying heat so accurately, it allowed the researchers to
Speaker 3: track exactly how those ridges behave over time.
Speaker 2: Ah, so they could watch them age in the simulation exactly.
Speaker 3: They demonstrated that those high steep ridges are the definitive
Speaker 3: signature of active or extremely recent movement. If the rift
Speaker 3: were truly ancient, like if the internal engine shut down
Speaker 3: one hundred million years ago, like everyone thought, those towering
Speaker 3: flanks would not be standing tall anymore, Which.
Speaker 2: Leads right into the most stunning part of the simulations.
Speaker 2: If these rifts are young, they must be moving. They are,
Speaker 2: and the models revealed they are widening much more rapidly
Speaker 2: than anyone believed. We are looking at a rate of
Speaker 2: three to ten centimeters.
Speaker 3: Per year, which is huge, is it? Oh? Yeah, In
Speaker 3: the context of a planetary lifespan, three to ten centimeters
Speaker 3: a year is practically.
Speaker 2: A sprint to geological sprint. Right.
Speaker 3: It points to an immense amount of kinetic energy and
Speaker 3: heat churning just below the crust to actively push that
Speaker 3: much solid rock apart.
Speaker 2: But wait, this brings up a major physics problem for me.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's hear it.
Speaker 2: The simulations showed that when this tectonic movement eventually does cease,
Speaker 2: the older the rift system gets, the less steep and
Speaker 2: narrow its flanks become. Right, the ridges essentially flatten out rapidly.
Speaker 2: But if there is absolutely no wind or water erosion
Speaker 2: on Venus, I mean no oceans no rainstorms, no glaciers
Speaker 2: to grind down the mountains like we have on Earth.
Speaker 2: How does solid rock just decide to flatten out on
Speaker 2: its own?
Speaker 3: That's the billion dollar question, and we have to completely
Speaker 3: abandon our Earth's centric view of geology to understand this. Okay,
Speaker 3: on our planet, we rely almost entirely on erosion. Water, ice,
Speaker 3: and wind act like cosmic sandpaper, just slowly wearing down
Speaker 3: jagged mountain peaks over millions of years. Right, Venus obviously
Speaker 3: doesn't have that sand paper, but it does have immense
Speaker 3: suffocating heat.
Speaker 2: We're talking hundreds of degrees celsius at the surface exactly.
Speaker 3: And at those extreme temperatures the physical properties of the
Speaker 3: crust change entirely. The rock isn't cold and brittle like
Speaker 3: a piece of granite you'd.
Speaker 2: Find on a hike here, so it's soft.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly hot, which means it behaves plastically over
Speaker 3: geological timeframe plastically. Right, It's not melted lava. It is
Speaker 3: still solid rock, but it has a microscopic flexibility to it.
Speaker 3: Imagine like a thick pane of glass suspended in a
Speaker 3: hot kiln, or a fresh patch of boiling asphalt in
Speaker 3: the summer. It's solid, but under its own weight and
Speaker 3: that intense heat, it begins to slowly.
Speaker 2: Sag ah crystal relaxation, that.
Speaker 3: Is the exact term. Yes, When the upward pressure from
Speaker 3: the active rifting stops, gravity takes over and it just
Speaker 3: groups exactly because the rock is so hot and slightly plastic,
Speaker 3: it simply cannot support its own towering weight over millions
Speaker 3: of years. It slowly slumps. It SAgs back down into
Speaker 3: the crust. So without the active churning of the planet's
Speaker 3: interior constantly pushing those flanks up, crustal relaxation causes them
Speaker 3: to rapidly subside and flatten.
Speaker 2: Wait, so the heat is actually the key to solving
Speaker 2: the entire mystery.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 2: The heat causes the sagging, which means if the mountains
Speaker 2: along these rifts are still standing tall, they have to
Speaker 2: be new, yes, because otherwise the Venusian heat would have
Speaker 2: relaxed them flat.
Speaker 3: By now you've just walked through. The exact logical deduction
Speaker 3: that Shi Yang and Tarskaria made from their data is
Speaker 3: the supercomputer provided the blueprint. It showed them exactly what
Speaker 3: a living, breathing Venus should look like, and conversely, what
Speaker 3: a dead Venus would look like right.
Speaker 2: But a computer simulation, no matter how advanced, is just
Speaker 2: a brilliant theory until it can be matched with physical
Speaker 2: observational proof.
Speaker 3: True, you need the real world data to back it up.
Speaker 2: And here's where it gets really interesting, because if we
Speaker 2: misread Magellan's data for thirty years because our models were
Speaker 2: too simple, it makes me wonder what else we're misreading
Speaker 2: right now?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, because the visual proof for this three D model
Speaker 2: wasn't gathered by a new billion dollar satellite that we
Speaker 2: just launched. It was sitting in our space archives for
Speaker 2: decades since the nineties. Yeah. The wide and high rift
Speaker 2: flanks generated by the eth Zurix simulations perfectly matched physical
Speaker 2: features seen in actual images of the Venusian surface. And
Speaker 2: those images were captured by the Magellan prode way back
Speaker 2: in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3: Which is incredible. The Magellan mission remains one of the
Speaker 3: most phenomenal achievements in space exploration.
Speaker 2: It mapped almost the whole planet, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: It mapped a ninety eight percent of the surface of Venus.
Speaker 3: But the thing is it couldn't just take normal photographs.
Speaker 3: Why not, because visible light cannot penetrate the dense toxic
Speaker 3: clouds of sulfuric acid that blanket the planet. It's completely opaque.
Speaker 3: So Magellan had to use synthetic aperture radar.
Speaker 2: Wait, how does that actually work in practice? Like, how
Speaker 2: do you see through the acid clouds?
Speaker 3: Well, instead of capturing light level camera, the probe beams
Speaker 3: radio waves down at the planet. Okay, those radio waves
Speaker 3: pass right through the thick cloud cover unaffected. They hit
Speaker 3: the rocky surface, and then they bounce back up to
Speaker 3: the probe.
Speaker 2: Uh like an echo.
Speaker 3: Exactly like an echo. By timing exactly how long it
Speaker 3: takes for those echoes to return, Magellan was able to
Speaker 3: build a highly detailed topographical map of all the mountains
Speaker 3: and valleys down below.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, And it.
Speaker 3: Sent back mountains of this incredible radar data in the
Speaker 3: early nineties.
Speaker 2: But at the time we just didn't have the three
Speaker 2: D modeling capability to properly interpret what Magella had actually found.
Speaker 3: Right, we saw the high ridges and the radar data,
Speaker 3: they were right there, but because our two D geodynamic
Speaker 3: models insisted the planet was cold and dead, we just
Speaker 3: couldn't make sense of them.
Speaker 2: I had the wrong context totally.
Speaker 3: The established science told us they had to be ancient,
Speaker 3: even though their towering height physically contradicted that very assumption.
Speaker 2: We were literally staring at the answer key for thirty years,
Speaker 2: but we didn't know how to read the language.
Speaker 3: Pretty much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't until we had the supercomputers decades later
Speaker 2: that the archival radar data suddenly clicked into place.
Speaker 3: And the combination of those two elements is what makes
Speaker 3: this scientific finding so incredibly.
Speaker 2: Robust, the old data and the new math.
Speaker 3: Exactly. You have theoretical physics running in a cutting edge
Speaker 3: three D simulation on one side, and then you have
Speaker 3: hard observational radar echoes from the Magellan probe.
Speaker 2: On the other, and they line up when.
Speaker 3: You overlay them. They match perfectly. The topography Magellan recorded
Speaker 3: shows youthful flank morphology, which means it unequivocally confirms that
Speaker 3: Venus has a dynamically warm interior.
Speaker 2: The dinosaurs alive and stopping around the living room.
Speaker 3: Huh. Yes, it remains a highly.
Speaker 2: Active planet that is just so wild to think about.
Speaker 3: The internal heat is still there, driving tectonic activity, likely
Speaker 3: driving volcanic activity, and pushing the crust around it up
Speaker 3: to ten centimeters a year. It thoroughly invalidates the long
Speaker 3: term geological dormancy theory.
Speaker 2: Well, so what does this all mean If we were
Speaker 2: so wrong about our closest planetary neighbor. It really forces
Speaker 2: a reckoning for humanity's next steps in space, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: It definitely changes the roadmap.
Speaker 2: We went from dismissing Venus as a baking, boring rock
Speaker 2: to realizing it's a dynamically active world. How does this
Speaker 2: radical shift in understanding change our immediate plans for exploration.
Speaker 3: Well, it instantly elevates Venus to one of the most
Speaker 3: high priority targets in the.
Speaker 2: Solar System over Mars.
Speaker 3: Well, for a long time, Mars received the lion's share
Speaker 3: of our exploratory budget and our attention because we thought
Speaker 3: Venus was a closed on interesting book. Right now, there
Speaker 3: is a massive surgeon interest. Both NASA and the European
Speaker 3: Space Agency are preparing specialized exploratory missions to go back.
Speaker 2: We are heading back into the hellscape.
Speaker 3: We are specifically, ESA is launching the Envision mission in
Speaker 3: the early twenty thirties.
Speaker 2: Okay, in Vision, and the.
Speaker 3: Core goal of Envision is to explore the planet holistically,
Speaker 3: like mapping the interactions from its inner core all the
Speaker 3: way up to its toxic upper atmosphere.
Speaker 2: I have to imagine the eth Zurich researchers who made
Speaker 2: this three D discovery are going to be heavily involved
Speaker 2: in that messure.
Speaker 3: Now they are central to it. Eophysics professors Paul Tackley
Speaker 3: and Tarasgaria are actively collaborating on the Envision mission right now.
Speaker 2: That's awesome.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they are helping develop specific surface analyzing instruments for
Speaker 3: the orbiter. And this is where their three D model
Speaker 3: transitions from like a theoretical breakthrough to a very practical.
Speaker 2: Tool, because now they know where to look exactly.
Speaker 3: Because we now know that Venus is active, we don't
Speaker 3: just want to look indiscriminately at the surface anymore. We
Speaker 3: want to look where the action is happening right now.
Speaker 3: The computational model acts like a treasure map, helping pinpoint
Speaker 3: the most dynamic shifting regions on the planet for these
Speaker 3: new probes to investigate in granular detail.
Speaker 2: So instead of blindly scanning the globe and hoping for
Speaker 2: the best, they can actually program the probe and say, hey,
Speaker 2: the model predicts active crustal tearing at this specific set
Speaker 2: of coordinates. Point the radar instruments exactly there.
Speaker 3: That's exactly how they'll do it.
Speaker 2: That is incredible. But I want to zoom out even
Speaker 2: further for a second, like beyond our Solar system. Let's
Speaker 2: zoom map, because whenever we figure out a fundamental mechanical
Speaker 2: truth about a planet next door, it usually changes how
Speaker 2: we interpret the rest of the universe, right, almost always.
Speaker 2: How does understanding crustal relaxation and the tectonic shifting of
Speaker 2: Venus actually help us find earthlike planets orbiting distant stars.
Speaker 3: It's a great question. It completely expands our recipe for
Speaker 3: planetary formation and life support. Howso, right now, when we
Speaker 3: use instruments like the James Webs Telescope to look for
Speaker 3: rocky exoplanets in deep space, we are mostly relying on
Speaker 3: our understanding of Earth.
Speaker 2: Because it's our only working example.
Speaker 3: Of life exactly. We look for biosignatures, sure, but we
Speaker 3: also look for geosignatures signs that a planet is geologically.
Speaker 2: Alive, because a dead planet can't maintain an atmosphere for
Speaker 2: very long.
Speaker 3: Right, you nailed it on Earth. Our specific style of
Speaker 3: plate tectonics constantly subducts the crust, recycling carbon and other
Speaker 3: elements into the mantle, which are then released back into
Speaker 3: the atmosphere through volcanic eruptions. This outgassing regulates.
Speaker 2: Our climate, keeps us breathing.
Speaker 3: Exactly until now. We basically assume that for a rocky
Speaker 3: planet to have sustained volcanic activity and a regulated atmosphere,
Speaker 3: it probably needed a fragmented, shifting crust just like ours.
Speaker 2: It needed plate tectonics.
Speaker 3: Right, But Venus proves that assumption wrong.
Speaker 2: Ohb it's doing it without the place exactly.
Speaker 3: It proves that a planet can be geologically alive and
Speaker 3: dynamically active without Earth specific tectonic plates.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Venus uses crustal relaxation and immense internal heat to constantly
Speaker 3: churn its interior. That ongoing slumping and rifting creates pathways
Speaker 3: for magma to rize, which leads to volcanic outgasing. If
Speaker 3: it's venting, Yes, it maintains atmospheric pressure and chemical cycles
Speaker 3: purely through these massive rifts without needing sliding puzzle pieces.
Speaker 2: So, if we are staring at a distant rocky exoplanet
Speaker 2: out in the galaxy, and we detect specific sulfur or
Speaker 2: carbon signatures in its atmosphere.
Speaker 3: We don't have to assume it has continents drifting around
Speaker 3: like Earth.
Speaker 2: We can add Venus to the list of possibilities exactly.
Speaker 3: Venus gives us an alternative blueprint for a living, rocky planet.
Speaker 3: It tells us that rocky worlds have more than one
Speaker 3: evolutionary path to stay active and maintain the atmospheric conditions
Speaker 3: that might, you know, under different circumstances, support.
Speaker 2: Life that is profound.
Speaker 3: It really broadens our entire understanding of what to look
Speaker 3: for in the dark.
Speaker 2: We started by looking at a planet we completely rode off,
Speaker 2: and it ended up teaching us how to search for dynamic,
Speaker 2: active worlds across the entire galaxy. Science is funny that way,
Speaker 2: it really is. We took Venus this inhospitable, crushing environment
Speaker 2: and assumed its sprawling rift valleys were just one hundred
Speaker 2: million year old scars, just dead rock. But by upgrading
Speaker 2: our perspective from a flat two D assumption to a
Speaker 2: staggering three D computational mesh, researchers realized those towering rift
Speaker 2: flanks are the undeniable fingerprint of ongoing tectonic.
Speaker 3: Movement, movement that is actively tearing the crust apart, fighting
Speaker 3: a constant battle against the intense heat of the planet
Speaker 3: that wants to rapidly sag and flatten those mountains through
Speaker 3: crustal relaxation.
Speaker 2: And the most poetic part of it all is that
Speaker 2: the proof was waiting patiently in our.
Speaker 3: Archives, sitting right there on the hard drives.
Speaker 2: Echoing back from the nineteen nineties Magellan Probe, just waiting
Speaker 2: for human mathematics to finally catch up and translate the signal.
Speaker 3: It's a great story.
Speaker 2: It transformed a dead world world into a dynamic, living
Speaker 2: planet right next door, and it's charting the literal flight
Speaker 2: path for the Envision mission in the twenty thirties. It
Speaker 2: serves as a profound reminder for you listening right now
Speaker 2: that scientific knowledge is never truly finished. Never the things
Speaker 2: we consider to be absolute, settled facts can literally be
Speaker 2: upended by a new perspective or a computational upgrade.
Speaker 3: Which is why we must constantly question our baseline assumptions
Speaker 3: and science. The physical data is ultimately only as good
Speaker 3: as the models we used to interpret.
Speaker 2: It absolutely, and it leaves you with a pretty wild
Speaker 2: thought to chew on as we wrap up. Yeah, at
Speaker 2: the very beginning, we talk about how comforting it is
Speaker 2: to neatly categorize things, to put a label on venus,
Speaker 2: it says dormant and just walk away. We love our labels,
Speaker 2: we really do. But if our closest planetary neighbor was
Speaker 2: secretly hiding, actively shifting tectonic forces and a churning, beating
Speaker 2: geological heart right in plain sight for thirty years, what
Speaker 2: other supposedly dead moons or rocky worlds in our Solar
Speaker 2: system might be secretly be alive, just waiting for us
Speaker 2: to finally build the right model to see them.