Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's the stranger's dog who just licked your mouth.
Speaker 1: Ali Ward, and let's turn our gaze and ears to
Speaker 1: the sky currently at the moment, one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: nine million miles away to the planet of Venus. Taking
Speaker 1: us on that journey. Is one of the most charming
Speaker 1: and informatively enthusiastic ologists in planetary history. A global geologist
Speaker 1: who studies both Earth and the other orbs in our
Speaker 1: solar system, with a focus on what Venus can tell
Speaker 1: us about our own home. And They graduated from Carlton College,
Speaker 1: got a master's from the University of Montana and a
Speaker 1: PhD from UCLA, before becoming a professor at Southern Methodist
Speaker 1: University and then heading to the University of Minnesota Duluth
Speaker 1: as a mcnight Presidential Endowed Professor of Earth and Planetary Scientists.
Speaker 1: They have worked for the US Geological Survey and done
Speaker 1: field work from Antarctica to the Arctic Yukon Territory. And
Speaker 1: just a little quick warning, you will fall in love
Speaker 1: with them and rock and Venus. But before we cast
Speaker 1: that spell, let's thank the folks who sent in great
Speaker 1: questions for them via Patreon dot com. Slash Ologies where
Speaker 1: you two can support the show for as little as
Speaker 1: a dollar a month and send your burning nine hundred
Speaker 1: degree questions. Thank you also to everyone out there in
Speaker 1: ologies merch from ologiesmerch dot com and of course, for
Speaker 1: zero dollars a month, you can support the show just
Speaker 1: by reviewing it and I read all the reviews. I
Speaker 1: prove it with a recent one like this one from
Speaker 1: listener and nurse Sara nine to sixteen, who wrote that
Speaker 1: the show takes listeners on a magic school bus like
Speaker 1: auditory journey, spanning from the smallest molecules to the largest
Speaker 1: existential topics. And Sara nine to sixteen, thank you for that,
Speaker 1: and thank you Lee E who tells their group therapy
Speaker 1: clients to listen. Hey, everyone who leaves reviews, it truly
Speaker 1: means the world keeps me going. I appreciate them and
Speaker 1: it helps boost the show so much, which means we're
Speaker 1: able to donate to a cause of theologists choosing each week.
Speaker 1: Thank you to sponsors of the show.
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Speaker 5: Hey Mark, how are you?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 1: I'm not great a sore throat.
Speaker 2: I think I'm coming down with cold.
Speaker 5: Oh no, you should try a Vogel sore throat spray.
Speaker 5: It's a natural remedy with echinata and sage and can
Speaker 5: treat symptoms of coals and flus, including sore throats.
Speaker 1: Perfect I'd give that a try.
Speaker 5: So we'll leave sore throats symptoms with a Vogel. A
Speaker 5: keen of force sore throat spray made from echinasia and
Speaker 5: sage herbs and designed to reach irritated parts of the throat,
Speaker 5: available from health stores and pharmacies nationwide.
Speaker 1: Always read the leaflet okay from the smallest molecules to
Speaker 1: the planets themselves. Let's blast off into this instant classic
Speaker 1: an episode that had me beaming every second of the interview.
Speaker 1: Here we go into the world of mission recon noodle data,
Speaker 1: melting machinery, swimming in air, baby siblings, goddess vibes, men,
Speaker 1: women and off the mark, self help books, sci fi,
Speaker 1: How to Endure a long day, atmosphere of old factory wonders,
Speaker 1: and whether or not it's a good idea to visit
Speaker 1: the Planet of Love with planetary geologists, comparative planetologist, Galactic
Speaker 1: treasure and venosologist doctor Vicki Hansen. So I'm trying to
Speaker 1: figure out there is an ology for this, right like,
Speaker 1: it's is it Venuology?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, that's really an interesting question because some
Speaker 6: say it's like Venusian or that those are the people.
Speaker 6: So venus ology, you know, I think would go just
Speaker 6: as well as anything than good.
Speaker 1: Are there a lot of people who are out there
Speaker 1: studying Venus? Do you all get together? Do you all
Speaker 1: know each other? Is it a relatively small number compared
Speaker 1: to Mars.
Speaker 6: Yes, it is a small number compared to Mars. It
Speaker 6: is an expanding community. When we had the Magellan Mission.
Speaker 6: Back in the late eighties early nineties. It was really
Speaker 6: a small community and we all met in one room
Speaker 6: at Caltech and Pasadena. Wow, you know. And now it's expanded,
Speaker 6: but it will never be as big as Mars, I'm sure,
Speaker 6: which it deserves to be much bigger, because Venus is
Speaker 6: much more exciting.
Speaker 1: And which is to us. I understand, Venus is larger
Speaker 1: than Mars. Yes, which is closer.
Speaker 6: Venus is closer to Us, and Venus is between Us
Speaker 6: and the Sun.
Speaker 1: And then we've got Mercury Venus Us, yes.
Speaker 6: Mars exactly, and then the asteroid belt, and then we
Speaker 6: go out to the bigger planets.
Speaker 1: And how big is Venus in comparison to Earth.
Speaker 6: It's about eighty percent of the size of Earth. So
Speaker 6: it's just it's little sister by a not much amount,
Speaker 6: but that could be important.
Speaker 1: So Venus closer to Earth than Mars, larger than Mars,
Speaker 1: and like a sibling that's like an inch and a
Speaker 1: half shorter than us. But mysterious and overlooked. Why do
Speaker 1: you think people are so hung up on Mars more
Speaker 1: so than Venus.
Speaker 6: Well, first of all, they say men are from Mars
Speaker 6: and women are from yes, So there we go.
Speaker 1: Mars distant red, named for the god of war, Venus
Speaker 1: bright in the sky, the spectacular goddess of love, and
Speaker 1: the only planet in our solar system named after our
Speaker 1: female deity. But in terms of attention battles over beauty,
Speaker 1: it figures.
Speaker 6: No more need to be said. But I think it's
Speaker 6: because there's this incredible search for life, and so people
Speaker 6: think that Mars might have a better chance of life.
Speaker 6: In fact, I'm not sure that's true. Another reason I
Speaker 6: think is just because Venus, like a woman, she keeps
Speaker 6: herself shrouded in clouds, and so she's called the morning
Speaker 6: star in the evening Star, and that's because the sun's
Speaker 6: light is reflected off of her surface, and so she
Speaker 6: really looks like a star. And we can't see through
Speaker 6: those clouds unless we have radar, and radar was not
Speaker 6: developed until really quite recently, especially compared to telescope. So
Speaker 6: we can with telescopes actually see the surface of Mars
Speaker 6: and Venus. We need radar to see through otherwise we
Speaker 6: just see these clouds and nothing else.
Speaker 1: What are those clouds made of?
Speaker 6: Those clouds are made up of mostly CO two and
Speaker 6: then some sulfuric acid and a tiny bit of water
Speaker 6: and other things thrown into the mix. The cloud bank
Speaker 6: is really, really thick and sits much higher above the
Speaker 6: planet than our own cloud bank. Way up there, very
Speaker 6: very dense and actually is a greenhouse effect that keeps
Speaker 6: a lot of heat into the planet. But what's really
Speaker 6: cool about those clouds is that there are layers within them.
Speaker 6: Because they're so thick, there's convection or flow because they're
Speaker 6: a gas, and that's actually where there might be life
Speaker 6: on Venus in the clouds, in the clouds, because the
Speaker 6: surfaces we'll find out is super hot, super dry, not
Speaker 6: good for life as we define it.
Speaker 1: So that's on land maybe not.
Speaker 6: Does it really exist, but up in the clouds, if
Speaker 6: we were up in the cloud bank, it would be
Speaker 6: about the same temperature and pressure as you and I
Speaker 6: sitting here. Oh, so we could exist in the clouds,
Speaker 6: maybe not so much oxygen at the surface. We'd be
Speaker 6: squashed flat because it would be like being under a
Speaker 6: couple of kilometers of water in the ocean. And it's
Speaker 6: basically nine hundred degrees fahrenheit, so super hot. Big temperature
Speaker 6: differential between here and Duluth, Minnesota, for sure. But in
Speaker 6: the clouds because they have the circulation. You could have again,
Speaker 6: not life like us, but life existing in those clouds
Speaker 6: and they just ride those convection cells. But they also
Speaker 6: the different chemicals that are in the clouds they could
Speaker 6: be feeding on and so there could be life there.
Speaker 6: We don't know, but there could. Isn't that cool?
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean, let me go get a scoop of this?
Speaker 1: How do we find out?
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, we need various missions, and so people have
Speaker 6: tried to say, maybe we can look into the clouds
Speaker 6: and see if there are geochemical indicators. There's nothing absolutely unique,
Speaker 6: so some things that could be but that's not the
Speaker 6: only way get a scoop. That hasn't been planned yet.
Speaker 1: So the vapor cloak around Venus may hold the answer,
Speaker 1: and by answer I mean aliens. Vicky says that there
Speaker 1: are various missions whose sites are set in the clouds
Speaker 1: and even going through the clouds and down to the
Speaker 1: surface like kind of diving through whipped cream to get
Speaker 1: into an ice cream Sunday, but one that is four
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty four degrees celsius. We're a blistering eight
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty seven degrees fahrenheit, But.
Speaker 6: That would just be one shot and would just give
Speaker 6: us kind of one pass. So but yeah, missions are
Speaker 6: what we need to do to explore it. And that's
Speaker 6: why we need more interest in Venus than perhaps.
Speaker 1: Mars, which is where you come in.
Speaker 6: Well, it's just such a fascinating planet. But fundamentally as
Speaker 6: humans and for myself, what I really want to learn
Speaker 6: about is Earth, and Venus has so much more to
Speaker 6: teach us about the Earth than Mars does. And you
Speaker 6: say why, because it is back to what you said,
Speaker 6: it's about the same size, it's about the same density.
Speaker 6: That means it's made up of generally the same materials.
Speaker 6: It's a similar proximity to the Sun. And they were very,
Speaker 6: very similar when they were born. I don't know if
Speaker 6: you have sisters. I do, and you know we're similar.
Speaker 6: Our photographs are interchangeable. Now we've gone completely different ways.
Speaker 6: But Mars is this tiny little weenie bean. You know,
Speaker 6: it's nothing like the Earth. You know, so size matters
Speaker 6: in terms of how planets work, because that's how much
Speaker 6: heat they have and how do they get rid of heat.
Speaker 6: If you take a big potato, put it in the microwave,
Speaker 6: it'll retain its heat for a long time. If you
Speaker 6: take a little potato cool off really quickly. Well, the
Speaker 6: way that that heat escapes is the mode of tectanism
Speaker 6: and volcanism or tectonics, not to be confused with plate tectonics.
Speaker 6: That's Earth's kind of tectonism. Venus has tectonics but not
Speaker 6: plate tectonics. So you immediately say, well why not why
Speaker 6: doesn't it have plate tectonics, or more why does Earth
Speaker 6: have plate tectonics? And so we can learn so so
Speaker 6: much more about Earth by studying Venus than we can Mars.
Speaker 1: Well what is a tectonic and how is it different
Speaker 1: than a plate tectonic?
Speaker 6: Okay, so let's talk what plate tectonics is, because we
Speaker 6: know what that is and tectonics be any other way.
Speaker 6: So plate tectonics, we have plates on the surface. The
Speaker 6: plates are made on the lithosphere rock sphere. Litho rock
Speaker 6: rock sphere, the outer sphere of a planet. And what
Speaker 6: that happens we can all do this with our hands,
Speaker 6: is that lithosphere slides around and it can pull apart
Speaker 6: and make new lithosphere. That's what Earth does at the
Speaker 6: spreading centers, and then it can also subduct and recycle
Speaker 6: that lithosphere. So how a planet cools is its tectonics.
Speaker 6: We cool by sweating dogs put their bellies down on
Speaker 6: the ground or pant right, and the Earth does it
Speaker 6: by spreading and by subduction because this is a cold lithosphere.
Speaker 6: And when I put it back down into that hot
Speaker 6: mantles like taking your cold hand putting it on your
Speaker 6: belly and you go, oh, that's going to cool me down.
Speaker 6: So that's the way Earth cools. And then there's volcanism
Speaker 6: that is associated with that. Volcanism as we spread the
Speaker 6: plates apart, volcanism as we subduct one plate beneath the other.
Speaker 6: So those are the plates. How Venus doesn't have plates.
Speaker 1: So what's it doing?
Speaker 6: So what's it doing? That's exactly right? And why do
Speaker 6: we care? Well, Earth, it wasn't born with plate tectonics.
Speaker 6: You don't start having plate tectonics, So we want to
Speaker 6: know what did Earth do early on? Oh, well, Venus
Speaker 6: doesn't have and I will say never did have. Now
Speaker 6: some people say, oh, maybe it did in the past. Well,
Speaker 6: all of the earliest rocks that we have that there's
Speaker 6: a lot of debate on Venus, but most people agree
Speaker 6: the earliest rocks are a kind of rock called tesra.
Speaker 1: So a tesra is a weird geological formation. They look
Speaker 1: kind of like creepy wrinkles in fabric, or these ribbons
Speaker 1: of deep fissures and chasms. Sometimes they look like honeycombs
Speaker 1: of domes and pits. And according to the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: paper in the Journal Geology titled Venus Tessaie feature layered,
Speaker 1: folded and eroded rocks, Tessai cover about eight percent of
Speaker 1: the surface of Venus, and there's seen more run the
Speaker 1: equator and some of the northern latitudes. They're usually the
Speaker 1: oldest thing in their regions, are up to seven hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty million years old, and scientists think they're caused
Speaker 1: by volcanic activity.
Speaker 6: They're very distinctive and we can map those out, and
Speaker 6: when we map those out across the surface, they make
Speaker 6: huge coherent global patterns, and they're the earliest record we have.
Speaker 6: So if we can set that and say, okay, but
Speaker 6: plate tectonics maybe happened after that, because that's the earliest record,
Speaker 6: then when I subduct things, I'm removing parts of the surface,
Speaker 6: and so I'm going to lose parts of that overall
Speaker 6: coherent pattern. They're going to be dissected interrupted and we
Speaker 6: don't see that. So I would say that's evidence that
Speaker 6: Venus never had plate tectonics. So if you want to
Speaker 6: say she had it, because Earthlings we love it. We
Speaker 6: just want everyone to have plate tectonics. If you want
Speaker 6: to say Venus had plate tectonics, then you have to say, well, yes,
Speaker 6: she had it, but we just have no record of it,
Speaker 6: and that's just not good science.
Speaker 1: I also just want to note that there are so
Speaker 1: many different formations that aren't even tessory on Venus's lithosphere
Speaker 1: or the rockscape, her rockscape. But my favorite might be
Speaker 1: this huge volcanic caldera with these fans of ridges extending
Speaker 1: from it, and it's called the tick. It looks so
Speaker 1: much like a tick. But yeah, if Venus had a
Speaker 1: bunch of shifting plates on her surface, there would be
Speaker 1: remnants of all that movement, but there isn't anything credible. Well,
Speaker 1: what's on the surface. Let's say that I were to
Speaker 1: get through those clouds, what does it even look like?
Speaker 6: Yeah, so what it looks like is, first of all,
Speaker 6: it's hot, okay, but it is there is no water,
Speaker 6: there's no nasty biological layer at all, it's basically rock
Speaker 6: everywhere that you look. Depending on where you are, you
Speaker 6: could be huge flat open areas that if you were
Speaker 6: to go into Kilauea and down onto the lava lake
Speaker 6: there when it's not erupting, but expand that and look
Speaker 6: around and just see that forever, you might see something
Speaker 6: like that. But you might also land in huge mountain
Speaker 6: range areas that the highest region on the planet is
Speaker 6: higher than the highest region on Earth. Or you might
Speaker 6: land actually in these relatively deep chasms, in which case
Speaker 6: you would be sort of like in the Marianas Trench
Speaker 6: on Earth, except not quite so deep. Other places, if
Speaker 6: you're walking around on Tessra, which I would love to do,
Speaker 6: you're going to be in these just at a much
Speaker 6: smaller scale. But consider your fingers. With ridges and troughs
Speaker 6: and ridges and troughs and ridges and truughs that would
Speaker 6: be steep drops. You could walk along the ridge, but
Speaker 6: you would drop into a trough, and as far as
Speaker 6: you can see, that's what you would see, incredibly incredibly varied.
Speaker 6: Other places, you might be on extensive lava flows like
Speaker 6: Pahoihuai flows that are on Hawaii, but go for much, much,
Speaker 6: much further distances. So on the surface there's all these
Speaker 6: amazing features to see, but no biology, no water, and
Speaker 6: you would have impact craters, absolutely pristinely preserved impact craters
Speaker 6: relative to earther Mars.
Speaker 1: Well, so it has active volcanoes, I would say, yes, Okay,
Speaker 1: we are getting more and more evidence that there are
Speaker 1: huge volcanic features.
Speaker 6: I think most of us at this point would be
Speaker 6: really surprised if they weren't active, and there's enough tantalizing
Speaker 6: data to say, yeah, we probably have active volcanism. There
Speaker 6: are these regions that are called volcanic rises, and they
Speaker 6: are huge provinces. If we take one volcanic rise, it
Speaker 6: would cover all of Australia, No, all of Australia. It's
Speaker 6: probably formed in the similar way to Hawaii, of a
Speaker 6: massive plume underneath that lithosphere. But because on Earth, here
Speaker 6: comes the plume and the lithosphere moves across, So Hawaii
Speaker 6: makes these chains of volcanoes right m But on Venus
Speaker 6: the plates don't move. There aren't plates. It's like a
Speaker 6: one plate planet, and so the plume sits there and
Speaker 6: it bows up the surface, actually much much higher, just
Speaker 6: because when things are hotter, they expand, including the rock,
Speaker 6: so it bows it way up. But there you have
Speaker 6: massive flows that we see on the surface, rock flows
Speaker 6: that are all volcanic flows. You can look at those
Speaker 6: and go, oh my god. You know, it doesn't take
Speaker 6: a geologist to say, these are amazing volcanic flows that
Speaker 6: go for tens and tens and hundreds of miles. Now,
Speaker 6: are they active today? It'd be pretty hard to say
Speaker 6: they're not, because that heat source is still there. Now,
Speaker 6: did it happen yesterday? Well no, but geologically is it active?
Speaker 6: I bet my life on it.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, you told me that way back when you
Speaker 1: first started studying this, there were a few of you
Speaker 1: in a room.
Speaker 6: Right yeah, about there were sixty two one hundred people,
Speaker 6: that's pretty much who studied venus, and I was new.
Speaker 6: Like people went around and said, where did you come from?
Speaker 6: Because no one knew me from anything except my one
Speaker 6: colleague at Southern Methodist University at the time, in his students.
Speaker 1: And now when they say where did you come from?
Speaker 1: Did you tell them Caltech Capacadya.
Speaker 6: No. They would go through that and they would say,
Speaker 6: you weren't just so and so students, You weren't just
Speaker 6: so and so students, you weren't just so and so
Speaker 6: to it. I was a young professor, but I spent
Speaker 6: my entire career on Earth and just absolute serendipitously ended
Speaker 6: up on Venus. It was a holiday party. I'm talking
Speaker 6: to grad students and postdocs of my colleague Roger Phillips,
Speaker 6: and they're saying, this mission is going to Venus, and
Speaker 6: I I was just making polite conversation. I'm not interested
Speaker 6: in Venus. I can't find it in the sky. But
Speaker 6: so I say, tell me about it. So they did,
Speaker 6: and they said, well, Venus is a planet that we
Speaker 6: think has a strong weak, strong relogy of this layer.
Speaker 6: And I thought that's fascinating, because that's like continental crust,
Speaker 6: and to think a whole planet of that. I don't
Speaker 6: think that is the case now, but I said, that
Speaker 6: would be amazing to have a whole planet like that.
Speaker 6: And then they said, and we have places like mid
Speaker 6: ocean ridges on the Earth, and I said, those two
Speaker 6: can't be true. Those two views of Venus are in
Speaker 6: contradiction because if you pull apart layers that are strong
Speaker 6: week strong, which the Earth has done in the Southwest Desert,
Speaker 6: we get something called metamorphic core complex. We don't get
Speaker 6: a mid ocean spreading center. So they said really, and
Speaker 6: I said, yeah, it's just relogy. Relogy is the study
Speaker 6: of flow. You know, how do things bend, break and fold?
Speaker 6: They said, you have to talk to Roger. So I
Speaker 6: went and talked to Roger and that started my thing
Speaker 6: on Venus. And then as a grad student and I
Speaker 6: wrote a proposal to NASA and it was funded and
Speaker 6: we said, oh my goodness, okay, and it was just
Speaker 6: going to be a one time thing, but it's been
Speaker 6: so fascinating that I can't pull away.
Speaker 1: You stuck around.
Speaker 6: I stuck around. I stuck around. And then after that
Speaker 6: was when I learned that, oh my gosh, Venus is
Speaker 6: who's going to tell me about early Earth, which is
Speaker 6: what I am really interested in. And Venus has a
Speaker 6: record of early Venus. Earth doesn't because it's been destroyed
Speaker 6: by plate tectonics. Oh, go back to the baby books.
Speaker 6: Venus never develop plate tectonics, and we have this beautiful
Speaker 6: record through radar of her surface, like nothing like what
Speaker 6: we have of Earth. And so if I learned to
Speaker 6: read Venus's baby book, I can stand those in for Earth.
Speaker 6: I'm I'm the middle of five kids, but I had
Speaker 6: two older sisters. Well there are no baby pictures of
Speaker 6: me because there my sisters by the time it got
Speaker 6: to me, and they're like, okay, just use this one,
Speaker 6: you know, And that works. So Earth and Venus they're
Speaker 6: probably interchangeable or not interchangeable. But Venus has a lot
Speaker 6: to tell us, and she's preserved her baby book. Earth
Speaker 6: is ripped it apart.
Speaker 1: I love her. I love her. Oh so what was
Speaker 1: it about Earth that got you down that path? At
Speaker 1: what point were you like, I want to be a geologist.
Speaker 1: I want to be a planetary scientist. Yes, so pretty.
Speaker 6: Silly more more sarendifit. I was at Carlton College. I
Speaker 6: was a chemistry major and doing art on the side,
Speaker 6: and a friend and I geology and chemistry shared the
Speaker 6: same building, and we thought the geology students looked like
Speaker 6: they were having a lot more fun than we was chemist.
Speaker 6: So Sandra and I decided to take a geology class
Speaker 6: and it was full. So the professor said, well, you
Speaker 6: can only take it if you're thinking about majoring. So
Speaker 6: of course we lied. We had no intention of majoring,
Speaker 6: but we just said, oh, yes, yes, we're thinking about majoring.
Speaker 6: In it. Well, Lynn Tennyson, the professor, she got the
Speaker 6: last laugh because both Sandra and I were just smitten
Speaker 6: with it. Sandra went on to be a geochemist and
Speaker 6: I went on to do geology, but more of structural geology,
Speaker 6: which is how things bend, breaking fold, more of a
Speaker 6: physics and mechanics of it.
Speaker 1: Did you keep in touch with that professor to say,
Speaker 1: like you converted us?
Speaker 6: You know, she went back to industry, but I did say,
Speaker 6: you know, Lynn, you got the last laugh because.
Speaker 1: Here we are are you. I have a friend. She's
Speaker 1: a planetary geologist and she her name is Racal, which
Speaker 1: is fun because her nickname was Rocky. Yeah, growing man,
Speaker 1: Oh that's incredible. We had her on for the Selenology
Speaker 1: Moon episode.
Speaker 6: Oh fun.
Speaker 1: She's wonderful. But she was saying that she always tricks
Speaker 1: her husband into going on vacations where there's a lot
Speaker 1: of rocks.
Speaker 6: That's great. Well, and our family we have two kids
Speaker 6: who are now adults, but they would say, can we
Speaker 6: go on a vacation where there's no geology? Because my
Speaker 6: husband and I are both geologists, we said, sure, you
Speaker 6: come up with it and that's where we'll go. So
Speaker 6: they got their heads together and they decided on Iceland,
Speaker 6: which has a lot of geology. We went to Iceland.
Speaker 6: We all had a great time. But they never complained
Speaker 6: about going on vacations. There wasn't any geology.
Speaker 1: They had some great geology, exactly. Jokes on that, right, yep. Well,
Speaker 1: what can you tell me a little bit about the
Speaker 1: missions to Venus? Like I don't know much about Magellan,
Speaker 1: Like I'm a blank slate here.
Speaker 6: Okay, So Magell. So first there were missions where they
Speaker 6: were looking at radar, but not very high quality, okay.
Speaker 6: And then the Russians Soviets excuse me, actually put some
Speaker 6: landers down on the surface of Venia and that that's
Speaker 6: really pretty amazing because they did that in the nineteen
Speaker 6: sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1: Oh, just a quick aside here. Between nineteen sixty one
Speaker 1: and nineteen eighty four, the Soviet Union launched a series
Speaker 1: of thirteen space probes within their Veniera missions, and ten
Speaker 1: probes landed on the surface of Venus. They lasted a flash.
Speaker 1: The longest visit was two hours and the shortest was
Speaker 1: twenty three minutes. All that work for twenty three minutes,
Speaker 1: but the program yielded a bunch of firsts in space exploration,
Speaker 1: including images and sounds from the surface of another planet
Speaker 1: and high res radar scans. Also fun facts. Vaniera shares
Speaker 1: the same root word as the verb to venerate or
Speaker 1: to regard very highly, coming from Venus, the goddess of love.
Speaker 1: So does venereal disease. And if your ears just perked up,
Speaker 1: you can stay tuned for an entire episode on sexually
Speaker 1: transmitted infections, which is coming very soon anyway, Yes, Vaniera missions.
Speaker 6: Those were really incredible because even today with the technology
Speaker 6: if we have, if we land something on the surface
Speaker 6: of Venus, given the horrid conditions, it wouldn't last a
Speaker 6: week and probably a couple of days wow at most
Speaker 6: at most, and that's with new technology. But the Magellan
Speaker 6: mission was an amazing mission. It was the first NASA
Speaker 6: all digital mission just across NASA. But what it did
Speaker 6: was had collected four data sets, three of which were
Speaker 6: extremely useful and they're all global. The first is the
Speaker 6: radar synthetic aperture radar, and it's the highest resolution. We
Speaker 6: have ninety eight percent of the planet covered in one
Speaker 6: hundred meters per pixel resolution, a lot. To put that
Speaker 6: in perspective, we have no data set like that on Earth,
Speaker 6: none like on our planet. And you say, well, why
Speaker 6: not because the radar doesn't see well through the oceans,
Speaker 6: and two thirds of our planet is ocean, and so
Speaker 6: we know very very little about the ocean floors. Actually,
Speaker 6: we have a better data set of Venus, and that's incredible.
Speaker 6: When we first got it, the computers that we're dealing
Speaker 6: with right now didn't exist. But now really anyone with
Speaker 6: a web connection can pull up and look at those images,
Speaker 6: and anyone can study them, and anyone can put their
Speaker 6: two cents in, which is really really good for science
Speaker 6: and is why there's been much more interest in it
Speaker 6: because of the accessibility of that.
Speaker 1: Just some quick definitions in case you feel kind of
Speaker 1: lost in the darkness of space here. So altimetry think
Speaker 1: altitude for height is just the measurements of height of objects.
Speaker 1: And to measure the highs and lows of this Venusian terrain,
Speaker 1: planetary geologists use radar, where this pulse of microwave energy
Speaker 1: is sent to the surface of the planet at a
Speaker 1: slight angle, and then the amount of energy that reflects
Speaker 1: back can tell us about what it's hitting down there,
Speaker 1: and they can also process that data for higher resolution,
Speaker 1: which is called synthetic aperture radar, and there are files
Speaker 1: accessible to the public via NASA's Open Data Portal, which
Speaker 1: has various types of measurements and info in addition to
Speaker 1: those collected by radar.
Speaker 6: So the radar data. Then there is the topography data
Speaker 6: or called ltimetry, but that's the shape of the surface.
Speaker 6: It's lower resolution, but it too is global and we
Speaker 6: can tell a lot about the topography. So on Venus
Speaker 6: we have some very high regions that have volcanic features
Speaker 6: all across the surface, and we can say, oh, those
Speaker 6: are young because they sit high because of the heat
Speaker 6: beneath them. And the topography is such that at a
Speaker 6: broad scale it's very gentle. And that's what heat does
Speaker 6: to make something, because it transfers. If I'm a hot
Speaker 6: body and a cold body, then I'm going to see
Speaker 6: a gradient from hot to cold, which means I'm going
Speaker 6: to see a gradient in my topography. On Venus, we
Speaker 6: refer everything to mean planetary radius.
Speaker 1: What does that mean? On Earth we.
Speaker 6: Refer everything to sea level. Yes, we don't have any water.
Speaker 6: We don't have any water on Venus. And also Venus
Speaker 6: is almost a perfect sphere So Earth is an oblate spheroid. Okay,
Speaker 6: it's got a big bulge at its belly, at its equator.
Speaker 6: And why does it have that Because the interior is
Speaker 6: a little sloshy and it's spinning.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, so Earth is like a gusher in the center,
Speaker 1: spinning relatively fast. The Venus not so much.
Speaker 6: Venus, its interior is probably still a little sloshy. But
Speaker 6: she rotates so slowly. So in fact, on Venus, her
Speaker 6: day is longer than her year. A day is how
Speaker 6: long it takes to go on. It's at doing rotation.
Speaker 6: Just knocked down the microphone. I get so excited.
Speaker 1: I love it, Honestly, her excitement about Venus makes me
Speaker 1: feel like Venus is a friend. Now. It's a beautiful delusion.
Speaker 6: And what's a year? It's the trip around the sun.
Speaker 6: So Venus rotates so slowly. Because she rotates so slowly,
Speaker 6: she maintains a perfect sphere. She's just all, you know, perfectly.
Speaker 6: Her doo is not must at all, right, she's not
Speaker 6: going to smash at the equator.
Speaker 1: So a day is long than a year, So that
Speaker 1: means it's in darkness and light for so long.
Speaker 6: Right, yes, for so long? Exactly.
Speaker 1: So, yes, you will circle the sun and have another
Speaker 1: birthday before the day ends. This is great if you
Speaker 1: like cake. This is not good if you're just having
Speaker 1: a random bad day, or if you have a five
Speaker 1: day work week. Then so let's say that you were
Speaker 1: to beam me down on the surface. It would the
Speaker 1: rocks would look like, are they grayish? Are they big?
Speaker 1: Would it smell farty because of the sulfur.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah it would be, but you probably couldn't smell
Speaker 6: because your nose won't work because it's nine hundred degrees. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so take your oven, you know, and turn it out
Speaker 6: so it would rain sulfuric acid. I mean, I've worked
Speaker 6: with the lab. I don't think that smells like sulfur does,
Speaker 6: so I don't know about the smells.
Speaker 1: So this has been a hot ghastly debated a bit,
Speaker 1: and I floated through data on this science of interplanetary
Speaker 1: fart smells here on Earth emanating from your very bowels.
Speaker 1: You can blame hydrogen sulfides for necessitating rolling down a
Speaker 1: car window, but sulfuric acid itself, also known oddly as
Speaker 1: oil of vitriol, in its pure state, is colorless and odorless,
Speaker 1: so would meeting with the albeit scant water vapor in
Speaker 1: the clouds cause stinky hydrogen sulfide. I don't know. There
Speaker 1: are several pop science articles saying that, yeah, Mars and
Speaker 1: Venus stink like toots. But I also went onto Blue
Speaker 1: Sky to ask a bevy of smart people about this
Speaker 1: posting any chemist friends here, I have a gaseous question.
Speaker 1: If you had sulfuric acid in the clouds of a
Speaker 1: planet as well as scant water vapor, would the process
Speaker 1: of dissociation create hydrogen sulfide and thus would it smell
Speaker 1: like farts? Just doing some fact checking here, to which
Speaker 1: tot's Grodi responded, more like fart checking true. But then
Speaker 1: doctor Michelle Frankel, a professor of chemistry and author of
Speaker 1: the books Deeped about the science of tea, replied, I
Speaker 1: think it's usually sulfur dioxide to sulfuric acid and oxidation process,
Speaker 1: and you can have a reducing atmosphere, but I don't
Speaker 1: think they're generally strong enough to reduce sulfate to sulfide.
Speaker 1: And then this assistant professor of organic chemistry, doctor Patrick Lutz,
Speaker 1: told me that water is neither reducing nor oxidizing in
Speaker 1: this specific scenario, So I don't think it would be farty,
Speaker 1: but Jack adly noted, despite whatever chemistry, the rankness wouldn't
Speaker 1: hit you because your sense of smell is unlikely to
Speaker 1: function in the kind of atmosphere that would support this scenario.
Speaker 1: So if a sulfur sulfur's in the vapor and no
Speaker 1: one is there to smell it, does it make a stink?
Speaker 1: A last smell is in the nose of the beholder. Now,
Speaker 1: in light of that, how about the beauty.
Speaker 6: The lighting would be very different because the sun is
Speaker 6: coming through these very thick clouds, but you would have
Speaker 6: lots of daylight or not. And it probably wouldn't be
Speaker 6: very windy because the wind is basically by pressure differentials,
Speaker 6: which are temperature differentials. And so when we think about
Speaker 6: the overall broad global cycles of the winds on Earth,
Speaker 6: they're driven by the suns is much more intense at
Speaker 6: the equatorial regions than going north and on Venus. With
Speaker 6: this blanket, it's probably a pretty similar temperature. As you
Speaker 6: go polar it will be somewhat different, but not greatly.
Speaker 6: Because of that surface, the rocks will probably look sort
Speaker 6: of dark black. We don't really know, but we think
Speaker 6: that they're mostly of basaltic rocks, which on Earth, if
Speaker 6: we want to just pick out two rocks, we would
Speaker 6: say granite, which are a lighter colored rock that we
Speaker 6: associate with the continents and continental crust, and basalts, which
Speaker 6: are what we would see in Hawaii or the ocean
Speaker 6: floor below the sediments. And we think that Venus mostly basaltic,
Speaker 6: but there's probably granitic type rocks. They may not be
Speaker 6: at the surface because granite has a hard time getting
Speaker 6: to the surface. It mostly gets stuck at depth.
Speaker 1: And so is there a huge temperature difference on one
Speaker 1: side of Venus versus the other.
Speaker 6: That's a good question, and I've heard this debated, and
Speaker 6: it's not at all like Mars. Mars is a huge
Speaker 6: temperature difference because there's basically no very little atmosphere to
Speaker 6: keep you warm, and that's what the atmosphere is, like
Speaker 6: a big down comforter Okay and on Earth we have
Speaker 6: a pretty nice down comforter. Venus has a you know
Speaker 6: down comforter on steroids, it's very warm. And so I
Speaker 6: think that there is some temperature difference. I don't know
Speaker 6: what that is. People would and what it would be
Speaker 6: postulated to be. But then you have to say, you know,
Speaker 6: there you are in darkness for so long as you said,
Speaker 6: because your days and nights are much longer.
Speaker 1: Because remember, Venus does a whole circle around the Sun
Speaker 1: a year, and the equivalent of seven or so months
Speaker 1: on Earth or two hundred and twenty five days, but
Speaker 1: it spins so slowly that it takes two hundred and
Speaker 1: forty three Earth days to go from dawn until the
Speaker 1: next dawn.
Speaker 6: But then the other thing is is if you were
Speaker 6: to touch the surface, the surface would be much much
Speaker 6: warmer than here, so it's going to be giving off
Speaker 6: heat into beneath that blanket. But at a human scale,
Speaker 6: it would just all be pretty hotter than be Jesus.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wouldn't be like going under a sun umbrella
Speaker 1: versus standing.
Speaker 6: Yes, not like that, Yeah, not like that at all.
Speaker 1: So gravity data also tells us a lot about a
Speaker 1: space object, and according to this twenty twenty five paper
Speaker 1: in the Planetary Science Journal titled Mapping Venus's gravity field
Speaker 1: with a Feritest mission, this planned twenty thirty one mission
Speaker 1: seeks to improve the data that we have on this
Speaker 1: using quote a key onboard element for the expeeriment called
Speaker 1: the Integrated Deep Space Transponder. Sounds like sci fi, it's
Speaker 1: real stuff. So it's kind of like when your friend
Speaker 1: has a kid and they send out the announcement with
Speaker 1: like the weight and the inches and a photo. We
Speaker 1: want as many details as possible. I would like to
Speaker 1: see the baby.
Speaker 6: Another thing about the surface that is just so fun.
Speaker 6: So thanks to a past graduate student, we can take
Speaker 6: that topography data, that altimetry data and put it together
Speaker 6: with the radar data, which is like like black and
Speaker 6: white photos of the surface, and we can put on
Speaker 6: red blue glasses and then you can see three D
Speaker 6: of the surface. And with our technology today you can
Speaker 6: zoom around and actually be like you have endless helicopter
Speaker 6: time flying around in these things. And you can do
Speaker 6: this for for public talks. It's just so fun. You know,
Speaker 6: have people put on the red blue glasses and you can,
Speaker 6: you know, show them. So I would have to beam
Speaker 6: you down. I'd say, here, we are a whole group,
Speaker 6: let's all go to Venus and now let's go over here,
Speaker 6: and now let's go over here.
Speaker 1: Vicky was doing this for a talk to a general
Speaker 1: audience into luth and she says she loves talking about
Speaker 1: venus to the public because they have great questions.
Speaker 6: So at the end of this talk, this little girl
Speaker 6: comes up afterwards and she says, so I want to know.
Speaker 6: So there's some really really steep, steep, steep slopes and
Speaker 6: it'd be like being in the Marianna's Trench in a sense,
Speaker 6: not quite that, but that's a big drop. And she says,
Speaker 6: if I was up here, and if I jumped off
Speaker 6: and went all the way down, and we're talking miles,
Speaker 6: she said, how long would it take me to fall?
Speaker 6: And first I was all I was like, well, we
Speaker 6: have to talk to your mom. This sounds like a
Speaker 6: little bit of a you know, we're not doing any jumping, kiddo,
Speaker 6: but I'd never thought of it before. But her question,
Speaker 6: I said, you know what, you wouldn't fall. What you
Speaker 6: would not fall because to the to the depths there,
Speaker 6: because the atmosphere is so dense. It's this dense coe too,
Speaker 6: so it would be like if we were all underwater
Speaker 6: and you just jumped off, you would just float. No,
Speaker 6: And she would be like a penguin that she could
Speaker 6: just sit there and be flying. She could not sink
Speaker 6: because she would be too buoyant. Isn't that fun?
Speaker 1: That's bonkers bonkers. Okay, so maybe at nine hundred degrees
Speaker 1: this would have its drawbacks. Well, I mean, I know
Speaker 1: it's very hot there, but I want to go check
Speaker 1: it out.
Speaker 6: Wouldn't it be right? Like talk about a what kids
Speaker 6: used to say? I'm sure not anymore, but an e
Speaker 6: ride at Disneyland, you know.
Speaker 1: And do we have any missions even planned coming up?
Speaker 6: Well, that's a really quick question. There are actually three
Speaker 6: missions to Venus in the plans, but they kind of
Speaker 6: keep being put off. So there's a European mission to
Speaker 6: go to Venus. There are two NASA emissions, and when
Speaker 6: we say that the US would coordinate with the European
Speaker 6: mission and vice versa. Within the nasamissions there is Da
Speaker 6: Vinci and that is to go down through the clouds
Speaker 6: and get a lot of data through the clouds and
Speaker 6: through the atmosphere and then basically photograph the surface and
Speaker 6: with the target being this Testra terrain that I said,
Speaker 6: is this very old and unique and distinctive terrain. The
Speaker 6: other is the Veritas mission, and that is one that
Speaker 6: is like Magellan in that it is a global data
Speaker 6: collection and it will have much higher resolution of basically
Speaker 6: all of the Magellan data sets. But all of these
Speaker 6: missions keep getting put off further and further into the future.
Speaker 1: And do those circle and use radar as opposed to
Speaker 1: getting through those clouds.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so the Da Vinci will actually something will go
Speaker 6: down through the clouds. I mean a spacecraft will go
Speaker 6: down through and photograph and ultimately become one with the planet. Okay,
Speaker 6: it'll go there because it's going to burn up. It's
Speaker 6: going to burn up exactly. Remember I said that Venus
Speaker 6: rotates very very slowly. Yeah, so normally we think about
Speaker 6: things going around, okay, and you can go around things
Speaker 6: both in a pole or orbit or an equatorial orbit.
Speaker 1: So over the top and underside or around the middle.
Speaker 1: But the spacecraft, pickI says, doesn't even have to move much,
Speaker 1: just kind of like sitting on a bench and watching
Speaker 1: a carousel go by.
Speaker 6: But Venus, because she's rotating, we can just stay in
Speaker 6: one plane and she just rotates underneath us, kind of
Speaker 6: like rolling of yarn, you know. And that's the way
Speaker 6: Magellan collected. All of these data sets are all in
Speaker 6: these little noodles, and that's what they were called. But
Speaker 6: it's just like one little noodle and another little noodle.
Speaker 6: They're about twenty five kilometers wide, and then they were
Speaker 6: just all stitched together. Oh wow, to give us this
Speaker 6: incredible global picture. Isn't that elegant?
Speaker 1: Yes, And they.
Speaker 6: Fully knew that at some point we're going to get
Speaker 6: so close that we're just gonna get sucked right in,
Speaker 6: and you know, there goes Magellan. Magellan is now one
Speaker 6: with Venus.
Speaker 1: Very poltic. Before this planned nineteen ninety four crash into Venus,
Speaker 1: Magellan had arrived in her orbit in nineteen ninety to
Speaker 1: make detailed measurements and also using arrow braking into the
Speaker 1: clouds to slow it down when it needed to, and
Speaker 1: it saved up to nine times the fuel just by
Speaker 1: using the atmosphere itself. Very clever.
Speaker 6: So there you are working with that planet in a
Speaker 6: way that you couldn't work with Mars or with Earth
Speaker 6: because of its differences. So I don't know how we
Speaker 6: got on that, but it's.
Speaker 1: Just I love it. I have some great questions from listeners,
Speaker 1: can I ask? Oh?
Speaker 6: Absolutely, a goad. No, I don't like questions.
Speaker 1: And before we get into that mail bag, let's launch
Speaker 1: some cash at a cause close to the ologist's heart.
Speaker 1: And this week, we're splitting it between the nonprofit Planetary
Speaker 1: Science Institute, which is dedicated to solar system exploration. They
Speaker 1: conduct fieldwork on all continents around the world. They're also
Speaker 1: actively involved in science education and public outreach through school programs,
Speaker 1: children's books, popular science books, and art. I suppose also
Speaker 1: podcasts will donate to them, as well as Vicky's beloved
Speaker 1: Nature Conservancy. She says to take care that our precious
Speaker 1: planet might continue to allow us to be part of it,
Speaker 1: and links to those causes are in the show notes.
Speaker 1: And thank you to sponsors for enabling us to donate
Speaker 1: to them.
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Speaker 1: Okay, your Venus questions patrons, If you would like to
Speaker 1: know what topics we have coming up and submit your questions,
Speaker 1: you can hit up patreon dot com slash ologies to
Speaker 1: join for a buck a month, and we do our
Speaker 1: best to ask as many as conversationally possible. This is
Speaker 1: what I should have asked up front, but I Rennebe,
Speaker 1: Scott Umaya, Sam Meghan the librarian, r J Deutsche Kaya
Speaker 1: and Jasmine wanted to know. Irnabe ask why have we
Speaker 1: gendered the planets? Why do we say she when we
Speaker 1: talk about her?
Speaker 6: Well, I don't know why we gendered the planets. I
Speaker 6: think that goes back to the Greeks and Romans, because
Speaker 6: those were you know, of gods and goddesses. And why
Speaker 6: did we decide that Mars was a male god and
Speaker 6: Venus was a female god. I have no idea I
Speaker 6: could imagine that with Venus, because she's an evening star
Speaker 6: and a morning star and so sort of some beauty
Speaker 6: and elusiveness. But I'm like them, inquiring minds want to know.
Speaker 1: In scientific surface is she referred to as a she
Speaker 1: or earn it?
Speaker 6: You know, that's really funny. It's all a personal thing.
Speaker 6: So some people get really upset when you refer to
Speaker 6: planets as him or her. But you know, for me,
Speaker 6: for Venus, we haven't even scratched the surface. We don't
Speaker 6: know the surface age. That is the age of her,
Speaker 6: her skin very well, she's veiled in things, and so
Speaker 6: I don't like cultural differences between males and female. But
Speaker 6: that's a cultural thing that seems to fit for this planet.
Speaker 6: But it's totally personal, and a lot of people don't care,
Speaker 6: and some people it gets to be in their bonnet.
Speaker 1: Oh I like it. I do too. I think it's
Speaker 1: cute as long as one does not take things too
Speaker 1: literally or literarily. Speaking of which, a blockbuster bestselling nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two book that continues to live in the minds
Speaker 1: of humans is titled Men Are From Mars, Women Are
Speaker 1: from Venus. A Practical Guide for improving communication and getting
Speaker 1: what you want in your relationships. And this heteronormative tone
Speaker 1: begins with this touching tale from the author, who is
Speaker 1: a relationship counselor with an unaccredited PhD and his wife Bonnie,
Speaker 1: who had just given birth to their daughter and whose
Speaker 1: nether regions were torn to shreds and the baby had
Speaker 1: kept them awake for days on end. But less than
Speaker 1: a week after Bonnie gave birth, when she couldn't walk
Speaker 1: and she was on painkillers, the author went back to
Speaker 1: work five days later, leaving her home out of medicine
Speaker 1: and too afraid to call him at work and disrupt
Speaker 1: his day, so she called his brother, who forgot to
Speaker 1: pick up her medicine. When the author got home, and
Speaker 1: she said, I've been in excruciating pain and your brother flaked.
Speaker 1: It's been a bad day. The author writes of his
Speaker 1: reaction at this point, I exploded. My fuse was also
Speaker 1: very short that day. I was angry that she hadn't
Speaker 1: called me. I was furious that she was blaming me
Speaker 1: when I didn't even know she was in pain. After
Speaker 1: exchanging a few harsh words, I headed for the door.
Speaker 1: I was fired, irritable and had hurt enough. We both
Speaker 1: had reached our limits. Then his wife cries and begs
Speaker 1: him to comfort her, and a book about male female
Speaker 1: relations was born, tearing a new asshole into the self
Speaker 1: help genre and selling fifteen million copies, and Men Are
Speaker 1: from Mars, Women Are from Venus includes hot chapters such
Speaker 1: as men go to their caves and women talk, and
Speaker 1: how to motivate the opposite sex and scoring points with
Speaker 1: the opposite sex. It also provided a foundation of thoughts
Speaker 1: such as two people of different genders have no common
Speaker 1: ground as humans, but have to approach each other like
Speaker 1: aliens to be manipulated via their native language. It also
Speaker 1: probably confused a lot of people who didn't know much
Speaker 1: about astronomy or evolution on Earth. Were you already studying
Speaker 1: Venus and also your husband a geologist? When mena for Mars,
Speaker 1: Women are from Venus? Did that book piss you off?
Speaker 6: I'd have to look that up, but I think Men
Speaker 6: Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus came out before
Speaker 6: the Magellan mission, and that's when I would have gotten
Speaker 6: onto all of that. I think the book did piss
Speaker 6: me off a bit, but totally independent of this, because
Speaker 6: I was like, this is just as stupid.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly exactly.
Speaker 6: But that was like, I don't associate that with Venus
Speaker 6: the planet. She's just above all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 1: In terms of pop cultural references like Lady Gaga songs,
Speaker 1: or b York Crooning about Venus as a boy and
Speaker 1: Ray Bradberry's All Summer in a Day, or the short
Speaker 1: story The Long Rain about the Venus Atmosphere, Wonder Woman's
Speaker 1: Venusian Allies, and a bunch of space age movies and
Speaker 1: comic books. Well, in spite of all that.
Speaker 6: I'm not much of a science fiction person, unlike most
Speaker 6: planetary people are all about science fiction, and I'm not
Speaker 6: that fascinated by it. I'm just more fascinated by the planet,
Speaker 6: and to me, it's much more interesting than any science fiction.
Speaker 6: So I won't remember who the author was, but there
Speaker 6: was a recent like within the last couple of years.
Speaker 1: An author, Annilie Knuitz is the author of The Terrorformers,
Speaker 1: and Vicki says it's not about Venus per se, but
Speaker 1: takes place in the far future on another planet, and
Speaker 1: inspiration from Venus was their motivation for reaching out to Vicky,
Speaker 1: who says that she loves anything that makes one think
Speaker 1: in different ways and that it's a really fun book.
Speaker 1: So anyway, Annali, journalist and science author and now using
Speaker 1: vey them pronouns, reached out to chat Planetary Geology, who.
Speaker 6: Wrote a book about Venus and called me and said,
Speaker 6: you know, I want to check some things out. And
Speaker 6: so it was so much fun to talk to her
Speaker 6: because I was like, no, no, no, no, no, this planet
Speaker 6: is much much more interesting than the credit you're giving it.
Speaker 6: And that actually made her change the way she was
Speaker 6: writing about it because she had plate tectonics in it,
Speaker 6: and it's like, no, but more other fascinating things. And
Speaker 6: I read the book, but I read a book. I
Speaker 6: enjoy it, and then I put it down and it's gone.
Speaker 6: If it's in science it sticks, but books it doesn't.
Speaker 6: It was a wonderful book and a lot of fun.
Speaker 6: But I'm just not much of a science fiction reader.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, truth is more fascinating than fiction.
Speaker 6: To me, it is to you it is.
Speaker 1: What about private missions? Kelly Shaver and Milan Yeki wanted
Speaker 1: to know Sarah Sager's Venus life Finder missions are very exciting.
Speaker 1: What do you think about robotic exploration? Is that on
Speaker 1: the table?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, robotic exploration to me, is absolutely the
Speaker 6: way to go for all of these things. If we
Speaker 6: don't pollute a planet, we don't have to take so
Speaker 6: many other energies. We can have robots do things are
Speaker 6: they geologists. No, they're not geologists. Eyes on things. But
Speaker 6: we can get so so so much more data, so
Speaker 6: much more comprehensive data, so many different data sets. We're
Speaker 6: just not limited by the limits of humans. And it's
Speaker 6: just to me, absolutely scientifically the way to go.
Speaker 1: So Vicki does not yearn for the bouncing among Venus's
Speaker 1: hot clouds. She's like, I'm good.
Speaker 6: I mean, if I'm going to go on adventures, I'll
Speaker 6: go out and do some great biking or snowshoeing or
Speaker 6: a you know, canoe trip or things. There's so much
Speaker 6: on Earth that I I'm going to do for an adventure.
Speaker 6: But if I want adventures in science, I want really
Speaker 6: good data, and robotics are the way to go. I
Speaker 6: think for basically all of our missions for Venus, you said,
Speaker 6: you know what about could we sample things? There's so
Speaker 6: many clever things to look at the clouds, but you
Speaker 6: could have a mission that what you send is basically
Speaker 6: a glider plane and you put solar panels on the wings,
Speaker 6: and you put collectors all under the winds, like all
Speaker 6: kinds of you just load that baby up, okay, like
Speaker 6: payload up the wazoo and this glider. It goes down
Speaker 6: through the clouds and collects all this data. It can
Speaker 6: even go beneath the clouds, collect all kinds of data
Speaker 6: on the surface. It starts to say robotically, oh, I'm
Speaker 6: running out of energy, so it just sends it back up,
Speaker 6: recharges those goes back down and it could go endlessly,
Speaker 6: you know. And so you could have time sensitive data,
Speaker 6: you could have tracking that would go for years. You
Speaker 6: could have so much different things. And so there's just
Speaker 6: so many elegant types of missions that you could have.
Speaker 6: And you could do this with someone who's got extra
Speaker 6: change to throw around, you know me. But there one
Speaker 6: could actually like really look at fascinating questions about venus,
Speaker 6: the plow blank but also the surface but also life.
Speaker 6: And it could be amazing and at probably a fraction
Speaker 6: of a cost.
Speaker 1: What about when they're collecting, when that glider would be
Speaker 1: collecting all of that data, does it analyze it on
Speaker 1: board and then beam it back to us? How does
Speaker 1: that work?
Speaker 6: Also really really great question, and this when the Magellan
Speaker 6: mission went, which gave us amazing data, The people who
Speaker 6: designed that mission had to use nineteen seventies technology. Now
Speaker 6: probably a lot of your audience. You know, they're like,
Speaker 6: that's older than my grandparents. Yeah, but that's the technology
Speaker 6: they were using. So now we have so much more
Speaker 6: things are so much smaller, and we can do a
Speaker 6: lot more processing on board. But what you do is
Speaker 6: when you come back up above the clouds, you're beaming
Speaker 6: that data back to Earth. You have to be at
Speaker 6: the right orientation to the Earth and you have to
Speaker 6: have a place on Earth that can accept it.
Speaker 1: And it's nuts that the Soviets were able to do
Speaker 1: this in the sixties.
Speaker 6: I mean, well that is nutty and not they just
Speaker 6: didn't put down one lander, I mean several of them,
Speaker 6: and they're what they did is the landers went down,
Speaker 6: the landers stayed there, but they beamed data back. It
Speaker 6: is truly truly mind boggling what they did. And you know,
Speaker 6: you can say and people do complain about the data
Speaker 6: and it's like, well, oh my goodness, you know it's
Speaker 6: not the quality, no, but just they that is amazing.
Speaker 6: And they actually have photographs of the surface that were
Speaker 6: beamed back, but true surface photographs, you know, of like
Speaker 6: the rocky surface right where they landed. It is it
Speaker 6: is mind boggling what they did, truly, like you know amazing.
Speaker 1: And two first time question askers, Emma Krookmeyer and Ashley
Speaker 1: p wanted to know, in Emma's words, why is the
Speaker 1: atmosphere on Venus the way it is? And Ashley Pe asked,
Speaker 1: does it rain chemicals there like it does water here?
Speaker 1: Would the sulfuric acid? Would the acid rain destroy a
Speaker 1: lot of that?
Speaker 6: Yes? Yeah, So when we're looking at all the electronics,
Speaker 6: the heat and the caustic environment are just going to that,
Speaker 6: just fry them, just wipe them out. But if you
Speaker 6: are up under the cloud bank, then you're not in
Speaker 6: that caustic environment. So landing on the surface is one thing.
Speaker 6: But back to that glide or people have proposed balloons
Speaker 6: or something, but a glider we'd have a lot more
Speaker 6: control of than a balloon. But there you can keep
Speaker 6: your instruments much safer and out of that caustic environment
Speaker 6: than if you're landing on the surface.
Speaker 1: Well, what about the past of it? Milena que first
Speaker 1: time question askers as longtime listener fest asker Caro Young,
Speaker 1: as well as Thistlebuzunger Nick writer Michael are A. Victor
Speaker 1: Lilly wanted to know, in Molena's words, is there any
Speaker 1: truth to the idea that Venus was once habitable. Could
Speaker 1: it ever become habitable once again?
Speaker 6: Was it ever habitable? Well, the surface might have been
Speaker 6: early on Earth. We keep pushing life back early and
Speaker 6: earlier on Earth, and the two planets were probably the
Speaker 6: most similar for the first two point five billillion years
Speaker 6: of their history, that's basically half of their history. And
Speaker 6: life was established on Earth well within that at three
Speaker 6: point five and probably we keep pushing it back further
Speaker 6: billion years. Three point five billion years.
Speaker 1: So Earth and Venus sister sibling planets about four point
Speaker 1: six billion years old, who looked a lot alike in
Speaker 1: their youth. And some scientists are now saying that life
Speaker 1: on Earth may have started at its relative infancy around
Speaker 1: four point two billion years ago. And by the way,
Speaker 1: did you know that, like how a century is one
Speaker 1: hundred years in a millennium is one thousand. A billion
Speaker 1: years has a name, it's called a gigantis.
Speaker 6: So Venus certainly could have been. We think that there
Speaker 6: was Venus once had an ocean of water. Now we
Speaker 6: always want to say that life is required water and
Speaker 6: that's life as we know it, but we really have
Speaker 6: to think about how we define life, and that's something
Speaker 6: that is a whole nother conversation. But if we just
Speaker 6: stick with water based life, Venus could have had that
Speaker 6: early in her history, as Earth has early life. As
Speaker 6: I say that now, on the surface of Venus we've
Speaker 6: never found extremophiles. We find extremophiles on Earth that are
Speaker 6: in extreme conditions, but not as extreme as what we
Speaker 6: see on the surface of Venus. However, that life could
Speaker 6: be up in the clouds and could have stayed, you know,
Speaker 6: existed there, or could have moved there, just as life
Speaker 6: has moved around, you know on Earth. In the future.
Speaker 6: It's a hot, hot, dry, dry planet and it's probably
Speaker 6: only going to get hotter and drier, and so we're
Speaker 6: not going to ever terraform Venus the way we may
Speaker 6: or may not do the Moon or Mars. And plate
Speaker 6: tectonics is something that is a real regulator of the
Speaker 6: Earth of our climate, and Venus doesn't have plate techs.
Speaker 6: And if she was ever to develop it, it probably
Speaker 6: had to be early in her history in a tight
Speaker 6: window of conditions, and she lost her chance. And so
Speaker 6: you know, in terms of it cooling down as a
Speaker 6: planet or anything like that.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, well, a few people had great questions Bugging
Speaker 1: and Rug and Killian sentpal and rob h wanted to
Speaker 1: ask about and red headed scientists. Bug and Rugg said, Okay,
Speaker 1: so I heard it's scientifically possible that there could be
Speaker 1: life in the atmosphere of Venus. Is this real? But
Speaker 1: I thought Killian's question of could the life be anaerobic
Speaker 1: since there's so much carbon dioxide.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we could have all different kinds of life there
Speaker 6: in that. Absolutely, when we look at the life at
Speaker 6: mid ocean spreading centers on Earth, very very different. They
Speaker 6: don't live on sunlight, so yeah, absolutely, and there could
Speaker 6: be forms that exist on Earth in unique environments, but
Speaker 6: that could be what is very typical on Venus. And
Speaker 6: there could be a range of different life styles that
Speaker 6: consume different things on Venus within the clouds. So that's
Speaker 6: such an open question. And I think what we need
Speaker 6: are data and we need open minds, and sometimes open
Speaker 6: minds are harder to come by than the data. And
Speaker 6: the open minds are just like your listeners to say, well,
Speaker 6: wait a second, maybe it could be life that does
Speaker 6: you know X, Y or Z instead of ABC as
Speaker 6: we want to force it into on Earth.
Speaker 1: We have a whole episode on Aliens with a NASA scientist,
Speaker 1: doctor Kevin Hand. We also have a UFO episode, so
Speaker 1: if you need more info on those, here's your sign.
Speaker 1: Speaking of signs, let's see some people asked about a
Speaker 1: lot of people asked about Venus associated with love and astrology.
Speaker 6: What's not to love?
Speaker 1: Does that come up in conversations? A lot of people like, oh,
Speaker 1: my god, in my son house, did like a bobblehead
Speaker 1: going down a gravel road. Yeah, yes, yes, I don't
Speaker 1: know much about that myself, but.
Speaker 6: I don't either.
Speaker 1: And is uh to find her in the sky? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it like look for just the brightest star in
Speaker 1: the morning or evening.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's going to be low in the horizon.
Speaker 6: She never rises up high. Why because she's between us
Speaker 6: and the sun.
Speaker 1: So think of Venus as being closer to the sun.
Speaker 1: So you're going to see her near the sun, but
Speaker 1: at the darkest time of day when the sun isn't
Speaker 1: quite outshining her. Hence she's low in the eastern sky
Speaker 1: before sunrise as the morning star, or in the western
Speaker 1: sky after sunset as the evening star.
Speaker 6: So Mars, because it's it's away from us in the sun,
Speaker 6: it can be see it. Mars, I have no problem
Speaker 6: calling it. Mars can be high in the sky, Jupiter,
Speaker 6: Saturn can be high in the sky, but Venus can
Speaker 6: only be low in the sky. And you're exactly right,
Speaker 6: brightest thing in the morning and in the evening. And
Speaker 6: you know, depending on what it is the other thing
Speaker 6: that Venus will sometimes appear brighter and other times less
Speaker 6: bright because she's between us and the sun. Think about
Speaker 6: sometimes she's very close to us and yet still reflecting
Speaker 6: the Sun's light, and other times when she's on the
Speaker 6: opposite side of the Sun, we can still see it
Speaker 6: reflecting the sun's light, but she's very far from us,
Speaker 6: and so she actually will look different in size. But
Speaker 6: like the moon, if you can resolve at which we
Speaker 6: can't with our naked eye, but you could actually see
Speaker 6: Venus can have phases in the same way the moon can,
Speaker 6: because you could see just half of Venus lit.
Speaker 1: Oh that's so cool. Well, I know that you are
Speaker 1: an Earth scientist and this is a big question on
Speaker 1: all over minds. Joel Henderson, Karen Nongasa, Arami Pharias wondering
Speaker 1: why all Embardo's Jones girl Averroz, Kate Our Victor and
Speaker 1: avios Le and Thistle wanted to know about Earth and Venus,
Speaker 1: and Kate asked, might climate change increase the likelihood of
Speaker 1: Earth's atmosphere following the path of Venus a lot about
Speaker 1: kind of the climate change. What can we learn about
Speaker 1: climate change and greenhouse gases here that we are looking
Speaker 1: at on Venus.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so Venus is a greenhouse planet, and what we
Speaker 6: can learn is we don't want to go there. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, we don't want greenhouse gases. Now, she's an
Speaker 6: extreme because we all know that CO two is such
Speaker 6: a powerful greenhouse gas, so is methane. But Venus has
Speaker 6: probably as much carbon dioxide as the Earth. But Earth
Speaker 6: has locked that carbon dioxide into rocks, So limestones and
Speaker 6: marbles and those sorts of things are all carbon dioxide,
Speaker 6: have lots and lots of carbon dioxide trapped within them.
Speaker 6: So if we wanted to make Earth like Venus really quickly,
Speaker 6: we would somehow release all that carbon dioxide. So that's
Speaker 6: going to the extreme. But we are making our planet
Speaker 6: too hot. Well, we make it hot so that plate
Speaker 6: tectonics will shut down and regulate. Probably not what we
Speaker 6: will do to this planet going the way we are
Speaker 6: is we are going to make it so that humans
Speaker 6: can't live on this planet anymore. I think the planet
Speaker 6: is going to go on and without us, and we
Speaker 6: will be a blip and it will probably say good
Speaker 6: riddance on that one. Yeah, And so that's what we
Speaker 6: can learn is that you know, this is serious and
Speaker 6: we don't want to go there because it's we're not
Speaker 6: going to ruin the Earth, but we're talking about the
Speaker 6: Earth for us. The Earth is a planet is going
Speaker 6: to go on. It's whether we're going to be a
Speaker 6: part of that or not. And the rate we're going
Speaker 6: it's not.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Are a lot of are more space agencies looking
Speaker 1: to Venus as sort of a prediction model.
Speaker 6: Well, people say that for missions to say, I think
Speaker 6: it's political. Frankly, Oh, we'll learn from And I want
Speaker 6: to say, no, we don't have to take a mission
Speaker 6: there to learn more. We know what we need to
Speaker 6: do and we just have to do it. And by
Speaker 6: saying Venus is going to give us magical answers with that, No,
Speaker 6: we know what we need to do. Yeah, stop procrastinating
Speaker 6: and do it. Yeah, we have the data we need. Yeah,
Speaker 6: Venus is fascinating to study. But not for those reasons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what is the hardest part about your job? Look,
Speaker 1: get you. It could be petty, it could be huge.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So I'll first say the most fun part of
Speaker 6: my job is doing the exploration with open minds, with students,
Speaker 6: with colleagues, with people in public forums that cause us
Speaker 6: to just ask questions, which I think is so human.
Speaker 6: It's just so human to ask questions. And that's what's
Speaker 6: so much fun. What I don't like about it is
Speaker 6: the science becomes about individuals and about me, me, me,
Speaker 6: and you lose sight of the data and it should
Speaker 6: just be fun to be able to try out different
Speaker 6: hypotheses and say, oh my gosh, okay, that was wrong,
Speaker 6: but we got somewhere because we did the data for
Speaker 6: this reason and that reason. And my colleague Roger Phillips,
Speaker 6: who was that geof physicists who first got me onto venus.
Speaker 6: What was so much fun was working with Roger because
Speaker 6: we could listen to each other, learn from each other,
Speaker 6: bounce things back and forth, and then we could come
Speaker 6: up with something and say ba ba blah, and then
Speaker 6: we come up with other data and say, oh gosh,
Speaker 6: we were wrong, and we could actually even put that
Speaker 6: in the scientific literature. That was an idea at the
Speaker 6: time it fit the data, But now we have more
Speaker 6: data that was wrong, and that's okay. If you're not
Speaker 6: making mistakes, you are not doing science. Oh I love that,
Speaker 6: And that's my biggest frustration. And I see that so
Speaker 6: much of hanging on to things that I know people
Speaker 6: know are wrong, and when we're looking at something so
Speaker 6: interesting and exciting as how planets work and evolve and
Speaker 6: interact through time, is that we're going to be wrong
Speaker 6: so much of the time. And that's okay, that's how
Speaker 6: we learn. But the fun of it is to put
Speaker 6: things together, and you need consistency and that attitude that
Speaker 6: science is right, science is fluid, science is ever changing.
Speaker 6: And that's what bugs me the most is that not
Speaker 6: making mistakes, you know, and not admitting that we're wrong.
Speaker 6: I'm wrong so many times, so so so many times,
Speaker 6: and that's how I learn.
Speaker 1: That's the best message ever. And I feel like, even
Speaker 1: even for a creative field, it's like, make mistakes, try something.
Speaker 1: It does not have to be perfect the first time out.
Speaker 6: No, or the tenth or the what happened? I just
Speaker 6: keep you know. I'm a potter. I play with Clay,
Speaker 6: I love it and it's like, oh yead, I just
Speaker 6: absolutely blew that, and you know, I learn from it.
Speaker 6: Sometimes it takes me several times before I learn from it.
Speaker 6: But if I didn't make those mistakes, I wouldn't learn.
Speaker 6: And you're right, it has to go with every bit
Speaker 6: of life that we're going to make mistakes and that's
Speaker 6: how we learn. And that's okay.
Speaker 1: Do you have a favorite thing about Venus that like
Speaker 1: someone is absolutely disinterested, like what is your favorite? Like boom,
Speaker 1: and then some's like holy smokes.
Speaker 6: Oh wow, that's a really interesting question. You know. I
Speaker 6: think it's different for different people, and so my favorite
Speaker 6: thing is to talk to people about Venus because there
Speaker 6: are so many different ways you can surprise them and
Speaker 6: say and it's never going to be the same for
Speaker 6: all people. Like thinking that you could fly across the
Speaker 6: surface is just mind boggling. To think that you could
Speaker 6: have two birthdays and one day will blow some people's minds.
Speaker 6: There are so many amazing things that she tells us,
Speaker 6: and I think that's the fun.
Speaker 1: I feel like I know her so much better now.
Speaker 1: I feel like she's a friend.
Speaker 6: She is she she's a friend, She's a tease. She
Speaker 6: laughs a lot. You know, she is just you know,
Speaker 6: she's having a great time up there.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I love this. I'll look for her in the sky.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and she will smile down on you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This has been amazing. Vickey, you are just a gem,
Speaker 1: an absolute gem, as are you. So ask planetary people
Speaker 1: ambiguous questions because that is how you learn and that
Speaker 1: is how you make friends. So thank you so much,
Speaker 1: doctor Vicki Hanson for spending your time with me to
Speaker 1: wax scientific about our new planet of obsession. I love Venus.
Speaker 1: Now you can find out more about Vicki at the
Speaker 1: links in the show notes, and of course more links
Speaker 1: to studies and mission data and photos and books are
Speaker 1: on our website at aliward dot com, slash ology slash
Speaker 1: venus Ology. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram.
Speaker 1: I'm at Ali Ward. Ali has one l on both.
Speaker 1: Thank you again to patrons of ologies for supporting the
Speaker 1: show for as little as a dollar a month. Thanks
Speaker 1: to all those out there in ologies, merch promologiesmerch dot
Speaker 1: com also heads Upsmologies are shorter kid friendly versions of
Speaker 1: ologies episode. They're in their own podcast speed so just
Speaker 1: search for smologies SMO L O G I E. S.
Speaker 1: Wherever you get your podcasts, please do subscribe. Tell Friends.
Speaker 1: Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes
Speaker 1: our professional transcripts. Kelly ar dwired as the website. Noel
Speaker 1: Dilworth works out our trajectories as scheduling producer. Mission Captain
Speaker 1: is managing director. Susan Hale. Jake Chafey stitches all our
Speaker 1: data together as editor and overseeing those pieces as lead editor.
Speaker 1: Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music.
Speaker 1: And if you stick around to the very very end,
Speaker 1: you know I may tell you a secret this week.
Speaker 1: Secret number one the evening of January fifteenth, twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: in La, I'm co hosting like a Drink and Draw
Speaker 1: kind of community art and science event with your favorite
Speaker 1: squid expert, doctor Sarah McNulty. And tickets are fifteen bucks.
Speaker 1: I'll link them in the show notes, but we only
Speaker 1: have about thirty tickets left, so you can get them
Speaker 1: while they are as hot as Venus rocks, folks. It'll
Speaker 1: sell out pretty quickly. Second secret is that I fully
Speaker 1: thought Venus was a gas planet until this conversation I'm
Speaker 1: not a big planet person. I don't know as much
Speaker 1: as like a third grader, but I knew gases were involved.
Speaker 1: I thought maybe the whole thing was gas. And now
Speaker 1: I know so much more about venus. And now I
Speaker 1: care about venus because I asked more questions. So let
Speaker 1: that be a lesson to assault. So go forth into
Speaker 1: this dawn of twenty twenty six. Do things quickly, do
Speaker 1: them imperfectly. Learn as you go. Things worth doing have
Speaker 1: to pass through these thick, noxious clouds of fear and apprehension.
Speaker 1: No one is immune to them. Don't let fear waste
Speaker 1: your precious time on Earth. Just go forth do this stuff,
Speaker 1: okay forbye?
Speaker 7: Pachadermatologymmeology, crypto zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, feratology, nathology, seriology, elinology.
Speaker 6: You are a beautiful venus.
Speaker 5: You make time to move, to breathe, to check your stamina,
Speaker 5: your sleep, your steps.
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