Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
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Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
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Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#2That’s enough time for a civilization to have been born, lived, and died. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find evidence of their existence by now it seems? Some day they may say Earth could have been habitable for billions of years.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#3That’s enough time for a civilization to have been born, lived, and died. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find evidence of their existence by now it seems? Some day they may say Earth could have been habitable for billions of years.
That's practically guaranteed.
Eventually, the Sun will expand so much that Earth's atmosphere will boil clean off.
A mega-civilization with enormous power could move Earth, buy some time, but nothing lasts forever.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#4Mars, shortly before sunset, a few billion years from now.
Martian: "Are you saying seriously believe that people used to live on Earth? And that the only thing they managed to send here from their civilization are spores to grow these mushrooms?"
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#5That’s enough time for a civilization to have been born, lived, and died. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find evidence of their existence by now it seems? Some day they may say Earth could have been habitable for billions of years.
It's a bit extreme to make that leap. Multi-cellular life only emerged on Earth ~600 million years ago, after the supposed habitable period of Venus.
It's unclear for how much of the 4.6 billion year history of the earth multicellular life could have emerged and just how improbable the evolution of multicellular life is.
There are certainly events such as the symbiosis of mitochondria which appear to have occurred only once in the history of life on earth.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#6It could have been habitable, but probably wasn't - if it had been, life there would almost certainly have resisted the greenhouse effect, as it probably will on Earth, though almost certainly not soon enough to save us monkeys.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#7Growing up I absorbed all the space stuff I could find.
But it wasn't until recently that I realized that the solar system didn't just form into some static natural state where it largely didn't change until say the sun was finished with it's lifespan.
Rather it evolves, changes, planets are habitable, then not, moons are formed and break up, even frozen planets are geologically active and are changing, Saturn's rings are relatively recent and etc.
Not sure how I didn't pick up on that.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#8That’s enough time for a civilization to have been born, lived, and died. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find evidence of their existence by now it seems? Some day they may say Earth could have been habitable for billions of years.
If we could get heavy rock-moving equipment on the surface and blast through the lava, maybe we could find out. Or if we got lucky and landed a probe on a high spot that escaped the lava and found either fossils or artifacts. All that to say, not likely in our lifetimes.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#9Mars, shortly before sunset, a few billion years from now. Martian: "Are you saying seriously believe that people used to live on Earth? And that the only thing they managed to send here from their civilization are spores to grow these mushrooms?"
Or maybe someone's asked that about Mars before we did?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
That one kinda blows my mind.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#10That’s enough time for a civilization to have been born, lived, and died. Unfortunately there’s probably no way to find evidence of their existence by now it seems? Some day they may say Earth could have been habitable for billions of years.
It's a bit extreme to make that leap. Multi-cellular life only emerged on Earth ~600 million years ago, after the supposed habitable period of Venus. It's unclear for how much of the 4.6 billion year history of the earth multicellular life could have emerged and just how improbable the evolution of multicellular life is. There are certainly events such as the symbiosis of mitochondria which appear to have occurred on…
Complex multicellularity and cellular endosymbiosis have both occurred multiple times on earth. Those aren't the hard part. Further, there's no reason to assume that having mitochondria (rather than just having an intrinsically more efficient metabolism) is optimal, much less necessary, rather than a path-dependent accident of Earth eukaryotes.