Question I'm asking myself is, what's the likelihood there would have ever been fossil fuel deposits with the potential to kickstart a civilization?
We could always have done a lot with wood and steam engines or even making wood gas or ethanol.
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)
#42It 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.
We don't know if it wasn't inhabited and we don't know if it is currently uninhabited.
Well we know that it's not inhabited by 'life as we know it' right now at the very least. Because that's just not going to survive there. It'd be a pretty far stretch to come up with something that can.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would cooling it help to reduce the amount of pressure the atmosphere has? Isn't the pressure on the surface something like 95 times that of earth.
PV=nRT, so yes, reducing the temperature would reduce the atmospheric pressure. Edit: wasn't thinking at all about the volume
While the equation you give is valid, I think it is probably not that useful given the "volume" is open to space and so we can't solve this equation.
I think more useful is a static equilibrium, specifically that d(pressure)/d(altitude)=-density(pressure,temperature)*gravity(altitude).
Which gives you roughly an exponential falloff with altitude if you assume gravity is constant (which is fine if it's a small fraction of planet radius) and molecular weight and temperature are constant (that's definitely not true but oh well)
EDIT: for the question asker: reducing the temperature would have a first order effect of just making the density gradient steeper, but surface pressure would be the same. The second order effect might be that the surface absorbs some CO2, which would actually reduce surface pressure.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#44Maybe they crashed their huge spaceship on Earth and killed the dinosaurs. Two of them survived and started gardening.
Is this an EYES ref?
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#45Question I'm asking myself is, what's the likelihood there would have ever been fossil fuel deposits with the potential to kickstart a civilization?
We could always have done a lot with wood and steam engines or even making wood gas or ethanol.
A lot yes, but anything near what we've done now? Over the course of a couple of [thousands|million|billion] years sure.
And if at a slower pace that would definitely (or should have) resulted in quicker reaction skills/abilities than we have now with a 50-100 year timespan within where our established way of being will have collapsed.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#46Growing 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 ring…
I think it's the way it's presented. We still have a sort of Newtonian "clockwork" view in primary education of astronomy.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't know if it wasn't inhabited and we don't know if it is currently uninhabited.
Well we know that it's not inhabited by 'life as we know it' right now at the very least. Because that's just not going to survive there. It'd be a pretty far stretch to come up with something that can.
There is a habitable zone on Venus in the upper atmosphere, so it's not completely out of the question.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#48Question I'm asking myself is, what's the likelihood there would have ever been fossil fuel deposits with the potential to kickstart a civilization?
Humans had civilization before we knew how to use fossil fuels, we just didn't have industrial civilization. AIUI civilization mostly consists of agreeing to live and work together in groups bigger than Dunbar's number.
Yeah of course would you'd need to redefine civilization as "inudstrial" civilization for my argumentn to make sense. Still, check out parent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563017
tl;dr: we've kickstarted civilization due to our harnessing of energy. If the venusians didn't have that option they would've probably lived as cavemen and couldn't have prevented or foreseen the disaster.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#49Growing 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 ring…
In a geology class we learned what very few people realize, that Earth's landscape is constantly changing. Only on a scale humans generally can't perceive.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#50That’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 there was a civilization on Venus anything like our current civilization on Earth, I expect there would still be evidence of it, even in that hostile environment. If nothing else, there'd probably be unnatural formations of ground from mines or freeway construction or whatever.
Not if a resurfacing event destroyed that evidence.