191–200 of 236 posts
Stanisław Lem - The Astronauts ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronauts )
[ SPOILERS TO FOLLOW ]
which plays with the idea that Venus was fine, inhabited, with sentient life, until recently, when they blew themselves up, throwing the planet into the state it is today.
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It's astounding that astronomers have mapped out the skies just by looking up. It's like as if I mapped out my entire city just by looking out the windows of my house.
If your city was 99% empty by volume and your house rotated every day it wouldn't be THAT difficult :)
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I'm not sure how old you are, but a lot has changed , recently, in our knowledge of Earth, its evolution, the solar system, and astronomy. One of the books I had growing up was a Patrick Moore juvenile book on astronomy, probably Seeing Stars (1970). That had a ... pretty good ... description of the state of knowledge at the time, but it was published only about five years after the 4.5 billion year figure for the ag…
> asteroid hypothesis for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs have passed from wild theory to accepted fact We should NEVER accept a hypothesis as fact because that makes people stop thinking or searching for answers. And there’s no way we can even definitively say something that happened tens of millions of years ago actually happened. I personally think it was an asteroid too, but I never want to be arrogant enoug…
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-asteroid-crater-case-dinosaur-...
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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.
Color me mind blown too... That's worth a submission on its own
Submitted.
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There is a habitable zone on Venus in the upper atmosphere, so it's not completely out of the question.
That's been thoroughly debunked.
You are probably thinking of the reports last year of phosphine in the upper atmosphere where the quantity turned out to be overstated by a significant amount.
On the other hand, there is a sweet spot in the Venusian atmosphere where the temperature is low enough and the atmosphere provides enough protection from solar radiation that microbial life could conceivably survive (which is not the same as saying there is any life there); there are certainly plenty of Earth microbes that live in environments just as inhospitable if not more.
Growing 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…
The wikipedia article is very poor compared to the depth of his work/thought but here it goes anyway for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier
And it could be again... I wish we would plan ahead and try a solar shield at L1. If we cooled the planet sufficiently, the CO2 would solidify and we could get to work processing it. Venus is far more interesting than the dusty little rock we keep probing. Sure, it may take a millenium, but the sooner we start, the sooner we finish.
Venus has lost almost all of its atmospheric hydrogen. Teraforming a planet like this to sustain life would be quite a challenge. Here's an excerpt from the wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus ) Difficulties include the fact that the production of organic molecules from carbon dioxide requires hydrogen, which is very rare on Venus. Because Venus lacks a protective magnetosphere, the u…
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Depends how small you’re willing to make the bodies. In Sweden the Sun is a huge spherical building.
and if it was smaller the planets would be invisible.
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That's been thoroughly debunked.
Note that a habitable zone does not necessarily mean there's any life actually there. You are probably thinking of the reports last year of phosphine in the upper atmosphere where the quantity turned out to be overstated by a significant amount. On the other hand, there is a sweet spot in the Venusian atmosphere where the temperature is low enough and the atmosphere provides enough protection from solar radiation tha…