Why is everyone so caught up on the atmospheric pressure of Venus being 90 atmospheres? That's only 3K feet of water, and plenty of stuff lives deeper then that in the oceans - so obviously things can survive the pressure ?
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)
#82Growing 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'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 age of the Earth, and plate tectonics as a geological mechanism, were formally adopted.
The Viking missions, Voyager, Mars rovers, New Horizons, the Hubble Space Telescope, Keck observatory, LIGO ... were all in the future.
The degree of development in the field of geology in the 20th century alone has been staggering. Credible scientific estimates of the age of the Earth in 1900 were as little as 30 million years (Lord Kelvin's gravitational collapse/cooling calculation). Interestingly, parallel developments in physics (notably radioactivity) helped give us the clocks we finally needed to measure geological time. We could trace landmass movements, make some determination of interior structures using seismic (and I suspect nuclear blast) waves, and more.
Much of the more interesting physics (and some chemistry) Nobel Prize awards of the past 50 years have been in sensing and detecting, at large and small scales, again, giving tools to measure, detect, and distinguish patterns, structures, and phenomena.
Within my own lifetime notions such as the asteroid hypothesis for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs have passed from wild theory to accepted fact, we've got evidence of 300 million-year snowball Earths, strong evidence concerning early Earth evolution, atmospheric composition, and life. We have detected thousands of extrasolar planets (a value still strongly limited by what sizes, types, orbits, and distances at which such detection is possible). Pluto's been un-planeted, and imaged. We've kissed the face of comets and returned their dust to Earth.
And we're starting to get some idea as what the long-term stability of planetary orbits might be --- the notion that planets may wander not only in the skies but in their orbital characteristics ... would change things markedly.
So it's quite possible that what you didn't pick up wasn't there to pick up when you were learning it.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "clockwork" view is objectively incorrect due to being the wrong scale. (Some) Accurate scale models of the solar system get played out across city blocks. If it's a tinkertoy style model or a drawing within a book, it's made up BS. There are no books large enough to actually show it to scale. Edit: For the pedants of the world, I have added "(Some)" to my sentence. "Not all accurate scale models" of course. Some…
City blocks? Sweden has a scale model of the solar system that stretches across the entire country - north to south. And even then it isn’t actually big/long enough for the entire solar system.
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Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#84Why is everyone so caught up on the atmospheric pressure of Venus being 90 atmospheres? That's only 3K feet of water, and plenty of stuff lives deeper then that in the oceans - so obviously things can survive the pressure ?
I think the issue is that we can't.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or send some microbes which convert it into oxygen. You are right Mars doesn't have enough resources to support anything.
that's an interesting proposition. If terraforming is really about engineering the right microbes to slowly (over several millenia even?) the atmosphere to habitable for humans, do we currently have the technology to actually accomplish it? Or is it still too advanced form of engineering?
We can't even terraform the Earth.
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#86And 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.
Or send some microbes which convert it into oxygen. You are right Mars doesn't have enough resources to support anything.
Also Venus is closer (minimum 38.2 million kilometer for Venus vs minimum distance of 55.7 million for Mars).
However I don't know about the microbes, i fear that they might get killed at an average temperature of 737 K (464 C).
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.htm... https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/venusfact.ht...
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's an interesting proposition. If terraforming is really about engineering the right microbes to slowly (over several millenia even?) the atmosphere to habitable for humans, do we currently have the technology to actually accomplish it? Or is it still too advanced form of engineering?
We can't even terraform the Earth.
we are terraforming the earth - see how much co2 is being pumped out!
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are called brown dwarfs... but it's better to link the NASA backyard worlds project directly for the curious: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-wor...
I suspected so. But all those objects are in this solar system.Brown dwarfs are sub-stellar bodies.
Touche, you are technically correct.
Though some might argue that in the changing nature of fusion reactions and body mass, this sorting of sub-stellar bodies is only true for as long as our star is a red dwarf.
Once that's over (thinking in the larger timescale of things) and it becomes a brown dwarf, what then? Wasn't it a solar system at one point in time?
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#89Why is everyone so caught up on the atmospheric pressure of Venus being 90 atmospheres? That's only 3K feet of water, and plenty of stuff lives deeper then that in the oceans - so obviously things can survive the pressure ?
The heat is a bigger problem
Re: Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "clockwork" view is objectively incorrect due to being the wrong scale. (Some) Accurate scale models of the solar system get played out across city blocks. If it's a tinkertoy style model or a drawing within a book, it's made up BS. There are no books large enough to actually show it to scale. Edit: For the pedants of the world, I have added "(Some)" to my sentence. "Not all accurate scale models" of course. Some…
Here's a Cody's Lab video showing a "to-scale" solar system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk
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.