June 15, 2019 • 56 mins
The planet Venus might seem a hellish destination and an unlikely place to find extraterrestrial life. And yet, many experts agree that life may have existed in the planet's ancient oceans -- and may thrive yet within the upper atmosphere. Join Robert and Joe in a quest for Venusian aliens. (Originally published May 17, 2018)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Let's take a stroll into the Yellow Vault. Why is
it yellow this time? It must be of all this
dispersed stuff in the air. Oh goodness, I'm breathing an
ind to Uh. This is an episode that we did
on May seventeen about the possibility of life on Venus.
(00:28):
We don't usually think about Venus, do we. That's right,
that's one of the things that's that's that's pretty awesome
about this episode. You know, all eyes are on Mars
for a for a few different reasons, some that are
very scientific, but others that are purely cultural and have
to do with our history of gazing at the red
planet and dreaming about what and misinterpreting what might be there.
But meanwhile, we have Venus over here, which, yes, is
(00:51):
an awful hell world, but that doesn't mean that it
never had life or couldn't according to some experts, potentially
have some form of life in certain areas. Let's jump
right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from
how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, you, welcome to Stuff
(01:16):
to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I've got a question for
you today. Hit me in your opinion. What is the
creepiest image photograph produced by human space exploration. Well, since
we're talking about exploration, I imagine this rules out weapons tests. No, no,
no, no no, I'm not interested in any clear bombs. Yeah,
(01:38):
because we have some pretty creepy new test footage such
as nineteen sixties Operation UH Dominique, which was involved the
atmospheric sort of slash space detonation of nukes. I don't
think I've ever seen that. Oh yeah, it's For instance,
there was the Starfish Prime event in which a one
point for megatun bomb detonated two fifty miles or four
(02:00):
and two kilometers above the planet, and that's above the
Carmen line. So like that's pretty disturbing when you when
you think about it, like a Cold War UH space
detonation test. But as far as like pure space exploration goes,
I'm always a sucker for stuff like the you know,
the so called Martian face, or even something like the
hexagon of Saturn, something that just inspires this sense of
(02:23):
mystery where you're asking, like, what what is this place? Really? Oh?
The hexagon on the I believe it's the north pole
of Saturn. It's either the north or the South pole.
I can't recall believe it's north. We we talked about
it in one of our previous episodes, Haunted Geography and
Haunted Geometry, very love Craft in Yeah, I guess they're forbidden.
Geometry is all through the Lovecraft Cosmos, right, you know it.
(02:44):
But I've got a different answer my and for a
long time this has been my answer. My favorite creepy
space images have got to be the photos taken by
the Venera thirteen lander, Robert, I've got them in the
notes here, But have you ever looked at these? For yes,
you know, I'm not sure i've seen the color corrected ones,
but but certainly i've seen the the the other ones
(03:06):
that have that that deep kind of reddish orange tinge
to them. Yeah. I mean, it's funny to try to
explain what's disturbing about them, because they're just pictures of
some rocks. You know, it's just you're you're looking at
some rocks and soil. Now, what the Venera Landers were,
it was a series of space missions to the planet
Venus that was done by the Soviet Space Program. They
(03:29):
launched these missions to put landers down on the surface
of Venus for the first time. There had mid Landers
sending things back from Venus or the surface of Venus
before this, but they sent a bunch of missions in
the seventies and the eighties. And one of the things
about landing on Venus, and we'll definitely get more into
this in the episode, is that you've got a very
short window of time to send stuff back because Venus
(03:51):
is a death trap. It will destroy you, even for
highly shielded powerful machines. You put a machine down there
and it's a suicide mission. The machine is going to
gather some data and transmit as long as it can,
but eventually the crushing heat and pressure of the atmosphere
of Venus will kill that robot and it will only
(04:12):
have this last sort of death note to send back
to Earth. And one of these missions managed to send
some really striking pictures as that last death note. Specifically,
it was the Venera thirteen lander, which was launched on
October one, and it landed on Venus on March first.
(04:32):
So even the idea of a lander setting down on Venus,
if you know anything about the Venusian atmosphere, is kind
of creepy to imagine, because first you're going into this
haze of sulfurous clouds, but as you go further and
further down, the atmospheric pressure gets so much and so
dense and so thick that it's almost more like sinking
into a liquid uh. And so you've got to imagine
(04:54):
this lander sinking down into this atmospheric ocean surrounding Venus,
this boiling hot, lead melting atmospheric ocean of of carbon
dioxide and nitrogen, with all this sulfur everywhere. And then
finally it sets down on the surface and takes these
images and sends them back to Earth. And there's almost
nothing in the images. You just see the edge of
(05:15):
the lander in the foreground, and it has some appropriately
creepy looking triangular teeth all around it, and then beyond
that there's some soil and some flat rocks. But nevertheless,
something about these images messes with me. I find them
absolutely creepy and haunting. They have this dirty grindhouse kind
of yellow film effect to them. Uh. And that's of
(05:38):
course the atmospheric effects that we see from from the
glow of Venus. Uh, it's almost as if we're looking
at everything through an evil haze. For me, I think
it's because it's the It's like the last known photograph
from from from the from the very you know, borders
of the known world. Yeah. Um, it's like if somebody
went to the Texas Chainsaw Mascre house and took a
(06:00):
picture of their feet by accident, and then that's all
you had to go on. So, you know, do you
know something terrible happened afterwards? You don't have a lot
of details, but you have this picture of somebody's feet
on a front porch in Texas. That's exactly right. Yeah,
it feels like that. And another creepy thing about them
is that you notice a difference that unlike Mars, where
(06:21):
if you see images back from the surface of Mars,
they can sometimes look kind of creepy, but it can
also just look kind of like, I don't know, a
desert on kind of an overcast day, it was just
a very bare in area with sand and rocks and
kind of a gray white sky. But unlike on Mars,
one thing you'll notice is the effects of sunlight and
the directionality of the sunlight. Where there's a thing sticking
(06:42):
out of the rover, you can see it casting a
shadow on the ground. These these pictures have no indication
of shadows really, you know, looking at them again, as
we podcast here, I do think there is a sense
of one taking a picture of one's own feet here.
So there's an incompleteness to it, you know, it's it
just it just gets at you. Whereas at least with
(07:02):
it with the Mars images, we have more of a true,
uh you know, panoramic vision of what's going on there. Well,
Mars has been thoroughly explored on the surface at this point.
I mean, we have all kinds of pictures of what
Mars looks like at different times of day, different times
of the year, you know, from multiple different landers and rovers.
Mars almost feels like, I don't mean to pooh pooh Mars.
(07:23):
I mean, Mars is still fascinating and mysterious and wonderful,
but it's it's very much more explored territory at this point. Yeah.
We know, as we've mentioned before, we have more detailed
information about the surface of Mars than we have about
the bottom of the ocean. In some ways, that is
definitely true, um, but the surface of Venus is like,
it's this mystery hell, you know, it's this hazy mystery
(07:44):
that's beyond the gate. And because it feels like this
hazy mystery that's beyond the gate, for some reason, the
idea of life on Venus has always seemed more creepy
and interesting and tantalizing a possibility to me than the
idea of life on Mars RS. I don't know if
you feel the same way. Yeah, I definitely think so.
I think v it's kind of a shame that Venus
(08:06):
doesn't get more attention, especially in terms of our our
science fiction, because when you think of life on another
planet within our Solar system, you think of really the
rich history of imagining life on Mars, both in the
future and the past, because you have everything from of
course the old Edgar Rice Burrows novels to uh total
(08:26):
to Total Recall. I mean, you have just there's there's
so much great stuff there. But when you start looking
for really cool examples of life on Venus, there are
some great examples, but there there aren't as many. It's
not it's not the place that the human imagination instantly
goes to, but as we'll discuss in this episode. We
really should, because there's a there there are some strong
cases to be made for life on Venus, either now
(08:50):
or in the past. Yeah, and so that's going to
be the main subject of today's episode. If there are,
or if there have been, creatures of Venus, what are
they like and how would we know about them now?
If we just turned to fiction for a few examples. Uh,
we don't have time to catalog everything, but I wanted
to mention a few that came to my mind. Anyway,
(09:10):
there is an HP Lovecraft story from ninety nine that
he wrote with Kenneth Sterling titled in the Walls of Rics,
which features a muddy jungle Venus and a maze with
invisible walls. That feels about right. Yeah, it's pretty good.
I remember I remember dating that story when I read it. Uh. C. S.
Lewis took us to a Venusian paradise in his novel Paralandra. Uh.
(09:34):
This involves an alien Adam and Eve and there and
then of course you have the devil show up as well,
possessing the body of a character by the name of
Professor Weston. Professor Weston, I wonder if that's named after
Jesse Weston, who wrote the book about the Grail legend
that was so popular in the early twentieth century. You know,
I don't I don't remember, but that it's a Paralandro was.
(09:54):
It was a book I really loved when I was younger,
and we'll probably read again at some at some point
I ever read it. But that seems interesting to explore,
especially because you've got, I mean, you've got multiple mythic
associations with Venus throughout history. You know, you've got the
god of love and the arrows in the Venus aphrodite
kind of association, but you've also got the Lucifer association. Yeah, yeah,
(10:15):
and both are explored in Peralandra. In Perilandro, Venus is
also a water world, and they're like these kind of
floating wraths of land that everyone is everyone it's like
three or four people, three or four individuals, anyway they
lived there. But yeah, it's it's a It is an
interesting take on Venus as well. Stephen King took us
to Venus twice, as it turns out, once in a
(10:38):
nineteen sixties self published short story titled The Cursed Expedition,
which I have not read. I'm not sure that's one
that's actually readily available, or it's kind of like a
you know, a vault story of kings uh. And then there's,
of course, is one short story, I Am the Doorway,
which doesn't actually visit the planet, but a character is
It takes part in a manned Vena fly by and
(11:01):
comes back and essentially infected with an alien organism. Well,
it's interesting to think about that this is a time
period at which the Venera missions were underway. Yeah, there's
also a similar Outer Limits episode from nineteen four titled
Cold Hands, Warm Heart that actually stars William Shatner. So
Shot goes to Venus or he's from Venus or what.
(11:22):
I haven't seen this episode, but he is involved in
some sort of space mission involving Venus. So you can't
give me the deets on the chat. I mean, things go,
you know weird. That's that's the Again, this is not
an Outer Limits episode that I've seen, but perhaps we
have listeners you can chime in on it. And then,
of course Venus plays an important role in the expanse
(11:44):
Uh TV series adaptation of the novels. No spoilers, but
it does have a pretty cool plot line involving life
and Venus. And there's also early mentioned in the books
and perhaps the TV series as well about a failed
attempt by humans to established cloud colonies there. Oh yeah,
that is an interesting idea I've read about the idea
of trying to create um I don't know whether you
(12:06):
call them aerostatic or hydrostatic, basically floating colonies. That would
be not too hard to do, actually, because of how
dense the atmosphere is. Yeah, cloud City right out of Empire. Yeah,
except I don't know, best Bin didn't look all that
cloudy compared to Venus. Yeah. Well, I mean they were
up there, right, It's been a long time since they've
seen Empire, so I don't remember how cloudy was or
(12:27):
if it became more cloudy in the special editions that
came out. Who knows. Oh yeah, they're really cged some
more clouds in there. It's it was worth it. Uh No.
I think it's interesting that Venus doesn't get as much
attention as Mars does in terms of the possibility of
finding microbial life forms. I mean, you know, way back
in the day, people used to think, before we'd explored
(12:49):
Mars that there, you know, there might be whole civilizations there.
People would look through telescopes and see what looked like
canals on Mars, and they'd say, oh, you know, there
are people on Mars, just like there are people here.
Now we pretty much can rule that out. I wonder
if part of it is because we went from being
so geocentric, the idea that the Earth is the center
of all things, and then we went to a heliocentric model,
(13:14):
and then of course we expanded beyond that. But if
if we're still kind of thinking heliocentrically, So the Sun
is the center of of our solar system, and therefore
it's kind of a center of order and and the known.
And this is not doesn't something not not something that
actually matches up necessarily with our our scientific understanding of everything,
But it is. It is a center. And therefore Venus
(13:37):
is closer to the center, It's closer to the center
of the known, whereas Mars is a little beyond us,
like Mars is a little more on the outskirts. And
therefore it makes this more it makes more sense that
it would have more mystery to it. That's where the
that's where the ghosts and goblins are going to live,
right they're not gonna live in the middle of the city,
They're gonna live on the outskirts of town. Well, yeah,
(13:58):
it's the outer limits. You don't talking about the or limit. Though.
I do really enjoy science fiction that that goes inward
instead of goes outward. Actually, I mean, this is something
I really liked about that movie Sunshine that came out,
which you know, I had a lot of problems. I
think some of the writing kind of fell apart in
the third part of the movie, but it explored the
idea that there was this deep, kind of ghostly mystery
(14:21):
to the Sun, and as you come closer and closer
to the Sun, it's sort of activates these instincts within
you that are sort of borderline supernatural, but at least
seemed to go deeper than the human or mammalian parts
of your nervous system, where you know, where the Sun
is the closest thing to a literal god there is
in the physical universe, right, it's the creator of us. Yeah, yeah,
(14:44):
I think that ye coupled with the fact that every
humans just want to keep going out and it's one
of the reasons probably that more people have been to
the Moon than to the bottom of than to the
deepest portions of the ocean. Well, I think we should
ignore this impulse to go out and we should go in.
Let's go in towards Venus, get closer to the Sun,
move one orbit in and start looking at this hothouse planet. Yeah.
(15:05):
Why go to a planet that doesn't have enough atmosphere
when instead you can take your your dreams and your
imagination to a place that has more atmosphere than you
can handle. Let's take a quick break and when we
come back, we will explore the surface of Venus. Thank alright,
we're back now. You're probably familiar with some of the
most basic features of Venus as a planet, right that
(15:26):
it's very much known as an Earth analog, and that
is a fair way to characterize it. It's very close
to the size and mass of the Earth. It's gonna
you know, it was created around the same time and
the accretion disk of the inner rocky planets um so
in many ways, it is a lot like the Earth
until you get down into the atmosphere. So, Robert, can
(15:47):
you take me on a tour of the surface of Venus. Yeah.
I actually chatted with astrobiologist David Grinspoon about the surface
of Venus several years back, as well as with JPL
scientists Susanne smrit Car. So, I want to run through
some of the attributes of the planet here that they
stressed to me. All right, let's take a stroll through
the toxic soup. Alright. So, so Grinsman pointed out that
(16:09):
first and foremost, this is a planet that's very rich
and volcanoes and mountains and tech tonic features. Now not
to be confused with tectonic activity. We'll get back to that.
You won't find signs of water erosion. Uh, probably unless
they're very, very ancient. And a lot of the topography
is dominated by a sort of low aligned rolling planes
(16:32):
that are largely ash. And this is punctuated by some
high volcanic mountains and some other sort of high plateaus
of titanically disrupted areas with with flows of ash. So
this is a planet surface that has been sort of
like hit and paved by volcanic activity. Yes, yeah, they're also,
(16:54):
he says, they're seemingly steady, slow winds, always blowing east
to west. And uh, as we've already touched on, the
atmospheric pressure is very high now One interesting thing about
the directionality of the movement of the atmosphere there is
that Venus rotates opposite of the way that most of
the planets in our Solar system rotate. It rotates in
(17:15):
a retrograde way to its orbit, so the sun actually
rises in the west and sets in the east on Venus. Yeah,
it's it's interesting. It also has an extremely slow rotation
two forty three terrestrial days, that's how long it takes,
but its atmosphere only needs four days to rot to rotate.
So yeah, there's already you can tell there's a lot
of a lot of by the from a terrestrial standpoint,
(17:37):
a lot of screwy things going on with Venus. If
you were approaching the this is like approaching the Texas
chainsaw mask or house and finding all sorts of bone
based you know, voodoo doo. Dad's hanging in trees and bushes, right,
some skull furniture. So the pressure is high, roughly ninety
times the pressure at sea level on Earth. That's a
(17:58):
lot of pressure of coal. Of course, is going to
vary though depending on you know exactly what altitude you're
at on Venus. We've already touched on the light a
little bit, you'd find very dull light. Grinsman says that
if you were suddenly transported to Venus, you would notice
that the light is very different. It's always cloudy, and
there's a very thick uh, the very thick atmosphere. So
(18:20):
light is, he says, is kind of diffused and gathered
so so much that it's a it's kind of reddish.
And there, as you said, no shadows because there's no
direct sunlight. It's all just clouds and scattered light. He
says that there would be enough daylight to see, but
it will be like a heavily overcast day on Earth.
And of course on the night side it would be dark.
Aside from whatever kind of like you you would probably
(18:42):
notice the dull red glow of the red hot rocks
in the ground lighting things a bit creepy. And he
pointed out that it is pretty much Earth's alter ego.
It's the only Earth sized planet in our Solar system only, uh,
and the only other roughly Earth sized planet that we
can send a spa acecraft two and study in detail. Uh,
(19:02):
that will and that's going to be true for a
long long time. And uh, indeed, Earth and Venus probably
had similar origins. Uh, it could have been, and they
could have been a nearly identical states in the beginning,
and yet we have gone down very difficerent routes in
terms of how our climates and surface conditions have turned out. So, yeah,
(19:23):
we started in similar states. What happened to Venus to
make it so different from us? Well, runaway greenhouse effect
boiled away the oceans long ago and they were lost
to space, and then it it became essentially stuck with
its present climate. It's so it's it's often touted as
kind of a worst case example of what climate change
on Earth could amount to. Yeah, now you might have
(19:45):
heard of this idea of the runaway greenhouse effect invoked,
but if you're wondering exactly how that works, Basically what
happens is you've got some liquid on the surface of
your planet. You've got like a liquid water oceans, and
if you heat the oceans up to much, they begin
to evaporate a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere.
But of course water vapor is an excellent greenhouse gas.
(20:08):
And then when there's a lot of water vapor in
the atmosphere, because it's a greenhouse gas, sunlight can pass
through it one way, coming in to heat the Earth
or heat the planet, but then it does not allow
as much energy to reflect back off of the planet
and radiate back out into space. So like other greenhouse gases,
this water vapor let's energy in but not back out,
(20:28):
and this warms the planet even more. As the planet warms,
the water vapor just keeps evaporating even more because it's
getting hotter and hotter, making the effect worse and worse
in this net positive feedback loop. So there's sort of
these tipping points for planets with liquid on the surface.
You don't want to get the water hotter than a
certain level because if you do, it's just going to
(20:50):
create this runaway effect that you kind of can't stop. Now.
I mentioned plate tectonics earlier. There are no plate tectonics
that we know of on Venus of all, but the
certainly there's a lot of volcanic activity. The volcanoes, though,
don't spring up along plate borders like they do on Earth.
They just pop up all over, so it's just kind
of surprise volcano. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's a different
(21:14):
pattern of convection, uh or so it seems according to Grinspoon.
Now in addition to the greenhouse gas issue, uh he
did drive home that a lot of the differences may
also just be due to orbit. You know. Obviously Venus
is more of an inner planet than Earth, and and
they're just going to be uh certain differences in place
(21:35):
just on where you are in relation to the Sun. Right,
So it is closer to the Sun than us, but
that's that's not the only thing that plays a role, because,
for example, the surface of Venus is hotter than the
surface of Mercury, which is closer to the Sun than
Venus is. Uh So, definitely, the atmosphere plays a huge
role in what surface conditions are like. Right, And we
(21:57):
already hit on the fact that the the atmosphere of
Venus is pretty incredible. The clouds of Venus are concentrated
sulfuric acid. Yeah, uh yeah, Now that's not to say
that the atmosphere is concentrated sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is
about ninety eight point five carbon dioxide carbon dioxide with
like three point five percent nitrogen or so, and then
(22:19):
it's got these aerosol ized sulfuric acid particles like colloidal
sulfuric acid suspended in the atmosphere. Needless to say, you
wouldn't want to breathe it. Noddy, we we touch on
exactly how hot the surface is. I'm not sure we did.
That's worth mentioning because it's it's it's hotter than you think, Dad,
hotter than you think. Yeah. Susan Spreaker pointed out that
(22:41):
the surface temperature is around nine hundred degrees fahrenheit or
four eight two celsius. That is, it's an often sided
fact hot enough to melt lead. These are almost like
metal works kind of conditions. Yeah. And another cool thing
that she pointed out is like, Okay, assume you're on
the on the surface, you're wearing some sort of high
tech suit that prevents you from having to worry about
(23:03):
melting or being crushed. Uh. She She points out that
walking on the surface would be really weird because it
would be like walking It would be more like walking
through a fluid than what we think of as as
an atmosphere. And this is again due to that high
pressure super critical c O two. So in some aspects,
some aspects of a fluid would be present as well
(23:24):
as some aspects of a gas. I wonder if that
atmospheric density is part of what contributes to the creepiness
of those photos taken by the Venera thirteen lander. I
don't know, like, is that queuing something in my eyes
to somehow the air look wrong, it looks heavier or something. Yeah,
I wonder now. Smart Car also pointed out that one
of the biggest mysteries about Venus is wine doesn't have
(23:47):
plate tectonics. Uh. And she says that the planet completely
resurface sometime in the last billion years, and so we
have no record of what happened in those first three
and a half billion years. Now, this is premised on
the fact that Venus is basically the same age as
the Earth, that they were created in this planetary accretion process,
and both planets are about four and a half billion
years old. But something happened about a billion years ago
(24:10):
in Venus that resurface most of it. Uh. And hit
the evidence they were like, we gotta get this redone
and I'm sick of this old pattern. We gotta get
it repaved. But you pointed out that we really don't
know if if it was some sort of catastrophic event
that caused a huge amount of of of volcanic activity
toated occur within a relatively short period of time, or
(24:30):
if it's just been a steady process over the last
billion years, where volcanic activity has just been accumulating. Now,
one of the things we often talk about when considering
whether or not a planet can sustain life is what
the sort of the geomagnetic properties of the planet are. Now,
we know that Venus does have an iron core like
Earth does, But the question is if it's going to
(24:51):
sustain life on its surface or within its atmosphere, does
it have a magnetic field to shield it from radiation
coming from space. Well, yeah, the answer here is really
interesting because no, it does not have an internally generated magnetosphere.
The solar wind can slam directly into the atmosphere. However,
it does benefit from partial protection due to its induced
(25:13):
magnetic field. Now, what's that. So you have solar ultra
violent radiation removing electrons from atoms in the upper atmosphere,
creating the electrically charged gas of the ionosphere. As on Earth,
it slows and diverts the flow of particles around the planet.
Now that's interesting, But so far, I guess we should
say we've just been sort of talking about the planet
(25:34):
in general and kind of spitballing about what life there
could be like or or you know, things that occur
to us. What do the experts actually have to say
about the possibility of life on Venus, either in the
past or now. I mean, it's hard to imagine life
on the surface of Venus now, given how hot and
high pressure it is. But let's not prejudge the question
what what What would for example, David Grinspoon have to
(25:57):
say about life on Venus. Well, he's very clear about
the fact that there's nothing controversial at all about speculating, uh,
that that ancient Venus might have boasted life, because he says,
if you go back four billion years, you'll find an
environment very similar to Earth. Yeah, And so much of
our speculations of regarding life on other worlds, you know,
(26:18):
it centers around the question how much like Earth is it?
Or was it? Yeah? Now, of course that's premised on
the fact that we basically know of one way biochemistry
can work, and that has certain physical tolerances built into it.
Biochemistry can work in a carbon based way with water
as a solvent, and so we know that can only
(26:38):
happen in a place where there's the right kind of
temperature to have liquid water, where it doesn't freeze or
boil um and you've got you know, you've got the
right kind of organic molecules present, so that sets these
tolerances there. But then again, there are other ways we
maybe aren't even imagining that biochemistry could work. Just don't
based on our limited imagination, but still based on what
(26:59):
we know, there's nothing wrong with saying, well, life could
have existed on Venus. I mean, you know, a place
like Earth can have life, And Grinspoon says, it's even
conceivable that life could have begun on Venus, and then
we're all essentially the Venusians. Uh. You know, it points
out that you have rocks being blasted between the planets,
(27:20):
so there was contact. So some form of pants burmia
is possible, uh, possible uh, concerning life on Earth and
possible life on Venus, and that's something people bring up
as a possibility, but not to say that there's a
strong reason to favor that hypothesis right now. Some of
are really a lot of the key theories regarding life
(27:40):
on Venus do in the past revolve around the idea
that there may have been oceans there in the past, right,
and we still don't have definitive proof. I think that
there were oceans on Venus in the past, but there's
there are pretty strong reasons to think that it at
least might have had oceans. I was looking at one
study by our no Salvador at all from the Journal
(28:01):
of Geophysical Research Planets in and this was kind of interesting.
So the background on the study is that they talk
about how early in the history of a Solar system,
you've got young inner planets and they get bombarded by
lots of impacts from rocky objects orbiting the Sun. Right
the early the early Solar system is very dirty and
it's very full of stuff, and over long periods of time,
(28:25):
eventually it gets kind of cleaned up. But early in
the Solar System, you've got big rocks slamming into young planets,
and they slam into them from space and can actually
heat planets up a lot, and big enough impacts can
even melt large portions of the mass of the planet
which surrounds it in this ocean of melted rock. But
after this happens, the molten ocean cools and then releases
(28:47):
volatile compounds to create the atmosphere, and in this study,
the authors create a model where they can sort of
play with model planets in this state. Right, You've got
model planets in early stages of formation that are releasing
certain amounts of C O two or water onto their surface,
and that's affecting you know, what kind of whether it
(29:07):
has oceans or what the atmosphere looks like. And so
that you can place a model planet like that in
orbit at different distances from a host star and then
predict what kind of surface the planet will evolve in
its geohistory. And their models suggests, based on what we
know about Venus today that it could have had water
oceans earlier in its history. That it's consistent with what
they've found now the presence of some sort of an
(29:29):
alien Adam and Eve. That there's no proof in that,
you have to leave that to C. S. Lewis. Even
though it might be hard to know for sure whether
there was life on Venus a long time ago, we
can at least get good clues about whether there would
have been windows of opportunity for it, Right, Yeah, According
to a Sanjay Limay and co authors in a two
thousand eighteen astrobiology paper Venus could have boasted a habitable
(29:52):
climate and liquid water for as long as two billion years.
That's that's that's longer than it might have occurred on
march Us. So you have a pretty pretty long period
of time there. Uh, that is enough time based on
our terrestrial model, for at least simple life to emerge. Yeah.
Now if you look at that period of time on Earth,
(30:14):
you're not really getting beyond single celled organisms. Yeah. I
mean to put that in perspective. Two billion years of
life on Earth was enough to get us from the
deep sea vent life to single celled life, you know,
be able to get us to photo since this and
atmospheric oxygen. But you need another one point five billion
years of Earth life to get to like multicellular life
(30:35):
and sexual reproduction. So is there based on the Earth model,
was their life on Venus? Maybe? Was there sex on Venus?
Probably not, but maybe maybe? Okay, imagine on Venus for
some reason, life evolves faster, Maybe there's maybe there's a
faster mutation rate, something like that. I want to by
the end of this episode, I want to be imagining
what it could have been like if there was fully
(30:57):
evolved intelligent civilization on Venus that doesn't now just paved
over by volcanic activity and we can't see any trace
of it. Well, it would be a shame, wouldn't that
the planet name for the goddess of Love would have
never known sexual reproduction it was just all a sexual
That would be a cruel irony. Well anyway, So we've
been exploring this question of whether whether life could have
(31:19):
existed on Venus in the past, but we should transition
to talk about whether life exists on Venus today. Yeah,
because this is where we really get into the the
the imagination capturing aspects of of of exploring Venus, the
idea that we could send something there, some sort of
probe and discover life like actually harness and study an
(31:42):
example of of life on another world. Now you're probably thinking, no,
wait a second. Earlier, didn't you say that the surface
of Venus had ninety times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere
at the surface and was like five hundred degrees celsius
or like nine hundred degrees fahrenheit. So you may be
thinking skeptically, you're not suggesting that life exists on the
(32:04):
surface of Venus, or are you will not on the surface.
We've got to get our heads in the clouds. That's
where things become more tolerable, at least in terms of
modern Venus. All right, we will explore that when we
come back from this break. Than alright, we're back. We've
been talking about the conditions on Venus as we know
them today, conditions on Venus in the ancient past. And
(32:28):
the big question was their life on Venus and is
their life on Venus. So we've speculated on the possibility
that there could have been life on Venus in its
ancient oceans, if they existed. But when we look at
the planet today, the surface again is just an intolerable hellscape.
But when we get up into the clouds, that's where
(32:49):
we start seeing uh conditions that makes sense for life
as we know it now, to be fair to the
surface of Venus. Of course, the surface of Venus, like
the surface of Earth, is not actually the same from
equator to poll right, yeah. It. In fact, it has
been proposed that Venus might boast acidic polar cs. Back
in nine seventy, Joseph sec Bach and W. F. Libby
(33:12):
suggested that photosynthetic life could exist in such an environment,
based on experiments with algae grown in pure C O
two under pressure with an accidic nutrient medium at elevated temperatures.
And I mean we've seen extreme aphile organisms on Earth
that survive in in highly pressurized environments and very very
hot environments, that live in geysers or around geothermal vents.
(33:36):
You know, these are conditions of life that US surface
dwelling land lovers can't really imagine. But certain single healed
organisms are simpler life forms have evolved to specialize in
these types of extreme conditions. They're usually called extreme aphiles.
Now we don't know if that's actually possible in the
surface of Venus. I mean, the surface of Venus is
maybe too extreme for even the most extreme extreme a
(33:57):
file you can imagine. But the tolerances of life, if
you expand your definition of life, go far beyond what
you might imagine just looking at the life forms that
inhabit You're nearby forests, are looking into a tide pool. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, certainly when you start looking at a deep
hydrothermal vent uh environments you start looking at the creatures
that thrive there, it does shift your expectations a little.
(34:20):
And then also when you get outside of because when
you look at those vents. I think one of the
things about deep hydrothermal of vent environments that are really
captivating is you get to see things like the hof crab,
you know, the it's not really a crab, it's more
a variety of lobster. But these pale crustaceans that that
swarm around these vents. Um Like that captures our imagination
(34:41):
because we can say, we can look at that and
we can say, okay, it's a crab, it's an animal.
Uh I can I can relate to that more. But
when you're just breaking it down to to to to
microbes and simpler life forms, then it's um. It's it's life,
but it's not the it's not the kind of of
life that we necessarily dream about discovering on other world
(35:02):
I'm sorry I haven't heard your last couple of sentences, Robert,
because you got me googling half crept. Yeah, the half
crabs are incredible. There's like squat little lobster creatures. It
looks like a mountain of skulls. Is like on a
mountain of skulls in the Castle of Pain, I sat
on a throne of blood. Yeah, basically they're there if
you look at pictures of these guys, they're jocking position
(35:25):
for their jocking for position in order to get closest
to the superheated water because that's where they're going to
find the little creatures that they eat. This is crazy.
I've never seen that. Well anyway, I'm sorry, but yes, yes,
so I should acknowledge your point. The more willing we
are to think of organisms less and less inherently like us,
the farther out into the extremes of physics and of
(35:48):
nature that life can extend. Yeah, as they said earlier,
we really have to look at the clouds, the the
atmosphere of Venus. That is where you can get away
from those hellish surface conditions and you encounter on our
conditions that are are far more in line with what
we typically think of his life sustaining conditions. Grinspoon has
written a number of papers on this. He points out
(36:11):
that there are pockets of Venus that you quote can't
completely rule out his habitats for life based on what
we know, and in particular, the clouds of Venus are
really interesting environments because, unlike the surface, they are not
particularly hot, and they are a continuous and sort of
chemically and energetically lively environment in terms of the sort
of availability of possible nutrients and availability of energy sources
(36:35):
and liquid media and the biogenic elements. And he also
pointed out this is this I found super interesting. In
his book Venus Revealed, he proposed that a photosynthetic pigment
may serve as the quote unknown ultra violent absorber. Uh.
And this is this is what may represent one of
(36:55):
four possible signs of life on Venus, along with absorbed
of solar energy by micro organisms as a driving force
for super rotation, the presence of larger and irregularly shaped
cloud particles that maybe quote unquote creatures, and the presence
of of bright radar signatures on the mountaintops which may
be covered with life. So that's another thing to keep
(37:16):
in mind when you're talking about the hellish surface of Venus.
There are there are peaks, there are places that are
gonna be be elevated from the from the truly like
pressure cooker environment that you find find lower down. Absolutely,
And I think in your talk with the Susanne Smurkar,
she also mentioned that the cloud environments of Venus could
(37:39):
host microbes, right, yeah, Yeah. The interesting thing is this
isn't crazy, Like we don't often stop to consider this,
but here on Earth, life is actually not confined strictly
to the surface of the planet and the water that's
beneath the oceans. You know, of course, we know we've
got flying birds and so forth, But there's plenty of
evidence that if you were to fly up into the
(38:00):
clouds and sort of take a bite out of a cloud,
you would probably end up with some life forms in
your mouth. Yeah, breathe deep, Yeah, dirty clouds. Uh. There's
a great article by Leslie Evans Ogden called Life in
the Clouds in the October issue of Bioscience. Uh. This
is a fun read and it talks about clouds full
of bacterium called Pseudomonas syringe a. It's bacteria that seemed
(38:25):
to float up into the clouds and perhaps spur ice nucleation,
which gives them enough weight to come falling back down
to the surface. And the article discusses the idea that
microorganisms living in clouds might play a major role in
weather and rain cycles on Earth, and this is known
as the bio precipitation theory. Yeah, people often forget that
when you're dealing with drops of precipitation, rain, snow, frost, etcetera.
(38:49):
It has to form around something, it has to condense
around something. There has to be a starting point, and
that point can be a microbe. Yeah and yeah, and
so it's obviously the case that with very light microbes,
they contend to be buoyant within the atmosphere. Like a
turbulent air current can churn up a bunch of dust
that has microbes living within it, and that can get
(39:10):
sent up into the atmosphere and suddenly you are a
macro organism that is miles above the ground and you're
up here in the cloud. How are you going to
get back down to a place that's better for you
in terms of reproduction, because the upper atmosphere of Earth
is probably not a good home for micro organisms on
a permanent basis. Right high up in the atmosphere is
often very cold, they can be very dry, you can
(39:32):
get desiccated if you're a cellular organism that needs liquid water,
and there's exposure to high levels of UV radiation from
the sun, which of course can burn your life away.
But it's a great plate way to get from one
place to the other. Right It's kind of like when
humans fly up into the upper atmosphere. It's it's it's
about getting from one point on the surface to another
(39:52):
point on the surface. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. It's
been sort of hypothesized that what if air currents like
the jet stream in a way, can could function to
transport interesting bacterial mutations from one population of of bacteria
somewhere to another, sort of like a gene conveyor belt.
But even if it is useful for for the genetic
(40:15):
diversity of a bacterial population around the world, like that,
microorganisms that travel in the Earth's clouds don't generally want
to live there forever. But Venus's atmosphere is actually not
the same as Earth's, as we've been discussing, and despite
how hostile Venus is, in many ways, Venus's atmosphere might
be a better place for organisms than Earth's atmosphere. Organisms
(40:37):
that might dwell within it, of course, are also different
from the organisms that live on Earth and might make
their living in a different biochemical way. So, Robert, you
mentioned a paper earlier by Sanjay Lemia at All, the
one that's in astrobiology this year, and that the earlier
thing that we talked about from that paper was the
conclusion that Venus might have had oceans for two billion years,
(40:58):
which you give plenty of time for organisms to possibly
evolved there. But the authors of this paper also talk
about the possibility that there are organisms living in the
clouds of Venus today, just like Grinspoon was talking about.
So the authors note that there are lots of good
reasons to look for life forms in the lower cloud
layer of Venus, which is about forty seven point five
(41:20):
to fifty point five kilometers from the surface. Now, if
you look at this layer of the atmosphere, it's got
very moderate temperatures roughly sixty degrees celsius, which is about
a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit. It's got moderate pressure,
it's like one Earth atmosphere roughly, it's got moderate radiation exposure.
They write that the UV levels in the upper atmosphere
(41:41):
of Venus are probably similar to the UV levels of
the Archaean Earth's surface, where of course we know micro
organisms thrived without being destroyed by radiation. And they mentioned
that it has quote micron sized sulfuric acid aerosols, which
are water droplets containing sulfuric acid dispersed throughout the cloud. Yeah. Really,
when you when you think about it, the the atmosphere
(42:04):
of Venus is kind of it's more it's more like
the surface of Earth in many respects, you know, uh,
or at least what we think without a ground. Yes,
but but really when you when you think of Earth though,
I think of the fact when if you're dealing with
the hard surface of Earth, most of the hard surface
of Earth is a is it is it is a cold,
(42:24):
lightless desert environment. Uh, that is underneath the ocean. That's
a very good point. Maybe you should think about the
atmosphere of Venus being less like the atmosphere of Earth
and more like the waters of the oceans on Earth.
But anyway, all of this that we've been saying so
far is just to the point that it's not impossible
that there could be microorganisms living within the clouds in Venus.
(42:47):
You know, there there are some favorable conditions. Are there
any positive reasons to think that there might be organisms there? Well,
this comes back to the unknown you v absorber that
we talked about earlier, Right, So, there this thing that
we have observed embedded within the Venusian clouds. So let
me think that, yeah, there could be alien bacteria in
the clouds, and and when we were looking at the
(43:10):
unknown UV absorber, this could be it. So NASA has
studied the the unknown UV absorber for some time, and
basically we're talking about an atmospheric anomaly that where we
see UV light being absorbed by something. Right. In general,
Venus is highly reflective. It's a bright planet, like it
shines things back out into space when the sun shines
(43:32):
on it, and the clouds that surround it reflect a
lot of sunlight. But there is this weird, mysterious UV
absorption then creating this contrast within the clouds. They're dark
patches and patterns within the reflective clouds. And the question is, well,
what could that be? Now we can say what it
almost certainly is not. It's not going to be say,
giant atmospheric like manta rays or anything like that. You know,
(43:56):
it's not going to be space whales in the atmosphere
of Venus. Uh. But it could potentially be like clouds
of micro organisms, like colonies of microorganisms kind of you know,
not not to exaggerated too much, but kind of like
the krill of Venus, but with no whales coming around
to scoop them up. No, that's a very very good
point of comparison. Actually, people, in fact, the scientists who
(44:18):
worked on this have compared it to the way you
would look at algal blooms and bodies of water here
on Earth. Uh. That that's a good point of comparison,
because one of the most interesting things about these dark
patches is that they have this kind of shimmering, moving
kind of quality to them. Uh. A quote from Lemo
which he gave in a uh in a press releases,
(44:39):
he said, quote, Venus shows some episodic dark sulfuric rich
patches which contrasts up to thirty in the ultra violet
and muted in longer wavelengths. These patches persist for days,
changing their shape and contrasts continuously and appear to be
scale dependent. So yeah, they're they've got this weird dynamic
(45:00):
quality to them, just like a bloom of organisms in
ocean water might. Now. I know some of you are
probably remembering, well, you said that there are sulphuric acid
clouds up there. How is life thriving up there? What?
One of the points that the Lamait makes is that, well,
if you consider the fact that life on Earth as
we know it can thrive in acidic conditions, that it
can feed on CO two and produce sulphuric acid. Uh,
(45:22):
it all lines up with the environments that we we
we know to exist in the in the atmosphere of Venus. Yeah. Now,
to be clear, we're not saying that this is evidence
that there is definitely, you know, life in the clouds
of Venus. It's just that there's a lot of interesting
evidence that would line up with their being patches of
micro organisms in the clouds of Venus that are making
(45:45):
their living this way. Now, there there are other options too.
It could be chemical, right, maybe you've got patches of
sulfur dioxide and iron chloride absorbing u V in the atmosphere.
But that doesn't necessarily seem to explain everything we observe,
at least not to Laman the co authors. So there
are these light absorbing particles dispersed in clouds, and we
don't know for sure what they are. The idea that
(46:08):
their microorganisms is a very elegant and exciting hypothesis. But
is there any way we could test this to see
if it's true. There is, and we should note we
haven't gotten detested because anything we've sent through has just
has not has not had the the the equipment, or
or it has not spent the necessary amount of time
in the atmosphere. But there is at least one really
(46:32):
awesome proposal for studying the atmosphere of Venus, and it
involves Shatner. No, it involves vamps. Vamps, yes, and by
vamps I don't mean the space vampires of of our
favorite Toby Hooper movie Life Force. Life Force. Yes. Oh,
I thought you were gonna say Planet of the Vampires. No, No,
(46:53):
it doesn't involve those space vampires either, though that is
that is also a good one. Man. I love Planet
of the Vampires. They got the best bass suits, and
they do they're so styled leather space suits. But this
is this is pretty stylish too. I think, if if you'll,
if you'll allow me here to discuss the venous atmospheric
maneuverable platform or VAMP please do Robert, which is a
proposed Northrop Grumman planetary exploration vehicle, and you should. You
(47:18):
used to look up images of this at home. It
looks kind of like a flying wing, which is interesting
considering that Northrop Grumman made the original flying wing aircraft,
the experimental y B thirty five and y B forty nine,
the former with propellers, the ladder with the jets uh
from the from the mid to late nineteen forties. I
don't think I know what those are? What are what
(47:38):
are they like? They essentially imagine a big boomerang as
a nineteen forties bomber, and that's what you have with
the YB thirty five and the YP forty nine. These
are military air yes, yeah, they were designed to be
big bombers, and Northrop Grumman later came back and did
the B two Spirit stealth bomber. So if you've seen
images of the stealth bomber, then you have seen flying
(48:00):
wing aircraft. Yeah. So they really like the idea of
a of a flying wing and in fact, this the
VAMPS concept involves sending one to Venus. So we're talking
about a propeller driven flying wing type of craft that's
solar powered and also semi buoyant. So it's kind of
a blimp plane hybrid, but it's a prop plane in Venus. Yeah, yeah,
(48:25):
it's a prop plane that this Yeah, I love the
idea that that one day we could have a propeller
driven vehicle in the atmosphere of Venus. Uh. It would
have about a hundred and eighty foot or fifty five
wing span. It would fly at a mac speed of
about thirty per second or sixty seven miles per hour,
and that it's desired altitude would would be something about
(48:46):
fifty to seventy kilometers or thirty to forty five miles
above the hard surface of the planet. All right, So
that would put it within access to that nice range
that Lama and colleagues were talking about, right. I should
also point out that this is what's categorized as a
lifting entry atmospheric flight system or a LEAF system, which
has also been proposed for explorations on Mars and Titan Uh.
(49:11):
But he here's here's just a quote from the material
that North of Grumman has on the VAMP project. The
VAMP is quote an aeroshell less hypersonic entry vehicle that
transitions to a semi buoyant, maneuverable solar powered air vehicle
for flight in Venus's atmosphere. So it's an atmospheric rover
and it could last for up to a year in
(49:33):
Venus's atmosphere, just flying through the upper and midcloud layers
equipped with with with the atmospheric sampling equipment, including equipment
that could help us determine if there are signs of
microbial life within the skies of Venus. Loving this for
multiple reasons. Number one, I of course always just love
good space exploration. Uh and and let's look for life.
(49:57):
Come on. But on top of that, since it's a
prop plane, I'm imagining it's got to also have a
surly mechanic with a big wrench sticking out of the overalls.
That's like working on it. Yeah, one would imagine, um
but kind of yellow and sulfur stand right. Yeah. I
do have to point out that it's very early days
still for for VAMP, but it is one of the options.
(50:20):
It's very much on the table for future exploration of Venus.
I like it, man, Yeah, And until we send something
like there, we just we can't say for certain when
it comes to the question of microbial life in the
clouds there. Well, I guess we'll just have to wait
and see. No, wait, we don't have to just wait
and see what we can We can publicly encourage space
exploration come on now, yeah, yeah, Now, earlier on we
(50:42):
were talking about the possibility of life in Venus and
you you want to step further, and you said, well,
what about intelligent life? Now, I know that's kind of
hard to imagine because let's say, according to these predictions
based on the papers we've been talking about today, that
maybe Venus had oceans for two billion years before the
runaway greenhouse effect killed all that we know from experience
(51:04):
in the history of the Earth that two billion years
of access to oceans is not enough time to evolve
complex multicellular organisms with brains and the ability to build
civilizations and all that. But let's just imagine things when
different there For some reason, maybe evolution happened faster. We
don't know. Um, what would things be like if say,
(51:25):
you have an intelligent civilization on a planet, maybe at
the level of technological achievement that human civilization is at
right now, and you realize all your scientists tell you, Okay,
we've got runaway greenhouse effect going on, We've got a
couple hundred years before things get intolerable on the surface
of this planet. What are you gonna do? And I wonder, well,
(51:48):
what could be done? I mean, is that just definitely
the end for the species? Or can you somehow try
to come up with some sustainable way to retreat to
the subterranean realm? Can you get can you get geothermal power?
Were uh, you know, I don't know, making lightbulbs for
you to grow plants down there. I I just like
wonder what's possible? How long can you survive on a
(52:09):
planet that doesn't want to host life on its surface anymore? Oh? Wow?
I mean, well, this is this is a wonderful sci
fi question. And you actually have some some fairly old
works that kind of explored a bit there. The old
William Hope Hodgson book The Night Lands. Oh I haven't
read that. It's um, it's tremendous work of early essentially
(52:30):
post apocalyptic literature in which the earth has grown dark.
It's it's the night Lands now. And there's this place
called the Last Rett Doubt. And so it's like a
pyramid and artificial uh structure created by humans, and it's
powered by hydrothermal power. And this is where essentially the
last remnants of humanity have have have assembled themselves and
(52:55):
tried to sort of hold on to life against the
darkness and the cold. Sounds bleak, Robert. It's pretty bleak.
It's it's it's kind of gorgeous in its own way,
but well, we're talking about a bleak concept. We're talking
about a life form losing its environment and having to
adapt to some sort of new take on life, either
by retreating into the darkness or finding a way to
(53:18):
live up in the clouds. Yeah. And then, of course
this is premised on the idea that if the scientists
of Venusian civilization did come to them and say, look,
we've only got a couple hundred years before, you know,
it's too hot to live on this planet anymore, would
people actually pay attention to them and do anything right?
It would kind of depend on what's the lifespan of
of the Venusian beings here. If it's like humans, then
(53:39):
if when you tell a human all right, we need
to do something because something bad happens in two hundred years,
they're going to say, well, I'm not going to be
alive for that, right. What's what's happening tomorrow, what's happening, uh,
the week after next, what's happening maybe next year. Because
we as a species don't have a great track record
for long term planning, we can maybe think, maybe thinking
(54:02):
to the next generation if we're being generous. Uh So,
I don't think the human model uh leaves much hope
for for what a Venusian life form might have accomplished. Yeah,
you can imagine there was a lot of oh these
you know, runaway greenhouse effect alarmists. Yeah, or two hundred years. Well,
in the next generation, they'll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah,
(54:24):
the technology will come online and they'll just fix everything. Uh.
And while they're off chatting about it, the the oceans
boil away, and then they boil away as well. But
maybe a few are able to crawl down into their crips,
you know, maybe a few were able to make it
up into their cloud cities. I don't know if they
can keep the others from from dragging them out or
dragging them back down. I guess this maybe deserves a
(54:47):
whole episode someday we should come back and examine the
idea of how long could a say, an ecosystem be
maintained purely in a subterranean existence. Could you go on
indefinitely if you had incoming energy sources. Yeah? I love
talking about subterranean life, so that would be a great
topic to discuss. In the meantime, Uh, we thank everybody
(55:09):
for joining us on this trip to Venus and UH,
if you if you enjoy this episode, let us know,
let us know what other planets, so, what other moons
even you would like us to explore in future episodes.
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(55:30):
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(55:51):
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for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com. The Bigger Believe
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Let's take a stroll into the Yellow Vault. Why is
it yellow this time? It must be of all this
dispersed stuff in the air. Oh goodness, I'm breathing an
ind to Uh. This is an episode that we did
on May seventeen about the possibility of life on Venus.
(00:28):
We don't usually think about Venus, do we. That's right,
that's one of the things that's that's that's pretty awesome
about this episode. You know, all eyes are on Mars
for a for a few different reasons, some that are
very scientific, but others that are purely cultural and have
to do with our history of gazing at the red
planet and dreaming about what and misinterpreting what might be there.
But meanwhile, we have Venus over here, which, yes, is
(00:51):
an awful hell world, but that doesn't mean that it
never had life or couldn't according to some experts, potentially
have some form of life in certain areas. Let's jump
right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from
how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, you, welcome to Stuff
(01:16):
to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I've got a question for
you today. Hit me in your opinion. What is the
creepiest image photograph produced by human space exploration. Well, since
we're talking about exploration, I imagine this rules out weapons tests. No, no,
no, no no, I'm not interested in any clear bombs. Yeah,
(01:38):
because we have some pretty creepy new test footage such
as nineteen sixties Operation UH Dominique, which was involved the
atmospheric sort of slash space detonation of nukes. I don't
think I've ever seen that. Oh yeah, it's For instance,
there was the Starfish Prime event in which a one
point for megatun bomb detonated two fifty miles or four
(02:00):
and two kilometers above the planet, and that's above the
Carmen line. So like that's pretty disturbing when you when
you think about it, like a Cold War UH space
detonation test. But as far as like pure space exploration goes,
I'm always a sucker for stuff like the you know,
the so called Martian face, or even something like the
hexagon of Saturn, something that just inspires this sense of
(02:23):
mystery where you're asking, like, what what is this place? Really? Oh?
The hexagon on the I believe it's the north pole
of Saturn. It's either the north or the South pole.
I can't recall believe it's north. We we talked about
it in one of our previous episodes, Haunted Geography and
Haunted Geometry, very love Craft in Yeah, I guess they're forbidden.
Geometry is all through the Lovecraft Cosmos, right, you know it.
(02:44):
But I've got a different answer my and for a
long time this has been my answer. My favorite creepy
space images have got to be the photos taken by
the Venera thirteen lander, Robert, I've got them in the
notes here, But have you ever looked at these? For yes,
you know, I'm not sure i've seen the color corrected ones,
but but certainly i've seen the the the other ones
(03:06):
that have that that deep kind of reddish orange tinge
to them. Yeah. I mean, it's funny to try to
explain what's disturbing about them, because they're just pictures of
some rocks. You know, it's just you're you're looking at
some rocks and soil. Now, what the Venera Landers were,
it was a series of space missions to the planet
Venus that was done by the Soviet Space Program. They
(03:29):
launched these missions to put landers down on the surface
of Venus for the first time. There had mid Landers
sending things back from Venus or the surface of Venus
before this, but they sent a bunch of missions in
the seventies and the eighties. And one of the things
about landing on Venus, and we'll definitely get more into
this in the episode, is that you've got a very
short window of time to send stuff back because Venus
(03:51):
is a death trap. It will destroy you, even for
highly shielded powerful machines. You put a machine down there
and it's a suicide mission. The machine is going to
gather some data and transmit as long as it can,
but eventually the crushing heat and pressure of the atmosphere
of Venus will kill that robot and it will only
(04:12):
have this last sort of death note to send back
to Earth. And one of these missions managed to send
some really striking pictures as that last death note. Specifically,
it was the Venera thirteen lander, which was launched on
October one, and it landed on Venus on March first.
(04:32):
So even the idea of a lander setting down on Venus,
if you know anything about the Venusian atmosphere, is kind
of creepy to imagine, because first you're going into this
haze of sulfurous clouds, but as you go further and
further down, the atmospheric pressure gets so much and so
dense and so thick that it's almost more like sinking
into a liquid uh. And so you've got to imagine
(04:54):
this lander sinking down into this atmospheric ocean surrounding Venus,
this boiling hot, lead melting atmospheric ocean of of carbon
dioxide and nitrogen, with all this sulfur everywhere. And then
finally it sets down on the surface and takes these
images and sends them back to Earth. And there's almost
nothing in the images. You just see the edge of
(05:15):
the lander in the foreground, and it has some appropriately
creepy looking triangular teeth all around it, and then beyond
that there's some soil and some flat rocks. But nevertheless,
something about these images messes with me. I find them
absolutely creepy and haunting. They have this dirty grindhouse kind
of yellow film effect to them. Uh. And that's of
(05:38):
course the atmospheric effects that we see from from the
glow of Venus. Uh, it's almost as if we're looking
at everything through an evil haze. For me, I think
it's because it's the It's like the last known photograph
from from from the from the very you know, borders
of the known world. Yeah. Um, it's like if somebody
went to the Texas Chainsaw Mascre house and took a
(06:00):
picture of their feet by accident, and then that's all
you had to go on. So, you know, do you
know something terrible happened afterwards? You don't have a lot
of details, but you have this picture of somebody's feet
on a front porch in Texas. That's exactly right. Yeah,
it feels like that. And another creepy thing about them
is that you notice a difference that unlike Mars, where
(06:21):
if you see images back from the surface of Mars,
they can sometimes look kind of creepy, but it can
also just look kind of like, I don't know, a
desert on kind of an overcast day, it was just
a very bare in area with sand and rocks and
kind of a gray white sky. But unlike on Mars,
one thing you'll notice is the effects of sunlight and
the directionality of the sunlight. Where there's a thing sticking
(06:42):
out of the rover, you can see it casting a
shadow on the ground. These these pictures have no indication
of shadows really, you know, looking at them again, as
we podcast here, I do think there is a sense
of one taking a picture of one's own feet here.
So there's an incompleteness to it, you know, it's it
just it just gets at you. Whereas at least with
(07:02):
it with the Mars images, we have more of a true,
uh you know, panoramic vision of what's going on there. Well,
Mars has been thoroughly explored on the surface at this point.
I mean, we have all kinds of pictures of what
Mars looks like at different times of day, different times
of the year, you know, from multiple different landers and rovers.
Mars almost feels like, I don't mean to pooh pooh Mars.
(07:23):
I mean, Mars is still fascinating and mysterious and wonderful,
but it's it's very much more explored territory at this point. Yeah.
We know, as we've mentioned before, we have more detailed
information about the surface of Mars than we have about
the bottom of the ocean. In some ways, that is
definitely true, um, but the surface of Venus is like,
it's this mystery hell, you know, it's this hazy mystery
(07:44):
that's beyond the gate. And because it feels like this
hazy mystery that's beyond the gate, for some reason, the
idea of life on Venus has always seemed more creepy
and interesting and tantalizing a possibility to me than the
idea of life on Mars RS. I don't know if
you feel the same way. Yeah, I definitely think so.
I think v it's kind of a shame that Venus
(08:06):
doesn't get more attention, especially in terms of our our
science fiction, because when you think of life on another
planet within our Solar system, you think of really the
rich history of imagining life on Mars, both in the
future and the past, because you have everything from of
course the old Edgar Rice Burrows novels to uh total
(08:26):
to Total Recall. I mean, you have just there's there's
so much great stuff there. But when you start looking
for really cool examples of life on Venus, there are
some great examples, but there there aren't as many. It's
not it's not the place that the human imagination instantly
goes to, but as we'll discuss in this episode. We
really should, because there's a there there are some strong
cases to be made for life on Venus, either now
(08:50):
or in the past. Yeah, and so that's going to
be the main subject of today's episode. If there are,
or if there have been, creatures of Venus, what are
they like and how would we know about them now?
If we just turned to fiction for a few examples. Uh,
we don't have time to catalog everything, but I wanted
to mention a few that came to my mind. Anyway,
(09:10):
there is an HP Lovecraft story from ninety nine that
he wrote with Kenneth Sterling titled in the Walls of Rics,
which features a muddy jungle Venus and a maze with
invisible walls. That feels about right. Yeah, it's pretty good.
I remember I remember dating that story when I read it. Uh. C. S.
Lewis took us to a Venusian paradise in his novel Paralandra. Uh.
(09:34):
This involves an alien Adam and Eve and there and
then of course you have the devil show up as well,
possessing the body of a character by the name of
Professor Weston. Professor Weston, I wonder if that's named after
Jesse Weston, who wrote the book about the Grail legend
that was so popular in the early twentieth century. You know,
I don't I don't remember, but that it's a Paralandro was.
(09:54):
It was a book I really loved when I was younger,
and we'll probably read again at some at some point
I ever read it. But that seems interesting to explore,
especially because you've got, I mean, you've got multiple mythic
associations with Venus throughout history. You know, you've got the
god of love and the arrows in the Venus aphrodite
kind of association, but you've also got the Lucifer association. Yeah, yeah,
(10:15):
and both are explored in Peralandra. In Perilandro, Venus is
also a water world, and they're like these kind of
floating wraths of land that everyone is everyone it's like
three or four people, three or four individuals, anyway they
lived there. But yeah, it's it's a It is an
interesting take on Venus as well. Stephen King took us
to Venus twice, as it turns out, once in a
(10:38):
nineteen sixties self published short story titled The Cursed Expedition,
which I have not read. I'm not sure that's one
that's actually readily available, or it's kind of like a
you know, a vault story of kings uh. And then there's,
of course, is one short story, I Am the Doorway,
which doesn't actually visit the planet, but a character is
It takes part in a manned Vena fly by and
(11:01):
comes back and essentially infected with an alien organism. Well,
it's interesting to think about that this is a time
period at which the Venera missions were underway. Yeah, there's
also a similar Outer Limits episode from nineteen four titled
Cold Hands, Warm Heart that actually stars William Shatner. So
Shot goes to Venus or he's from Venus or what.
(11:22):
I haven't seen this episode, but he is involved in
some sort of space mission involving Venus. So you can't
give me the deets on the chat. I mean, things go,
you know weird. That's that's the Again, this is not
an Outer Limits episode that I've seen, but perhaps we
have listeners you can chime in on it. And then,
of course Venus plays an important role in the expanse
(11:44):
Uh TV series adaptation of the novels. No spoilers, but
it does have a pretty cool plot line involving life
and Venus. And there's also early mentioned in the books
and perhaps the TV series as well about a failed
attempt by humans to established cloud colonies there. Oh yeah,
that is an interesting idea I've read about the idea
of trying to create um I don't know whether you
(12:06):
call them aerostatic or hydrostatic, basically floating colonies. That would
be not too hard to do, actually, because of how
dense the atmosphere is. Yeah, cloud City right out of Empire. Yeah,
except I don't know, best Bin didn't look all that
cloudy compared to Venus. Yeah. Well, I mean they were
up there, right, It's been a long time since they've
seen Empire, so I don't remember how cloudy was or
(12:27):
if it became more cloudy in the special editions that
came out. Who knows. Oh yeah, they're really cged some
more clouds in there. It's it was worth it. Uh No.
I think it's interesting that Venus doesn't get as much
attention as Mars does in terms of the possibility of
finding microbial life forms. I mean, you know, way back
in the day, people used to think, before we'd explored
(12:49):
Mars that there, you know, there might be whole civilizations there.
People would look through telescopes and see what looked like
canals on Mars, and they'd say, oh, you know, there
are people on Mars, just like there are people here.
Now we pretty much can rule that out. I wonder
if part of it is because we went from being
so geocentric, the idea that the Earth is the center
of all things, and then we went to a heliocentric model,
(13:14):
and then of course we expanded beyond that. But if
if we're still kind of thinking heliocentrically, So the Sun
is the center of of our solar system, and therefore
it's kind of a center of order and and the known.
And this is not doesn't something not not something that
actually matches up necessarily with our our scientific understanding of everything,
But it is. It is a center. And therefore Venus
(13:37):
is closer to the center, It's closer to the center
of the known, whereas Mars is a little beyond us,
like Mars is a little more on the outskirts. And
therefore it makes this more it makes more sense that
it would have more mystery to it. That's where the
that's where the ghosts and goblins are going to live,
right they're not gonna live in the middle of the city,
They're gonna live on the outskirts of town. Well, yeah,
(13:58):
it's the outer limits. You don't talking about the or limit. Though.
I do really enjoy science fiction that that goes inward
instead of goes outward. Actually, I mean, this is something
I really liked about that movie Sunshine that came out,
which you know, I had a lot of problems. I
think some of the writing kind of fell apart in
the third part of the movie, but it explored the
idea that there was this deep, kind of ghostly mystery
(14:21):
to the Sun, and as you come closer and closer
to the Sun, it's sort of activates these instincts within
you that are sort of borderline supernatural, but at least
seemed to go deeper than the human or mammalian parts
of your nervous system, where you know, where the Sun
is the closest thing to a literal god there is
in the physical universe, right, it's the creator of us. Yeah, yeah,
(14:44):
I think that ye coupled with the fact that every
humans just want to keep going out and it's one
of the reasons probably that more people have been to
the Moon than to the bottom of than to the
deepest portions of the ocean. Well, I think we should
ignore this impulse to go out and we should go in.
Let's go in towards Venus, get closer to the Sun,
move one orbit in and start looking at this hothouse planet. Yeah.
(15:05):
Why go to a planet that doesn't have enough atmosphere
when instead you can take your your dreams and your
imagination to a place that has more atmosphere than you
can handle. Let's take a quick break and when we
come back, we will explore the surface of Venus. Thank alright,
we're back now. You're probably familiar with some of the
most basic features of Venus as a planet, right that
(15:26):
it's very much known as an Earth analog, and that
is a fair way to characterize it. It's very close
to the size and mass of the Earth. It's gonna
you know, it was created around the same time and
the accretion disk of the inner rocky planets um so
in many ways, it is a lot like the Earth
until you get down into the atmosphere. So, Robert, can
(15:47):
you take me on a tour of the surface of Venus. Yeah.
I actually chatted with astrobiologist David Grinspoon about the surface
of Venus several years back, as well as with JPL
scientists Susanne smrit Car. So, I want to run through
some of the attributes of the planet here that they
stressed to me. All right, let's take a stroll through
the toxic soup. Alright. So, so Grinsman pointed out that
(16:09):
first and foremost, this is a planet that's very rich
and volcanoes and mountains and tech tonic features. Now not
to be confused with tectonic activity. We'll get back to that.
You won't find signs of water erosion. Uh, probably unless
they're very, very ancient. And a lot of the topography
is dominated by a sort of low aligned rolling planes
(16:32):
that are largely ash. And this is punctuated by some
high volcanic mountains and some other sort of high plateaus
of titanically disrupted areas with with flows of ash. So
this is a planet surface that has been sort of
like hit and paved by volcanic activity. Yes, yeah, they're also,
(16:54):
he says, they're seemingly steady, slow winds, always blowing east
to west. And uh, as we've already touched on, the
atmospheric pressure is very high now One interesting thing about
the directionality of the movement of the atmosphere there is
that Venus rotates opposite of the way that most of
the planets in our Solar system rotate. It rotates in
(17:15):
a retrograde way to its orbit, so the sun actually
rises in the west and sets in the east on Venus. Yeah,
it's it's interesting. It also has an extremely slow rotation
two forty three terrestrial days, that's how long it takes,
but its atmosphere only needs four days to rot to rotate.
So yeah, there's already you can tell there's a lot
of a lot of by the from a terrestrial standpoint,
(17:37):
a lot of screwy things going on with Venus. If
you were approaching the this is like approaching the Texas
chainsaw mask or house and finding all sorts of bone
based you know, voodoo doo. Dad's hanging in trees and bushes, right,
some skull furniture. So the pressure is high, roughly ninety
times the pressure at sea level on Earth. That's a
(17:58):
lot of pressure of coal. Of course, is going to
vary though depending on you know exactly what altitude you're
at on Venus. We've already touched on the light a
little bit, you'd find very dull light. Grinsman says that
if you were suddenly transported to Venus, you would notice
that the light is very different. It's always cloudy, and
there's a very thick uh, the very thick atmosphere. So
(18:20):
light is, he says, is kind of diffused and gathered
so so much that it's a it's kind of reddish.
And there, as you said, no shadows because there's no
direct sunlight. It's all just clouds and scattered light. He
says that there would be enough daylight to see, but
it will be like a heavily overcast day on Earth.
And of course on the night side it would be dark.
Aside from whatever kind of like you you would probably
(18:42):
notice the dull red glow of the red hot rocks
in the ground lighting things a bit creepy. And he
pointed out that it is pretty much Earth's alter ego.
It's the only Earth sized planet in our Solar system only, uh,
and the only other roughly Earth sized planet that we
can send a spa acecraft two and study in detail. Uh,
(19:02):
that will and that's going to be true for a
long long time. And uh, indeed, Earth and Venus probably
had similar origins. Uh, it could have been, and they
could have been a nearly identical states in the beginning,
and yet we have gone down very difficerent routes in
terms of how our climates and surface conditions have turned out. So, yeah,
(19:23):
we started in similar states. What happened to Venus to
make it so different from us? Well, runaway greenhouse effect
boiled away the oceans long ago and they were lost
to space, and then it it became essentially stuck with
its present climate. It's so it's it's often touted as
kind of a worst case example of what climate change
on Earth could amount to. Yeah, now you might have
(19:45):
heard of this idea of the runaway greenhouse effect invoked,
but if you're wondering exactly how that works, Basically what
happens is you've got some liquid on the surface of
your planet. You've got like a liquid water oceans, and
if you heat the oceans up to much, they begin
to evaporate a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere.
But of course water vapor is an excellent greenhouse gas.
(20:08):
And then when there's a lot of water vapor in
the atmosphere, because it's a greenhouse gas, sunlight can pass
through it one way, coming in to heat the Earth
or heat the planet, but then it does not allow
as much energy to reflect back off of the planet
and radiate back out into space. So like other greenhouse gases,
this water vapor let's energy in but not back out,
(20:28):
and this warms the planet even more. As the planet warms,
the water vapor just keeps evaporating even more because it's
getting hotter and hotter, making the effect worse and worse
in this net positive feedback loop. So there's sort of
these tipping points for planets with liquid on the surface.
You don't want to get the water hotter than a
certain level because if you do, it's just going to
(20:50):
create this runaway effect that you kind of can't stop. Now.
I mentioned plate tectonics earlier. There are no plate tectonics
that we know of on Venus of all, but the
certainly there's a lot of volcanic activity. The volcanoes, though,
don't spring up along plate borders like they do on Earth.
They just pop up all over, so it's just kind
of surprise volcano. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's a different
(21:14):
pattern of convection, uh or so it seems according to Grinspoon.
Now in addition to the greenhouse gas issue, uh he
did drive home that a lot of the differences may
also just be due to orbit. You know. Obviously Venus
is more of an inner planet than Earth, and and
they're just going to be uh certain differences in place
(21:35):
just on where you are in relation to the Sun. Right,
So it is closer to the Sun than us, but
that's that's not the only thing that plays a role, because,
for example, the surface of Venus is hotter than the
surface of Mercury, which is closer to the Sun than
Venus is. Uh So, definitely, the atmosphere plays a huge
role in what surface conditions are like. Right, And we
(21:57):
already hit on the fact that the the atmosphere of
Venus is pretty incredible. The clouds of Venus are concentrated
sulfuric acid. Yeah, uh yeah, Now that's not to say
that the atmosphere is concentrated sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is
about ninety eight point five carbon dioxide carbon dioxide with
like three point five percent nitrogen or so, and then
(22:19):
it's got these aerosol ized sulfuric acid particles like colloidal
sulfuric acid suspended in the atmosphere. Needless to say, you
wouldn't want to breathe it. Noddy, we we touch on
exactly how hot the surface is. I'm not sure we did.
That's worth mentioning because it's it's it's hotter than you think, Dad,
hotter than you think. Yeah. Susan Spreaker pointed out that
(22:41):
the surface temperature is around nine hundred degrees fahrenheit or
four eight two celsius. That is, it's an often sided
fact hot enough to melt lead. These are almost like
metal works kind of conditions. Yeah. And another cool thing
that she pointed out is like, Okay, assume you're on
the on the surface, you're wearing some sort of high
tech suit that prevents you from having to worry about
(23:03):
melting or being crushed. Uh. She She points out that
walking on the surface would be really weird because it
would be like walking It would be more like walking
through a fluid than what we think of as as
an atmosphere. And this is again due to that high
pressure super critical c O two. So in some aspects,
some aspects of a fluid would be present as well
(23:24):
as some aspects of a gas. I wonder if that
atmospheric density is part of what contributes to the creepiness
of those photos taken by the Venera thirteen lander. I
don't know, like, is that queuing something in my eyes
to somehow the air look wrong, it looks heavier or something. Yeah,
I wonder now. Smart Car also pointed out that one
of the biggest mysteries about Venus is wine doesn't have
(23:47):
plate tectonics. Uh. And she says that the planet completely
resurface sometime in the last billion years, and so we
have no record of what happened in those first three
and a half billion years. Now, this is premised on
the fact that Venus is basically the same age as
the Earth, that they were created in this planetary accretion process,
and both planets are about four and a half billion
years old. But something happened about a billion years ago
(24:10):
in Venus that resurface most of it. Uh. And hit
the evidence they were like, we gotta get this redone
and I'm sick of this old pattern. We gotta get
it repaved. But you pointed out that we really don't
know if if it was some sort of catastrophic event
that caused a huge amount of of of volcanic activity
toated occur within a relatively short period of time, or
(24:30):
if it's just been a steady process over the last
billion years, where volcanic activity has just been accumulating. Now,
one of the things we often talk about when considering
whether or not a planet can sustain life is what
the sort of the geomagnetic properties of the planet are. Now,
we know that Venus does have an iron core like
Earth does, But the question is if it's going to
(24:51):
sustain life on its surface or within its atmosphere, does
it have a magnetic field to shield it from radiation
coming from space. Well, yeah, the answer here is really
interesting because no, it does not have an internally generated magnetosphere.
The solar wind can slam directly into the atmosphere. However,
it does benefit from partial protection due to its induced
(25:13):
magnetic field. Now, what's that. So you have solar ultra
violent radiation removing electrons from atoms in the upper atmosphere,
creating the electrically charged gas of the ionosphere. As on Earth,
it slows and diverts the flow of particles around the planet.
Now that's interesting, But so far, I guess we should
say we've just been sort of talking about the planet
(25:34):
in general and kind of spitballing about what life there
could be like or or you know, things that occur
to us. What do the experts actually have to say
about the possibility of life on Venus, either in the
past or now. I mean, it's hard to imagine life
on the surface of Venus now, given how hot and
high pressure it is. But let's not prejudge the question
what what What would for example, David Grinspoon have to
(25:57):
say about life on Venus. Well, he's very clear about
the fact that there's nothing controversial at all about speculating, uh,
that that ancient Venus might have boasted life, because he says,
if you go back four billion years, you'll find an
environment very similar to Earth. Yeah, And so much of
our speculations of regarding life on other worlds, you know,
(26:18):
it centers around the question how much like Earth is it?
Or was it? Yeah? Now, of course that's premised on
the fact that we basically know of one way biochemistry
can work, and that has certain physical tolerances built into it.
Biochemistry can work in a carbon based way with water
as a solvent, and so we know that can only
(26:38):
happen in a place where there's the right kind of
temperature to have liquid water, where it doesn't freeze or
boil um and you've got you know, you've got the
right kind of organic molecules present, so that sets these
tolerances there. But then again, there are other ways we
maybe aren't even imagining that biochemistry could work. Just don't
based on our limited imagination, but still based on what
(26:59):
we know, there's nothing wrong with saying, well, life could
have existed on Venus. I mean, you know, a place
like Earth can have life, And Grinspoon says, it's even
conceivable that life could have begun on Venus, and then
we're all essentially the Venusians. Uh. You know, it points
out that you have rocks being blasted between the planets,
(27:20):
so there was contact. So some form of pants burmia
is possible, uh, possible uh, concerning life on Earth and
possible life on Venus, and that's something people bring up
as a possibility, but not to say that there's a
strong reason to favor that hypothesis right now. Some of
are really a lot of the key theories regarding life
(27:40):
on Venus do in the past revolve around the idea
that there may have been oceans there in the past, right,
and we still don't have definitive proof. I think that
there were oceans on Venus in the past, but there's
there are pretty strong reasons to think that it at
least might have had oceans. I was looking at one
study by our no Salvador at all from the Journal
(28:01):
of Geophysical Research Planets in and this was kind of interesting.
So the background on the study is that they talk
about how early in the history of a Solar system,
you've got young inner planets and they get bombarded by
lots of impacts from rocky objects orbiting the Sun. Right
the early the early Solar system is very dirty and
it's very full of stuff, and over long periods of time,
(28:25):
eventually it gets kind of cleaned up. But early in
the Solar System, you've got big rocks slamming into young planets,
and they slam into them from space and can actually
heat planets up a lot, and big enough impacts can
even melt large portions of the mass of the planet
which surrounds it in this ocean of melted rock. But
after this happens, the molten ocean cools and then releases
(28:47):
volatile compounds to create the atmosphere, and in this study,
the authors create a model where they can sort of
play with model planets in this state. Right, You've got
model planets in early stages of formation that are releasing
certain amounts of C O two or water onto their surface,
and that's affecting you know, what kind of whether it
(29:07):
has oceans or what the atmosphere looks like. And so
that you can place a model planet like that in
orbit at different distances from a host star and then
predict what kind of surface the planet will evolve in
its geohistory. And their models suggests, based on what we
know about Venus today that it could have had water
oceans earlier in its history. That it's consistent with what
they've found now the presence of some sort of an
(29:29):
alien Adam and Eve. That there's no proof in that,
you have to leave that to C. S. Lewis. Even
though it might be hard to know for sure whether
there was life on Venus a long time ago, we
can at least get good clues about whether there would
have been windows of opportunity for it, Right, Yeah, According
to a Sanjay Limay and co authors in a two
thousand eighteen astrobiology paper Venus could have boasted a habitable
(29:52):
climate and liquid water for as long as two billion years.
That's that's that's longer than it might have occurred on
march Us. So you have a pretty pretty long period
of time there. Uh, that is enough time based on
our terrestrial model, for at least simple life to emerge. Yeah.
Now if you look at that period of time on Earth,
(30:14):
you're not really getting beyond single celled organisms. Yeah. I
mean to put that in perspective. Two billion years of
life on Earth was enough to get us from the
deep sea vent life to single celled life, you know,
be able to get us to photo since this and
atmospheric oxygen. But you need another one point five billion
years of Earth life to get to like multicellular life
(30:35):
and sexual reproduction. So is there based on the Earth model,
was their life on Venus? Maybe? Was there sex on Venus?
Probably not, but maybe maybe? Okay, imagine on Venus for
some reason, life evolves faster, Maybe there's maybe there's a
faster mutation rate, something like that. I want to by
the end of this episode, I want to be imagining
what it could have been like if there was fully
(30:57):
evolved intelligent civilization on Venus that doesn't now just paved
over by volcanic activity and we can't see any trace
of it. Well, it would be a shame, wouldn't that
the planet name for the goddess of Love would have
never known sexual reproduction it was just all a sexual
That would be a cruel irony. Well anyway, So we've
been exploring this question of whether whether life could have
(31:19):
existed on Venus in the past, but we should transition
to talk about whether life exists on Venus today. Yeah,
because this is where we really get into the the
the imagination capturing aspects of of of exploring Venus, the
idea that we could send something there, some sort of
probe and discover life like actually harness and study an
(31:42):
example of of life on another world. Now you're probably thinking, no,
wait a second. Earlier, didn't you say that the surface
of Venus had ninety times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere
at the surface and was like five hundred degrees celsius
or like nine hundred degrees fahrenheit. So you may be
thinking skeptically, you're not suggesting that life exists on the
(32:04):
surface of Venus, or are you will not on the surface.
We've got to get our heads in the clouds. That's
where things become more tolerable, at least in terms of
modern Venus. All right, we will explore that when we
come back from this break. Than alright, we're back. We've
been talking about the conditions on Venus as we know
them today, conditions on Venus in the ancient past. And
(32:28):
the big question was their life on Venus and is
their life on Venus. So we've speculated on the possibility
that there could have been life on Venus in its
ancient oceans, if they existed. But when we look at
the planet today, the surface again is just an intolerable hellscape.
But when we get up into the clouds, that's where
(32:49):
we start seeing uh conditions that makes sense for life
as we know it now, to be fair to the
surface of Venus. Of course, the surface of Venus, like
the surface of Earth, is not actually the same from
equator to poll right, yeah. It. In fact, it has
been proposed that Venus might boast acidic polar cs. Back
in nine seventy, Joseph sec Bach and W. F. Libby
(33:12):
suggested that photosynthetic life could exist in such an environment,
based on experiments with algae grown in pure C O
two under pressure with an accidic nutrient medium at elevated temperatures.
And I mean we've seen extreme aphile organisms on Earth
that survive in in highly pressurized environments and very very
hot environments, that live in geysers or around geothermal vents.
(33:36):
You know, these are conditions of life that US surface
dwelling land lovers can't really imagine. But certain single healed
organisms are simpler life forms have evolved to specialize in
these types of extreme conditions. They're usually called extreme aphiles.
Now we don't know if that's actually possible in the
surface of Venus. I mean, the surface of Venus is
maybe too extreme for even the most extreme extreme a
(33:57):
file you can imagine. But the tolerances of life, if
you expand your definition of life, go far beyond what
you might imagine just looking at the life forms that
inhabit You're nearby forests, are looking into a tide pool. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, certainly when you start looking at a deep
hydrothermal vent uh environments you start looking at the creatures
that thrive there, it does shift your expectations a little.
(34:20):
And then also when you get outside of because when
you look at those vents. I think one of the
things about deep hydrothermal of vent environments that are really
captivating is you get to see things like the hof crab,
you know, the it's not really a crab, it's more
a variety of lobster. But these pale crustaceans that that
swarm around these vents. Um Like that captures our imagination
(34:41):
because we can say, we can look at that and
we can say, okay, it's a crab, it's an animal.
Uh I can I can relate to that more. But
when you're just breaking it down to to to to
microbes and simpler life forms, then it's um. It's it's life,
but it's not the it's not the kind of of
life that we necessarily dream about discovering on other world
(35:02):
I'm sorry I haven't heard your last couple of sentences, Robert,
because you got me googling half crept. Yeah, the half
crabs are incredible. There's like squat little lobster creatures. It
looks like a mountain of skulls. Is like on a
mountain of skulls in the Castle of Pain, I sat
on a throne of blood. Yeah, basically they're there if
you look at pictures of these guys, they're jocking position
(35:25):
for their jocking for position in order to get closest
to the superheated water because that's where they're going to
find the little creatures that they eat. This is crazy.
I've never seen that. Well anyway, I'm sorry, but yes, yes,
so I should acknowledge your point. The more willing we
are to think of organisms less and less inherently like us,
the farther out into the extremes of physics and of
(35:48):
nature that life can extend. Yeah, as they said earlier,
we really have to look at the clouds, the the
atmosphere of Venus. That is where you can get away
from those hellish surface conditions and you encounter on our
conditions that are are far more in line with what
we typically think of his life sustaining conditions. Grinspoon has
written a number of papers on this. He points out
(36:11):
that there are pockets of Venus that you quote can't
completely rule out his habitats for life based on what
we know, and in particular, the clouds of Venus are
really interesting environments because, unlike the surface, they are not
particularly hot, and they are a continuous and sort of
chemically and energetically lively environment in terms of the sort
of availability of possible nutrients and availability of energy sources
(36:35):
and liquid media and the biogenic elements. And he also
pointed out this is this I found super interesting. In
his book Venus Revealed, he proposed that a photosynthetic pigment
may serve as the quote unknown ultra violent absorber. Uh.
And this is this is what may represent one of
(36:55):
four possible signs of life on Venus, along with absorbed
of solar energy by micro organisms as a driving force
for super rotation, the presence of larger and irregularly shaped
cloud particles that maybe quote unquote creatures, and the presence
of of bright radar signatures on the mountaintops which may
be covered with life. So that's another thing to keep
(37:16):
in mind when you're talking about the hellish surface of Venus.
There are there are peaks, there are places that are
gonna be be elevated from the from the truly like
pressure cooker environment that you find find lower down. Absolutely,
And I think in your talk with the Susanne Smurkar,
she also mentioned that the cloud environments of Venus could
(37:39):
host microbes, right, yeah, Yeah. The interesting thing is this
isn't crazy, Like we don't often stop to consider this,
but here on Earth, life is actually not confined strictly
to the surface of the planet and the water that's
beneath the oceans. You know, of course, we know we've
got flying birds and so forth, But there's plenty of
evidence that if you were to fly up into the
(38:00):
clouds and sort of take a bite out of a cloud,
you would probably end up with some life forms in
your mouth. Yeah, breathe deep, Yeah, dirty clouds. Uh. There's
a great article by Leslie Evans Ogden called Life in
the Clouds in the October issue of Bioscience. Uh. This
is a fun read and it talks about clouds full
of bacterium called Pseudomonas syringe a. It's bacteria that seemed
(38:25):
to float up into the clouds and perhaps spur ice nucleation,
which gives them enough weight to come falling back down
to the surface. And the article discusses the idea that
microorganisms living in clouds might play a major role in
weather and rain cycles on Earth, and this is known
as the bio precipitation theory. Yeah, people often forget that
when you're dealing with drops of precipitation, rain, snow, frost, etcetera.
(38:49):
It has to form around something, it has to condense
around something. There has to be a starting point, and
that point can be a microbe. Yeah and yeah, and
so it's obviously the case that with very light microbes,
they contend to be buoyant within the atmosphere. Like a
turbulent air current can churn up a bunch of dust
that has microbes living within it, and that can get
(39:10):
sent up into the atmosphere and suddenly you are a
macro organism that is miles above the ground and you're
up here in the cloud. How are you going to
get back down to a place that's better for you
in terms of reproduction, because the upper atmosphere of Earth
is probably not a good home for micro organisms on
a permanent basis. Right high up in the atmosphere is
often very cold, they can be very dry, you can
(39:32):
get desiccated if you're a cellular organism that needs liquid water,
and there's exposure to high levels of UV radiation from
the sun, which of course can burn your life away.
But it's a great plate way to get from one
place to the other. Right It's kind of like when
humans fly up into the upper atmosphere. It's it's it's
about getting from one point on the surface to another
(39:52):
point on the surface. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. It's
been sort of hypothesized that what if air currents like
the jet stream in a way, can could function to
transport interesting bacterial mutations from one population of of bacteria
somewhere to another, sort of like a gene conveyor belt.
But even if it is useful for for the genetic
(40:15):
diversity of a bacterial population around the world, like that,
microorganisms that travel in the Earth's clouds don't generally want
to live there forever. But Venus's atmosphere is actually not
the same as Earth's, as we've been discussing, and despite
how hostile Venus is, in many ways, Venus's atmosphere might
be a better place for organisms than Earth's atmosphere. Organisms
(40:37):
that might dwell within it, of course, are also different
from the organisms that live on Earth and might make
their living in a different biochemical way. So, Robert, you
mentioned a paper earlier by Sanjay Lemia at All, the
one that's in astrobiology this year, and that the earlier
thing that we talked about from that paper was the
conclusion that Venus might have had oceans for two billion years,
(40:58):
which you give plenty of time for organisms to possibly
evolved there. But the authors of this paper also talk
about the possibility that there are organisms living in the
clouds of Venus today, just like Grinspoon was talking about.
So the authors note that there are lots of good
reasons to look for life forms in the lower cloud
layer of Venus, which is about forty seven point five
(41:20):
to fifty point five kilometers from the surface. Now, if
you look at this layer of the atmosphere, it's got
very moderate temperatures roughly sixty degrees celsius, which is about
a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit. It's got moderate pressure,
it's like one Earth atmosphere roughly, it's got moderate radiation exposure.
They write that the UV levels in the upper atmosphere
(41:41):
of Venus are probably similar to the UV levels of
the Archaean Earth's surface, where of course we know micro
organisms thrived without being destroyed by radiation. And they mentioned
that it has quote micron sized sulfuric acid aerosols, which
are water droplets containing sulfuric acid dispersed throughout the cloud. Yeah. Really,
when you when you think about it, the the atmosphere
(42:04):
of Venus is kind of it's more it's more like
the surface of Earth in many respects, you know, uh,
or at least what we think without a ground. Yes,
but but really when you when you think of Earth though,
I think of the fact when if you're dealing with
the hard surface of Earth, most of the hard surface
of Earth is a is it is it is a cold,
(42:24):
lightless desert environment. Uh, that is underneath the ocean. That's
a very good point. Maybe you should think about the
atmosphere of Venus being less like the atmosphere of Earth
and more like the waters of the oceans on Earth.
But anyway, all of this that we've been saying so
far is just to the point that it's not impossible
that there could be microorganisms living within the clouds in Venus.
(42:47):
You know, there there are some favorable conditions. Are there
any positive reasons to think that there might be organisms there? Well,
this comes back to the unknown you v absorber that
we talked about earlier, Right, So, there this thing that
we have observed embedded within the Venusian clouds. So let
me think that, yeah, there could be alien bacteria in
the clouds, and and when we were looking at the
(43:10):
unknown UV absorber, this could be it. So NASA has
studied the the unknown UV absorber for some time, and
basically we're talking about an atmospheric anomaly that where we
see UV light being absorbed by something. Right. In general,
Venus is highly reflective. It's a bright planet, like it
shines things back out into space when the sun shines
(43:32):
on it, and the clouds that surround it reflect a
lot of sunlight. But there is this weird, mysterious UV
absorption then creating this contrast within the clouds. They're dark
patches and patterns within the reflective clouds. And the question is, well,
what could that be? Now we can say what it
almost certainly is not. It's not going to be say,
giant atmospheric like manta rays or anything like that. You know,
(43:56):
it's not going to be space whales in the atmosphere
of Venus. Uh. But it could potentially be like clouds
of micro organisms, like colonies of microorganisms kind of you know,
not not to exaggerated too much, but kind of like
the krill of Venus, but with no whales coming around
to scoop them up. No, that's a very very good
point of comparison. Actually, people, in fact, the scientists who
(44:18):
worked on this have compared it to the way you
would look at algal blooms and bodies of water here
on Earth. Uh. That that's a good point of comparison,
because one of the most interesting things about these dark
patches is that they have this kind of shimmering, moving
kind of quality to them. Uh. A quote from Lemo
which he gave in a uh in a press releases,
(44:39):
he said, quote, Venus shows some episodic dark sulfuric rich
patches which contrasts up to thirty in the ultra violet
and muted in longer wavelengths. These patches persist for days,
changing their shape and contrasts continuously and appear to be
scale dependent. So yeah, they're they've got this weird dynamic
(45:00):
quality to them, just like a bloom of organisms in
ocean water might. Now. I know some of you are
probably remembering, well, you said that there are sulphuric acid
clouds up there. How is life thriving up there? What?
One of the points that the Lamait makes is that, well,
if you consider the fact that life on Earth as
we know it can thrive in acidic conditions, that it
can feed on CO two and produce sulphuric acid. Uh,
(45:22):
it all lines up with the environments that we we
we know to exist in the in the atmosphere of Venus. Yeah. Now,
to be clear, we're not saying that this is evidence
that there is definitely, you know, life in the clouds
of Venus. It's just that there's a lot of interesting
evidence that would line up with their being patches of
micro organisms in the clouds of Venus that are making
(45:45):
their living this way. Now, there there are other options too.
It could be chemical, right, maybe you've got patches of
sulfur dioxide and iron chloride absorbing u V in the atmosphere.
But that doesn't necessarily seem to explain everything we observe,
at least not to Laman the co authors. So there
are these light absorbing particles dispersed in clouds, and we
don't know for sure what they are. The idea that
(46:08):
their microorganisms is a very elegant and exciting hypothesis. But
is there any way we could test this to see
if it's true. There is, and we should note we
haven't gotten detested because anything we've sent through has just
has not has not had the the the equipment, or
or it has not spent the necessary amount of time
in the atmosphere. But there is at least one really
(46:32):
awesome proposal for studying the atmosphere of Venus, and it
involves Shatner. No, it involves vamps. Vamps, yes, and by
vamps I don't mean the space vampires of of our
favorite Toby Hooper movie Life Force. Life Force. Yes. Oh,
I thought you were gonna say Planet of the Vampires. No, No,
(46:53):
it doesn't involve those space vampires either, though that is
that is also a good one. Man. I love Planet
of the Vampires. They got the best bass suits, and
they do they're so styled leather space suits. But this
is this is pretty stylish too. I think, if if you'll,
if you'll allow me here to discuss the venous atmospheric
maneuverable platform or VAMP please do Robert, which is a
proposed Northrop Grumman planetary exploration vehicle, and you should. You
(47:18):
used to look up images of this at home. It
looks kind of like a flying wing, which is interesting
considering that Northrop Grumman made the original flying wing aircraft,
the experimental y B thirty five and y B forty nine,
the former with propellers, the ladder with the jets uh
from the from the mid to late nineteen forties. I
don't think I know what those are? What are what
(47:38):
are they like? They essentially imagine a big boomerang as
a nineteen forties bomber, and that's what you have with
the YB thirty five and the YP forty nine. These
are military air yes, yeah, they were designed to be
big bombers, and Northrop Grumman later came back and did
the B two Spirit stealth bomber. So if you've seen
images of the stealth bomber, then you have seen flying
(48:00):
wing aircraft. Yeah. So they really like the idea of
a of a flying wing and in fact, this the
VAMPS concept involves sending one to Venus. So we're talking
about a propeller driven flying wing type of craft that's
solar powered and also semi buoyant. So it's kind of
a blimp plane hybrid, but it's a prop plane in Venus. Yeah, yeah,
(48:25):
it's a prop plane that this Yeah, I love the
idea that that one day we could have a propeller
driven vehicle in the atmosphere of Venus. Uh. It would
have about a hundred and eighty foot or fifty five
wing span. It would fly at a mac speed of
about thirty per second or sixty seven miles per hour,
and that it's desired altitude would would be something about
(48:46):
fifty to seventy kilometers or thirty to forty five miles
above the hard surface of the planet. All right, So
that would put it within access to that nice range
that Lama and colleagues were talking about, right. I should
also point out that this is what's categorized as a
lifting entry atmospheric flight system or a LEAF system, which
has also been proposed for explorations on Mars and Titan Uh.
(49:11):
But he here's here's just a quote from the material
that North of Grumman has on the VAMP project. The
VAMP is quote an aeroshell less hypersonic entry vehicle that
transitions to a semi buoyant, maneuverable solar powered air vehicle
for flight in Venus's atmosphere. So it's an atmospheric rover
and it could last for up to a year in
(49:33):
Venus's atmosphere, just flying through the upper and midcloud layers
equipped with with with the atmospheric sampling equipment, including equipment
that could help us determine if there are signs of
microbial life within the skies of Venus. Loving this for
multiple reasons. Number one, I of course always just love
good space exploration. Uh and and let's look for life.
(49:57):
Come on. But on top of that, since it's a
prop plane, I'm imagining it's got to also have a
surly mechanic with a big wrench sticking out of the overalls.
That's like working on it. Yeah, one would imagine, um
but kind of yellow and sulfur stand right. Yeah. I
do have to point out that it's very early days
still for for VAMP, but it is one of the options.
(50:20):
It's very much on the table for future exploration of Venus.
I like it, man, Yeah, And until we send something
like there, we just we can't say for certain when
it comes to the question of microbial life in the
clouds there. Well, I guess we'll just have to wait
and see. No, wait, we don't have to just wait
and see what we can We can publicly encourage space
exploration come on now, yeah, yeah, Now, earlier on we
(50:42):
were talking about the possibility of life in Venus and
you you want to step further, and you said, well,
what about intelligent life? Now, I know that's kind of
hard to imagine because let's say, according to these predictions
based on the papers we've been talking about today, that
maybe Venus had oceans for two billion years before the
runaway greenhouse effect killed all that we know from experience
(51:04):
in the history of the Earth that two billion years
of access to oceans is not enough time to evolve
complex multicellular organisms with brains and the ability to build
civilizations and all that. But let's just imagine things when
different there For some reason, maybe evolution happened faster. We
don't know. Um, what would things be like if say,
(51:25):
you have an intelligent civilization on a planet, maybe at
the level of technological achievement that human civilization is at
right now, and you realize all your scientists tell you, Okay,
we've got runaway greenhouse effect going on, We've got a
couple hundred years before things get intolerable on the surface
of this planet. What are you gonna do? And I wonder, well,
(51:48):
what could be done? I mean, is that just definitely
the end for the species? Or can you somehow try
to come up with some sustainable way to retreat to
the subterranean realm? Can you get can you get geothermal power?
Were uh, you know, I don't know, making lightbulbs for
you to grow plants down there. I I just like
wonder what's possible? How long can you survive on a
(52:09):
planet that doesn't want to host life on its surface anymore? Oh? Wow?
I mean, well, this is this is a wonderful sci
fi question. And you actually have some some fairly old
works that kind of explored a bit there. The old
William Hope Hodgson book The Night Lands. Oh I haven't
read that. It's um, it's tremendous work of early essentially
(52:30):
post apocalyptic literature in which the earth has grown dark.
It's it's the night Lands now. And there's this place
called the Last Rett Doubt. And so it's like a
pyramid and artificial uh structure created by humans, and it's
powered by hydrothermal power. And this is where essentially the
last remnants of humanity have have have assembled themselves and
(52:55):
tried to sort of hold on to life against the
darkness and the cold. Sounds bleak, Robert. It's pretty bleak.
It's it's it's kind of gorgeous in its own way,
but well, we're talking about a bleak concept. We're talking
about a life form losing its environment and having to
adapt to some sort of new take on life, either
by retreating into the darkness or finding a way to
(53:18):
live up in the clouds. Yeah. And then, of course
this is premised on the idea that if the scientists
of Venusian civilization did come to them and say, look,
we've only got a couple hundred years before, you know,
it's too hot to live on this planet anymore, would
people actually pay attention to them and do anything right?
It would kind of depend on what's the lifespan of
of the Venusian beings here. If it's like humans, then
(53:39):
if when you tell a human all right, we need
to do something because something bad happens in two hundred years,
they're going to say, well, I'm not going to be
alive for that, right. What's what's happening tomorrow, what's happening, uh,
the week after next, what's happening maybe next year. Because
we as a species don't have a great track record
for long term planning, we can maybe think, maybe thinking
(54:02):
to the next generation if we're being generous. Uh So,
I don't think the human model uh leaves much hope
for for what a Venusian life form might have accomplished. Yeah,
you can imagine there was a lot of oh these
you know, runaway greenhouse effect alarmists. Yeah, or two hundred years. Well,
in the next generation, they'll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah,
(54:24):
the technology will come online and they'll just fix everything. Uh.
And while they're off chatting about it, the the oceans
boil away, and then they boil away as well. But
maybe a few are able to crawl down into their crips,
you know, maybe a few were able to make it
up into their cloud cities. I don't know if they
can keep the others from from dragging them out or
dragging them back down. I guess this maybe deserves a
(54:47):
whole episode someday we should come back and examine the
idea of how long could a say, an ecosystem be
maintained purely in a subterranean existence. Could you go on
indefinitely if you had incoming energy sources. Yeah? I love
talking about subterranean life, so that would be a great
topic to discuss. In the meantime, Uh, we thank everybody
(55:09):
for joining us on this trip to Venus and UH,
if you if you enjoy this episode, let us know,
let us know what other planets, so, what other moons
even you would like us to explore in future episodes.
You can check out all of our past episodes that
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership.
That's where we will find links out to our various
social media accounts. And I also want to remind everyone
(55:30):
that if you want to support the show, a great
way to do it is to rate and review us
wherever you have the power to do so. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and
Tarry Harrison. If you want to get in touch with
us directly to suggest a topic for future episodes, uh,
to let us know what you thought about this episode
or any other, or just to say hi, let us
know who you are, where you listen to the show
(55:51):
from what you like about it. You can email us
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