4 ms·

So I had two thoughts while reading it: Is it possible that in the 3 billion years that it had liquid water, Venus evolved advanced life that managed to trigge

So I had two thoughts while reading it: Is it possible that in the 3 billion years that it had liquid water, Venus evolved advanced life that managed to trigger runaway greenhouse warming? Secondly, is Venus’s atmosphere a worst case scenario for global warming here or is there something that would prevent it happening?

albemuth 7y ago
they would have just gone to Earth
- gnulinux 7y ago
  How do you know? Can we go to Mars today? What if earth gets destroyed before we can emigrate to Mars? (assume that Mars is a clone of earth i.e. the same conditions we have in Earth) Also it's possible earth wasn't suitable for Venisian life back then.
  - theseadroid 7y ago
    Say if we suddenly realize earth is going to be unsuitable for all life forms in a year. What would we do? I would fire as many rockets as possible to Mars, carrying all kind of life forms on earth, and hope a few of them will survive and possibly evolve to Mars' environment.
    - jlarocco 7y ago
      That's easy to say, but how would you actually do it? To use myself as a counterexample, I don't see the point, and wouldn't be inclined to help.
    - emiliobumachar 7y ago
      Even all-out nuclear war would leave the Earth far more habitable than Mars. We'd need to come up with quite the feat to extinguish life here, think steering a Moon-sized asteroid.
    - gnulinux 7y ago
      We do know at this rate earth will be unsuitable for human life in the future and we do almost nothing about. If it were just next year, maybe we would do more about it. But my point is we can't do much since we don't have the technology to go to Mars. Emigrating to Mars is an unsolved problem and it can remain unsolved before we wreck the planet.
  - jerf 7y ago
    Because the level of destruction imposed on Venus implies a degree of power a great deal beyond what we have now. Venus has 93 times the atmosphere of Earth. Wrecking Earth's atmosphere to that extent on a short time frame due to intelligent life's activity isn't just burning a tons of hydrocarbons, it would be going out to the Solar System and pulling in mass in quantity to be dropped in to the atmosphere. By the time they got there they ought to have the capacity to do a lot of other things too. It isn't particularly plausible that life destroyed Venus. It's especially not particularly plausible that it just so happens that life did it to Venus using exactly what happens to be a fashionable thing to talk about here on Earth at this exact time.
    - stcredzero 7y ago
      They wouldn't have had to wreck their atmosphere to that extent so quickly. What if they wrecked their atmosphere more slowly, then experienced a slow global collapse of civilization due to the climate change? There could have been a "phase change" event where they retained technology, but quickly lost the ability to engage in the magnitude of project required to save their planet. "We of Souvenusia do not trust the people of Norvenusia to act in good faith in the sun-shield project!" Venusian civilization devolves into global war. Then the climate has warmed up to the point, where their wartime activities trigger a global methane clathrate catastrophe. It's especially not particularly plausible that it just so happens that life did it to Venus using exactly what happens to be a fashionable thing to talk about here on Earth at this exact time. But it could make for a timely, marketable, ripping good novel!
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    We're trying. I think these things are path dependent. There's not a particularly good, short-term, economic reason to go to Mars and build it up enough to be self-sustaining. However long term, it probably does improve our civilization's and species' (and perhaps life's) chance at survival. Unfortunately, we're not terribly good at long-term decision making. It could very well be that there was a window when the hypothetical Venusian civilization had the capacity to leave en masse to Earth but by the time the matter had become pressing enough, it was too late. For instance, it could be that advanced geoengineering techniques were able to hold off the effects of warming for thousands or tens of thousands of years which reduced the urgency leaving Venus, but over time the cost to maintain such systems became much too expensive and then some crisis (global war?) destroyed the geoengineering scheme, quickly heating Venus and destroying the advanced technological civilization and/or putting it into terminal decline. Point is you have to do such things when you have the chance, not necessarily when it seems most pressing. As Randall Monroe has said, "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." https://xkcd.com/893/ https://xkcd.com/893/ We went to the Moon ~50 years ago and soon stopped. It was somewhat of a historical accident that we went at all. It's not obvious that we will return in the future (even those efforts to go to the Moon or Mars face voices calling on even private efforts to be stopped). The future has not been written, and we don't know that it'll end up in the positive direction. But we, today, have the power to try.
- DennisP 7y ago
  Or just denied that it was a problem until it was too late to migrate to Earth before their civilization crashed.
- WaxProlix 7y ago
  Maybe they did :hmm:
gdubs 7y ago
I've often wondered the same thing! A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult. Not at all my area, but it doesn't seem like we can actually answer that question you posed. It's fascinating. Carl Sagan's COSMOS might be the first time I'd ever heard about Global Warming, and he explained how it was through the study of Venus that we really began to understand it.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult. Now imagine detecting one, when the entire planet is covered in a 90 bar atmosphere with sulphuric acid clouds. I'll update my downer Sci-fi novel premise. Humanity makes its first Alcubierre drive warp ship. On its test run, something goes wrong, and the ship is shifted by a vast amount in time-space. The ship arrives at an unfamiliar, abandoned star system, with a different sized Sun, vast amounts of orbital construction, but an eerily similar though slightly different configuration of planets. Over time, the test pilot crew realizes that they were merely in stasis and "arrived" back in the Solar System far in the future, and that the 2nd Venus-like planet is actually the Earth.
  - sprucely 7y ago
    I'll buy that book when you write it.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    That's a little like Planet Of the Apes where they find out that they are actually on Earth.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult. Depends on how you define advanced. Anything in geostationary orbit is basically there for the life of the solar system.
DennisP 7y ago
According to James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren, Venus-level warming is far beyond anything we could achieve on Earth. Given our greater distance from the sun we don't have enough carbon to pull it off. (The worst we could do is still enough to destroy us, though.)
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  Does that imply that an advanced enough Venusian life form could have triggered global warming there more easily?
  - DennisP 7y ago
    Seems reasonable. Interesting thought.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Maybe we’ll find ruins.
mirimir 7y ago
I see no reason why intelligent life with high technology could not have developed on Venus. Say, several hundred million years ago. And perhaps they triggered runaway greenhouse warming, which vaporized the oceans. And so perhaps it was the loss of the oceans that ended plate tectonics, not the other way around. I doubt that runaway greenhouse warming could get so extreme for Earth. I recall reading that solar input is enough lower here. Also, at million-year scales, I gather that high CO2 levels increase weathering, and drive carbonate deposition in the oceans.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > I see no reason why intelligent life with high technology could not have developed on Venus. Say, several hundred million years ago. And perhaps they triggered runaway greenhouse warming, which vaporized the oceans. And so perhaps it was the loss of the oceans that ended plate tectonics, not the other way around. The only way that thought experiment could make sense is if they had the technology to do that, but not the technology to escape Venus and get to Earth. Think about it; several hundred million years ago, Earth was habitable; maybe not for modern humans (but I bet we could do it - though uncomfortably), but definitely life existed in some form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth So there was liquid water, and the Earth wasn't a Dante-esque hellscape of volcanos and lava, etc. It was probably much warmer and more humid, but overall not crazy to live on. So if your situation was dire enough, and you had the technology to escape the planet (which you'd almost have to, if you had the energy resources to cause your own global warming and demise scenario) - wouldn't you at least try? So either they tried and failed in some manner (never reaching Earth), or they succeeded (meaning?) or something in between. Even if they didn't try, with the level of technology, wouldn't they at least have left something behind in the solar system that we'd recognised as created by intelligent life long ago? Some artifact somewhere? Maybe they did, and we haven't found it (space is big - the solar system is a big place); but I'd almost expect there'd be something orbiting Venus that was artificial (though maybe again, we can't detect it from here - too small, likely inactive, etc). I guess a good question would be, if you were on Venus (or even in Venusian orbit) - could you detect Earth's satellites currently orbiting Earth? Could you detect a singular one (last of its kind) in a degraded, virtually inert state? Again, I don't know. It's a bit fascinating to think about; part of me wants to say "we should be able/have found something by now" if such a scenario were real - but at the same time, I can think of reasons why we haven't or can't...

albemuth 7y ago

they would have just gone to Earth

gnulinux 7y ago
How do you know? Can we go to Mars today? What if earth gets destroyed before we can emigrate to Mars? (assume that Mars is a clone of earth i.e. the same conditions we have in Earth) Also it's possible earth wasn't suitable for Venisian life back then.
- theseadroid 7y ago
  Say if we suddenly realize earth is going to be unsuitable for all life forms in a year. What would we do? I would fire as many rockets as possible to Mars, carrying all kind of life forms on earth, and hope a few of them will survive and possibly evolve to Mars' environment.
  - jlarocco 7y ago
    That's easy to say, but how would you actually do it? To use myself as a counterexample, I don't see the point, and wouldn't be inclined to help.
  - emiliobumachar 7y ago
    Even all-out nuclear war would leave the Earth far more habitable than Mars. We'd need to come up with quite the feat to extinguish life here, think steering a Moon-sized asteroid.
  - gnulinux 7y ago
    We do know at this rate earth will be unsuitable for human life in the future and we do almost nothing about. If it were just next year, maybe we would do more about it. But my point is we can't do much since we don't have the technology to go to Mars. Emigrating to Mars is an unsolved problem and it can remain unsolved before we wreck the planet.
- jerf 7y ago
  Because the level of destruction imposed on Venus implies a degree of power a great deal beyond what we have now. Venus has 93 times the atmosphere of Earth. Wrecking Earth's atmosphere to that extent on a short time frame due to intelligent life's activity isn't just burning a tons of hydrocarbons, it would be going out to the Solar System and pulling in mass in quantity to be dropped in to the atmosphere. By the time they got there they ought to have the capacity to do a lot of other things too. It isn't particularly plausible that life destroyed Venus. It's especially not particularly plausible that it just so happens that life did it to Venus using exactly what happens to be a fashionable thing to talk about here on Earth at this exact time.
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    They wouldn't have had to wreck their atmosphere to that extent so quickly. What if they wrecked their atmosphere more slowly, then experienced a slow global collapse of civilization due to the climate change? There could have been a "phase change" event where they retained technology, but quickly lost the ability to engage in the magnitude of project required to save their planet. "We of Souvenusia do not trust the people of Norvenusia to act in good faith in the sun-shield project!" Venusian civilization devolves into global war. Then the climate has warmed up to the point, where their wartime activities trigger a global methane clathrate catastrophe. It's especially not particularly plausible that it just so happens that life did it to Venus using exactly what happens to be a fashionable thing to talk about here on Earth at this exact time. But it could make for a timely, marketable, ripping good novel!
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  We're trying. I think these things are path dependent. There's not a particularly good, short-term, economic reason to go to Mars and build it up enough to be self-sustaining. However long term, it probably does improve our civilization's and species' (and perhaps life's) chance at survival. Unfortunately, we're not terribly good at long-term decision making. It could very well be that there was a window when the hypothetical Venusian civilization had the capacity to leave en masse to Earth but by the time the matter had become pressing enough, it was too late. For instance, it could be that advanced geoengineering techniques were able to hold off the effects of warming for thousands or tens of thousands of years which reduced the urgency leaving Venus, but over time the cost to maintain such systems became much too expensive and then some crisis (global war?) destroyed the geoengineering scheme, quickly heating Venus and destroying the advanced technological civilization and/or putting it into terminal decline. Point is you have to do such things when you have the chance, not necessarily when it seems most pressing. As Randall Monroe has said, "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." https://xkcd.com/893/ https://xkcd.com/893/ We went to the Moon ~50 years ago and soon stopped. It was somewhat of a historical accident that we went at all. It's not obvious that we will return in the future (even those efforts to go to the Moon or Mars face voices calling on even private efforts to be stopped). The future has not been written, and we don't know that it'll end up in the positive direction. But we, today, have the power to try.
DennisP 7y ago
Or just denied that it was a problem until it was too late to migrate to Earth before their civilization crashed.
WaxProlix 7y ago
Maybe they did :hmm:

gdubs 7y ago

I've often wondered the same thing! A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult. Not at all my area, but it doesn't seem like we can actually answer that question you posed. It's fascinating. Carl Sagan's COSMOS might be the first time I'd ever heard about Global Warming, and he explained how it was through the study of Venus that we really began to understand it.

stcredzero 7y ago
A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult. Now imagine detecting one, when the entire planet is covered in a 90 bar atmosphere with sulphuric acid clouds. I'll update my downer Sci-fi novel premise. Humanity makes its first Alcubierre drive warp ship. On its test run, something goes wrong, and the ship is shifted by a vast amount in time-space. The ship arrives at an unfamiliar, abandoned star system, with a different sized Sun, vast amounts of orbital construction, but an eerily similar though slightly different configuration of planets. Over time, the test pilot crew realizes that they were merely in stasis and "arrived" back in the Solar System far in the future, and that the 2nd Venus-like planet is actually the Earth.
- sprucely 7y ago
  I'll buy that book when you write it.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  That's a little like Planet Of the Apes where they find out that they are actually on Earth.
Dylan16807 7y ago
> A little while back two NASA scientists published a paper on how you would detect the existence of a previous advanced society on Earth. Apparently, over a long time scale it's actually fairly difficult. Depends on how you define advanced. Anything in geostationary orbit is basically there for the life of the solar system.

DennisP 7y ago

According to James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren, Venus-level warming is far beyond anything we could achieve on Earth. Given our greater distance from the sun we don't have enough carbon to pull it off. (The worst we could do is still enough to destroy us, though.)

stronglikedan 7y ago
Does that imply that an advanced enough Venusian life form could have triggered global warming there more easily?
- DennisP 7y ago
  Seems reasonable. Interesting thought.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Maybe we’ll find ruins.

mirimir 7y ago

I see no reason why intelligent life with high technology could not have developed on Venus. Say, several hundred million years ago. And perhaps they triggered runaway greenhouse warming, which vaporized the oceans. And so perhaps it was the loss of the oceans that ended plate tectonics, not the other way around. I doubt that runaway greenhouse warming could get so extreme for Earth. I recall reading that solar input is enough lower here. Also, at million-year scales, I gather that high CO2 levels increase weathering, and drive carbonate deposition in the oceans.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cr0sh 7y ago
> I see no reason why intelligent life with high technology could not have developed on Venus. Say, several hundred million years ago. And perhaps they triggered runaway greenhouse warming, which vaporized the oceans. And so perhaps it was the loss of the oceans that ended plate tectonics, not the other way around. The only way that thought experiment could make sense is if they had the technology to do that, but not the technology to escape Venus and get to Earth. Think about it; several hundred million years ago, Earth was habitable; maybe not for modern humans (but I bet we could do it - though uncomfortably), but definitely life existed in some form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth So there was liquid water, and the Earth wasn't a Dante-esque hellscape of volcanos and lava, etc. It was probably much warmer and more humid, but overall not crazy to live on. So if your situation was dire enough, and you had the technology to escape the planet (which you'd almost have to, if you had the energy resources to cause your own global warming and demise scenario) - wouldn't you at least try? So either they tried and failed in some manner (never reaching Earth), or they succeeded (meaning?) or something in between. Even if they didn't try, with the level of technology, wouldn't they at least have left something behind in the solar system that we'd recognised as created by intelligent life long ago? Some artifact somewhere? Maybe they did, and we haven't found it (space is big - the solar system is a big place); but I'd almost expect there'd be something orbiting Venus that was artificial (though maybe again, we can't detect it from here - too small, likely inactive, etc). I guess a good question would be, if you were on Venus (or even in Venusian orbit) - could you detect Earth's satellites currently orbiting Earth? Could you detect a singular one (last of its kind) in a degraded, virtually inert state? Again, I don't know. It's a bit fascinating to think about; part of me wants to say "we should be able/have found something by now" if such a scenario were real - but at the same time, I can think of reasons why we haven't or can't...