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Venus is volcanically alive, new find shows
- andrewstuart 4y agoThis documentary on Venus is one of the most compelling documentaries I have seen: https://archive.org/details/BBCHorizonCollection512Episodes/BBC+Horizon+-+s1995e06+-+Farewell+Fantastic+Venus.avi https://archive.org/details/BBCHorizonCollection512Episodes/... If you watch it you'll hear the story of Venus plate tectonics and they present it in such a way as to make it one of the most fascinating mysteries of the solar system. It's a documentary worth settling in to for an hour on the couch and enjoying the ride. Anyhow my theory (as a highly qualified astro geologist) is that Venus, whilst being the same size as the Earth does not have plate tectonics because it does not have a moon which pulls the magma around the planet, stirring it up nicely. Instead, Venus surface just cools off and then gets hot again periodically. I hope you didn't buy the astro geologist line.
- defrost 4y agoAny thoughts on the chemistry here? Astronomers may have found a signature of life on Venus Evidence indicates phosphine, a gas associated with living organisms, is present in the habitable region of Venus’ atmosphere. https://news.mit.edu/2020/life-venus-phosphine-0914 https://news.mit.edu/2020/life-venus-phosphine-0914 In particular: MIT scientists have previously shown that if this stinky, poisonous gas were ever detected on a rocky, terrestrial planet, it could only be produced by a living organism there. ( I'm assuming your credentials as an astro biologist are fine... )
- bioemerl 4y agoIf that is what I think it is, I'm pretty sure that isn't considered strong evidence anymore. I don't know exactly why, I just remember there's reason to be skeptical of it and the reason seemed pretty valid. Something to do with the amounts being minuscule, the fact that there are valid explanations outside of biology that could create such a chemical.
- andrewflnr 4y agoIIRC there was some combination of the data actually being kind of patchy, and the signal being consistent with SO2.
- goodcanadian 4y agoI'll have to look for the source, but they did follow-up observations with a different instrument and detected phosphine again. In spite of the wide-spread scepticism, the observation appears to be real. The source of the phosphine can be debated, of course.
- andrewstuart 4y agoBased on my impeccable qualifications as an Astro biologist, it seems unlikely to me there’s life there given the intense heat and crushing pressure but lots of people like to be optimistic about it.
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- zirgs 4y agoThere's a lot more pressure at the bottom of Earth's oceans. The heat and lack of liquid water could be the deal breakers though.
- yieldcrv 4y agosidenote: I'm so glad the field of celestial artist renditions has been rug pulled by AI just always annoyed me that someone was paid to pretend like one of our great telescopes saw something that looked like what the headline says
- defrost 4y agoBoth the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile made the spectral observation inferred to be phosphine (aka 'signature of life') described in the headline and lede.
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- pengaru 4y agoI thought it was generally accepted science that Earth was the only planet having plate tectonics in the entire solar system...
- zamadatix 4y agoA couple of moons in the solar system are thought to as well.
- welder 4y agoThat was recorded in 1995... almost 30 years ago.
- croutonwagon 4y agoso what? We havent sent much of anything to Venus in the past 30 years. There isnt TOO much to add. Parker Solar probe I believe made a few passes in the last couple years that added some terrain mapping and a few headlines about life possibilities based on some spectrographic reads that ended up being debunked. But I dont think much else has been done. All that is to say, something from 30 years ago is probably still pretty relevant for Venus.
- andrewstuart 4y agoNews from Venus is slow.
- whatshisface 4y agoThis was suspected for a long time from the radar surface imaging.
- andsoitis 4y agoI loved watching the movie, Into the Inferno, by Werner Herzog. Netflix carries it. Very very fascinating!
- yesenadam 4y agoHis more recent doco Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020)[0] was, for me, even more fascinating. Also, his 1977 short La Soufrière[1] is set on an island where a volcano is about to erupt. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9203832/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9203832/ [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076741/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076741/ Link to Into the Inferno: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846318/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4846318/
- bmurray7jhu 4y agoUnderlying scientific paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm7735 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm7735
- bioemerl 4y agoFun fact regarding Venus. Unlike the earth which has all sorts of tectonics going on and constant interruptions releasing pressure, on Venus the pressure just builds and builds until the crust can't take it anymore and it just pops and you get volcanic activity unlike anything we could probably even imagine. Then it cools and the pressure starts building yet again. I am 100% confident that should human society settle on the planet we will totally ignore the fact that's going to happen one day and it will be a amazing catastrophe when it finally does occur.
- iampivot 4y agoI'd assume they'd worry more about the daily 450 degrees temperature more. Might be cooler at the poles.
- chongli 4y agoJust to clarify for anyone wondering: that’s 450C or over 850F. And the atmospheric pressure is about 93 bar, which is 4 times the pressure inside the boiler of a steam engine.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago> 93 bar, which is 4 times the pressure inside the boiler of a steam engine Or it is 93x atmospheric pressure, which is what 'bar' indicates...
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y agoI’m one of those people who was ignorant as to what ‘bar’ indicates. Now I know, but there’s nothing wrong with the steam engine example for imagining a comparison.
- adastra22 4y agoPedantic: 1 atm = 1.01325 bar (exactly). They're nearly equivalent units, even more so when you consider that Earth's atmosphere varies by more than 1.325% on a given day. But in a strict sense they're not the same.
- FredPret 4y agoWe could colonize Venus by sending floating cities. The atmosphere is so dense you could float a large (sealed!) steel container high up in the atmosphere where it’s close to a livable temperature and pressure.
- bell-cot 4y agoPossibly. But I suspect that old-fashioned "fake gravity via rotation" cities in space would be cheaper, have fewer catastrophic failure modes, and be easy (relatively) to construct in far more desirable locations.
- vasvir 4y agoArtificial Gravity via rotation is no walk in the the park either. See: https://www.wired.com/story/the-problem-with-spinning-spacecraft/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-problem-with-spinning-spacec... for the long explanation. and the youtube example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ_seXo-Enc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ_seXo-Enc
- ben_w 4y agoNeeding to build buildings the size of football stadiums isn't exactly a significant issue, given we already do that with… football stadiums. The hard part is "in space", where we need to solve both ISRU and getting there cheaply[0] for this to be anything other than vanity projects. [0] Starship, if it works as advertised, is a wagon train to the stars — you need it to get going, but you don't want to do the Oregon trail in a wagon train when you have an airline or an interstate highway at your disposal.
- vasvir 4y agoThe point of my comment was that there are implications for the human body with the rotational artificial gravity. The video sums it up pretty nicely with a live experiment in 6min. Keyword: Coriolis (pseudo)force
- mastazi 4y agohttps://archive.is/3a8GF https://archive.is/3a8GF
- jscipione 4y agoSo then Venus must have a magnetosphere, one step closer to terraforming it. Just add H2 and Sabetier will take care of the rest.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoYou need nickel too, apparently.
- jscipione 4y agoAFAIK Venus has a similar composition to Earth so it should have enough nickel. The rotation rate of 243.025 days per Earth day on Venus is the real problem for it having a magnetosphere.
- mcv 4y agoI've often wondered how important our moon was to Earth developing life. The moon gives us tides which creates areas where sea life can learn to adapt to land, but I've also wondered if the moon had any effect on keeping the Earth's core and mantle hot and fluid. If moonless Venus also has volcanic activity, then clearly our moon is not necessary for that. But if Earth has tectonic activity while Venus doesn't, then why that difference? I would have expected tectonic and volcanic activity to go hand in had, but clearly that's not necessarily the case.
- azernik 4y agoThe difference isn't active tectonics vs not. It's plate tectonics vs stagnant lid tectonics. The presence of water at many fault lines is essential to allowing plates to stay separate and move relative to each other. The subduction and divergence is then essential to gas exchange between atmosphere and mantle that gives the system stabilizing inertia. It's unclear what came first on Venus, but it's pretty clear that high temperature, boiling water (a greenhouse gas!), and stagnant lid tectonics all provided positive feedback to each other, with the boiling off of water probably kicking the process into high gear.
- dalyons 4y agoCan you expand on the water at fault lines thing? Sounds interesting
- azernik 4y agoSilica's melting point is lowered when mixed with water, so oceanic faults can have actual molten magma lubricating and weakening the fault line. Otherwise, you'd have the stronger malleable solid mantle at the joint, and lose much more energy whenever the fault tried to move. Having at least some faults that slippery is necessary to keep the system from locking up.
- dalyons 4y agolate but thank you! That is indeed super interesting
- matrix12 4y agoVenus also rotates the wrong way, and is slowing down.