Venus: Recent Discoveries and Surprises - Video Compilation

hello wonderful person this is anton and in this video we're going to be talking about venus and a new idea coming out of godric institute for space sciences that suggests that it seems that venus probably had water and habitable conditions for a very long time and it also seems that these conditions only disappeared a few hundred million years ago in other words it's possible that venus was habitable for billions of years so for a very long time most scientists have been kind of speculating that it wasn't just earth that became habitable but that it was also mars and of course venus all three planets very likely were somewhat similar to each other and in some sense may have even had very similar initial conditions for is well essentially life we know for example that mars definitely had a notion and we even see very obvious signs of shoreline um on the surface of mars including even signs of a mega tsunami that happened here but at the same time back in the late 70s when the soviets and the russians launched their mission to venus specifically the pioneer missions and also the venera missions this right here is one of the pioneer probes they realized that the surface of venus and more specifically the middle part of the atmosphere had quite a lot of water vapor and at the same time they also realized that venus despite being such a different planet today was very likely very earth-like at some point in history and there are quite a lot of studies out there that do analyze the water vapor presence on venus in a lot more detail and also talk about venus being a lot more earth-like in the past and most likely having a global ocean as well but this particular idea that was recently presented in the golder institute for space science investigates how long this ocean may have lasted and also tries to identify when this ocean disappeared now there is no actual paper out yet it's only based on the presentation and the paper will come out eventually but here the scientists used several simulations specifically five very specific unique simulations to try to identify how long the ocean on the surface of venus would last and most importantly discover when it may have disappeared and to their surprise and let's actually maybe try to create a notion here as well by modifying certain parameters of this venus they discovered that it's possible that ocean here only disappeared about 700 million years ago and more specifically approximately 715 million years ago when something major occurred something so dramatic and so catastrophic that it eventually released all of the carbon dioxide that was hiding inside of the planet and um following the so-called runaway greenhouse effect the entire atmosphere became extremely saturated in co2 very very hot and we got the planet we have today which is the object you see right here and extremely hot very highly pressurized planet that um doesn't really have any capability of supporting organic life the temperatures here are 450 to 500 degrees celsius and the pressures are around 90 to 94 atmospheres in other words about 90 to 94 times more than on the surface of our planet and these conditions were very likely created by this so-called runaway greenhouse gas effect now what exactly happened here we don't really know but we do have some ideas so um the way that it works at least right now for earth on our beautiful planet the co2 and a lot of other greenhouse gases are more or less controllers in other words they're reduced by something and here on earth a lot of the co2 gas and actually most of the co2 gas is actually not in the atmosphere it's inside ground it's basically deposited inside the rock and has been there for a very long time the vast majority of co2 is literally underneath us and the thing is there is a way for it to be released usually through volcanic eruptions and you can actually check out some of the older videos specifically the one that might be above my head right now that does talk about the amount of co2 inside earth but just to give you a summary if you were to release all of it into the atmosphere the pressures here would be pretty much even higher than on venus and the temperatures would be dramatically higher as well close to about 1000 degrees celsius and so all of the co2 is stored there and only major volcanic eruptions such as for example the eruptions of the siberian traps that occurred in siberia around 250 million years ago and here the war trap simply means steps which refer to the very unusual formation that you can see in this picture right here from india or in this picture here all of these were formed by volcanic traps now siberian traps that were tremendously large and located in this area right here although let me show you on the map instead so this right here these traps these volcanoes were so large and so powerful that um they caused an actual extinction one of the biggest extinctions ever and today we believe that all major extinctions can be correlated um or associated with some kind of a major volcanic eruption and even the one that affected dinosaurs 65 million years ago happened around the time of a very major eruption in india known as the dakon traps the location for which is right here in purple so this extremely large eruption happened around the same time as the passing of dinosaurs which means that many scientists for a longest time argued that it's probably the volcanoes that killed them not the actual asteroid but today we believe that it's very likely that it did start with the asteroid but the volcanic eruption in india basically finished the job so the volcanic eruptions of this proportion are usually enough to start releasing a tremendous amount of gases into the atmosphere and more specifically the co2 gas and if such volcanic eruption releases a very large amount of co2 it can suddenly and quite dramatically change the entire face of a planet and so the scientists behind this presentation and behind the study believe that something like this must have happened on venus now we don't really know what caused it we don't really know exactly how old it started but it's possible that roughly around 750 million years ago something occurred on venus and here we can only speculate what it was but there is a suggestion that maybe it was actually a crash this isn't really coming from this particular study but it has been investigated by other scientists and this crash which may have occurred around 750 million years ago then initiated a kind of a chain reaction following the collision with whatever it was or possibly some other catastrophic event pretty much all of the volcanoes or all major volcanoes on venus kind of activated they started releasing a large amount of atmospheric gases and um we believe that this may have led to the end of venus as a habitable planet now it doesn't have to be a crash to cause this it could actually be just the volcanoes themselves that suddenly triggered all at the same time but we don't really know what can cause such a tremendously powerful eruption to literally annihilate the entire planet i guess the biggest worry here is that it could happen on earth one day now um there are several papers investigating the correlation between major volcanic eruptions and potential crashes so um like i mentioned the indian deccan trap volcanoes did occur around the same time as the um catastrophic asteroid that started the demise of dinosaurs and so there are papers suggesting that by experiencing this collision earth's volcanoes on the opposite side of the planet literally triggered and started releasing a large amount of gas that then added a lot of various materials to the atmosphere that then changed climate and caused the dinosaurs to completely die out and so we're not sure if this is what happened on venus but what we're certain about is that it definitely changed dramatically this change if it did occur about 750 million years ago was quite sudden and quite i guess in some sense unexpected but what's more interesting here is that prior to this change venus was very likely a very earth-like planet the average temperature here would not be really as low as earth but it would be a relatively comfortable maybe 20 to possibly 50 degrees celsius and so it's quite possible that prior to this unusual catastrophe venus temperature was in the range of about 20 to 50 degrees celsius and the conditions could have been very similar to earth although a little bit hotter because venus is closer to the sun and in the simulations that they ran for this study they've even tried to simulate a planet where it was literally covered in water um approximately 158 meters on average in depth and the simulation where there was very little water and all of them had very similar results with the sudden changes and conditions around 700 million years ago and in all of those situations you get pretty much the same result eventually the water disappears and venus then sort of turns into this very inhospitable planet that it is today with extremely hot temperatures and pressures and although the scientists behind this study didn't really go into the details of how they think it happened they do speculate that it probably has something to do with magma on the inside not so much as the actual asteroid collision so in other words it's basically anyone's guess what happened until we actually go to venus and try to investigate some of the details by landing here and by somehow trying to survive long enough to study the actual rock we're not going to be able to answer these questions but why is this important well it's important for one reason if sometime long time ago venus looked like this and now it sort of looks like this and is basically no longer capable of sustaining life what went wrong how do we avoid this from having this here on earth because venus is so similar to earth in many different ways just a little bit smaller we definitely want to avoid this and trying to understand what happened here and to prevent this sudden release of co2 and to keep planet like this is very important for the survival of life on our planet and so this study is actually very important if this was an asteroid impact we have to try to understand how to prevent large asteroids from hitting our planet in the future if this was some kind of um solidification of magma on the inside that we don't really even know how to prevent right now we then need to find other ways of managing this if it actually happens in the future and since of all the terrestrial planets in our solar system really just one is capable of hosting human life we need to make sure that we maintain it this way and we need to understand other planets and what actually went wrong here to try to prevent this from happening to our planet and at the same time this study may also help us understand if life did exist on venus and possibly maybe it even somehow transferred to earth afterwards so all of these questions will one day be answered but for now we just need to send more probes and study a little bit more of both venus and mars to try to understand what actually happened to both of these planets hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to be talking about the hottest planet in the solar system venus but more specifically we're going to discuss the possibility of life here especially based on some of the more recent studies so imagine an object that is so extremely hot acidic and filled with so much pressure that even the toughest soviet probe only survived here for like two hours max as a matter of fact that probe was able to take a picture that sort of looks like this after processing so this is venus the hell of the solar system how could we talk about life possibly existing here well um when the soviets discovered that the temperatures and pressures and the acidity here was just too extreme they more or less abandoned further missions they realized that no life will probably be found here but in 1963 carl sagan wrote a very interesting paper proposing that even though on the surface of venus there might be no life we could potentially find something in venusian atmosphere and he even identified a region in the venusian atmosphere that is currently referred to as the habitable zone of venus this habitable zone is anywhere between 47 to about 70 kilometers of altitude and essentially it's the region where we can technically expect temperatures and pressures very similar to those right here on earth anywhere between -20 to about 65 degrees celsius with pressures of about one atmospheric pressure and the only problem being well a lot of acid acidic clouds more specifically but that never really stopped some of the bacteria here on earth as a matter of fact in one of the recent videos i talked about the extreme waters and lakes of the lowe's volcano which have some of the highest acidity possible actually it's basically ph of zero and very high temperatures and also a lot of acidity and many lakes here do have life some don't but many do and this suggests that some of the more extreme bacteria could technically survive in those upper layers of venusian atmosphere and the thing is there are a lot of signs pointing at some unusual strange activity in the venusian atmosphere more specifically we have recently discovered what seems to be climatic changes or basically something equivalent to i guess seasons of venusian atmosphere where the temperature and also most importantly these unusual patches do change in size depending on the year and today many scientists actually think that the unusual dark patches that have been observed inside the atmosphere or the so-called dark uv absorbers as they're also known could may be caused by some sort of a bacterial organism that is absorbing the uv light and is using it for its life purposes in other words there is currently a lot of scientists believing that venusian life could actually exist in the upper atmosphere now this would not really be a surprise because we do have bacteria living in our atmosphere and even upper atmosphere while at the same time even though technically venus currently looks like this this is a composite shot taken by the venera emissions back in the 70s once upon a time we think venus looked very much like earth it had oceans it had very likely a lot of atmosphere possibly oxygen and for all we know we may have had life and if some of that life survived it could now be thriving in the venusian apparatus here and so the most recent study assumed that there could be life here and decided to investigate if it can survive other dangers to life phenomena such as for example the cosmic rays that strike earth and of course venus from every single direction so we know that cosmic rays and radiation can easily destroy life and because it comes not just from the sun but also from the actual space around us it could destroy any life that is trying to survive in venusian atmosphere if there's a lot of radiation there but because venus has such a thick atmosphere and because it's so close to the sun it generates this unusual phenomenon known as the induced magnetosphere sort of by accident basically when the solar wind because of its power close to the sun strikes venusian thick atmosphere it creates charged particles which then cause venus to have a little bit of magnetosphere but possibly enough to protect some of the life if it exists in the atmosphere and so the scientists behind this recent paper that you can find in the description below decided to investigate assuming that the life is in the atmosphere would it survive the radiation and they decided to look at bacterium such as this bacteria right here which survives in really extreme environments this bacteria is known as showanella on a densest and it's very interesting to science because it doesn't seem to need oxygen or a lot of other materials to survive it can thrive in metallic or sulfur-rich environments and it can also even help us extract some of the metals if we ever decide to go and explore other worlds but the most interesting part about it here is that it could easily survive in the conditions of the so-called habitable zone in venusian atmosphere the only other danger to this bacteria would be radiation coming from cosmic rays and if it can technically survive the cosmic rays there will be almost no reason for us to assume that something in the northern atmosphere could destroy bacterial life and by analyzing various conditions and various doses of radiation the scientists behind this paper basically came to a conclusion that there is not enough radiation in the venusian habitable zone to harm chonella on a densest in other words most bacteria similar to this one would easily survive in the nutrient atmosphere and despite acidic clouds would very likely thrive in those conditions there's a lot of material there there's a lot of sulfur there's a lot of what would be equivalent to bacterial food and any bacteria that's present in the atmosphere of venus could definitely adapt to these conditions and even use the uv light coming from the sun for its own purposes which is maybe what we're observing with these strange unexplained uv dark patches that scientists have been witnessing in the last few years so far there's really no explanation no chemical explanation for what we're observing but many scientists believe that maybe a bacterial colony of an extremely large size could explain what we're seeing essentially venusian life but not on a surface in the clouds and interestingly the venera missions and also the magellan and pioneer missions that came to venus roughly around 40 years ago discovered a lot of interesting materials here that are used by life here on earth for example the magellan mission discovered different types of carbonyl sulfides we also discovered a lot of hydrogen sulfides sulfur dioxide and all these materials are used here on earth by life to produce energy and so there's no reason for us to believe that venus is incapable of also hosting life but slightly different from life on earth now unfortunately no major mission is really being planned to venus anytime soon and the only currently functioning probe around venus is the japanese akatsuki that is currently mapping and exploring the venusian atmosphere in a little bit more detail it's also trying to discover any kind of sign of lightning for example and hasn't really seen anything it seems like there's no lightning on venus but anyway that's something we'll talk about in some of the future videos what is important though is that we don't have any missions planned to try to discover if what we're seeing on venus is life because there might be alien life very close to earth the closest planet to venus but currently we're really just planning missions to mars and not venus although interestingly last year nasa awarded about 120 thousand dollars to one of the teams to try to develop something similar to what you see on a screen a kind of an autonomous flying drone that would stay in the atmosphere and try to discover something alive but the thing is this is still in really early planning stages so it would probably be at least a decade before we develop anything equivalent to an actual mission for now we only have akatsuki and its beautiful pictures but anyway what's important from all of these studies is that there are clear signs that something is going on in the atmosphere of venus and all these signs point at bacterial life unusual life that seems to affect the atmospheric conditions on venus and also seem to visually change the appearance and if we're lucky in the next few years we might discover what exactly is causing this but until then that is all i wanted to mention in this video let's finish this video on this beautiful image of so-called mad mons the eight kilometer high volcano the image for which was created by the magellan mission many decades ago hello wonderful person this is anton and in this video we're going to imagine going back in time and taking a look at our own solar system looking at what it may have looked like approximately 3.8 to 3.7 billion years ago some planets will actually be quite similar but some will really surprise you depending on how many videos you've watched on the channel you may actually already know what we're going to talk about there's a video i made a few years ago where i actually looked at each individual planet as it was uh several billion years ago and some planets actually haven't really changed that much as a matter of fact for the most part the gas giants and the ice giants here will still look kind of similar maybe slightly different but not by much and one of the reasons i picked this specific date is because approximately 3.8 billion years ago was when the period uh known as late heavy bombardment was about to come to an end that's a period when there were quite a lot of various leftover rocks left in our solar system that started colliding with pretty much everything in the solar system these were the leftovers after the creation of the solar system itself for gas giants though as you can probably see it doesn't really affect them that much in terms of at least visual appearance a lot of these rocks will create a lot of energy when they collide with for example jupiter but the appearance of the planet itself will not change very much and so uh jupiter saturn neptune and uranus very likely haven't really changed dramatically but the terrestrial planets did change quite a lot as a matter of fact now for example mercury is a good example of seeing what it may have been like because the craters on mercury haven't really actually dissipated that much and so for the most part it very likely looked something like this essentially it was a level world covered with quite a lot of remnants of collisions and was very likely even hotter than it is today and possibly had some liquid water that evaporated pretty quickly now um for the most part that's probably the most sort of exciting time for mercury because it had quite a lot of active things going on on the surface and it may have even had a slightly uh thicker atmosphere because of all of the collisions and all the stuff that was released because of those collisions but overall because mercury is so small in comparison to other planets and also because it doesn't have much gravity um as soon as it cooled down and as soon as things started to settle it essentially evaporated a lot of the atmosphere disappeared a lot of water will disappear as well and pretty much nothing was left except for the actual signs of this really dramatic past that mercury experienced now the other three planets that we're going to talk about were most likely completely different from what they are today let's start with uh the more obvious one our home planet earth so we actually are going to erase this version of earth and put a completely new earth that we're also going to terraform giving it a little bit of atmosphere and more hospitable conditions and for the most part this is most likely what earth looked like back then we don't really know about the actual continents because it's very difficult to study what happened about 3.8 billion years ago in terms of the actual shape of the continent but the planet was buried on the surface and had quite a lot of different bacterial life in the oceans at some point as i mentioned on the previous videos planet was also purple in color because the bacteria inside the oceans most likely changed the color of water to purple and later on it also became a nice bowl um for several hundred millions of years so it was actually completely white but right after the so-called late heavy bombardment it's most likely that the earth will look kind of like this as a matter of fact it was a little bit less earth-like than it is today uh it was probably less hospitable it most likely had um very little oxygen on the surface and if you were to take most of the life from earth today and try to put it there most of it would not actually survive it was not a very hospitable place just yet the oceans though were actually really really great places to have life kick-start but also to have life evolve pretty quickly now how about mars now today we know that mars actually had a very large ocean as well and it's very likely that in that particular period of time mars was actually a lot more earth-like than earth itself and it's very likely that the atmosphere here was um pretty thick enough to support liquid water we actually do see the signs of very large ocean in in the region that you see right here and um we also detect uh quite a lot of leftover water coming off the actual surface even today as you know already we've also discovered water underneath the surface of mars so this was a very hospitable place and which is actually why a lot of scientists believe that maybe just maybe life also started here and maybe even transferred to earth later on this is the theory known as panspermia but it hasn't really been proven yet and um unfortunately there is no way for us to prove it until we find an asteroid that shows signs of life somewhere out there in space now um interestingly mars was probably the most earth-like planet in the region as a matter of fact it was most hospitable to life 3.8 billion years ago and would actually be a very great planet to live on if it wasn't so uh small the lack of gravity here and also the lack of the actual metal at the core meant that mars lost its magnetosphere pretty quickly and pretty much everything here water and atmosphere and all of the air slowly escaped making mars the dead planet that it is today at least on the surface it might actually have life inside but we haven't really been able to discover anything yet but we might one day and lastly let's talk about venus now venus is also an extremely exciting place and i'm going to try to transform it right now just so you can actually see what's happening here underneath the cloud layer that's hiding the actual surface now it's very difficult for us to estimate how much water venus actually had but we're almost certain that venus 2 was a very earth-like planet and let's try to change it right now by putting just the right amount of water here and giving it just the right amount of atmosphere so this is very likely what venus may have actually looked like just like mars it most likely had quite a lot of liquid water on the surface it also possibly had enough sort of temperature and atmosphere to support not just liquid water but actual life and for all we know just like mars it may have had some kind of life but because of the very slow rotational venus and because it didn't really have a very active geologically speaking surface in other words it didn't really have any plate tectonics or a way for it to continuously fix carbon dioxide and keep it inside the actual planet and at the same time circulate any kind of excess of co2 eventually all of the co2 started to actually come out and we think that venus just like earth experienced quite a lot of volcanic eruptions that ended up releasing so much co2 over time that was never actually fixed into the soil again creating the venus that we know today so over time it basically started to acquire more and more atmosphere and eventually had so much that water evaporated the entire planet got really really hot and became what it is today it became this dry super hot world filled with co2 that was released from inside the surface now um venus is actually an excellent lesson for us as well because earth turns out has way more co2 than venus did and so if one day earth actually loses its ability to fix co2 and to keep it inside the soil and if one day co2 starts coming out to the surface as well earth is actually going to become even worse than venus it's going to become so hot that it's probably going to be glowing kind of like this and so in a sense venus is actually quite a good warning for us because it does show us what happens when co2 um goes out of control and creates this tremendously hot and tremendously inhospitable object now for the most part that's kind of all i wanted to show you in this video i wanted to explore the idea of early solar system and show you what all of these terrestrial planets used to be like about 3.8 to 3.7 billion years ago hello wonderful person this is anton and in this video we're going to be talking about our beautiful neighbor venus this is what it kind of looks like in space engine and it sort of represents what it really looks like in real life as well today we'll talk about the discovery coming from venus that suggests that venus has really interesting climate and also climatic changes that we really didn't know existed so this beautiful terrestrial planet is actually the closest planet to us not mars at its closest venus approaches earth at a distance of about 38 million kilometers which is uh relatively close when it comes to planetary distances but today our interest in venus is in regards to its past specifically in regards to its changes um related to the so-called greenhouse effect we believe that venus has undergone a dramatic change in its past going from well basically something that looked more like earth with liquid water on the surface to a tremendously hot hellish conditions with very hospitable surface equivalent to i guess what you would literally call hell temperatures here are close to 500 degrees celsius the pressures are ridiculous the atmosphere is also full of acidic elements and so most of the pros that were sent here didn't really survive for very long the only pictures of the surface that we do have um all came from the soviet missions back in the 70s these so-called venerab missions were able to survive on the surface for just enough time to take a few shots and were then most likely completely destroyed by the super high pressure and of course the temperature and although the photos that we have are not super detailed they do give you an idea of what it's like on the surface now if you'd like to explore these photos i'm posting the link for this website that was created by don mitchell quite a while ago over a decade ago actually and he does have these really well reconstructed photos from the soviet mission but even though one day we would like to go back to venus and possibly take a few more shots of the surface it's really the atmosphere of venus that's the most interesting part to us right now and more specifically this composite shot right here taken by the japanese akatsuki mission gives you an idea that there's something happening in the atmosphere of venus that um we can't really explain just yet there are these dark patches pretty much everywhere and these dark patches are not really simply just clouds or any other formations that are easy to explain they do have properties that um we've only observed in some features on earth specifically they seem to actually change the ultraviolet absorption of the planet in other words some of these dark patches in the atmosphere of venus as they travel around the atmosphere they either increase or decrease the uv light absorption and this does influence the atmosphere quite a lot now one thing you need to know about venus and here's maybe a slightly better view of this um you can't really see its surface pretty much about 90 of all of the light that comes to venus is reflected it has a very high albedo and the word albedo refers to the reflectivity of an object so obviously things like mirrors for example have very high albedo whereas things like black roads will have very low albedo and albedo venus is so high that if we were to make it similar to albedo of earth the temperature on the planet would jump dramatically so right now the temperature is shown at 475 degrees celsius and just for fun let's actually decrease the libido to what it is on earth which is roughly around 35 percent and look what happens to the actual planet it becomes a level world it literally lights up it melts everything becomes ridiculously hot and so the atmosphere itself even though the plant was really super hot and even though the greenhouse effect influenced the temperature on the surface still kind of protects the rest of venus from becoming a completely molten world so this is why for us it's interesting to find out what's really happening in the atmosphere and since 2007 we've been actively studying the atmosphere and discovered that the reflectivity of this planet is correlated with the number of these unusual dark patches and we're still not really sure what they are these scientists currently refer to them as unknown absorbers and the explanation differs from them being some sort of particle some sort of aerosols possibly something related to oxides of sulfur or maybe some kind of a ferric chloride or essentially something that can influence the absorption of ultraviolet light but lead carl sagan even suggested that there are some similarities to bacteria living in the atmosphere of our own planet that seem to actually have very similar features in other words he even suggested that this could be signs of life in venusian atmosphere simply because of the properties we're observing but what is really unusual is that as these patches were changing so was the absorption of the ultraviolet light as a matter of fact since 2007 the absorption of uv light on venus halved but then it started going up again and so that's exactly what this recent paper talks about what they did is analyzed the data from these different missions and discovered that the changes in the dark patches in the venusian atmosphere were correlated with the changes um or actually heating of the atmospheric layers and thus most likely the increase of the wind speed and the winds on venus are really really fast the speeds here can reach up to about 300 kilometers per hour and this is due to a phenomenon known as super rotation where even though the planet doesn't spin the winds above it rotate or technically move really really really fast and today or at least now because of this paper we believe that all of this is related so these patches wherever they are whatever is in them are causing the planets to um drop its albedo and then absorb more light specifically uv light from the sun which heats up the atmosphere accelerates the winds and creates i guess in a sense summer so technically the conditions in venusian atmosphere change very periodically and according to the observations from this paper these changes happen roughly around every decade or around 12 years or so and so this suggests to us that venus has these climatic changes every 12 years which we have never known existed and which we couldn't really explain before but this of course creates a lot more questions than answers and it's of course interesting that these dark patches relate to all of this but what are the patches what are they made out of and this of course means that we need to go to venus we need to find a way to explore the atmosphere of venus and potentially find a way to launch some sort of an atmospheric probe that can study this in a little bit more detail and maybe discover if it's life or not and this is really the important part because if it is life living in those atmospheric layers on venus this would mean that life can survive much more inhospitable environments than we imagined so here even though the surface is ridiculously hot and extremely difficult to survive for anything really the atmosphere however might have something for us to look into and specifically there are layers in venetian atmosphere where the atmosphere itself and also the temperature is somewhat similar to what we have right here on earth although not entirely chemically similar to what we have on earth because there are also things like acids and of course a lot of co2 and absolutely no oxygen in those layers nevertheless they could create conditions for atmospheric or aerial life but what's even more unusual about this particular discovery is that the variation in climate that we've observed on venus seem to be dramatically stronger than they are on earth in other words not only does venus have an extremely powerful greenhouse effect it also seems to have very powerful climatic changes with temperatures very likely changing by a huge amount every single i guess you could call it winter even though it's still hot it's maybe not as hot as every summer and this is of course not including things like storms or i guess the gushes of wind that are present in the upper atmosphere of the planet that are already really strong stronger than pretty much anything we have on earth but what i find really intriguing in this discovery is the importance of albedo just to show you again remember the albedo value for venus is basically the highest of all planets in the solar system it's at ninety percent and this study really underlines how essential albedo studies are to discovery of new planets that are potentially habitable to also analyzing atmospheres and analyzing atmospheric conditions because here as soon as i change albedo by about 10 the temperature of the planet changes so much that a lot of the atmosphere disappears and you can actually peer through the atmosphere and this shows you the power of this property that's very rarely talked about so here the temperature jumped by about 100 degrees when i change the albedo by only 10 so the reflectivity of objects um is an important study this is how we usually study the properties of objects that are far away but it's even more important to study around objects like venus because obviously here since 90 of light is reflected even a tiny tiny deviation from that makes the planet dramatically hotter and since we're not entirely sure what really caused all of this and what's causing the changes in these unusual particles or basically reflectivity of the planet trying to identify the source is very very important there are suggestions that maybe it's because of the cosmic rays maybe the actual cosmic radiation or um the activity of the sun itself causes the changes in reflectivity of venus in that case well it's a lot easier to understand and a lot easier to simulate but right now the changes we've detected are not really connected to the so called solar cycle by the way you can check out a video about sorrow cycles right there above my head it's a very recent study that analyzed them in more detail but either way a very exciting study and hopefully this will help us launch a mission to venus soon so we can explore this planet a little bit more unfortunately there hasn't been a lot of talk about venus and um there really haven't been that many missions to venus the major missions all happened back in the 70s when the soviets went there but since then no one really came but still studying what happened to this planet and also understanding this climate is super important so we can actually prevent this on earth we don't want earth to turn like this and we know venus used to be very earth-like before so let's hope we can learn some lessons from venus so we can preserve our planet as it is right now hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to be talking about the sister planet of earth venus and more specifically about a very exciting mission that nasa is planning for the next few years and the contest that was just run by nasa that had some really incredible designs and winners but we'll also talk a little bit more about the planet itself and why it's an exciting opportunity for us to advance science and potentially find an incredible object for us to colonize but i wanted to start with a little bit of history this right here is what's known as the vegapro this was a soviet probe launched in the 80s that was the last attempt by the soviets to land on venus and essentially try to retrieve as much data as possible when it comes to planetary exploration the soviet union and russia didn't really have a lot of luck with mars most of the missions here were from nasa but they had tremendous success with the partner venus and most of the information and most of the data we have about venus is from the soviet union from the soviet space program so for example the first ever picture of the surface of venus along with the information on the temperature the pressure the composition were all more or less accomplished by the soviet venera and other similar missions that were able to survive for a few hours on the surface of venus and early on we realized how extremely inhospitable venus was not just to life but even to the instruments sent to the planet essentially that in here survived for longer than a couple of hours unless it was in the upper atmosphere one of the last missions that soviets were able to succeed in were actually part of the vega mission you see right here and were these extremely robust balloons with a lot of instruments and communication devices attached to them that would fly around the upper atmosphere collecting all the data and transmitting it via the orbiter around venus now obviously this would have continued for a long time if ussr survived we might have had even some sort of aerial colony by now if we continue these missions but ussr is gone russia is no longer continuing venus missions and other agencies including nasa have only now started to pick up where it was basically left a few decades ago but honestly the new nasa missions are absolutely brilliant and they're brilliant for a very unusual reason and what's important here is that it might lead to a creation of an incredible new type of technology that we've never had before but more accurately it might actually lead to the re-explosion of the so-called automata or mechanical technology something that was created in the ancient world and mostly for entertainment purposes and something that was actually created over 2 000 years ago such as for example this right here this is the famous antikythera mechanism that was created most likely over 2000 years ago by the greeks to try to predict the emotion of the planets across the sky but there were these unusual automata in very different cultures across the planet and many of them were extremely advanced but pretty much all of them were more or less only used for entertainment or recreation not so much for actual signs or any other productive reasons which is why the new nasa mission is so extremely exciting it's not just entertainment anymore it's actually trying to use similar principles to try to create an automata that can then be sent to venus and explore all of its regions all its surface by combining ancient technology with some of the modern research and modern technology and that would definitely lead to the development of some of the more extreme electronics we've ever been able to create but i guess the question here is why can't we just send a regular probe on venus and why exactly can't it survive for a very long time and the answer here temperature pressure and a lot of corrosive materials on the surface of venus that make any kind of electronics here last for only a few minutes maybe an hour maximum and even then all the data received from these electronics would be completely useless to us today all of these silicon based electronics can only really function at maximum about 150 or so celsius after that they no longer work so even if you were to cool down your probe dramatically eventually the temperatures here will reach critical levels and you will be stuck with a broken probe on this very inhospitable planet one of these solutions here is to try to use some other material like for example silicon carbide or gallium nitride to try to produce electronics that can survive in higher temperatures here the conditions that gallium nitride for example can survive is usually around 400 degrees celsius but venus is even more extreme than that so even though these electronics might be able to survive on venus a little bit longer and could potentially create programs that are days long instead of being hours long we're still really early in the development of these technologies and only the studies from 2020 were able to create stable gallium nitride electronic devices that are still extremely primitive for what nasa needs them for and so electronics for now are out of the questions on venus we have to use something else and in this case nasa realized that mechanical devices can definitely survive here we just obviously have to figure out how to create a mechanical device that can not only withstand venusian conditions but can also then do everything else that a typical probe needs to do it has to be able to navigate it has to be able to sense everything around it and it also has to be able to communicate with planet earth and so all these challenges are now being addressed and one of the missions that is trying to address all of them is this right here the so-called arie or automation rover for extreme environments but nasa realized that they can't really do this alone in other words they admitted to themselves that they were just not smart enough they needed help from the public so they opened a very interesting challenge known as exploring hell and the idea was pretty simple submit your design and in this case they were only looking for an idea for sensors to help this rover navigate the venusian conditions and venution surface because for the most part they kind of already have a lot of things figured out like this right here is going to produce energy there's enough components on the inside to give it mobility but they don't really know how to sense the environment the rover right here does not have any ways to see where it's going and there was also a price of about 30 thousand dollars that was going to be shared between three winners but despite this challenge not really being widely shared and also widely announced it had a lot of different submissions over 6 000 as a matter of fact with over 400 different teams joining in to try to win this and the winners had some of the more brilliant and more original designs i honestly have ever seen so i wanted to kind of highlight some of them the first place went to yusuf gali whose beautiful sensors you can see right here it's all mechanical it's all absolutely brilliant and the way it works um i guess in some sense blue nasa's mind yusuf is an architect and a designer from cairo in egypt and he calls this device venus feelers essentially it allows this rover to feel any kind of a rock or any other device and also relies on a relatively simple mechanical system that actually would be very cheap to produce would be extremely easy to maintain and would allow this rover to survive on windows for a very long time i'm also posting these winner videos in the description below so check out the links because a lot of this is absolutely mind-blowing the second place went to these two mechanical engineers from santa barbara in california and it's a team known as team rover tronix essentially they created something that looks like this it's a device that can sense and heal the rocks once again but using a very different type of mechanism that is actually just as good as the previous model in being able to navigate around a rocky terrain the third place doesn't have a video but this went to calum herron of brisbane australia for the so called direction biased obstacle sensor d-boss this sensor combines a type of a windmill with a sterling engine on the inside and is a lot more sensitive compared to the previous two winners in terms of detecting rocks and other obstacles for this rover apart from this there was also the best prototype winner and this was christine burza and oscar's birds these two designers are from latvia and it's really impressive that they were able to create all of this in only a few weeks and as you can see from this video it works completely by itself it has no um person driving this and it's all mechanical it's all autonomous and only requires this to make so check out their video if you'd like to try to make this yourself as well and the most innovative award went to matthew reynolds a mechanical engineer from the united kingdom for his design known as echoes evaluate cliffs hose objects and loops here it creates a mechanical solar and this allows it to detect various large holes or actually even small holes in front of the rover allowing it to traverse the terrain much easier and so honestly i am super excited to hear more about how this mission progresses in the next few years and by the time we launch it it's very likely that we might be able to combine the mechanical technology with some of the most advanced electronic technology that we currently are developing be it either silicon carbides that you see right here or gallium nitrides that might create electrical devices that are able to survive on the surface of venus which is why i think this mission is going to lead to some of the most extreme new technologies we've ever seen and this beautiful competition that only cost nasa thirty thousand dollars might provide enough new advances for years and even decades to come but this is only one of the missions that nasa and other space agencies are planning in the next decade so there are definitely a lot new things we're going to be talking about in some of the future videos i definitely encourage you to check out the competition and the winners by yourself as well all of the links for this are in the description below and all of the additional information is there as well but for now we don't really know what exactly the mission is going to be like when it actually launches in the next few years and we don't really know if it's even going to be successful but just the fact that we're inventing new technologies just to meet this challenge already means that this mission has to go on this mission has to continue because it will definitely help us develop something we've never had before hello wonderful person this is anton and in today's video we're going to be talking about a beautiful planet earth and a new discovery that seems to indicate that venus and jupiter seem to play a really really large role in determining the climate on our planet so in this climate simulation you can kind of see that a lot of the planetary surface changes over time with seasons every year you get winters and summers and you get other seasons in between depending on the location on the planet but our planetary climate is actually a lot more complex than this as a matter of fact we have other cycles usually referred to as the melancholic cycles that influence the climate on our planet on longer terms for example uh because of the way that our planet wobbles in other words if i look at the planetary alignment here because of the way that it changes from about 23 degrees to about 21 degree every few thousand years the climate changes uh differently during those periods when the actual axis of the planet changes this is one of the more common commonly known melancholic cycles we've actually studied this quite extensively and discovered that if you look at the sediments on our planet and if you actually dig into the planetary crust and you start looking at how the climate change because of this uh it actually becomes quite apparent that every few thousand years and i believe it's actually something like uh 20 000 years the planetary uh climate changes quite dramatically so something like 23 000 years uh our planet will have relatively different climate but a more recent discovery actually looks at something else as a matter of fact this is a very unusual discovery that happened pretty much completely by accident we discovered a new layer of the melancholic cycle and this cycle is formed by venus and jupiter now you may not really see where i'm going with this yet but basically venus and jupiter actually pull uh on our planet earth and play a kind of a game of thug where they actually change the orbital parameters of our planet every four hundred and five thousand years on the dot as a matter of fact it's one of the more stable milankovic cycles we've discovered so far and it seems to influence our planetary climate quite dramatically now what exactly do venus and jupiter do to our planet well both of them actually pull with relatively similar strength um on basically our planet and they both uh change the planetary orbit to a relatively large extent depending on where these planets are located in their orbit and what we discovered is that so every 405 thousand years the elliptical shape of our uh orbit of the planet earth orbit in other words the eccentricity which i believe is somewhere right here changes by about five percent from pretty much circular like it is right now to more elliptical in approximately four hundred thousand years and this cycle is essentially responsible for changing the climates quite dramatically so if the eccentricity of our planet was basically five percent instead of just one percent like it is right now the actual summers and winters will become dramatically different well dramatically is a relative term compared to other planets it's maybe not as dramatic but here the temperatures will now start moving uh with a lot more extremity so winters will be a lot colder and summers will be a lot harder and the scientists behind the study from the rutgers university specifically dennis kent discovered that over the last 215 million years this cycle was extremely extremely accurate so basically you can detect the changes in climate every 405 000 years and they seem to happen no matter what else happens so in other words venus and jupiter have been pulling on our planet with pretty much the same parameters and same strength for the past millions and possibly billions of years now what exactly does this mean for our planet well in short term pretty much nothing on the short term you probably won't even notice any climate changes because uh it takes thousands of years for this to actually become influential but in longer terms this is actually one of the many male and coverage cycles that we have to be aware of because this will actually change the face of earth as humanity basically becomes more mature and uh in the next few thousand years the actual parameters of uh planetary orbit will change and this will lead to more extreme changes of climate so you'll have more glaciation in the winter and it might as you can see here even cause another ice age or several ice ages that will become cyclical as well and sometimes those melancholic cycles actually align in such a way that you might get some really really extreme climate changes like for example if you have the longest orbit or the most eccentric orbit mixed with something like uh very very high orbital tilt and possibly some more events that we're not aware of just yet so this kind of shows you that uh in when it comes to climate and when it comes to climate change on the long term at least there is a lot of stuff going on things that we're not even aware of but obviously one concern with the study is that this will probably give more fuel to climate change deniers they'll basically start saying that uh this is all natural not human made and well yes it is natural but the uh age and the years we're talking about here are way way more dramatic than what humans have been able to do in the last few hundreds of years as a matter of fact the climate change that humans were able to uh influence in the last few decades alone are actually a lot more dramatic than thousands of years of melancholy cycles so in that sense climate change is also basically influenced by organisms living on the planet and in this case it's us but as you can see because i changed the parameters for our planet earth and made it um tilt much more dramatic and also increased its eccentricity we suddenly now have another ice age in the northern part of the planet this is what new and coach cycles usually cause every few thousand years so this is a really cool discovery something that we didn't really expect to discover and something that i personally didn't really realize uh until i read the paper and what's really important to understand here is that it's probably not just venus and jupiter that are causing these cycles i think as we study other planets we'll discover that even saturn and mars might actually be pulling on our planet earth in such a way that other melancholic cycles are being formed and influence our planet even more so in that sense planet earth and the climate on planet earth is still quite a mystery to us and we still don't really understand everything about it but until we study more and until we discover more of these melancholic cycles we can't really say exactly what's going to happen in the next few thousand years hello wonderful person this is anton and welcome to venus in today's video we're going to be talking about more recent discoveries in regards to the surface of venus and in what we now believe seems to be a type of plate tectonics that we may have detected on its surface so here are the three sister planets side by side with earth in the middle venus on the right and mars on the left and uh we now believe or i guess we'll delete for a few years now uh that o3 used to look very similar um billions of years ago specifically o3 had the liquid water o3 had some sort of atmosphere and most likely some sort of magnetosphere and at some point o3 used to be what would be now known as habitable planets now for one reason or another only earth sort of stayed as earth and basically remain habitable and this is why we have so much life including ourselves on this planet but mars and venus changed dramatically and took a very different approach with mars becoming a kind of a dry dead world uh with basically no geological activity on the surface only signs of geological activity such as these volcanoes that you see right here and of course the ridges as well on the other hand venus uh has very thick atmosphere and it's really hard to see through it but more recent discoveries showed us that its surface uh and i'm going to try to show it to you right now by basically removing the atmosphere its surface seems to be covered with all sorts of ridges and all sorts of signs of geological activity very similar to the ones on earth and to some extent on mars so once again this indicates that all three of these planets had a relatively similar surface and possibly even internal uh structure at some point in history now very very recent discovery on very recent study on venus basically made a proposition that it actually is still geologically active even though it doesn't look like um like it is if you just look at it it seems that um it has a type of a plate tectonic activity now let me do a quick review of what plate tectonics implies what you're observing right now is essentially a simulation of plate tectonics in action where um our continents and the place they're located on are moving around and changing the shape of earth now this is actually going back in time so in other words it's sort of in reverse this particular video was actually made by a professor uh from texas uh i believe his name is christopher scortesi and um in this video you can kind of see how over time our planet has actually changed quite dramatically and this is what we today refer to as plate tectonics so here is a another procedurally generated tectonic simulation um by i actually don't know who made this as uh there's no contact information available but i guess his name is davidson um but anyway so in this particular simulation you can kind of see how over time and we're gonna try to accelerate this a little bit uh plate tectonics actually uh basically change the shape and the surface of the planet in this particular case it's basically a procedurally generated planet now so we know that this is how plate tectonics work on on earth and on mars we thought that it had a kind of a similar idea called stagnant lid basically implying that uh the whole crust is one continuous piece and the plate tectonics don't really occur because it's essentially just one joined piece of shell and we kind of thought that this is what's happening on venus as well but it turns out we may have been wrong because we now discover that venus seems to have these parameters that indicate that there is some motion going on and specifically actually here is a picture indicating some of the potential movements that have been detected in the last few decades also suggesting that it's not really plate tectonics as we know it but it's somewhere in between completely stagnant shell where essentially nothing moves and uh somewhat mobile crust that seems to be the case for venus in other words if mars had the completely stagnant shot where nothing moves and earth had completely active plate tectonics where everything moves venus was somewhere sort of in the middle where things move but just not really the way we see them on earth now we are not entirely sure what exactly is happening on venus but we just know that there's definitely some sort of a tectonic activity going on and uh it's very possible that uh this is actually something that happens on other exoplanets out there uh that we may need to investigate in more detail now one of the reasons we think that this so-called crustal motion occurs is because the surface of venus is very hot now in this particular simulation it's kind of low because i removed the atmosphere uh but the actual temperature of on venus is on average about 462 degrees celsius suggesting that um one of the reasons this crustal movement occurs is because the surface is already so hot that rock kind of behaves as a somewhat liquid-like material and this also suggests that this might be actually just one of the stages of plate tectonics and something that our own earth may have experienced as well now this study basically leads to a whole new idea of plate tectonics not really being fixed in other words it's not something that either happens or doesn't happen it might be actually something that happens for a little bit and then stops and then occurs again so venus for all we know might actually be in this in between stage whether it's going to have plate tectonics later or not is another question but we know that uh venusian surface actually does have some really really extreme events happening every 300 million years or so and there's one that's going to happen in the next few million years because it's sort of uh due for another such event and maybe that just maybe this will actually restart the plate tectonics on the surface thus changing the surface of venus completely but this actually does have a lot of implications one of them is that we now think that in the next five billion years or so so basically when earth is about 10 billion years old it's very likely that the plate tectonics on earth will also stop and this will not be uh very good for our planet because it will most likely lead to the same thing that happened on venus the so-called runaway greenhouse effect where pretty much the entire uh deposit of co2 inside our planet will come to the surface turning our planet ridiculously scarcely uh ultra hot possibly raising the temperatures to 200 300 or even higher degrees celsius we're not entirely sure um when this is going to happen it's definitely not going to be anytime soon but if it does happen it's going to be basically the end of habitable earth as we know it and its face will more likely be similar to that of venus but this still doesn't answer the question what will actually happen to venus so when and if the venusian crust starts moving around again it might actually become more habitable looking in other words it might actually turn into something that looks like earth or at least lose some of its atmospheric pressure in some ways temperature and become easier to essentially terraform and turn into something that looks like earth for now though that's all we discovered we basically now understand a little bit more about plate tectonics and just understand that it's not all or non-event it does seem to have an in-between like it it appears to have on venus and um what happens next is obviously going to depend on when we come back to venus and when we start studying it again so for now all our focus have been on mars and maybe just maybe we need to refocus our attention on venus once again and try to discover as much about it as we can because it is a lot similar to earth than mars is as you can see mars is a lot smaller and a lot more dead looking oh wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to be talking about two different planets in our solar system that seem to share the same property no moons and i wanted to explain why neither mercury that you see right here nor venus have any moons anymore and the important emphasis here is on the ward anymore because it's very likely that they did have moons previously many different objects in the solar system and not just planets have moons for example here's how maya the pictures of which were taken by hubble telescope many different dwarf planets including pluto of course have moons and in case of pluto it has quite a lot of moons so how is it that neither mercury nor venus have any what makes these two objects unique and unusual well in some of the previous videos a few years ago i tried to explain this individually but there are a lot of other things i didn't really explain in those videos and today i wanted to combine all of them and explain them to you in two simple concepts related to orbital dynamics and also briefly explain how all of this allows certain objects to have moons and other objects to have nothing yet at the same time allowing some objects like the other dwarf planet haumea to possess rings as well so it all comes down to orbital dynamics and a lot of gravitational interactions so first of all both mercury and venus are slightly closer to the sun and in case of mercury it's also a lot less massive than earth here's how four of these objects compare to one another and in case of mercury it's actually easier to compare to our own moon it's about four and a half times as massive as the moon of our planet which is already kind of weird i guess mars on the other hand is roughly around eight times as massive as the moon so both of these objects have a lot less gravity on the surface which is also why they're not really that good at holding other objects in their orbits but mars has two moons phobos and deimos now why is it that mars has moons but mercury doesn't well one of the first questions we can ask here is how do planets get moons and right now we believe there are two main ways one of the ways is by capturing moons like for example we believe that the vast majority of the smaller moons around jupiter and saturn and also around neptune and uranus are captured moons they're moons that used to be asteroids or smaller objects and eventually came too close and became captured we also thought this was true for mars because its two moons are basically really really small they are kind of similar to asteroids here's for example what phobos looks like it's really really small but at the same time would today think that this is not the case and they were most likely created as part of another way of acquiring moons through a collision in this case we know so because the orbits of the moons seem to align with the rotation of the planet meaning that they most likely were created when something really massive collided with mars and most likely caused a lot of other effects but first of all it very likely had rings these rings eventually solidified creating a lot of smaller objects orbiting around mars some of these objects probably fell back some of them became transient moons some of them became phobos and deimos with time a lot of this sort of either disappeared and fell back onto martian's surface but some of them survived and became phobos in demos this illustration was created by the royal observatory of belgium and it kind of gives you a really good summary of how a lot of moons including the moon orbit in our own planet were created and how they eventually evolve into these permanent objects but we also know that both venus and mercury also had a lot of collisions and these collisions are especially apparent if you look at the surface of mercury it's pretty much covered in collision impacts and some of these collisions definitely suggest that this planet had a very active past venus is probably no exception at least one of these collisions would definitely create some sort of a moon around mercury but what happened to them well like i said previously we think that they did exist it's very likely that they existed but they just disappeared for two simple reasons the proximity to the sun and also this other really important feature that you can probably see right here in this simulation the rotation of the planets is different and this is really important when it comes to moons orbiting planets as you can see here both earth and mars have a relatively similar rotation speed earth does a single spin in 24 hours roughly around 24 hours and mars does it in approximately 25 hours on the other hand neither venus nor mercury spin really fast as a matter of fact if we were to change this into one day being a single second this is what it would all look like these are really really slow rotators now this plays a really important role when it comes to stability of moons and here the best example is from our own moon because the moon and earth have a kind of a gravitational relation toward each other the pool from the moon causes earth to have these two so called tidal bulges one of them is formed by the attraction from the moon the other one is called by so-called inertia because of this and because the moon has a lot less mass eventually the moon actually became tidally locked to earth which is why of course we always get to see the same side of the moon no matter where we are if the moon was not tidally locked it would sort of look like this and you would always get to see all sides but earth is more massive and for the moon to tidally lock the earth it would take a lot longer possibly up to about 10 billion years from now and that's a really long time and since earth is not tidally locked it rotates and causes this tidal bulge to shift just a little bit making it so that it's always in front of the moon and all of this causes a little bit of pull on the moon's front side this pool causes the moon to slowly accelerate and because of this the moon is slowly receding away from earth roughly around 3 centimeters or about 1 inch per year because of this we today believe that once upon a time moon was way way closer and also earth was spinning much much faster about four times as fast and because of this we also believe that one day moon may actually go beyond the ability of earth to hold it and become its own body possibly i guess another planet or another dwarf planet orbiting around the sun but what if the earth was not spinning as fast and was spinning similar to mercury and venus well in this case the bulge would be actually behind the moon at all times simply because the moon would be orbiting around faster than the spin of the planet and this would obviously slow down the object which is exactly why we believe all of the moons that existed around mercury and venus eventually fell back to the surface and most likely at least for mercury created one of these beautiful spots on the surface now we obviously don't really know which one it was but technically if we were to go to mercury and investigate we could probably find out by just looking at the impact caused by the collision but since there are so many different craters to look at it will be pretty difficult to discover which one it was even though technically we should really only be looking at the craters on the equator but could the moon have been much farther away from mercury like for example could it be in orbit somewhere like a million kilometers away and still be there and we just don't see it well here we come to the other feature we need to talk about the so-called hill sphere if we look at the gravitational parameters formed by the sun and for example earth that's right here you can kind of see that because sun has a lot more gravitational potential and it has obviously a lot more mass it forms this unusual sphere around our planet known as helisphere which is the only region around our planet where we can easily hold on to the moons and other objects beyond this hill sphere nothing really can stay in orbit and actually becomes part of the sun's orbit this hill sphere around planet earth is roughly around 1.5 kilometers in radius which is about one-fifth of the radius of where moon is currently located but for planets closer to the sun the heliosphere decreases in size here are some other objects for comparison and you can see that for venus it's about 1 million kilometers for mercury it's significantly lower which of course means that mercury cannot really hold on to objects as easily as earth simply because the sun just kind of steals them and due to this only close moons are possible around mercury but if the moon is too close to mercury within only a few hundred million years and possibly even sooner than that due to the relation i just described to you due to the tidal interaction it basically just falls back to the surface so as it stands right now there's really no way for mercury to have a stable moon for longer than a few million years it either disappears and becomes part of the sun or it becomes the property of the surface of mercury and pretty much the same applies to venus except here the story is a little bit more interesting because we don't think venus was always spinning so slow we think at least we believe uh from i guess the last few years or so that the reason venus spins so slow is actually because at some point it had a very unusual ocean on the surface so-called global ocean that caused due to the tidal effects from the sun the planet to slowly spin slower and slower and because of this effect eventually venus was spinning really slow and we don't really know what happened next and what came first whether the venus heated up and the ocean disappeared or whether if it had a moon the moon started to slowly fall down and eventually caused the collision that then released all of this other stuff forcing the venus to become this hellish world where no life can technically survive all of this is a mystery that we would like to solve because we would really like to find out if venus became like this from being an earth-like object due to the so-called runaway greenhouse effect or if it was due to a collision from for example its own moon and in order for us to learn all this we of course need to launch some sort of mission that investigates this in a little bit more detail but at the moment even if we land on the surface it's still going to be very very difficult to find out because venus has an extremely thick atmosphere that sort of erases all of the signs of previous collisions so unfortunately some mysteries may remain mysteries for a long time but in a nutshell this is why neither venus nor mercury have any moons although in case of venus since it does have a relatively large field sphere which is as i previously showed you around 1 million kilometers it could potentially have a moon a really small moon that's difficult to see somewhere farther away like up to about a million kilometers this would be probably some sort of a captured object and it would be somewhat difficult to find it but this is of course hypothetical and we don't really know if there's anything around it right now although chances are if there is something we are definitely going to discover it sometime in the next decade or so simply because our telescopes have gotten so much better and so many more amateur astronomers became interested in looking into the night skies and discovering new things hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to be talking about our beautiful neighbor venus the planet that seems to have at least 37 active volcanoes on the surface something that kind of surprised the scientists so let's just say you were choosing a new planet to try to colonize and to try to send a new mission to we have two choices either we go to mars which is obviously being planned by different space agencies and of course elon musk or we can try something a little bit different we can try venus now as you can see in terms of earth similarity venus is actually a much better and a much more earth-like contender its size and mass are relatively similar it also has relatively thick atmosphere on the surface already it has a lot of necessary components that could potentially form earthquake conditions but we obviously would have to terraform it using methods and techniques we just don't have yet but most importantly unlike mars venus also has at least some areas in its atmosphere at an altitude of just over 50 kilometers where the conditions are somewhat similar to the atmosphere of earth the only difference being that there's no oxygen and there's a little bit more acidic compounds but we've already speculated that life could technically exist there although in every other respect at least on the surface the conditions here are well comparable to what you would call hell extremely hot extremely pressurized and very acidic this is the actual picture taken by the soviet veneer probes the probes that were able to survive for only a couple of hours before being completely destroyed by the conditions here but it seems like the more we learn about venus the more we realize that it does seem to be a place where life could potentially exist and most importantly this planet does seem to have a lot more activity than we originally speculated and not just atmospheric conditions but also conditions on the surface making venus a lot more geologically active than we originally believed and geological activity is as we know today extremely important for well not just maintenance of the planet but also the potential existence and maintenance of life on the planet as well and one of the more important geological activities that we can have on the planet is of course volcanoes and plate tectonics but unfortunately we haven't really discovered any plate tectonics on venus so we don't really know if there are any most likely not so far but in terms of volcanoes the story is completely different although these are not really the volcanoes you're going to find on venus they're a little bit different actually very different they seem to be very different from anything we have on planet earth as well and the reason we know so is because of the signs we've observed on the surface of venus the objects that the scientists currently refer to as corona now these geological corona have only been found on two different objects in the solar system one of them is venus and the other one is the tiny moon known as miranda that orbits uranus here is what miranda looks like in comparison to planet venus and to some extent planet earth as well both venus and miranda have these corona and they seem to be forming in a very similar fashion by the action of the heat from the inside of the planet and a kind of a heat bubble that forms underneath this region here that then lifts up and as the heat dissipates and also as some of the lava escapes here it leaves behind these strange corona some of which are quite gigantic in size this one known as the artemis corona is about 2 000 miles or about 3 000 kilometers in size with the actual volcanic activity happening right here at the edges of this corona and so the scientists behind the paper you can find in the description essentially try to investigate this by simulating how these corona are formed and by trying to analyze if the structures that are visible on venus and of course on miranda could be explained as a kind of volcanic activity on the inside of the planet and because there are so many different corona and venus and because these corona don't really have a very good explanation right now other than of course being created by some kind of a volcanic activity the scientists on this paper were very eager to try to recreate the morphology or the actual visible signs of these corona by using computer simulations and they of course discovered that it's very likely venus is still volcanically active and what we're observing on the surface of venus can only be created by a recent volcanic activity from these unusual corona formations and at least on planet earth volcanoes mean quite a lot for example you might already know that volcanoes recycle a lot of different stuff on our planet including of course carbon dioxide so for example here's one of the things that happened on planet earth this is a very simple simulation tool created by the scientists in colorado university here what you're looking at is the new plate that's going to be going under this older continental crust plate and this layer right here shows you all the sediment that was deposited over time including all sorts of minerals that were created by fixating for example carbon dioxide or even things like sulfurous and phosphorus and eventually as the plates start moving and one goes under the other within only a few million years all this carbon dioxide as it warms up inside the planet and of course other chemicals as well they'll start slowly seeping out creating the volcanoes on the surface of the planet this is just one of many ways that volcanoes do form on the planet and as you can see right here all of this gas right here gets released into the atmosphere gets used by different types of life on the planet and then eventually gets fixated into the different types of sediments that then continue the cycle so all of this takes a few million years to complete but this is how a lot of the circulation of the atmosphere happens on the planet and this is why volcanoes and geological activity on the planet are essential for the survival of life obviously this is a very very simple model a lot of more complex things going on but this is one of the reasons why discovering volcanoes on venus is kind of important it allows us to understand that the planet might be a lot more geologically active than we initially assumed it also of course means that trying to investigate and obviously colonize this planet at some point might be much more beneficial than trying to colonize mars that doesn't really have much going on on the surface or inside of it unlike mars venus seems to be quite geologically active and also might be able to at some point recycle its atmosphere and as you can see from this illustration these scientists have confirmed at least 37 different active or possibly dormant volcanoes that at least to some extent were recently active now interestingly on the surface of venus all of these corona are usually extremely large at least a few hundred kilometers in size suggesting that the volcanoes here at least the ones we've seen so far seem to be these gigantic formations unlike the ones on planet earth on earth the volcanoes for the most part are much smaller and also seem to be distributed along the lines of the tectonic plates so venusian geology does seem to be at least to some extent different but this is just some of the ones we've discovered there could be a lot more hiding underneath the atmosphere nevertheless all these discoveries along with the missions that nasa is planning will definitely make venus a super exciting world for us to explore in the next decade or so mostly because the missions being planned here are going to redefine our understanding of this planet and you never know at some point we might even find a way to somehow remove all of this toxic and thick atmosphere and possibly even find ways to somehow slowly terraform venus back into what it used to be long time ago an earth-like planet at least we think it used to be like this and even if it wasn't it still doesn't hurt for us to try to colonize it and to try to create something beautiful there as well and one of the major discoveries in this paper is in regards to the differences between these corona that are present on venusian surface according to the scientists behind this paper the differences are actually from the different ages of these corona in other words they all seem to progress to the same stages but they do look very different depending on the age and of course the size of the corona in other words all of the newer corona all of the ones that are still active will have very similar features that seem to be all present along the edges of this corona identifying venus as a geologically active planet and the other major discovery is that these active coronas seem to be also kind of clustered as of some regions of venus are still active the other regions not so much you can see some of this clustering right here for example this of course suggests that maybe there is some sort of a strange geological activity we haven't really learned about yet and instead of plate tectonics maybe venus has something else going on that allows it to exchange the material over time so honestly all we know this is a pretty exciting paper and only gives us one more reason to try to go and investigate venus in the next few years luckily nasa is definitely planning at least one mission here the mission that you see right here that nasa will be launching in the next few years and you can also learn about this in one of the previous videos but hopefully even more missions will be planned and launched to venus in the next few decades because this is definitely one of the more exciting objects in the solar system and the volcanic activity discovered in this paper is one of many reasons why venus should be our priority not really mars hello wonderful person this is anton and in this video we're going to be talking about a discovery of a very unusual asteroid that seems to be one of the closest asteroids to our sun and it's also really massive so in some sense it could be potentially dangerous to earth as well so the asteroid we're looking at right now is actually known as atera by definition all of the athera asteroids are always orbiting within the orbit of earth in other words they are kind of like the inner ballot asteroids currently this is the smallest group of asteroids known to us there's only about 21 of them that's been discovered so far but all of them are also really really large as a matter of fact they're all within about one kilometer in size and in some cases might potentially cross orbits with earth as well so in other words a lot of these asteroids are actually kind of dangerous and the main reason is not only because they orbit so close to our planet but because when we're looking for asteroids it's very easy for us to see asteroids that are away from the sun mostly because we're looking at dark space but all of the asteroids that are orbiting close to the sun are very difficult for us to detect because basically the sun is kind of covering most of them in other words in order for us to detect anything in this region we always have to look at these asteroids during twilight basically at dawn or at dusk when the sun is not too bright so it allows us to kind of see some of these asteroids in the night skies and to do this a lot of specialized telescopes have been developed and we also rely on a lot of automatic systems one of such online systems is known as the virtual telescope it's basically a remotely controlled telescope that's controlled via the internet created by the discoverer of this new asteroid an italian researcher by the name of gianluca messi and as you can see from this picture he got really lucky recently and discovered this asteroid that you see on the screen this is currently known as 2020 av2 and 2020 is obviously the year when it was discovered and what makes this asteroid very unusual compared to all of the previous ethereal asteroids is that it seems to be actually within the orbit of venus in other words it seems to always orbit within this circle here approaching venus and mercury once in a while this also currently makes this asteroid the second closest asteroid to our sun slightly beat by the previous discovery from 2019 the asteroid 2019 lf6 but unlike this asteroid the new discovered asteroid does not have this eccentric orbit as a matter of fact from all of the soko that hero asteroids we've discovered most of them seem to possess very very eccentric orbits and some of them even have eccentricity that's nearly 97 making it sound the most eccentric objects in the solar system except for certain comets now a lot of them actually leave really really far almost reaching jupiter and then come back close to the sun but unlike all these other eccentric asteroids what seems to be unusual about the new discovery is that its orbit is a lot more circular than other asteroids here the eccentricity of 2020 av2 is only about 17 and it basically kind of goes in between the orbit of mercury and the orbit of venus but the thing is it also never really approaches either planet really close the closest distance that it gets to is about 10 million kilometers which creates a lot of really interesting questions one of them is of course how did it even get here what caused this asteroid to assume this orbit and the second question is of course well we think that this is not a stable orbit so what is going to happen to this asteroid eventually the current size estimates suggest that this is anywhere from about one to maybe three kilometers in diameter making this a relatively large rock and if you've watched some of the previous videos you might also remember that in the last year we've discovered at least three craters on our planet that were created by rocks that are very very similar in size to this the most recent discovery coming from the wow of a large crater that's about 15 kilometers in diameter was actually created by something similar to this this of course doesn't really give us any comfort because it just means that these rocks are still out there a lot of them do collide with our planet and one of them might eventually make its way toward earth and collide with it as well although currently we don't think that is going to be this specific asteroid as a matter of fact it has a much higher chance to collide with venus right now than it does with planet earth but the other major mystery is of course in regards to its low eccentricity and the fact that it never actually crosses the orbit of venus it never really comes close to orbit of earth at all what exactly caused it to have such an unusual orbit and more importantly um are there other asteroids that are similar to this somewhere else hiding in this region and this is of course a very important question for us to answer because we need to understand how these asteroids form and what makes them assume these orbits these are tier asteroids or i guess in some sense you can also call them the twilight asteroids because they can only be visible when it's twilight on earth are probably some of the more dangerous asteroids out there and the two main reasons are of course that we can't really see them very easily they can come from out of nowhere and the second reason is because they get to approach both venus and mercury much more frequently a single year here only takes about 150 days meaning that every 150 days this asteroid has a chance to slightly shift its orbit and then that orbit can accidentally cross with any of the planets in the solar system and since we've already found three different craters on the planet that were created by similar asteroids within the last three million years or so this kind of makes it really important for us to understand could these craters have been created by these unusual attira asteroids and obviously if the material here matches to the one on the planet earth then it's very likely that these are the main culprits behind all of the collisions maybe these asteroids are the ones we should be actually watching more carefully so all this is really important for us to understand in order to basically protect our own civilization on the other hand we also would like to find out how many of these asteroids are located in these regions it's very unlikely that we're going to discover something similar to an asteroid belt with hundreds of thousand different asteroids but nevertheless there could be a lot of rocks hiding in this region many of which could potentially be dangerous to planet earth as well but one of the more immediate mysteries is of course in regards to its unusual orbit it's the only asteroid that has such an unusual low eccentricity orbit that doesn't really come to any major planet which means that we need to study this in a little bit more detail the only current explanation for how it got its orbit is by possibly passing next to some sort of a planet possibly even jupiter which took it closer to the sun and then through the action of the so-called kosai mechanism which i explained about four years ago in the video that you can find somewhere above my head right now the orbit of this asteroid eventually shifted making it look the way that it does today but i guess the scary part here is that kozai mechanism never stops acting as a matter of fact it's very likely going to shift the orbit again with time suggesting that at some point the asteroid will either get a much closer orbit to the sun or it might actually increase its eccentricity once again and start crossing planet earth's orbit which is something we don't really want asteroids to do and i guess if we're lucky enough this asteroid will one day hit another planet but at this point it's probably going to be either mercury or venus it's currently not really estimated to hit anything but if the cosine mechanism shifts the orbit of this asteroid enough it will definitely cross the path with one of the planets creating a relatively large collision which we could then of course use to study what happens when these asteroids collide with planets like earth hopefully by not actually having it collide with earth of course currently our understanding of the effects of asteroids on planets is actually not really that advanced we know they do something to the climate for example we're just not entirely sure what and we know many collisions have happened in the past so by using other planets as a kind of experimental box or experimental lab we'll definitely be able to understand the effects of asteroid collisions and of course learn to prevent them in the future as well hello wonderful person this is anton and in this video we're going to be tackling a mystery of our solar system specifically why is it that the planets in our solar system have such different compositions now when you look at various planets in our solar system you may quickly realize how different they look but what you may not realize is how different the insides of those planets are as well even the terrestrial planets mercury venus earth and mars are very different from each other in what's on the inside for example mercury has a lot of iron venus on the other hand has a lot less iron in comparison to its silicates mars is really really small and also has very low density and earth seems to have the tremendously large amount of mass and also density compared to all three other objects same can be said of jupiter and saturn but the idea here is that the composition of the planets is very different now this was not really well understood but a recent study from university of copenhagen actually tries to tackle this using well geology they looked at a various meteorites found across our planet that came from various objects such as for example mars and also uh even from the asteroid belt several asteroids were collected from an asteroid known as vesta and they studied the calcium isotope composition of several meteorites called angerites and uralites and what they discovered is that the ratio of isotopes in samples correlated directly with the masses of their parent planets and asteroids or in other words what they discovered was that a lot of planets stopped growing at different times the protoplanets all grew at the same rate basically they all increased in mass relatively identically but some of them stopped growing earlier such as for example mars and mercury others grew much longer such as earth but why is it that their composition is different well this actually suggests that our solar system received more material from the outside most likely from nearby supernova as the time went by so by the time mercury finished growing more material may have come to our solar system but was actually absorbed by earth and similarly a lot of material was absorbed by larger planets like jupiter and saturn in other words a smaller planet most likely seized growing early on probably indicating that this was one of the oldest planet in the solar system while larger planets grew much much much longer and thus are most likely the youngest planet in our solar system which makes earth the youngest terrestrial planet so just to summarize what have we learned from this particular study well it seems that our solar system was actually developing throughout possibly several millions or even hundreds of millions of years and throughout that time it actually received more and more material from the outside more likely from the supernova but possibly also just from the gas nearby as this gas arrived to our solar system various planets started absorbing it but those planets that were smaller or that kind of finished a creating their mass have actually received almost nothing the newer gas and newest materials most likely ended up in planets that are most massive today this also means that a lot of this material that came later on was actually very different from material that was there in beginning and this would explain why planets are so different in their composition so this study is actually very unusual and very interesting in that it presents the growth of solar system as this dynamic and very long process where planets were still growing even millions of years after some of the planets already stopped growing this is very interesting and definitely requires more follow-up studies for now though that's all i wanted to mention in this video and hopefully now you know why the planets in our solar system are somewhat different in composition hello wonderful person this is anton and in today's video we're going to be talking about venus and its surface we're going to discover why the surface of venus has such an unusual amount of volcanoes and why it is actually so so hot so there's a lot of papers out there trying to speculate about why venus is so much hotter than earth even though it's pretty much uh identical in every other parameter the temperature here currently is 472 degrees celsius or about 745 degrees kelvin which is pretty much like 450 degrees higher than it is on earth and yes it is closer to the sun than earth but not by amount that should cause such a tremendous temperature now we know that the temperature is very likely caused by the tremendous tremendous greenhouse effect from the atmosphere that's about 92 times thicker than the atmosphere on earth and also the composition of the atmosphere that's pretty much mostly carbon dioxide so in other words most of the temperature comes from a tremendous greenhouse effect but that's not really what we're going to be discussing today we're going to be discussing the reasons for such a hot and unusual atmosphere and also for the differences in geology and geological activities on venus now if we remove the atmosphere because it's actually very thick and hard to see through and also remove the clouds because we don't really need them you'll notice that the surface of venus looks like a planet that is basically made up of a lot of volcanoes there's a lot of volcanic activity signs everywhere including right here is a large one with very unusual um lag like formations which are actually unique to venus and there's a lot of other volcanoes actually there's one right here there's a bunch right there and overall if you actually count all of them you'll find that there's something like 1600 major volcanoes on venus as a matter of fact venus has the most volcanoes in our solar system more even than io and io if you remember is the most uh volcanically active uh object in our solar system and that's the moon of jupiter that's right here so io does have a lot of active volcanoes but when it comes to inactive or old volcanoes venus basically takes that price so in terms of just a number of various volcanoes including the large volcanoes this is definitely the place uh to take it to take all of those prizes now on earth we have at least one major volcano uh and that's in hawaii on venus there is almost a hundred of similar sized volcanoes and considering the fact that you know its surface is very similar to earth it's about 90 uh basal rock um it's very unusual to see that about 65 of the entire planet here consists of various lava planes indicating that volcanism played a very major role in and changing how this planet looks now we've actually kind of measured the age of all of these volcanoes and they all seem to be about 500 million years old and that's very unusual and for the most part none of them are actually presently active or at least we haven't really seen any uh indications that any of them are active but we have seen um parameters in the atmosphere that indicate that some volcanoes still kind of spew things out specifically sudden increase in methane in the atmosphere indicated that there is at least a few volcanoes that are still spewing things out but for the most part this is essentially what the surface looks like a lot of just dead volcan volcanic activity or in other words dormant and sleeping volcanoes that are now completely inactive but a lot of recent studies have actually showed two very important things about volcanoes on this beautiful planet one is that well they actually are responsible for changing the crust of this planet every few hundred million years completely so in other words uh venus is actually going to have a major volcanic eruption activity sometime in the next few 10 to maybe 100 million years or maybe a little bit longer we don't really know exactly how long it will take but when the crust here heats up even more when it gets even hotter it's going to be weak too weak enough to support the pressures coming from the inside and the new volcanic eruption will begin and we're going to simulate this by basically colliding a few asteroids just to kind of emulate what's going to happen to the surface of venus and so essentially a year ago so here are the volcanic eruptions that will start at some point and will continue for about 100 million years now there's going to be a lot more obviously but this is just an initial eruption event and so essentially venus will you could call it burst from the inside and a lot of the heat and a lot of the pressure will start coming out and recycle the entire um surface of the planet once again so there will be so many eruptions that the entire surface will change and become renewed yet again and this will happen quite a few times in the next five or six billion years until our sun expands on swallows venus but this is essentially how venus recycles its surface and so up to about 2 000 more volcanoes will be formed and all of them will essentially create a completely new surface here now on earth it doesn't happen that way on earth we have something called plate tectonics which actively recycles our surface and actively dissipates the heat from the inside and basically makes our planet not only habitable to life for many many reasons but also recycles the very very important co2 carbon dioxide because of the plate tectonics because of the way that the actual plates move around a lot of the co2 gets trapped on the inside and again gets released with volcanoes and gets trapped again on venus this doesn't happen because the eruptions happen so suddenly the entire co2 gets released right away and so one of the reasons venus is the way it is today is because it actually lacks plate tectonics now let's go back a few uh billion years and find out why exactly is it that venus doesn't have any plate tectonics on the surface we're going to create a new system here with the sun and two uh planets one is going to be right here and one is going to be right here so these are early venus and river earth so both of these are relatively similar in pretty much everything as a matter of fact they were very likely twins they both had um very similar surfaces very similar densities and they even had water on the surface so here is the face of early earth with basically crust and water and atmospheric pressure of about one atmosphere this is just for the simulation purposes and here's venus very similar in every respect maybe a little bit more water here but this is just because i pressed this button a little bit too long we're gonna maybe decrease a little bit of water making it a little bit more realistic and so here we go now with time venus started to lose the water so something happened and the water started to evaporate it's probably because there wasn't enough magnetic um magnetosphere magnetic field to protect water and it's also probably because it was a little bit closer to the sun than the earth but basically if water started to disappear completely and we're still not entirely sure how but water is directly responsible for keeping uh very active plate tectonics so for example in our planet earth because of water uh the actual plates underneath the water are different from the plates above it and they're a little bit more dense and so they actually sink underneath these these other plates and this sinking allows for the recycling of various crusts that are deposited on the surface and obviously recycles carbon dioxide as well now venus lost the water and its crust became sort of very similar everywhere it sort of started it it became very uniform it also started losing atmosphere at first because there was nothing protecting it from the sun but we're not going to remove atmosphere because venus recovered from that event later now at this point there was no more water and so all of the surface was kind of similar and it started to heat up relatively similarly as well but because it was closer to the sun and because it was actually a little bit hotter than the earth it kind of repaired itself so basically it was able to recirculate the materials relatively actively so no plates were actually formed now this is a very interesting concept because on earth something else happens let me just show you what happened on earth so first of all water always stayed with us but also another really important difference or another important event started happening here on earth some of the areas where the crust were kind of joined together were actually still damaged from all of the heat and were not repaired just enough mostly because they were cooling down too fast so even though for the most part all of these uh planes on earth basically all of the plates were just like on venus being repaired actively because of the heat some areas so areas where later on we developed the um the so-called plate tectonics plate crusts or i guess boundary areas as you can also call them were actually constantly damaged they never had a chance to repair and at some point they basically snapped and created the boundaries that we have today where the plate tectonics either converge or diverge or slide against each other and all of this was very very important and only happened because earth was a little bit farther away from the sun and it was a little bit cooler and also because water was partially responsible for causing this damage we're still not entirely sure how all of this occurred but basically earth maintained its plate tectonics and venus didn't and because venus didn't have the plate tectonics it started to warm up started to heat up more and more and more and water by then was probably already gone atmosphere was already dwindling and then a few ten or maybe a few hundred million years later um something started happening the planet was so hot it became so heated that it suddenly started exploding from the inside and we're going to simulate this by uh basically colliding a bunch of objects into venus to create this humongous explosion now it wasn't really as big as you're about to see but this is just to kind of give you a dramatic dramatization of such event so the volcanoes basically started erupting all over the surface this was the first such eruption there were probably a few more afterwards and the entire surface became essentially molten became covered with these very very large volcanoes and all of the carbon dioxide on the inside got released a lot of other stuff like sulfur dioxide became released as well and suddenly the atmosphere of venus became really really thick so because of this sudden increase in atmospheric pressure the atmosphere of venus was now something like 90 times the atmosphere of earth and it acquired a tremendous greenhouse effect and since then venus was really really really hot and it very likely changed a little bit uh throughout the years with more eruptions but for the most part that's essentially how venus recycles its crust and what actually happens on the surface and why it's actually so hot now it's very possible that this might one day happen to earth as well especially if we lose the water but for now we're pretty safe because water does protect us and does create and maintains the plate tectonics on our surface so for as long as we have plate tectonics we really shouldn't have such a crazy and dramatic uh runaway greenhouse effect and uh as you can see this is the new surface of venus after the collisions now this planet will very likely undergo another such event in the next few hundred million years so we might uh one day even witness it if we're still around but for now though what we know about venus is that even though it started like earth because of the greenhouse effect because of the lack of plate tectonics on the surface and lack of exchange of material on the surface it's basically a very very hot hell like conditions hello wonderful person this is anton and in this video we're going to be talking about our beautiful neighbor venus this is what it kind of looks like in space engine and it sort of represents what it really looks like in real life as well today we'll talk about the discovery coming from venus that suggests that venus has really interesting climate and also climatic changes that we really didn't know existed so this beautiful terrestrial planet is actually the closest planet to us not mars at its closest venus approaches earth at a distance of about 38 million kilometers which is uh relatively close when it comes to planetary distances but today our interest in venus is in regards to its past specifically in regards to its changes related to the so-called greenhouse effect we believe that venus has undergone a dramatic change in its past going from well basically something that looked more like earth with liquid water on the surface to a tremendously hot hellish conditions with very hospitable surface equivalent to i guess what you would literally call hell temperatures here are close to 500 degrees celsius the pressures are ridiculous the atmosphere is also full of acidic elements and so most of the pros that were sent here didn't really survive for very long the only pictures of the surface that we do have um all came from the soviet missions back in the 70s the so-called venera missions were able to survive on the surface for just enough time to take a few shots and we're then most likely completely destroyed by the super high pressure and of course the temperature and although the photos that we have are not super detailed they do give you an idea of what it's like on the surface now if you'd like to explore these photos i'm posting the link for this website that was created by don mitchell quite a while ago over a decade ago actually and he does have these really well reconstructed photos from the soviet mission but even though one day we would like to go back to venus and possibly take a few more shots of the surface it's really the atmosphere of venus that's the most interesting part to us right now and more specifically this composite shot right here taken by the japanese akatsuki mission gives you an idea that there's something happening in the atmosphere of venus that um we can't really explain just yet there are these dark patches pretty much everywhere and these dark patches are not really simply just clouds or any other formations that are easy to explain they do have properties that um we've only observed in some features on earth specifically they seem to actually change the ultraviolet absorption of the planet in other words some of these dark patches in the atmosphere of venus as they travel around the atmosphere they either increase or decrease the uv light absorption and this does influence the atmosphere quite a lot now one thing you need to know about venus and here's maybe a slightly better view of this um you can't really see its surface pretty much about 90 of all of the light that comes to venus is reflected it has a very high albedo and the word albedo refers to the reflectivity of an object so obviously things like mirrors for example have very high albedo whereas things like black roads will have very low video and albedo venus is so high that if we were to make it similar to albedo of earth the temperature on the planet would jump dramatically so right now the temperature is shown at 475 degrees celsius and just for fun let's actually decrease the libido to what it is on earth which is roughly around 35 percent and look what happens to the actual planet it becomes a level world it literally lights up it melts everything becomes ridiculously hot and so the atmosphere itself even though the planet was really super hot and even though the greenhouse effect influenced the temperature on the surface still kind of protects the rest of venus from becoming a completely molten world so this is why for us it's interesting to find out what's really happening in the atmosphere and since 2007 we've been actively studying the atmosphere and discovered that the reflectivity of this planet is correlated with the number of these unusual dark patches and we're still not really sure what they are these scientists currently refer to them as unknown absorbers and the explanation differs from them being some sort of particle some sort of aerosols possibly something related to oxides of sulfur or maybe some kind of a ferric chloride or essentially something that can influence the absorption of ultraviolet light but late carl sagan even suggested that there are some similarities to bacteria living in the atmosphere of our own planet that seem to actually have very similar features in other words he even suggested that this could be signs of life in venusian atmosphere simply because of the properties we're observing but what is really unusual is that um as these patches were changing so was the absorption of the ultraviolet light as a matter of fact since 2007 the absorption of uv light on venus halved but then it started going up again and so that's exactly what this recent paper talks about what they did is analyzed the data from these different missions and discovered that the changes in the dark patches in the venusian atmosphere were correlated with the changes um or actually heating of the atmospheric layers and thus most likely the increase of the wind speed and the winds on venus are really really fast the speeds here can reach up to about 300 kilometers per hour and this is due to a phenomenon known as super rotation where even though the planet doesn't spin the winds above it rotate or technically move really really really fast and today or at least now because of this paper we believe that all of this is related so these patches wherever they are whatever is in them are causing the planets to drop its albedo and then absorb more light specifically uv light from the sun which heats up the atmosphere accelerates the winds and creates i guess in a sense summer so technically the conditions in venusian atmosphere change very periodically and according to the observations from this paper these changes happen roughly around every decade or around 12 years or so and so this suggests to us that venus has these climatic changes every 12 years which we have never known existed and which we couldn't really explain before but this of course creates a lot more questions than answers and it's of course interesting that these dark patches relate to all of this but what are the patches what are they made out of and this of course means that we need to go to venus we need to find a way to explore the atmosphere of venus and potentially find a way to launch some sort of an atmospheric probe that can study this in a little bit more detail and maybe discover if it's life or not and this is really the important part because if it is life living in those atmospheric layers on venus this would mean that life can survive much more inhospitable environments than we imagined so here even though the surface is ridiculously hot and extremely difficult to survive for anything really the atmosphere however might have something for us to look into and specifically there are layers in venetian atmosphere where the atmosphere itself and also the temperature is somewhat similar to what we have right here on earth although not entirely chemically similar to what we have on earth because there are also things like acids and um of course a lot of co2 and absolutely no oxygen in those layers nevertheless they could create conditions for atmospheric or aerial life but what's even more unusual about this particular discovery is that the variation in climate that we've observed on venus seem to be dramatically stronger than they are on earth in other words not only does venus have an extremely powerful greenhouse effect it also seems to have very powerful climatic changes with temperatures very likely changing by a huge amount every single i guess you could call it winter even though it's still hot it's maybe not as hot as every summer and this is of course not including things like storms or i guess the gushes of wind that are present in the upper atmosphere of the planet that are already really strong stronger than pretty much anything we have on earth but what i find really intriguing in this discovery is the importance of albedo just to show you again remember the albedo value for venus is basically the highest of all planets in the solar system it's at 90 percent and this study really underlines how essential albedo studies are to discovery of new planets that are potentially habitable to also analyzing atmospheres and analyzing atmospheric conditions because here as soon as i change albedo by about 10 percent the temperature of the planet changes so much that a lot of the atmosphere disappears and you can actually peer through the atmosphere and this shows you the power of this property that's very rarely talked about so here the temperature jumped by about 100 degrees when i changed the albedo by only 10 so the reflectivity of objects um is an important study this is how we usually study the properties of objects that are far away but it's even more important to study around objects like venus because obviously here since 90 of light is reflected even a tiny tiny deviation from that makes the planet dramatically hotter and since we're not entirely sure what really caused all of this and what's causing the changes in these unusual particles or basically reflectivity of the planet trying to identify the source is very very important there are suggestions that maybe it's because of the cosmic rays maybe the actual cosmic radiation or um the activity of the sun itself causes the changes in reflectivity of venus in that case well it's a lot easier to understand and a lot easier to simulate but right now the changes we've detected are not really connected to the so-called solar cycle by the way you can check out a video about sorrow cycles right there above my head it's a very recent study that analyzed them in more detail but either way a very exciting study and hopefully this will help us launch a mission to venus soon so we can explore this planet a little bit more unfortunately there hasn't been a lot of talk about venus and there really haven't been that many missions to venus the major missions all happened back in the 70s when the soviets went there but since then no one really came but still studying what happened to this planet and also understanding this climate is super important so we can actually prevent this on earth we don't want earth to turn like this and we know venus used to be very earth-like before so let's hope we can learn some lessons from venus so we can preserve our planet as it is right now hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're talking about venus now venus is not a planet we normally talk a lot about mostly because whenever we found out that it was relatively hot and somewhat hellish there we kind of lost the interest in trying to colonize it even though technically it should be the most interesting object to us because it's a lot closer in mass and even in composition to earth than mars's but still it's just too hot and we don't really know how to get rid of that heat this is what we believe venus may have looked like billions of years ago when it very likely had ocean we'd still believe that venus was very earth-like in the beginning and we believe that probably looked something like this mostly because of the fact that it's extremely similar to earth in density it has water that we've detected escaping from within we also detected a lot of co2 obviously and a lot of the similarities resemble our planet earth but as if basically transitioned from a relatively habitable world to a world filled with co2 that's completely uncontrolled creating a tremendously large greenhouse effect now today we're talking about a study that analyzed this idea of venus having water and when they ran the simulations using tidal inversion software from the oregon state university that's often used to try to calculate the amount of tides and also the energy produced by ties it's actually a very complex software that's used pretty regularly by people studying the oceans here on earth they realized that well if venus had oceans and if venus had a certain depth of notion there's a very high chance that it would most likely cause venus to lose those oceans and become what it is today this paper that you can find in the description below is an analysis of various tidal effects that venus would have experienced if it had a liquid ocean of various types of depths based on the topography of venus that was then used to calculate what kind of a shape the ocean of venus would have and the results were quite interesting now these are not necessarily conclusive results but based on the simulation based on the topography what the scientists discovered is that within only a few million years venus or at least the surface of venus would probably look like this in other words because of the effects that it gets from the sun because of these tidal effects it's very likely it would transform into what it is today relatively quickly now let's discuss this in a little bit more detail because it's actually kind of interesting so first of all um we know that on our own planet which is by the way this except that i'm basically upside down here um the uh tidal effects we get for the most part are coming from both the sun and the moon and the moon is actually responsible for over two times more tidal effects than the sun is mostly because earth is farther away from the sun than venus but on venus it receives about 2.67 times more tidal effects from the sun than earth so here the tidal effects would be quite more dramatic but at the same time only a little bit more dramatic than the effects from the moon at the same time just having a dry surface like this is not enough to have any type of effects however today we know that um it's very likely that the surface of venus is covered with so much thick layers of co2 that underneath um all of the co2 that we have here um there is a layer that acts as a kind of a supercritical gas in other words it's a gas that sort of acts like a liquid and is responsible for changing the rotation of the planet but we're not entirely sure if this gas was always there it's uh assumed today that it was not always like this on our planet and i guess pretty much on every planet that has a liquid water the tidal effects are usually caused by the water which of course makes sense because when we say ties we often refer to the level water but the water itself causes other things and when it comes to tides this is normally how it's interpreted so the uh gravitational effects from the moon create this kind of a tidal bulge right here on two sides of the planet and that's because the gravity sort of uh stretches the planet creating a slightly taller or slightly higher level of water here than here but the thing is because the planet also rotates the tidal bulge actually gets moved a little bit in front of earth and so the real bulge is under an angle and because of this the effect here is that first of all this transfers some of the energy to the moon's orbit and pushes it away from us so moon is constantly moving farther and farther away it used to be a lot closer to us now it's farther and will be a lot farther in the next few billion years but at the same time this force also pulls back on our own planet slowing it down a little bit and so today we know that um the planet used to orbit a lot faster as a matter of fact when the dinosaurs were walking earth the single day on earth was approximately 20 hours long and when moon and earth were just created a single day was about six hours long so the planet used to spin about four times faster and eventually every object that has tides becomes tidally locked so sort of like if we were to look at pluto and his partner sharon right here these are tidally locked objects what this means is that they're always facing each other with the same side so as pluto and sharon orbit around one another they're always facing each other and this happens because eventually because of tides things become tidally locked this is true for every major object that has any kind of a liquid ocean on the surface or underneath so for example every major moon like ganymede io europa and so on all of them are tidally locked as well and it's very likely that this tidal lock occurred because they have liquid oceans inside and so pretty much every single object with liquid water or with an ocean on the surface is going to at some point become tidally locked or at least slows rotation so this is very likely what happened to venus because this particular study when they assumed that there was ocean here which let's just create this really quickly by giving venus a liquid ocean right here um so in this case depending on the depth of the ocean it would um most likely cause different types of energy from tidal forces and when they ran the simulations they found very different results but some of those results were quite dramatic so even though um today if you were to basically add oceans to venus because of its slow rotation the tidal effects would be about point 15 gigawatt of energy in total which is something like um five or six thousand times less than what it is on earth if venus was rotating faster so maybe something closer to planet earth where a single day takes a single day in that particular case the energy from the tides would be dramatically higher and they've discovered that some of those tides might have been just as high as they are on earth so in other words it would produce approximately 600 gigawatts of energy which when they ran the simulation gave the planet so much drag because of the tidal effects that it would start slowing down quite a lot some of their calculations suggested that it could lose as much as 72 days per million years in other words within about 10 million years it could have slowed down to a crawl that it has today and basically become tightly locked now those were some of the more extreme versions with a very specific depth of an ocean i think it was about 600 meters on average but if the oceans were deeper or more shallow it may have not had as much effect but it doesn't change the fact that the tidal effect would still be powerful enough to slow down the planet within about billion years and if this planet suddenly slowed down like it did right here it would then be basically exposed to the soul radiation 24 7. and if it becomes tidally locked like this it's very likely that it's going to lose any kind of magnetosphere it might have here because we believe magnetosphere is actually created by the rotation of the planet or at least partially created by that uh lack of rotation here would kill magnetosphere without magnetosphere all of this ocean would start evaporating like crazy venus would most likely start losing tremendous amounts of water really really quickly um it would escape into the atmosphere as hydrogen and oxygen which we still detect even today eventually becoming better like this and then this would start the cycle of co2 release and the planet would become hotter and hotter pretty much every single year with co2 eventually covering the entire surface causing really high greenhouse effects and superheating the planet to the temperature that it has today and so this is one of the major discoveries in this particular paper that suggests that if venus had ocean in the beginning this ocean would most likely kill the existence of water on the planet in other words it's kind of like doomed if you do doom if you don't if venus had water it would most likely lose all of it almost instantly and if it didn't have water then it had this really thick atmosphere that probably did the same now interestingly today venus doesn't really have a tidal lock anymore as a matter of fact it has something called retrograde rotation in other words it actually spins um in the opposite direction of other planets and we believe this is formed by this thick atmosphere so the atmosphere that it currently has if you were to look underneath it and by the way you'd probably see something that looks like this but what you would see here and what you would actually feel here would feel like liquid because this lower level atmosphere here has so much pressure and so much temperature that the carbon dioxide that's here starts acting like liquid it literally flows across the surface of venus and this flow also creates tides as well so there is a very unusual very interesting co2 tide on the surface that's causing venusian rotation to change again and um in the last few billion years it acquired kind of a balance where it literally has an equilibrium between the tidal walk caused initially by the sun itself and by the water it may have existed here and the atmospheric tides that are caused by the heating of the atmosphere by the sun and by the very unusual properties of supercritical carbon dioxide that's on the surface of venus and we've recently actually become quite interested in the so-called supercritical co2 because it also might be the source of very clean energy but i'm going to talk about this in another video nevertheless the main discovery in this paper is that no matter what venus used to have in the beginning here it most likely even if it was a much faster planet which it probably was it would have lost the spin despite anything it would have lost it if it had thick atmosphere it would have also lost it if it had the liquid ocean because of the tidal effects from the sun and because it's relatively close to the sun compared to planet earth even though venus was probably habitable like you see on the screen right here eventually this actually destroyed the ocean itself so it's kind of ironic in a sense that these tidal effects basically cause the planet to lose the ocean what's important about this study is that it allows us to now understand how this could happen on other planets specifically exoplanets because of the approach that this particular paper took we now can potentially study what happened on other planets like for example if we go to trappist-1 with its seven terrestrial worlds today we believe that many of these worlds are maybe water worlds but if they are water worlds it's very likely that many of them also became tidally locked and it's very likely that they may have suffered the same fate as venus so it's possible that pretty much every world that becomes tidally locked becomes similar to venus so this is something that we need to investigate a little bit more because one day it will hopefully help us find a planet that's not like venus not like mars but a planet that's like earth if we understand how these effects evolve and how all of this changes with time we'll be able to find this beautiful earth 2.0 but remember until that happens we still only have one earth only this earth i guess you can call it earth 1.0 so we do have to take care of this planet a little bit better than we do right now because unless we find somewhere else to live there is just no other hope for us hello wonderful person this is anton and in this video we're going to be talking about a discovery right here in our own solar system actually two discoveries now i actually left for a couple of weeks i had to do a few things and as soon as i left we started discovering incredible things in our own solar system and other star systems and there's going to be a lot of videos in the next few weeks to basically catch up with all of these events but this one here kind of takes the cake because it's basically something that was always there but we never really noticed it and as you can see from the picture right here what we discovered is basically rings really beautiful really awesome looking rings that are in the orbit of venus and also in the orbit of mercury now these are actually two completely separate studies but it just so happens that they happen around the same time and interestingly what these rings suggest to us is that there's a lot of asteroids in the orbit of venus and mercury that we've never really discovered or actually never even looked for so let's talk a little bit more about this and let's discuss what was really discovered so first of all this is the first paper uh that talks about the um circum solar dust during near mercury's orbit by uh guillermo stenborg and the second paper is by potter pokorny and mark kuchner and this is the one about venus or specifically the ring around venus now both of these papers are in the description below so you can read more about the study itself but let me actually explain to you how uh this was basically discovered how we were able to identify these particular rings and to discover one of these rings the scientists use this satellite right here known as stereo ahead there's actually two uh parallel satellites one is called ahead and one is called behind and if you were to look at where they're located they're located in the same orbit as our planet earth and this is actually the orbit here except that one of them orbits a little bit ahead of earth and one of them orbits behind earth and they're used for various studies but in this particular case both of these satellites or specifically this one actually uh were just looking at the sun and while looking at the sun they were able to detect something really unusual specifically dust they were actually able to see an increase of about five percent of brightness due to dust or basically reflections from the dust no matter where the spacecraft was in its orbit and interestingly this only has one explanation that there is dust pretty much all across the orbit of venus and also all across the orbit of mercury now the dust right here this is the venus dust is actually a little bit more well studied we even know that uh the thickness here is approximately 15 million kilometers but the dust rain of mercury even though it's kind of smaller is a little bit more interesting and a little bit more exciting because we never expected to find anything so close to the sun mostly because we thought that because mercury is so close to the sun the solar emissions and specifically the solar wind would actually most likely dislodge anything that would be that close to it and the only way for this ring to actually maintain itself is to have a source of dust and this is where it gets a little bit interesting if we were to try to create this ring in universe sandbox just to simulate what all of this looks like if mercury is right here then somewhere in its orbit there are at least several hundred relatively large asteroids and these asteroids are most likely responsible for creating all of this dust now we're not entirely sure how big these asteroids are but just based on the amount of dust we've detected it may suggest that if we were to combine all of this dust into one single piece it would create a rock approximately three maybe four kilometers in diameter and all these rocks are obviously responsible for shedding all of this dust and then depositing it in orbit and as the sun expels some of these dust particles through various activities such as for example solar flares or just solar wind in general each of these asteroids is then responsible for slowly shedding this dust and creating the ring that we've detected now um we don't really know the mechanism exactly just yet we don't even know what's causing these particles to kind of appear as a dust ring we just know that it's there and even though we suspected the one around venus to be relatively large and we kind of knew that it was there we really didn't expect mercury to have anything similar so now we know that um pretty much every major object in the solar system has these unusual rings we're pretty sure that earth has it as well we just haven't really been able to detect it just yet because it is relatively difficult to see it and so basically the discovery kind of looks like this there is the ring around mercury that's a little bit smaller and the ring around venus the venus is somewhere right there um that's a little bit larger and this also implies that it's very likely that venus has slightly more asteroids or potentially that sun doesn't really have as much influence over the region where venus is located as opposed to the region where mercury is now we don't really know much lsuc for example we don't really know how long this ring will exist or if it's going to expand or shrink and also we don't really know its composition just yet we just know that it's kind of thin um and for the most part the only actual explanation so far is the simulation that was run using well actually something similar to universe sandbox basically the way that the scientists were able to explain how these rings were formed is by running a simulation for about well kind of four and a half billion years really and they initially placed approximately ten 000 rocks in the same orbit as venus and their simulation showed that even after four and a half billion years at least 800 asteroids are still going to stay in the orbit here and they're still going to orbit and release the actual dust material and this dust material will then kind of stay around until sun expels it somewhere to the outskirts of the outer solar system and even though we don't really know what it's made out of it's very likely that it's probably rocky and also metallic in its composition so in other words it's very likely not isis not water not anything that's uh easy to dislodge by the sun it's probably something heavy and for all we know it might be even precious but because this is so diffused it's actually very very thin it's almost like a vacuum here these particles are really really far away from each other in that sense it's not really that useful other than scientific curiosity like there's no way we're going to be able to collect these particles or to in any way use them it's just going to stay in this orbit until the sun expels it for good and even a spacecraft that passes through this dust cloud doesn't really have to worry about any collisions or anything because these particles are really far away really really small and um it would be really really challenging for us to even find one of these particles so in that sense um it's a really interesting discovery but doesn't have much practical use just yet it will however help us understand our own solar system and the evolution of the solar system but also help us understand what we're looking at when we're seeing these rings in other star systems as well and on that note that's unfortunately all we know right now as new studies come out i'm going to definitely mention the follow-up in one of the future videos but for now well that's really it we discovered two really cool rings in our own solar system around mercury and venus hello wonderful person this is anton and in this video we're going to be talking about this beautiful neighbor of ours venus in this video we're going to discuss some of the recent research that suggests that we may have been actually wrong about the surface of venus we've always thought that the surface here was relatively dead in other words there's no volcanoes there's just a lot of heat a lot of pressure and a lot of gases for the most part venus has always been imagined as a kind of a deadly feature of earth in other words this is what happens when plate tectonics no longer exist and when you can't really fix any more carbon dioxide and it sort of escapes into the atmosphere the extreme greenhouse effect but the recent research and summary of various scientific findings of the last few years from pole burn suggests otherwise it suggests that venus is quite active even today in other words this beautiful planet might be a lot more mysterious than we thought originally now for the longest time scientists believe that approximately 250 to maybe 750 million years ago venus had a major eruption that resurfaced everything changed the entire landscape and since then venus was relatively inactive volcanically for the longest time scientists also believed that it might happen again sometime in the future but not just yet but recent research and most importantly recent observations kind of showed us that we were wrong first of all we've discovered several areas on venus specifically areas that you can kind of see if you look beneath the atmosphere and usually this is done by scanning the surface of venus with radar some of these surface features here are only about 250 000 years old and that's relatively young even for a planet like earth because here only like for example islands in hawaii or certain other regions that are currently being developed by volcanoes and by various types of volcanism are that young and the reason we know that they're so young is because they lack weathering effects they seem to resemble something very very recently created and that definitely goes against the previous theories that suggested there was no volcanism on venus at the same time if you were to look around the surface of this beautiful planet you wouldn't really find any large craters or any large formations from collisions from anything really in other words something seems to constantly remove craters and collusions from the surface now if it's just atmosphere atmospheric corrosion it would still leave some impact science however on venus there is practically nothing and this also suggests that there is constant resurfacing and constant change in the appearance of upper crust in other words most likely volcanoes there is still probably a lot of active volcanoes now we obviously haven't seen any actual eruptions like this even though this is probably what it looks like but we have seen these signs of past volcanic eruptions from relatively recently that may have changed the surface quite dramatically and here is actually one of those images that was produced by one of the probes flying around venus that indicates the surface here is somewhat young with the obvious only explanation possible that this was done by a recent volcanic eruption and here's one such example of a potential proof that some of the regions here are still volcanic this object here is mons is probably a volcano you can see that it's a lot hotter on the inside than in the surroundings suggesting that there is something really hot and very pressurized inside that most likely escapes once in a while and probably creates new volcanic features around the subject now interestingly we don't really have a good explanation for how this happens but it seems that it's definitely happening all over the surface and the current estimate for the number of these volcanoes is around 1600 and that's a lot of volcanoes that means that the entire surface of venus will most likely change over time in the next few million years and will look completely different and remember here on earth we have things like plate tectonics that usually are responsible for generating a lot of volcanism and a lot of volcanic eruptions but how it happens on venus is a mystery to us there is however at least one explanation at least a suggestion so the scientists behind the study believe that instead of plate tectonics venus might have something like this these circles that you see here represent mini plate tectonics fragments of rock literally just floating on top of the mantle similar to how ice floats on top of water and as these fragments float sometimes they squeeze the surface sometimes they stretch the surface and this generates a lot of different activity and of course volcanoes very different from how it works on earth but this is the only explanation we have so far for what might happen or what is happening on the surface of venus and this also suggests that the surface of venus is very thin very stretchy and very very very mobile it sort of is more elasticy and a lot more flexible and bendable compared to the surface of earth and is also probably filled with a lot of really interesting stuff now today the scientists also believe that inside of venus there is a large deposit of water the reason scientists believe that is because venus doesn't have plate tectonics and because of that a lot of water is trapped inside the planet and although here on earth our planet has lost approximately half of its internal reserves of water that eventually made its way to the surface and is now literally oceans here on venus this never happened the water is still trapped there and only about a quarter of the entire deposits may have escaped previously and right now the scientists believe that at least three quarters of venusian water are still there inside so this is actually good news because one day we could potentially change the atmosphere of venus in other words we could somehow terraform it removing all of this toxic and highly highly dangerous atmosphere that is currently there and replace it with something nicer and more beautiful and then if we can find a way to somehow release this water it will probably turn into oceans turning venus into a terraformed world it would not be as challenging as mars because venus already has all the prerequisites on the inside we just have to release them whereas obviously mars doesn't even have enough water or enough of anything for us to sustain a livable world on the surface unless we bring it from somewhere else i know it actually changes a little bit so it looks a little bit more earth-like because i think it has way too much water and here we go here's what venus might look like if all of the water from the inside escaped and if the atmosphere wasn't so crazy hot in other words if we somehow remove the atmosphere of venus and make it more habitable this is what we expect to see and so this particular study and this investigation actually provides really good news for the future of humanity if one day we decide to settle venus it essentially explains that venus is still active it also explains that there's most likely a lot of water hidden inside and most importantly it allows us to kind of dream and think about how we could maybe terraform it one day and change it into an earth-like planet however unfortunately we just don't have enough data right now to investigate anything else because there are only two missions that are active on venus there is the japanese akatsuki which struggled a little bit in the beginning but is currently trying to study venus a little bit more and there is the venus express probe both of which are just not producing enough data we need to send more probes just like we do with mars to try to investigate this beautiful planet and find out what we can do to make it more habitable even if not on the actual surface at least maybe we could try to find a way to build some kind of a cloud city or cloud colony in the upper atmosphere of venus where it's actually one atmospheric pressure you could totally live there except for maybe the nauseous dangerous gases as long as you have a mask you should be fine hello wonderful person this is anton and in today's video we're going to be talking about colonization terraforming and potentially the future of humanity but we're actually not going to be talking about mars even though i'm kind of showing it to you right now we're going to be talking about the planet that we really need to focus on colonizing and from the title you probably know what this planet is so first of all let's actually start by briefly discussing why mars is not going to be terraformed probably ever now obviously we can colonize if we can create quite a large um underground or even above ground colony on mars and we can create various ways of sustaining humanity here for quite a long time but it's just simply not terraformable for one very very simple scientific reason gravity it just doesn't have enough surface gravity it needs more surface gravity to permanently hold on things like oxygen and without oxygen you can't just have terraformed world for this reason unfortunately mars is going to be axed from the potential places where humanity can survive for the next billion or several billion years if there's no oxygen well then you're gonna have to live inside big domed cities and that's just not terraforming but on the other hand as you can probably tell from this title there is a planet in our solar system that is totally capable of supporting earth-like atmosphere and that planet of course is venus this is the planet that we really need to consider colonizing or basically finding a way to colonize because it is probably the only object in our solar system right now that we could potentially call a new home in the next few um hundreds of years now let's actually discuss a little bit more about the problems with venus first and in this multi-part video i'm going to discuss some of the possible solutions we can actually try to realize so first of all what are the problems with venus and why is it still not colonizable the biggest problem of course is ridiculously high temperature the temperature here is close to about 480 degrees celsius which of course is something that would melt most of the materials we would bring here including things like plastics and even lead now on the other hand uh this high temperature could also potentially serve as a kind of a catalyst for various chemical reactions that would initialize here to try to change the atmosphere and that's the next uh problem with venus the atmosphere it's actually very very earth-like except for one part the vast majority of atmospheric pressure on venus comes from huge amounts of co2 and this is what's creating so much temperature it's the incredibly powerful greenhouse effect so if we actually hypothetically remove all of the co2 from the atmosphere this will actually be a very very comfortable possibly around three atmospheres in pressure atmosphere very similar to one on earth with just a little bit less oxygen oxygen that we can then try to create so atmospheric pressure comes from co2 and co2 can definitely be removed there's also a few other problems in the atmosphere of venus and one of them is huge amounts of sulfur dioxide which can potentially be corrosive and deadly and back in 1961 carl sagan actually proposed that if we genetically modify bacteria and send it to venus and basically keep it in the atmosphere to try to break down carbon dioxide we could potentially colonize this planet in under a decade however then we discovered that it wasn't just carbon dioxide here it's also very very acidic uh sulfur dioxide like components which would very likely kill most of the bacteria but not all of the bacteria and we'll talk about which kind of bacteria could survive here in a few minutes now another problem is in regards to the rotation of venus and we'll actually talk about this in one of the future videos uh there's also the problem of not having any magnetosphere and that's also another problem we'll be solving in the future video and finally the fact that we're kind of close to the sun means that we actually receive uh at least a double of an actual even more than double of uh solar energy that can both be a blessing and also a curse because obviously we'll have to cool down this planet a lot more so in today's video we're actually going to only focus on various techniques that we can use to try to essentially change the atmosphere of venus and let's start with the one proposed by carl sagan and that's adding some kind of a genetically modified bacteria to try to essentially reduce the atmosphere here and change it from 91 atmospheres like right now to down to about three atmospheres by removing the entire carbon dioxide deposits now this could be done with genetically modified bacteria and also various uh animal like or plant like life that could potentially survive in super hot and super acidic temperatures right now we only know of some extremophiles that could actually survive in very hot conditions but even for them this would be a little bit too extreme so having extremophiles or basically bacteria that can survive in very very hot various conditions that could potentially survive here but even for them uh 480 degrees celsius and super acidic conditions is maybe a little bit too much for example uh the bacteria that can survive the highest temperature right now near the hydrothermal vents um under the ocean is a bacteria known as a pure lobus fumari but the temperature it can usually survive is about 120 degrees celsius uh there's a lot of other bacteria that can survive various conditions so for example super high radiation and so on but overall nothing is ready for these extreme conditions just yet so we need to either wait and find something more extreme or possibly genetically modify them until they can actually sustain uh and live in super hot and super super acidic conditions on venus and then they can help us get rid of the co2 the alternative here is actually uh something that was proposed by british scientist paul burch and he basically said that well listen if we take a lot of hydrogen like for example if we were to kind of somehow find a way to transfer hydrogen from the atmosphere of jupiter that's right there and if we essentially were to transfer all of this hydrogen from here and then put it on venus or basically not just put it but bombard venus with that hydrogen we could actually completely reduce the atmosphere here and turn it uh into a relatively habitable planet so using hydrogen bombardment you can actually pretty much turn everything here into graphite which is a type of carbon and also water which is something that we definitely need to survive so hypothetically by bombarding venus with hydrogen you can actually create a somewhat sustainable and actually somewhat wonderful looking world with really interesting earth-like conditions already a lot of carbon on the surface a lot of water and quite a large amount of material needed for life to live here including for plants of course so a lot of carbon here can definitely be used by plants and about 80 of the surface of venus would actually be covered by water if we were to somehow do this now obviously the difficult part here is getting this hydrogen delivering it here and basically bombarding venus with it we don't really have that kind of technology just yet but once we do then sky is the limit uh alternatively of course you could maybe find some sort of um asteroid and potentially asteroid that actually has a lot of hydrogen in it and essentially what you could do is launch it so that it basically collides with venus and delivers a lot of material that way now it could also potentially be used to remove atmosphere from venus as a matter of fact you could if you could somehow collide about thousand objects with venus you could remove most of the excessive um atmosphere but even a large rock like for example um rocks the size of a maki market here at 700 kilometers in radius would only strip venus of about one percent of its atmosphere that's just not enough we need a lot of these rocks for venus to lose most of its atmosphere so bombardment is a possibility but a very expensive one and also would require quite a lot of new technology for redirect redirecting asteroids from the asteroid belt to venus and lastly uh one of the other ideas uh comes from the paper known as the stability of climate on venus that was written back in 96 and this was by mark bullock and david uh greenspun from university of colorado at boulder and basically they proposed that well you could also bombard the atmosphere of venus with other things like for example refined magnesium and calcium and this would actually oh i don't know what happened to my venus i think it just suddenly got too hot um this could actually change venus for the batter as well reducing quite a large amount of um atmospheric uh carbon dioxide into rocks essentially solidifying them into calcium deposits and leaving them on the surface as tiny pebbles and in this case you could actually even create factories on the surface of venus that would basically uh pour out this calcium from inside the ground and use calcium from venus to reduce its own atmosphere but unfortunately there's just not enough calcium and magnesium inside so we would still need to deliver some of this uh by essentially colliding asteroids with venus so we're back to the same problem we need to find a way to redirect asteroids now before we can actually successfully redirect even a small asteroid this is a bit of a science fiction realm but uh genetically modified bacteria and bacteria that could reduce carbon dioxide and basically produce um atmosphere that's a lot more habitable for humans by essentially living on the surface of venus surviving in high acidic conditions and also converting co2 into essentially oxygen and potentially some other materials this is something that we could definitely create in a lab today we just need a little bit more time and research to try to develop these bacteria now all we know uh this is actually a good start for humanity to try to tear from planets and i think venus is a much much better candidate than mars on the other hand venus also has about 90 of earth gravity so the actual surface gravity here is very similar to the one on earth it's about 90 and for this reason it's actually capable of sustaining long-term atmosphere without losing it so that's really really important for terraforming planets now in the next video we're actually going to discuss some of the other problems and issues in colonizing videos but for now that's actually all i wanted to talk about i wanted to talk about the atmosphere first and really the best solution i think is the bacteria that can we can definitely create in the next few decades and if we can actually make bacteria that can do this on venus we can then potentially introduce a much milder version the one we can actually control easier to try to reduce the co2 level on earth as well because this would basically help us uh find the solution to the ongoing problem of increasing carbon dioxide currently the levels of carbon dioxide are already above 400 and they have been increasing higher and higher every year and reducing carbon dioxide is super important and if we can find bacteria to do this for us and do it quick well that's something we can then use on venus so that's kind of all for now in the next part we're going to discuss a few more techniques for solving some of the other problems but for now that's all i wanted to talk about because it's actually a very complex idea with quite a lot of scientific discoveries but also quite a lot of science fiction behind it hello wonderful person this is anton and in today's video we're going to be continuing our discussion about the potential terraforming of the beautiful neighbor that we have right here also known as venus now this is often ignored in most uh scientific discussions and also most sci-fi movies don't really talk about terraforming venus as much as they do mars but we're going to focus on this because i personally think this is probably the best place for humanity to potentially call home in the future in the previous part we actually talked about changing the atmosphere of venus and we also talked about various chemical techniques and uh other scientific techniques we can use to try to basically remove the vast majority of atmosphere here exposing the surface of venus if you do want to know more about it watch the previous video but here we're actually going to be talking about something different venus has another problem for us and this is actually something that we need to fix for us to create a terrestrial planet with habitable conditions venus has very very very very slow spin so let me just actually remove this for a second it spins extremely slow a single day on venus is equivalent to approximately 243 days on earth because of this there are two problems one is that a single side is exposed to the cell radiation for about basically over a hundred days and then the other side is exposed to the dark side for over 100 days on the other hand except for this there's also a problem of magnetosphere or magnetic field the magnetosphere on venus is non-existent even though it does seem to have relatively similar composition to the composition of earth as a matter of fact its density and its parameters are very similar so we would expect this to have magnetic fields and we think it doesn't exist because it just doesn't spin fast enough so if we can somehow accelerate venus and make it spin faster you would probably expect uh things here to look a lot more earth-like now one of the reasons it's actually spinning so fast is because of its thick atmosphere we think that over the billions of years the atmospheric pressure here simply due to drag made venus slow down and spin to the point where it's barely even moving at all so there is several solutions to this problem but even before i start talking about solutions this is probably the most scientifically unachievable task right now because removing the atmosphere is one thing but making venus spin faster would require quite a lot of energy as a matter of fact current estimates uh stand at approximately 50 billion per watt hours of energy which is approximately a billion times less than the entire world on earth uses in a single year as a matter of fact if we were to run every single generator tv set computer and playstation on earth for about a billion years this is how much energy we would require to basically accelerate the rotation of venus to that of earth on the other hand this is also the same amount of energy that our sun which is right there in the distance produces in about 10 minutes so on one side it's kind of a lot of energy but on the other side uh we actually do have a generator right there that can potentially create enough energy to make venous spin faster now one of the first techniques we're going to discuss here is relatively obvious so here we're actually going to just um take a look at our current rotations 243 days the more obvious technique is basically colliding things with venus and basically colliding them with the side where it would actually kind of increase the rotation and so here okay that actually decreased the rotation 246 days i put it on the wrong side let's try it again here um we're using uh palace to basically try to increase the rotation speed on it with one single collision it actually already improved it by a third so here we have 72 days rotation speed on the other hand what you could actually do and this is a little bit more realistic than just colliding things with venus is to launch thousands of smaller asteroids basically redirect smaller asteroids and make them move really really fast and basically fly by venus instead of colliding with venus so here with this every single flyby there's going to be an energy transfer between venus and the object passing next to venus and if we do this enough times we'll actually make venus spin faster and faster so here an object that's uh relatively massive that passes by venus relatively close to its surface is actually going to gravitationally influence its rotation and as long as it passes on the right side is going to basically make it spin a little bit faster so now if i take a look at it again its rotation will have increased or i guess decreased to 70.3 days so it just gained about two days of rotation uh or i guess it basically made it spin a little bit faster and if you do this thousands of times you can basically bring this down to approximately one day per uh day in other words you can make it more earth-like so that's the solution that's a little bit uh more realistic than just colliding things with venus because redirecting asteroids is not a very impossible task we think that we are going to be capable of redirecting an asteroid in the next few uh decades and so if you do this thousands of times eventually venus might actually start spinning faster and faster on the other hand if we actually launch several smaller asteroids but make them move way way faster at several thousands kilometers per second and that's of course using some sort of an ion drive propulsion or something else that will increase their speed constantly we could then um use a lot less objects and also smaller objects but would probably require uh some sort of technology to have constant acceleration of these asteroids toward venus so that's basically a second technique using close pass bys to slowly accelerate the rotation of venus and the last technique i was going to discuss is or would require something to be installed on the surface of venus first and here we're talking about the so-called mass drivers these are basically this is here's a picture one these are very very large accelerators of matter and these accelerators can often um increase the velocity of something up to about 10 of the speed of light so hypothetically and this is actually still in the realm of science fiction but we already have some of these on earth so we might as well uh try to find a way to create them on venus if you were to install a very very massive mass driver on the surface of venus and then somehow use the atmosphere of venus to basically get injected into the mass driver and then get shot out of it at ridiculously fast speeds we could then maybe use these mass drivers to accelerate the spin of venus to the point where it's going to spin just as fast as earth now this technique is definitely science fiction for now but here's the thing not only will this actually make venus spin faster but it will also get rid of the huge atmospheric pressure so you could technically remove all 90 atmospheres of pressure from venus and at the same time accelerate its rotation as long as you can create these mass drivers on the surface this would potentially solve two problems within just about a year maybe even less and as long as we can actually increase the speed of venus we can then start thinking about everything else including of course hopefully re-establishing the magnetosphere here re-enabling the carbon exchange cycle and creating something that seems to resemble um more earth-like features and also more earth-like uh surface atmosphere and pressure and this is basically i personally think one of the more important steps for us as long as we can make it spin faster it will solve a lot of problems on the other hand uh relatively recent studies actually did show that you could potentially have terraformed venus even without the fast spin using a variety of techniques like such as for example orbital mirrors you could project light on the other side and using various techniques like thick cloud layers or an object placed in between the sun and venus in one of the lagrange points to basically block the sun would maybe make it a little bit uh easier to live on by reducing sunlight on the bright side and increasing sunlight on the dark side now these techniques are still in planning and a lot of them are still relatively theoretical but they are possible and would definitely potentially create worlds that we could then live on in the next few millions and maybe even billions of years until the sun expands and absorbs it anyway that's all i wanted to talk about in this video and hopefully you'll learn a little bit more about terraforming venus in it and if you do have any other ideas about how it could potentially tear from venus please post it in comments below and in one of the future videos we're going to bring it all together and possibly terraform it once and for all creating some kind of a livable world at least in universe sandbox i'll see you tomorrow peace out and as always bye you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 240,935

Rating: 4.8661089 out of 5

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, venus, venus mission, venutian, venus nasa, nasa on venus, new venus mission, volcanoes on venus, vega probe, is there life on venus, venus atmosphere, venera, venera mission, vega, volcanism on venus, venus colonization, automata, automata on venus, aree, aree venus, gallium nitride, silicon carbite

Id: fVqmqKWgZjQ

Length: 181min 39sec (10899 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020