Venus Used To Be A Lot More Like Earth | Answers With Joe

well thank you guys so much for coming in today i know that therapy is not always the most fun thing can be kind of scary but uh i hope that this can be a a jumping-off point for some healing between the two of you so why don't you introduce yourselves and uh tell me why you're here do you want me to oh yeah okay so uh yeah so um i'm earth and this is venus my brother venus i assume you're twins yes uh yes sir well that's what everybody always says i like your shirts helps you tell you apart oh thank you yeah we like them too available at answersthejoe.com sorry go ahead oh okay well um yeah so venus and i you know we grew up together and um we were really similar for a while but then we just kind of went in different directions he's always so angry and hot-headed all the time i mean his surface can melt lead that sucks how are you angry at lead can i can i ask a quick question are either of you closer to your mother he is and uh what can you tell me about your mother she's the son like she's the actual sun oh okay well well that would make sense then that he would be a little bit hotter being closer to the sun one would think right well yeah i mean but no he we we used to be a lot more similar we would have similar temperature similar atmospheres liquid water all the other planets that say that that earth and venus they're two of a kind i don't know somewhere along the way he just he just changed he it's like he got enveloped in a fog that i couldn't see through i just have no idea what's going on on his surface and he's like under all this pressure and i just i can't you ever think maybe uh you're just a little thin skinned i don't know about that there's nothing wrong with me okay i just have a tough exterior i i don't i'm not covered with cracks i don't let my insides out all the time i keep my insides inside okay well and how's that working out for you uh fine want to look at yourself maybe gonna show him oh show him show me what it it's it's not i mean it's nothing i mean this arm's fine so i don't oh my god um it's gotten worse it's a little what is that it's not it's nothing it's a human infection humans who doesn't get some humans from time you have humans you brought you brought humans in my it's spreading how is it why are you okay with this everything's fine i don't know it's on your face oh it's on your face i want to scratch it but i think it'll just make it spread even further oh god it's on the chair now i can i can't i can't get that out of my couch you know it's i think it's embedded in the fight oh god oh my god yeah it's a look it's whatever god don't breathe this direction i'm telling you you're a part of human infection we have a human infection in the third uh orbit from the sun [Music] imagine you're planning a vacation you pick a resort with a tropical setting lush jungles beautiful beaches and the last thing you do before buying tickets is you check the weather and good thing you did because this place has changed since travelocity put their photos up instead of a beautiful vacation spot it's a hellish toxic wasteland so hot it could melt lead this must be what astronomers felt like when mariner 2 sent back its first readings of venus's temperature in 1962. because up to that point the prevailing wisdom was that venus was a lot like earth it was a rocky planet about the same size had a reflective atmosphere why wouldn't it have life there in fact in the earliest works of science fiction aliens were more likely to come from venus than from mars and they were usually described in glowing terms beautiful creatures from advanced civilizations just the name venus evokes the roman god of beauty we've known that venus had clouds since the 17th century and ever since then scientists have been wondering what was underneath those clouds some suspected there was a planet-wide ocean underneath there others thought that it was an endless desert in between were theories that it was a partly ocean partly land with most of the land being swampy for example c.s lewis and isaac asimov covered their venuses in an ocean edgar rice burrows added continents like here on earth but with skyscraping trees if there was going to be life outside of earth it was going to come from venus earth's sister planet and they've been debating this all the way going back to the greek days but aristotle insisted that there could only be one world and the prevailing wisdom went along with aristotle because he was aristotle and then later the early christian church kind of took the same attack now in the late middle ages some scholars began to argue that god could create multiple worlds if we wanted to i mean he's god one of those scholars was william vockham by the way the razer guy point is belief in aliens didn't start in the 20th century this has been going back a very very long time and venus was always one of the prime locations for that which is why by the way one of the very first things that happened in the space race with both the us and the soviet union was to send probes to venus to find out what was going on underneath those clouds what paradise or advanced civilization were we going to find there but all that went flying out the window as soon as mariner 2's findings came back no oceans no paradise just a rocky surface as hot as a pizza oven at 425 degrees celsius now to be clear there were some scientists that argued that venus was probably the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect carl sagan was one of them but even carl probably couldn't have imagined what a hellscape venus is it is actually one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system the longest operational lifetime ever managed by venus lander is the soviet union's venera 13 at 127 minutes it was finally done in by hurricane force winds of 457 degrees celsius temperature and 89 standard atmospheres of pressure one standard atmosphere is basically what you're feeling right now that that is one atmosphere venus's atmosphere is 90 times as dense as ours in fact it's similar to the pressure at one kilometer under the ocean for comparison advanced scuba divers generally go no deeper than 60 meters and anything below 100 meters is a record attempt most of venus's crushing atmosphere is carbon dioxide in fact it's 96.5 percent carbon dioxide earth's atmosphere is point zero four one percent carbon dioxide and you can see the problems that that's creating on its own carbon dioxide is a great insulator the crazy thing is that venus wasn't always like this it's thought that for most of its history it was a lot more like earth but before we get into that we got to talk about one more crazy thing about venus it rotates backwards very slowly looking down at the north pole the planet rotates clockwise this is the opposite of earth and all planets in our solar system except uranus but we always knew uranus was weird and when i say slowly i mean very very slowly one day on venus is equal to 117 earth days meaning it takes about 117 earth days for the sun to reach the same spot in venus's sky its rotation is so slow it's basically the same as walking speed so if you could just continuously walk you would never see the sun go down which if there were civilizations on venus they might be nomadic they might have to keep moving so they can stay in that daytime instead of being in 117 days of night and for just a little more context their full year is 225 days so they basically have like four seasons each year a day season a night season and then a second day season in the second night season now interestingly computer models suggest that a slow rotation of that kind might actually be amenable for life to form this was the conclusion of mike way and anthony delgenio of nasa's goddard institute for space studies they hypothesized that a slow rotation would favor forming dense clouds on a planet with the right chemistry clouds raise a planet's albedo helping it to lower the temperatures now obviously didn't work out that way on venus but according to the authors it might have actually helped it to be more like earth for the first three billion years of its life they describe a venus with cooler temperatures in liquid surface water and this came from some of the findings they found from nasa's venus pioneer mission basically that mission determined that there should be more water vapor on venus venus's water vapor is only .002 percent of its atmosphere on planet earth is more like 0.4 percent so very little water but a very high concentration of deuterium was found by the pioneer venus mission deuterium is a heavier isotope of hydrogen meaning that once upon a time there was a lot of hydrogen in the atmosphere probably bonded to oxygen and h2o and of course the only way that it could have had h2o was for the planet to have been much much cooler and the amount of deuterium suggests that they may have had oceans hundreds of meters deep so what changed venus from a vacation spot to a toxic pizza oven there are several ideas but none of these ideas exist in a vacuum most experts agree that it wasn't just one thing that changed everything it was probably a combination of all the above all the above being volcanic activity wonky magnetic fields and ancient impacts so let's start with volcanoes venus has plenty of those in fact no planet in the solar system has more volcanic features than venus it's estimated that 75 of venus's surface was made by lava flows here on earth liquid hot magma usually breaches earth's crust at tectonic plate boundaries though as you may remember from my super volcanoes episode there are times when magma finds its way out of the center of a tectonic plate usually two horrible results and the crust of venus is thicker and more rigid than that of earth in fact at one point they thought it might have been just one seamless lid but they do know from the magellan mission that there are tectonic plates there plates yes but they don't act the way they do here because they're so much thicker that they don't subduct at boundaries like they do here on earth on earth we have this ongoing cycle where plates abduct at the boundaries pushing the crust down into the magma to melt down only to ooze out somewhere else where the two plates are spreading apart this maintains a steady rotation of co2 and it's a significant part of the carbon cycle that's made life on earth possible they also cause earthquake tsunamis landslides and volcanoes but i mean life with no subducting plate boundaries volcanic eruptions build up more underneath venus they happen less often and then cover more of the ground when they do and according to one theory the magma that formed the 75 percent of the surface that got resurfaced i was talking about earlier started about half a billion years ago for something like a hundred thousand years it fed a surging magma ocean that covered the majority of the planet that's just a blink of an eye in geologic time there are other theories that say that uh the volcanic eruptions were less extreme and happened over a longer time scale more like the millions of years this is actually one of the biggest mysteries in the solar system i covered that in a previous video but whether it happened gradually or suddenly the effects were the same the first is that venus's surface looks super young with few impact craters that are older than 500 million years old and the second is that all that volcanic eruption put massive amounts of co2 into the atmosphere that had no place to go so it built up a runaway greenhouse effect happened and we get what we got today but here's the weird part on earth volcanic eruptions usually cause global temperatures to fall this is because the heating from carbon dioxide is usually counterbalanced by a different effect from sulfur dioxide yeah volcanoes also pump out massive amounts of sulfur dioxide which combines to h2o water vapor in the air to create sulfate aerosols and sulfate aerosols absorb radiation this is why a big enough volcano can create a volcanic winter but the study's author suggests that the so2 on venus didn't cool the planet because it was too hot in the first place for it to form uh combined with water it's it's pretty complicated i'll put the link to the study down in the description so the planet warm the atmosphere thickened a runaway greenhouse effect happened and whatever water was on the surface got evaporated of course water evaporates all the time on earth too but it gets recycled as rain that falls down to the ground so that the amount of water in the atmosphere stays pretty constant it stays constant on venus too at practically none so if there was water on venus and there is no water now where did it go the answer is most likely space it's thought that over time water in the atmosphere was broken down by something called photodissociation this is where ultraviolet light splits molecules apart long story short the sun broke h2o into h h and o hydrogen being the lightest atomic element eventually just floated off into space except for the heavier deuterium atoms which is why there's higher amounts of them in the atmosphere now this doesn't happen on earth for a couple of reasons one is something that we have called the cold trap which means that the atmosphere basically gets cold enough that the water vapor condenses into clouds and then falls back down to the ground as rain the other reason as you probably guessed is that we have this lovely magnetic field which venus kind of lacks actually it has one but it's way different from ours our magnetic field is generated by currents of molten iron in our planet's core making it intrinsic it comes from the earth and it's super strong extending out about 65 000 kilometers directing particles around the planet like iron filings around a bar magnet but venus has an induced magnetic field it gets pretty complicated but basically when solar winds hit the atmosphere it strips electrons off of atoms making it positively charged and this forces the sun's magnetic field to sort of wrap around venus forming sort of a teardrop shape uh and this does sort of protect the lower atmosphere but not the upper atmosphere like i said it's it's complicated and research is still ongoing on it but if you're wondering why venus doesn't have the spinning iron core creating an intrinsic magnetic field like we do well it it might have something to do with that wacky backwards motion that it has so we all know that earth got its moon because a mars-sized planet called thea smashed into us in the early days well it's thought that pre-thea the layers of our planet were more stratified like the the like this latte that you're looking at here the the darker uh heavier elements would sink down to the middle and the lighter stuff would float up top but the thea smash may have rearranged our insides enough to where we got a convection current going this generating magnetic field to this very day so maybe venus wasn't smacked around enough as a kid you know not only does it not have a magnetic field it also doesn't have a moon like we do so no moon no field no smash but in typical venus fashion the flip side of this argument is that the whole reason it has this weird backward rotation is because it got smashed either smashed with enough velocity to slow down its rotation and reverse it or smashed from up above and flip the whole planet upside down and cause it to spin backwards that way maybe with a little more oomph it really could have been earth's twin assuming the venusian impact theory is true that's still very hotly debated get it hotly debated because venus is you get it by the way experts dispute pretty much every theory that i'm listing here venus is a cornucopia of contradictions and mysteries but considering how weird venus is it's kind of amazing to think that for most of its history up until about 500 million years ago it still could have been habitable it still had the right conditions for life i mean earth was teeming with single cell life before this point maybe venus was too and scientists think that maybe mars did as well so it's possible that once upon a time three planets in a row had life on it hell there may be an advanced civilization 500 million light years from here that is right now looking at this solar system and thinking they hit the jackpot but both venus and mars suffer from a lack of tectonic activity i mean maybe earth's superpower is its ability to remake itself slowly over geologic time and avoiding quick shifts that can throw things out of control and some worry that our pumping of carbon into the atmosphere might be a similar threat that we might be reaching a tipping point where we're going to spin out of control and turn into another venus this is unlikely but still venus serves as a cautionary tale of how fleeting the conditions of life can be how fragile paradise can be and how important it is to protect it and as i said earlier if you want to feel what it's like to be on the surface of venus just stick your hand in a pizza oven yet don't stick your hand in a pizza oven but if you don't have a pizza oven don't worry you can still make amazing meals at home with today's sponsor hellofresh hellofresh delivers fully stocked meal kits right to your front door with recipes created by professional chefs pre-proportioned with instructions even a dummy like me can follow it saves time you'd normally spend going to the store besides the ingredients you're procured directly from farmers so it's fresher than what you get at the store and most of all it has some flavors and ingredients you might not even be able to find at your local store and that's one of the things i like most about hellofresh it's introduced me to all kinds of flavors and spices that i probably would have never tried otherwise some of the meals i've gotten from hello fresh are now like my favorite thing it's it's 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supporting this video and a shout out to the answer files on patreon that are forming an awesome community helping me out with videos they're they're amazing people there's there's a few people to call out real quick we got mikai papa billy bates and alan boaz just just three guys right now that's cool uh thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos and access to exclusive live streams all kinds of cool stuff just go to patreon.com answers with joe please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this video because google thinks you'll like that or any of the others that i've done that youtube might throw at you and if you enjoy them i invite you to subscribe i do come back with videos every monday all right that's it you guys thanks for watching go out there have an eye opening week and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 498,774

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: QQOCidVdHJ0

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021