- #36
cbacba
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TR345 said:
It's not exactly new but there's a number of reasons. It's much closer to the sun. It's not really rotating at any speed so the days are ridiculous. It's got an atmosphere with about 900+ PSI (versus our atmosphere's 14.7 PSI of pressure) of almost pure CO2 like a giant ocean of pea soup thick gas, with virtually an earthlike atmosphere riding atop it kilometers above the surface and conditions not particularly different from Earth way high above the CO2 'ocean'. It's got what appears to be massive amounts of current or relatively recent volcanic activity and there are all sorts of highly reflective clouds (sulphur compounds etc). Also, there doesn't seem to be much water vapor there, at least not enough to form an ocean were it to cool off below boiling point. It's possible that the water once existed and later disassociated in the atmosphere and it's possible that it never existed there.
From what I understand, there's only a couple of photos from the surface done by a russian probe many years ago. It's pizza oven hot down there and otherwise it sort of ressembles some of the martian landscape. Exploring the surface is rather out of the question since our electronic technology isn't capable of surviving at that teemperature as it's just about hot enough to melt solder and cook transistors fairly quickly.
Whether venus ever ressembled Earth as it exists now or whether Earth ever ressembled venus now is a good question. Somewhere along the line, Earth seems to have established chemical mechanisms to suck up all the massive amounts of CO2 and stuff it into limestone etc. Later, life forms started doing similar things after they got started. If venus never had the oceans or water vapor, it may never have had the means to dispose of all the CO2 that was there. Having no fairly short day like most planets, there would tend to be a significant heat build up on the daytime side so things wouldn't work very well even without the massive CO2 'ocean'