Venusology (VENUS) with Vicki Hansen

Gassy veils! Orange sunlight! Alien life? It’s the sole goddess of our solar system: Venus. And to tour us through her beauty is the charming and enthusiastic planetary geologist and Venusian expert Dr. Vickie Hansen, a Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. In what is sure to become an instant classic, Vickie will delight you with tales of space probes past and future, dazzling terrain, myths, melting machinery, “noodle data,” analogues to Earth, tectonic misconceptions, and reactions to self-help books that capitalize on our solar geography. Also: what does Venus smell like?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey. It's the stranger's dog who just licked your mouth, Ally Ward. And let's turn our gaze and ears to the sky. Currently, at the moment, 159 million miles away, to the planet of Venus. Taking us on that journey is one of the most charming and informatively enthusiastic ologists in planetary history, a global geologist who studies both Earth and the other orbs in our solar system with a focus on what Venus can tell us about our own home. And they graduated from Carleton College, got a master's from the University of Montana, and a PhD from UCLA before becoming a professor at Southern Methodist University, and then heading to the University of Minnesota Duluth as a McKnight Presidential Endowed

• 0:45Alie Ward?

  Professor of Earth and Planetary Scientists. They have worked for the US Geological Survey and done fieldwork from Antarctica to the Arctic Yukon Territory. And just a little quick warning, you will fall in love with them and rocks and Venus. But before we cast that spell, let's thank the folks who sent in great questions for them via patreon.com/ologies, where you too can support the show for as little as a dollar a month and send your burning 900-degree questions. Thank you also to everyone out there in Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And of course, for $0 a month, you can support the show just by reviewing it. And I read all the reviews. I prove it with a recent one, like this one from listener and nurse, sari916, who wrote that the show takes listeners on a magic school bus-like

• 1:30Alie Ward?

  auditory journey, spanning from the smallest molecules to the largest existential topics. And sari916, thank you for that. And thank you, Lee E., who tells their group therapy clients to listen. Hey, everyone who leaves reviews, it truly means the world, keeps me going. I appreciate them, and it helps boost the show so much, which means we're able to donate to a cause of the ologists choosing each week. Thank you to sponsors of the show. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care.

• 2:12Alie Ward?

  So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.

• 2:57Alie Ward?

  These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. Oh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Okay, from the smallest molecules to the planets themselves, let's blast off into this instant classic, an episode that had me beaming

• 3:42Alie Ward?

  every second of the interview. Here we go into the world of mission recon, noodle data, melting machinery, swimming in air, baby siblings, goddess vibes, men, women, and off-the-mark self-help books, sci-fi, how to endure a long day, atmosphere of olfactory wonders, and whether or not it's a good idea to visit the planet of love with planetary geologist, comparative planetologist, galactic treasure, and venusologist, Dr. Vicky Hansen.

• 4:30Alie Ward?

  And so I'm trying to figure out, there is an ology for this, right? Like, is it venu- venuology?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Well, you know, that's really an interesting question because some say it's like Venusian or that those are the people. So Venusology, you know, I think would go just as well as anything.

• 4:49Alie Ward?

  Then good. Are there a lot of people who are out there studying Venus? Do you all get together? Do you all know each other? Is it a relatively small number compared to Mars?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yes, it is a small number compared to Mars. It is an expanding community. When we had the Magellan mission back in the late 80s, early 90s, it was really a small community. And we all met in one room at Caltech in Pasadena.

• 5:18Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  You know, and now it's expanded, but it will never be as big as Mars, I'm sure. Which it deserves to be much bigger because Venus is much more exciting.

• 5:29Alie Ward?

  And which is closer to us? I understand Venus is larger than Mars.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:34Alie Ward?

  Which is closer?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Venus is closer to us, and Venus is between us and the sun.

• 5:39Alie Ward?

  And then we've got Mercury, Venus, us, Mars.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yep, Mars, exactly. And then the asteroid belt, and then we go out to the bigger planets.

• 5:48Alie Ward?

  And how big is Venus in comparison to Earth?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  It's about 80% of the size of Earth. So it's just, it's little sister by not a much amount. But that could be important.

• 6:04Alie Ward?

  So Venus, closer to Earth than Mars, larger than Mars, and like a sibling that's like an inch and a half shorter than us, but mysterious and overlooked. Why do you think people are so hung up on Mars, more so than Venus?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, they say men are from Mars and women are from Venus. So there we go.

• 6:24Alie Ward?

  Mars, distant, red, named for the god of war. Venus, bright in the sky.

• 6:31Alie Ward?

  The spectacular goddess of love and the only planet in our solar system named after a female deity. But in terms of attention, battles over beauty.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Figures.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  No more need to be said, but I think it's because there's this incredible search for life. And so people think that Mars might have a better chance of life. In fact, I'm not sure that's true. Another reason, I think, is just because Venus, like a woman, she keeps herself shrouded in clouds. And so she's called the morning star and the evening star. And that's because the sun's light is reflected off of her surface. And so she really looks like a star. And we can't see through those clouds unless we have radar. And radar was not developed until really quite recently, especially compared to telescopes.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  So we can, with telescopes, actually see the surface of Mars. And Venus, we need radar to see through. Otherwise, we just see these clouds and nothing else.

• 7:36Alie Ward?

  What are those clouds made of?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Those clouds are made up of mostly CO2 and then some sulfuric acid and a tiny bit of water and other things thrown into the mix. The cloud bank is really, really thick and sits much higher above the planet than our own cloud bank.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Way up there.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Very, very dense and actually is a greenhouse effect that keeps a lot of heat into the planet. But what's really cool about those clouds is that there are layers within them. Because they're so thick, there's convection or flow because they're a gas. And that's actually where there might be life on Venus.

• 8:19Alie Ward?

  In the clouds?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  In the clouds because the surface, as we'll find out, is super hot, super dry, not good for life as we define it.

• 8:29Alie Ward?

  So that's on land?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Maybe not as it really exists, but up in the clouds. If we were up in the cloud bank, it would be about the same temperature and pressure as you and I sitting here.

• 8:40Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  So we could exist in the clouds, maybe not so much oxygen. At the surface, we'd be squashed flat because it would be like being under a couple of kilometers of water in the ocean. And it's basically 900 degrees Fahrenheit, so super hot. Big temperature differential between here and Duluth, Minnesota, for sure. But in the clouds, because they have the circulation, you could have, again, not life like us, but life existing in those clouds. And they just ride those convection cells. But they also, the different chemicals that are in the clouds, they could be feeding on. And so there could be life there. We don't know, but there could. Isn't that cool?

• 9:25Alie Ward?

  Yes. I mean, can we go get a scoop of this? How do we find out?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, we need various missions. And so people have tried to say, maybe we can look into the clouds and see if there are geochemical indicators. There's nothing absolutely unique. So some things that could be, but that's not the only way. Get a scoop? That hasn't been planned yet.

• 9:48Alie Ward?

  So the vapor cloak around Venus may hold the answer. And by answer, I mean aliens. Vicky says that there are various missions whose sites are set in the clouds. And even going through the clouds and down to the surface, like kind of diving through whipped cream to get into an ice cream sundae, but one that is 464 degrees Celsius or a blistering 867 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  But that would just be one shot and would just give us kind of one pass. So, but yeah, missions are what we need to do to explore it. And that's why we need more interest in Venus than perhaps Mars. Which is where you come in. Well, it's just such a fascinating planet. But fundamentally, as humans and for myself, what I really want to learn about is Earth. And Venus has so much more to teach us about the Earth than Mars does. And you say, why? Because it is, back to what you said, it's about the same size. It's about the same density. That means it's made up of generally the same materials. It's a similar proximity to the Sun.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  And they were very, very similar when they were born. I don't know if you have sisters, I do. And, you know, we're similar. Our photographs are interchangeable. Now, we've gone completely different ways. But Mars is this tiny little weenie bean. You know, it's, it's nothing like the Earth, you know? So, size matters in terms of how planets work, because that's how much heat they have. And how do they get rid of heat? If you take a big potato and put it in the microwave, it'll retain its heat for a long time. If you take a little potato, it'll cool off really quickly. Well, the way that that heat escapes is the mode of tectonism and volcanism, or tectonics.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Not to be confused with plate tectonics. That's Earth's kind of tectonism. Venus has tectonics, but not plate tectonics. So, you immediately say, well, why not? Why doesn't it have plate tectonics? Or more, why does Earth have plate tectonics? And so, we can learn so, so much more about Earth by studying Venus than we can Mars. Well, what is a tectonic? And how is it different than a plate tectonic? Okay, so, let's talk what plate tectonics is, because we know what that is. And tectonics would be any other way. So plate tectonics, we have plates on the surface.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  The plates are made on the lithosphere, rock sphere, litho-rock-rock sphere, the outer sphere of a planet. And what that happens, we can all do this with our hands, is that lithosphere slides around and it can pull apart and make new lithosphere. That's what Earth does at the spreading centers. And then it can also subduct and recycle that lithosphere. So how a planet cools is its tectonics. We cool by sweating. Dogs put their bellies down on the ground or pant, right? And the Earth does it by spreading and by subduction because this is a cold lithosphere. And when I put it back down into that hot mantle, it's like taking your cold hand,

• 13:06Speaker 02

  putting it on your belly and you go, oh, that's going to cool me down. So that's the way Earth cools. And then there's volcanism that is associated with that. Volcanism as we spread the plates apart. Volcanism as we subduct one plate beneath the other. So those are the plates. Now Venus doesn't have plates. So what's it doing? So what's it doing? That's exactly right. And why do we care? Well, Earth, it wasn't born with plate tectonics. You don't start having plate tectonics. So we want to know, what did Earth do early on? Oh, well Venus doesn't have, and I will say, never did have. Now, some people say, oh, maybe it did in the past.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Well, all of the earliest rocks that we have, that there's a lot of debate on Venus, but most people agree, the earliest rocks are a kind of rock called tesera.

• 14:03Alie Ward?

  So a tesera is a weird geological formation. They look kind of like crepey wrinkles in fabric or these ribbons of deep fissures and chasms. Sometimes they look like honeycombs of domes and pits. And according to the 2020 paper in the journal Geology titled Venus Tessary Feature Layered, Folded, and Eroded Rocks, Tessary cover about 8% of the Surface of Venus and they're seen mostly run the equator and some of the northern latitudes. They're usually the oldest thing in their regions are up to 750 million years old. And scientists think they're caused by volcanic activity.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  They're very distinctive and we can map those out. And when we map those out across the surface, they make huge coherent global patterns. And they're the earliest record we have. So if we can set that and say, okay, but plate tectonics maybe happened after that. Cause that's the earliest record. Then when I subduct things, I'm removing parts of the surface. And so I'm going to, I'm going to lose parts of that overall coherent pattern. They're going to be dissected, interrupted, and we don't see that. So I would say that's evidence that Venus never had plate tectonics. So if you want to say she had it because earthlings, we love it. We just want everyone to have plate tectonics.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  If you want to say Venus had plate tectonics, then you have to say, well, yes, she had it. But we just have no record of it. And that's just not good science.

• 15:34Alie Ward?

  I also just want to note that there are so many different formations that aren't even tesseri on Venus's lithosphere or that's rock scape, her rock scape. But my favorite might be this huge volcanic caldera with these fans of ridges extending from it. And it's called the tick. It looks so much like a tick. But yeah, if Venus had a bunch of shifting plates on her surface, there would be remnants of all that movement, but there isn't anything credible. Well, what's on the surface? Let's say that I were to get through those clouds. What does it even look like?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what it looks like is first of all, it's hot. Okay. But it is, there is no water. There's no nasty biological layer at all. It's basically rock everywhere that you look. Depending on where you are, you could be in huge. Flat, open areas that if you were to go into Kilauea and down onto the lava lake there when it's not erupting, but expand that and look around and just see that forever, you might see something like that. But you might also land in huge mountain range areas that the highest region on the

• 16:54Speaker 02

  planet is higher than the highest region on Earth. Or you might land actually in these relatively deep chasms, in which case you would be sort of like in the Marianas Trench on Earth, except not quite so deep. Other places, if you're walking around on Tessera, which I would love to do, you're going to be in these, just at a much smaller scale, but consider your fingers with ridges and troughs and ridges and troughs and ridges and troughs that would be steep drops. You could walk along the ridge, but you would drop into a trough. And as far as you can see, that's what you would see. So it's incredibly, incredibly varied.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Other places, you might be on extensive lava flows, like Pahoihoi flows that are on Hawaii, but go for much, much, much further distances. So on the surface, there's all these amazing features to see, but no biology, no water, and you would have impact craters, absolutely pristinely preserved impact craters relative to Earth or Mars. Well, so it has active volcanoes? I would say yes. Okay. We are getting more and more evidence that there are huge volcanic features. I think most of us at this point would be really surprised if they weren't active.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  And there's enough tantalizing data to say, yeah, we probably have active volcanism. There are these regions that are called volcanic rises, and they are huge provinces. If we take one volcanic rise, it would cover

• 18:36Speaker 02

  All of Australia.

• 18:38Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  All of Australia. It's probably formed in a similar way to Hawaii of a massive plume underneath that lithosphere, but because on Earth, here comes the plume and the lithosphere moves across. So Hawaii makes these chains of volcanoes, right?

• 18:57Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  But on Venus, the plates don't move, there aren't plates. It's like a one-plate planet. And so the plume sits there and it bows up the surface, actually much, much higher, just because when things are hotter, they expand, including the rocks. So it bows it way up. But there you have massive flows that we see on the surface, rock flows that are all volcanic flows. You can look at those and go, oh, my God. You know, it doesn't take a geologist to say, these are amazing volcanic flows that go for tens and tens and hundreds of miles. Now, are they active today? It'd be pretty hard to say they're not, because that heat source is still there. Now, did it happen yesterday? Well, no. But

• 19:43Speaker 02

  geologically, is it active? Hmm, I'd bet my life on it.

• 19:47Alie Ward?

  Well, okay, you told me that way back, when you first started studying this, there were a few of you in a room, right?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there were 60 to 100 people. That's pretty much who studied Venus. And I was new. Like, people went around and said, where did you come from?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Because no one knew me from anything, except my one colleague at Southern Methodist University at the time, and his students.

• 20:12Alie Ward?

  And now, when they say, where did you come from, did you tell them Caltech Pasadena?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  No, they would go through that. And they would say, you weren't a so-and-so student, you weren't a so-and-so student, you weren't a so-and-so student. I was a young professor. But I'd spent my entire career on Earth and just absolutely serendipitously ended up on Venus. It was a holiday party. I'm talking to grad students and postdocs of my colleague, Roger Phillips, and they're saying, this mission is going to Venus. And I was, you know, I was just making polite conversation. I'm not interested in Venus. I can't find it in the sky. But so I say, tell me about it. So they did. And they said, well, Venus is a planet that we think has a strong, weak, strong...

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Realogy of this layer. And I thought, that's fascinating, because that's like continental crust. And to think a whole planet of that, I don't think that is the case now. But I said, that would be amazing to have a whole planet like that. And then they said, and we have places like mid ocean ridges on the earth. And I said, those two can't be true. Those two views of Venus are in contradiction. Because if you pull apart layers that are strong, weak, strong, which the earth has done in the southwest desert, we get something called metamorphic core complex. We don't get a mid ocean spreading center. So they said, really? And I said, yeah, it's just reology. Reology is the study of flow.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  You know, how do things bend, break and fold? They said, you have to talk to Roger. So I went and talked to Roger and that started my on Venus. And then I was a grad student and I wrote a proposal to NASA and it was funded. And we said, oh, my goodness, okay. And it was just going to be a one time thing. But it's been so fascinating that I can't pull away. You stuck around. I stuck around. I stuck around. And then after that was when I learned that, oh, my gosh, Venus is who's going to tell me about early earth, which is what I am really interested in. And Venus has a record of early Venus.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Earth doesn't, because it's been destroyed by plate tectonics. Oh. So go back to the baby books. Venus never developed plate tectonics. And we have this beautiful record through radar of her surface, like nothing like what we have of earth. And so if I learn to read Venus's baby book, I can stand those in for earth. I'm the middle of five kids, but I had two older sisters. Well, there are no baby pictures of me because they were my sisters. By the time it got to me and they're like, okay, just use this one, you know? And that works. So earth and Venus, they're probably interchangeable or not interchangeable. But Venus has a lot to tell us and she's preserved her baby book.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Earth has ripped it apart. I love her. I love her.

• 23:15Alie Ward?

  So what was it about Earth that got you down that path? At what point were you like, I want to be a geologist? I want to be a planetary scientist.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so pretty silly. More, more serendipity. I was at Carleton College. I was a chemistry major and doing art on the side. And a friend and I, we, geology and chemistry shared the same building. And we thought the geology students looked like they were having a lot more fun than we were as chemists. So Sandra and I decided to take a geology class and it was full. So the professor said, well, you can only take it if you're thinking about majoring. So of course, we lied. We had no intention of majoring, but we just said, oh, yes, yes. We're, we're thinking about majoring in it.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Well, Lynn Tenderson, the professor, she got the last laugh because both Sandra and I were just smitten with it. Sandra went on to be a geochemist and I went on to do geology, but more of structural geology, which is how things bend, break and fold, more of a physics and mechanics of it.

• 24:28Alie Ward?

  Did you keep in touch with that professor to say like, you converted us?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  You know, she went back to industry, but I did say, you know, Lynn, you got the last laugh because here we are.

• 24:43Alie Ward?

  Are you, I have a friend, she's a planetary geologist and she, um, her name is Raquel, which is fun because her nickname was Rocky.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Yes. Oh, man. Oh, that's incredible.

• 24:55Alie Ward?

  We had her on for the salinology moon episode.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Oh, fun.

• 25:00Alie Ward?

  She's wonderful, but um, she was saying that she always tricks her husband into going on vacations where there's a lot of rocks.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  That's great. Well, in our family, we have two kids who are now adults, but they would say, can we go on a vacation where there's no geology? Because my husband and I are both geologists. We said, sure, you come up with it and that's where we'll go. So they got their heads together and they decided on Iceland. Which has a lot of geology.

• 25:33Alie Ward?

  Lot of geology.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  But we went to Iceland. We all had a great time, but they never complained about going on vacations where there wasn't any geology.

• 25:41Alie Ward?

  They've got some great geology.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 25:44Alie Ward?

  Joke's on them.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Right, yep.

• 25:47Alie Ward?

  Well, what, can you tell me a little bit about the missions to Venus? Like, I, I don't know much about Magellan. Like, I'm a blank slate here.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Okay, so Magellan, so first there were missions where they were looking at radar, but not very high quality.

• 26:03Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  And then the Russians, Soviets, excuse me, actually put some landers down on the surface, um, Venera. And that, that's really pretty amazing because they did that in the 1960s and 70s.

• 26:16Alie Ward?

  Whoa. Just a quick aside here. Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Union launched a series of 13 space probes within their Venera missions, and 10 probes landed on the surface of Venus. They lasted a flash. The longest visit was two hours, and the shortest was 23 minutes. All that work for 23 minutes, but the program yielded a bunch of firsts in space exploration, including images and sounds from the surface of another planet and high-res radar scans. Also, fun fact, Venera shares the same root word as the verb to venerate or to regard

• 26:57Alie Ward?

  very highly, coming from Venus, the goddess of love. So does venereal disease. And if your ears just perked up, you can stay tuned for an entire episode on sexually transmitted infections, which is coming very soon. Anyway, yes, Venera missions.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Those are, were really incredible because even today, with the technology, if we have, if we land something on the surface of Venus, given the horrid conditions, it wouldn't last a week and probably a couple of days.

• 27:24Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  At most, at most. And that's with new technology. But the Magellan mission was an amazing mission. It was the first NASA all-digital mission, just across NASA. But what it did was, um, had collected four data sets, three which were extremely useful. And they're all global. The first is the radar, synthetic aperture radar, and it's the highest resolution. We have 98% of the planet covered.

• 27:52Alie Ward?

  Whoa.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  In 100 meter per pixel resolution.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  Is that a lot?

• 27:56Speaker 02

  To put that in perspective, we have no data set like that on Earth. None, like on our planet. And you say, well, why not?

• 28:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Because the radar doesn't see well through the oceans. And two thirds of our planet is ocean. And so we know very, very little about the ocean floors, actually. We have a better data set of Venus, and that's incredible. When we first got it, the computers that we're dealing with right now didn't exist. But now, really, anyone with a web connection can pull up and look at those images. And anyone can study them, and anyone can put their two cents in, which is really, really good for science. And is why there's been much more interest in it because of the accessibility of that.

• 28:41Alie Ward?

  Just some quick definitions in case you feel kind of lost in the darkness of space here. So altimetry, think altitude for height, is just the measurements of height of objects. And to measure the highs and lows of this Venusian terrain, planetary geologists use radar, where this pulse of microwave energy is sent to the surface of the planet at a slight angle. And then the amount of energy that reflects back can tell us about what it's hitting down there. And they can also process that data for higher resolution, which is called synthetic aperture radar. And there are files accessible to the public via NASA's Open Data Portal, which has various types of measurements and info in addition to those collected by radar.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  So the radar data, then there is the topography data, or called altimetry. But that's the shape of the surface. It's lower resolution, but it too is global. And we can tell a lot about the topography. So on Venus, we have some very high regions that have volcanic features all across the surface. And we can say, oh, those are young because they sit high because of the heat beneath them. And the topography is such that at a broad scale, it's very gentle. And that's what heat does to make something, because it transfers, if I'm a hot body in a cold body, then I'm going to see a gradient from hot to cold, which means I'm going to see a gradient in my topography. On Venus, we refer everything to mean planetary radius.

• 30:07Alie Ward?

  What does that mean?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  On Earth, we refer everything to sea level.

• 30:11Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  We don't have any water. We don't have any water on Venus. And also Venus is almost a perfect sphere. So Earth is an oblate spheroid, okay? It's got a big bulge at its belly at its equator. And why does it have that? Because the interior is a little sloshy and it's spinning, okay?

• 30:31Alie Ward?

  Yeah, so Earth is like a gusher in the center, spinning relatively fast, but Venus, not so much.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Venus, its interior is probably still a little sloshy, but she rotates so slowly. So in fact, on Venus, her day is longer than her year. A day is how long it takes to go on its do one rotation. Just knock down the microphone, I get so excited.

• 31:02Alie Ward?

  I love it. Honestly, her excitement about Venus makes me feel like Venus is a friend now. It's a beautiful delusion.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  And what's a year, it's the trip around the sun. So Venus rotates so slowly, because she rotates so slowly, she maintains a perfect sphere. She's just all, you know, perfectly, her do is not must at all, right? She's not going to smush at the equator.

• 31:29Alie Ward?

  So a day is longer than a year. So that means that it's in darkness and light for so long, right?

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Yes, for so long, exactly.

• 31:40Alie Ward?

  So yes, you will circle the sun and have another birthday before the day ends. This is great if you like cake. This is not good if you're just having a random bad day or if you have a five day work week. Then so, let's say that you were to beam me down on the surface. It would, the rocks would look like, are they grayish? Are they big? Would it smell farty because of the sulfur?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it would be, but you probably couldn't smell because your nose won't work because it's 900 degrees.

• 32:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  So take your oven, you know, and turn it up. So it would rain sulfuric acid? I mean, I've worked it through the lab. I don't think that smells like sulfur does. So I don't know about the smells.

• 32:24Alie Ward?

  So this has been a hot, ghastly debate a bit. And I floated through data on the science of interplanetary fart smells. Here on Earth. Emanating from your very bowels, you can blame hydrogen sulfides for necessitating rolling down a car window. But sulfuric acid itself, also known oddly as oil vitriol, in its pure state is colorless and odorless. So would meeting with the, albeit scant, water vapor in the clouds, cause stinky hydrogen sulfide? I don't know. There are several pop science articles saying that, yeah, Mars and Venus stink like toots. But I also went on to Blue Sky to ask a bevy of smart people about this, posting, "Any chemist

• 33:09Alie Ward?

  friends here? I have a gaseous question. If you had sulfuric acid in the clouds of a planet, as well as scant water vapor, would the process of dissociation create hydrogen sulfide? And thus, would it smell like farts?" Just doing some fact checking here, to which Totes Grody responded, "More like fart checking." True. But then, Dr. Michelle Frankel, a professor of chemistry and an author of the book Steeped, about the science of tea, replied, "I think it's usually sulfur dioxide to sulfuric acid and oxidation process. And you can have a reducing atmosphere, but I don't think they're generally strong enough to reduce sulfate to sulfide." And then this assistant professor of organic chemistry, Dr. Patrick Lutz, told me that water is neither reducing nor oxidizing in

• 33:52Alie Ward?

  this specific scenario, so I don't think it would be farty. But Jack Adley noted, "Despite whatever chemistry, the rankness wouldn't hit you because your sense of smell is unlikely to function in the kind of atmosphere that would support this scenario." So, if a sulfur sulfers in the vapor and no one is there to smell it, does it make a stink? Alas, smell is in the nose of the beholder. Now, in light of that, how about the beauty?

• 34:19Speaker 02

  The lighting would be very different because the sun is coming through these very thick clouds, but you would have lots of daylight or not. And it probably wouldn't be very windy. Because the wind is basically by pressure differentials, which are temperature differentials. And so when we think about the overall broad global cycles of the winds on Earth, they're driven by the sun has is much more intense at the equatorial regions than going north. And on Venus with this blanket, it's probably a pretty similar temperature. As you go polar, it will be somewhat different, but not greatly because of that surface.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  The rocks will probably look sort of dark black. We don't really know, but we think that they're mostly of basaltic rocks, which on Earth, if we want to just pick out two rocks, we would say granite, which are a lighter colored rock that we associate with the continents and continental crust, and basalt, which are what we would see in Hawaii or the ocean floor below the sediments. And we think that Venus is mostly basaltic, but there's probably granitic type rocks. They may not be at the surface because granite has a hard time getting to the surface. It mostly gets stuck at depth.

• 35:43Alie Ward?

  And so is there a huge temperature difference on one side of Venus versus the other?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  That's a good question, and I've heard this debated. And it's not at all like Mars. Mars is a huge temperature difference because there's basically no very little atmosphere to keep you warm. And that's what the atmosphere is like, a big down comforter. Okay. And on Earth, we have a pretty nice down comforter. Venus has a, you know, down comforter on steroids.

• 36:12Alie Ward?

  It's very warm.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  And so I think that there is some temperature difference. I don't know what that is, people would and what it would be postulated to be. But then you have to say, you know, there you are in darkness for so long, as you said, because your days and nights are much longer.

• 36:31Alie Ward?

  Because remember Venus does a whole circle around the sun a year and the equivalent of seven or so months on Earth or 225 days. But it spins so slowly that it takes 243 Earth days to go from dawn until the next dawn.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  But then the other thing is, is if you were to touch the surface, the surface would be much, much warmer than here. So it's going to be giving off heat into beneath that blanket. But at a human scale, it would just all be. Pretty hotter than bejesus.

• 37:05Alie Ward?

  Yeah, it wouldn't be like going under a sun umbrella versus standing. Yeah, it's not like that.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, not like that at all.

• 37:12Alie Ward?

  So, gravity data also tells us a lot about a space object. And according to this 2025 paper in the Planetary Science Journal titled, Mapping Venus's Gravity Field with a Veritas Mission, this planned 2031 mission seeks to improve the data that we have on this using, quote, "a key onboard element for the experiment called the integrated deep-space transponder." Sounds like sci-fi, it's real stuff. So, it's kind of like when your friend has a kid and they send out the announcement with like the weight and the inches and a photo. We want as many details as possible.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  I would like to see the baby.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Another thing about the surface that is just so fun. So, thanks to a past graduate student, we can take that topography data, that altimetry data, and put it together with the radar data, which is like, like, black and white photos of the surface. And we can put on red-blue glasses. And then you can see 3D of the surface. And with our technology today, you can zoom around and actually be like you have endless helicopter time flying around in these things.

• 38:22Alie Ward?

  What?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  And you can do this for, for public talks. It's just so fun. You, you know, have people put on the red-blue glasses and you can, you know, show them. So, I wouldn't have to beam you down. I'd say, here we are, a whole group. Let's all go to Venus. And now let's go over here. And now let's go over here.

• 38:37Alie Ward?

  Vicky was doing this for a talk to a general audience in Duluth. And she says she loves talking about Venus to the public because they have great questions.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  So, at the end of this talk, this little girl comes up afterwards and she says, so, I want to know. So, there are some really, really steep, steep, steep slopes. And it'd be like being in the Marianas Trench, in a sense. Not quite that, but that's a big drop. And she says, if I was up here and if I jumped off and went all the way down and we're talking miles, she said, how long would it take me to fall? And first of all, I was like, well, we have to talk to your mom. This sounds like a little bit of a, you know, we're not, we're not doing any jumping, kiddo. But I'd never thought of it before. But her question, I said, you know what?

• 39:29Speaker 02

  You wouldn't fall.

• 39:31Alie Ward?

  What?

• 39:31Speaker 02

  You would not fall because to the to the depth there because the atmosphere is so dense. It's this dense CO2. So it would be like if we were all underwater and you just jumped off, you would just float.

• 39:49Alie Ward?

  No.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  And she would be like a penguin that she could just sit there and and be flying. She could not sink because she would be too buoyant. Isn't that fun?

• 40:01Alie Ward?

  That's bonkers. Bonkers. Oh.

• 40:06Alie Ward?

  Okay, so maybe at 900 degrees, this would have its drawbacks.

• 40:10Alie Ward?

  Well, I mean, I know it's very hot there, but I want to go check it out.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Wouldn't it be great? Like, talk about a what kids used to say, I'm sure not anymore, but an e-ride at Disneyland.

• 40:24Alie Ward?

  Yeah. And do we have any missions even planned coming up?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Well, that's a really good question. There are actually three missions to Venus in the plans, but they kind of keep being put off. So there's a European mission to go to Venus. There are two NASA missions. And when we say that the US would coordinate with the European mission and vice versa. Within the NASA missions, there is Da Vinci, and that is to go down through the clouds and get a lot of data through the clouds and through the atmosphere. And then basically photograph the surface and with the target being this TESRA terrain that I said is this very old and unique and distinctive terrain.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  The other is the Veritas mission, and that is one that is like Magellan in that it is a global data collection, and it will have much higher resolution of basically all of the Magellan data sets. But all of these missions keep. Getting put off further and further into the future.

• 41:37Alie Ward?

  And do those circle and use radar as opposed to getting through those clouds?

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Da Vinci will actually, something will go down through the clouds. I mean, a spacecraft will go down through and photograph and ultimately become one with the planet. Okay, it'll go there.

• 41:54Alie Ward?

  Because it's gonna burn up.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  It's gonna burn up. Exactly. Remember I said that Venus rotates very, very slowly?

• 42:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  So normally, we think about things going around, okay? And you can go around things both in a polar orbit or an equatorial orbit.

• 42:10Alie Ward?

  So over the top and underside or around the middle. But the spacecraft, Vicky says, doesn't even have to move much. Just kind of like sitting on a bench and watching a carousel go by.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  But Venus, because she's rotating, we can just stay in one plane. And she just rotates underneath us, kind of like rolling a ball of yarn, you know? And that's the way Magellan collected all of these data sets. They're all in these little noodles, and that's what they were called. But it's just like one little noodle and another little noodle. They're about 25 kilometers wide. And then they were just all stitched together.

• 42:46Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  To give us this incredible global picture. Isn't that elegant?

• 42:52Alie Ward?

  Yes.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  And they fully knew that at some point, we're gonna get so close that we're just gonna get sucked right in. And, you know, there goes Magellan. Magellan is now one with Venus.

• 43:05Alie Ward?

  Before this planned 1994 crash into Venus, Magellan had arrived in her orbit in 1990 to make detailed measurements and also using aero braking into the clouds to slow it down when it needed to. And it saved up to nine times the fuel just by using the atmosphere itself. Very clever.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  So there you are, working with that planet in a way that you couldn't work with Mars or with Earth because of its differences. So I don't know how we got on that, but it's just elegant.

• 43:38Alie Ward?

  I love it. I have some great questions from listeners. Can I ask?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 43:42Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  No, I don't like questions.

• 43:45Alie Ward?

  And before we get into that mailbag, let's launch some cash at a cause close to the ologist's heart. And this week, we're splitting it between the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute, which is dedicated to solar system exploration. They conduct fieldwork on all continents around the world. They're also actively involved in science education and public outreach through school programs, children's books, popular science books, and art. I suppose also podcasts will donate to them as well as Vicky's beloved Nature Conservancy. She says to take care that our precious planet might continue to allow us to be part of it. And links to those causes are in the show notes. And thank you to sponsors for enabling us to donate to them. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to?

• 44:29Alie Ward?

  We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need.

• 45:14Alie Ward?

  That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase

• 45:59Alie Ward?

  of a website or domain. You can do it. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend. Give the gift of bike riding confidence this year and help Peppa learn to ride her bike. Kids can imagine learning to ride a bike with the Ready Pedal Go Peppa Bicycle Playset. Put Peppa's helmet on, attach the push stick to her bike, and push to make her pedal. Ready Pedal Go Peppa and more from Peppa Pig are now available at all major retailers this holiday season.

• 46:31Speaker 06

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• 46:40Speaker 07

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• 46:46Speaker 08

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• 47:09Alie Ward?

  Okay, your Venus questions, patrons. If you would like to know what topics we have coming up and submit your questions, you can hit up patreon.com/ologies to join for a buck a month. And we do our best to ask as many as conversationally possible. This is one I should have asked upfront, but E. Renneby, Scott, Umaya, Sam, Megan the Librarian, RJ Doidge, Kaia, and Jasmine wanted to know, E. Renneby asked, why have we gendered the planets? Why do we say she when we talk about her?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know why we've gendered the planets. I think that goes back to the Greeks and Romans because those were, you know, of gods and goddesses. And why did we decide that Mars was a male god and Venus was a female god? I have no idea. I could imagine that with Venus because she's an evening star and a morning star. And so sort of some beauty and elusiveness, but I'm like them, inquiring minds want to know. In scientific surface, is she referred to as a she or an it? You know, that's really funny. It's all a personal thing. So some people get really upset when you refer to planets as him or her.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  But, you know, for me, for Venus, we haven't even scratched the surface. We don't know the the surface age, that is, the age of her, her skin very well. She's veiled in things. And so I don't like cultural differences between male and female. But that's a cultural thing that seems to fit for this planet. But it's, it's totally personal and a lot of people don't care. And some people, it gets a bee in their bonnet. Yeah. Oh, I like it. I do, too. I think it's cute.

• 48:54Alie Ward?

  As long as one does not take things too literally or literarily. Speaking of which, a blockbuster bestselling 1992 book that continues to live in the minds of humans is titled, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships. And this heteronormative tome begins with this touching tale from the author, who is a relationship counselor with an unaccredited PhD and his wife Bonnie, who had just given birth to their daughter and whose nether regions were torn to shreds. And the baby had kept them awake for days on end. But less than a week after Bonnie gave birth, when she couldn't walk and she was on painkillers,

• 49:37Alie Ward?

  the author went back to work five days later, leaving her home out of medicine and too afraid to call him at work and disrupt his day. So she called his brother, who forgot to pick up her medicine. When the author got home and she said, I've been in excruciating pain and your brother flaked. It's been a bad day, the author writes of his reaction. At this point, I exploded. My fuse was also very short that day. I was angry that she hadn't called me. I was furious that she was blaming me when I didn't even know she was in pain. After exchanging a few harsh words, I headed for the door. I was fired, irritable, and had heard enough. We both had reached our limits. Then his wife cries and begs him to comfort her. And a book about-

• 50:21Alie Ward?

  "Male Female Relations" was born, tearing a new asshole into the self-help genre and selling 15 million copies. And "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" includes hot chapters such as "Men Go To Their Caves" and "Women Talk" and "How To Motivate The Opposite Sex" and "Scoring Points With The Opposite Sex." It also provided a foundation of thought such as, "Two people of different genders have no common ground as humans, but have to approach each other like aliens to be manipulated via their native language." It also probably confused a lot of people who didn't know much about astronomy or evolution on Earth.

• 51:00Alie Ward?

  Were you already studying Venus, and also your husband, a geologist, when "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus"? Did that book piss you off?

• 51:10Speaker 02

  I'd have to look that up, but I think "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" came out before the Magellan mission. And that's when I would have gotten on to all of that. I think the book did piss me off a bit, but totally independent of this. Because I was like, this is just as stupid.

• 51:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  But that was like, eh, pff. I don't associate that with Venus, the planet. She's just above all that.

• 51:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 51:38Alie Ward?

  So in terms of pop cultural references, like Lady Gaga songs, or Bjork crooning about Venus as a boy, and Ray Bradbury's "All Summer In A Day", or the short story "The Long Rain" about the Venus atmosphere, Wonder Woman's Venusian Allies, and a bunch of space age movies and comic books. Well, in spite of all that...

• 52:00Speaker 02

  I'm not much of a science fiction person. Unlike most planetary people are all about science fiction. And I'm not that fascinated by it. I'm just more fascinated by the planet. And to me, it's much more interesting than any science fiction. So I won't remember who the author was, but there was a recent, like, within the last couple of years, an author...

• 52:22Alie Ward?

  Annalise Newitz is the author of "The Terraformers", and Vicky says it's not about Venus per se, but takes place in the far future on another planet. And inspiration from Venus was their motivation for reaching out to Vicky, who says that she loves anything that makes one think in different ways and that it's a really fun book. So anyway, Annalise, journalist and science author, and now using they/them pronouns, reached out to chat planetary geology.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Who wrote a book about Venus and called me and said, you know, I want to check some things out. And so it was so much fun to talk to her because I was like, no, no, no, no, no. This planet is much, much more interesting than the credit you're giving it. And that actually made her change the way she was writing about it because she had plate tectonics in it. And it's like, no, but more other fascinating things. And I read the book, but I read a book, I enjoy it, and then I put it down and it's gone. If it's in science, it sticks, but books, it doesn't. It was a wonderful book and a lot of fun, but I'm just not much of a science fiction reader.

• 53:25Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I mean, truth is more fascinating than fiction.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  To me, it is. To me, it is.

• 53:30Alie Ward?

  What about private missions? Kelly Shaver and Milan Yekki wanted to know, Sarah Sager's Venus Life Finder missions are very exciting. What do you think about robotic exploration? Is that on the table?

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Well, you know, robotic exploration to me is absolutely the way to go for all of these things. We don't pollute a planet. We don't have to take so many other energies. We can have robots do things. Are they geologists? No, they're not. Geologists eyes on things, but we can get so, so, so much more data, so much more comprehensive data, so many different data sets. We're just not limited by the limits of humans. And it's just, to me, absolutely scientifically, the way to go.

• 54:20Alie Ward?

  So Vicky does not yearn for the bouncing among Venus's hot clouds. She's like, I'm good.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  I mean, if I'm going to go on adventures, I'll go out and do some great biking, or snowshoeing, or a, you know, canoe trip, or things. There's so much on Earth that I'm going to do for an adventure. But if I want adventures in science, I want really good data. And robotics are the way to go, I think, for basically all of our missions. For Venus, you said, you know, what about, could we sample things? There's so many clever things to look at the clouds, but you could have a mission that what you send is basically a glider, plane. And you put solar panels on the wings and you put collectors all under the wings, like all kinds of, you just load that baby up, okay?

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Like payload up the wazoo. And this glider, it goes down through the clouds and collects all this data. It can even go beneath the clouds, collect all kinds of data on the surface. It starts to say robotically, oh, I'm running out of energy. So it just sends it back up, recharges those, goes back down. And it could go endlessly, you know? And so you could have time sensitive data. You could have tracking that would go for years. You could have so much different things. And so there's just so many elegant types of missions that you could have. And you could do this with someone who's got extra change to throw around, you know?

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Not me, but there, one could actually like really look at fascinating questions about Venus, the plow blank, but also the surface, but also life. And it could be amazing and at probably a fraction of a cost.

• 56:11Alie Ward?

  What about when they're collecting, when that glider would be collecting all of that data, does it analyze it on board and then beam it back to us? How does that work?

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Also, really, really great question. And this, when the Magellan mission went, which gave us amazing data, the people who designed that mission had to use 1970s technology. Now, probably a lot of your audience, you know, they're like, that's older than my grandparents. But that's the technology they were using. So now we have so much more, things are so much smaller and we can do a lot more processing on board. But what you do is when you come back up above the clouds, you're beaming that data back to Earth. You have to be at the right orientation to the earth and you have to have a place on earth that you can accept it.

• 57:03Alie Ward?

  And it's nuts that the Soviets were able to do this in the 60s.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  I mean, Well, that is nutty and not, they just didn't put down one lander. I mean, several of them. And there, what they did is the landers went down, the landers stayed there, but they beamed data back. It is truly, truly mind boggling what they did. And you know, you can say, and people do complain about the data and it's like, wow, oh my goodness, you know, it's not the quality, no, but that just they did that is amazing. And they actually have photographs of the surface that were beamed back, but true surface photographs, you know, of like the rocky surface, right where they landed. It is, it is mind boggling what they did.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Truly like, you know, amazing.

• 57:55Alie Ward?

  And two first time question askers, Emma Kirkmeier and Ashley P. wanted to know, in Emma's words, why is the atmosphere on Venus the way it is? And Ashley P. asked, does it rain chemicals there like it does water here?

• 58:07Alie Ward?

  Would the sulfuric acid, would the acid rain destroy a lot of that?

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. So when we're looking at all the electronics, the heat and the caustic environment are just going to that, that just fry them, just wipe them out. But if you are up under the cloud bank, then you're not in that caustic environment. So landing on the surface is one thing, but back to that glider or people have proposed balloons or something, but a glider, we'd have a lot more control of than a balloon. But there you can keep your instruments much safer and out of that caustic environment than if you're landing on the surface.

• 58:55Alie Ward?

  Well, what about the past of it? Melena Kay, first time question asker, says, longtime listener, first time question asker. Caro Young, as well as Thistle Boozinger, Nick Ryder, Michael, Ara Victor, Lilly, wanted to know, in Melena's words, is there any truth to the idea that Venus was once habitable? Could it ever become habitable once again?

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Was it ever habitable? Well, the surface might have been, early on. Earth, we keep pushing life back early and earlier on Earth. And the two planets were probably the most similar for the first 2.5 billion years of their history. That's basically half of their history. And life was established on Earth well within that, at 3.5 and probably we keep pushing it back further, billion years, 3.5 billion years.

• 59:49Alie Ward?

  So Earth and Venus, sister sibling planets, about 4.6 billion years old, who looked a lot alike in their youth. And some scientists are now saying that life on Earth may have started at its relative infancy around 4.2 billion years ago. And by the way, did you know that, like, how a century is 100 years and a millennium is 1,000? A billion years has a name. It's called a giganus.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  So Venus certainly could have been. We think that there was Venus once had an ocean of water. Now, we always want to say that life has required water. And that's life as we know it. But we really have to think about how we define life. And that's something that is a whole nother conversation. But if we just stick with water-based life, Venus could have had that early in her history as Earth has early life. As I say, that now on the surface of Venus, we've never found extremophiles. We find extremophiles on Earth that are in extreme conditions, but not as extreme as what we see on the surface of Venus.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  However, that life could be up in the clouds and could have stayed, you know, existed there, or could have moved there, just as life has moved around, you know, on Earth. In the future, it's a hot, hot, dry, dry planet. And it's probably only going to get hotter and drier. And so, we're not going to ever terraform Venus the way we- May or may not do the moon or Mars. And plate tectonics is something that is a real regulator of the Earth, of our climate. And Venus doesn't have plate tectonics. And if she was ever to develop it, it probably had to be early in her history

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  in a tight window of conditions. And she lost her chance. And so, you know, in terms of it cooling down as a planet or anything like that, no.

• 1:01:51Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Well, a few people had great questions. Bug in a Rug and Killian Senpal and Rob H. wanted to ask about and redheaded scientist Bug in a Rug said, okay. So I heard it's scientifically possible that there could be life in the atmosphere of Venus. Is this real? But I thought Killian's question of could the life be anaerobic since there's so much carbon dioxide?

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, we could have all different kinds of life there in that. Absolutely. When we look at the life at mid ocean spreading centers on Earth, very, very different. They don't live on sunlight. So yeah, absolutely. And there could be forms that exist on Earth in unique environments. And but that could be what is very typical on Venus. And there could be a range of different lifestyles that consume different things on Venus within the clouds. So that's such an open question. And I think what we need are data and we need open minds. And sometimes, open minds are harder to come by than the data.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  And the open minds are just like your listeners to say, well, wait a second. Maybe it could be life that does, you know, X, Y, or Z instead of A, B, C as we want to force it into on Earth.

• 1:03:09Alie Ward?

  Hmm. We have a whole episode on aliens with a NASA scientist, Dr. Kevin Hand. We also have a UFO episode. So if you need more info on those, here is your sign. Speaking of signs. Let's see. Some people asked about, um, a lot of people asked about Venus associated with love and astrology.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  What's not to love?

• 1:03:27Alie Ward?

  Right? Does that come up in conversations a lot? Are people like, oh, my God, in my son's house. She nodded like a bobblehead going down a gravel road. Yeah?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:03:41Alie Ward?

  I don't know much about that myself, but.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  I don't either.

• 1:03:46Alie Ward?

  And is to find her in the sky, is it, is it like, look for just the brightest star in the morning or evening?

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's going to be low in the horizon. She never rises up high. Why? Because she's between us and the sun.

• 1:04:02Alie Ward?

  So think of Venus as being closer to the sun. So you're going to see her near the sun. But at the darkest time of day, when the sun isn't quite outshining her. Hence, she's low in the eastern sky before sunrise as the morning star, or in the western sky after sunset as the evening star.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  So Mars, because it's, it's away from us and the sun. It can be, see it.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Mars, I have no problem calling it. Mars can be high in the sky. Jupiter, Saturn can be high in the sky. But Venus can only be low in the sky. And you're exactly right. Brightest thing in the morning and in the evening. And, you know, depending on what it is. The other thing that, that Venus will sometimes appear brighter and other times less bright because she's between us and the sun. Think about sometimes she's very close to us and yet still reflecting the sun's light. And other times, when she's on the opposite side of the sun, we can still see it reflecting the sun's light, but she's very far from us. And so she actually will look different in size.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  But like the moon, if you can resolve it, which we can't with our naked eye. But you could actually see Venus can have phases in the same way the moon can, because you could see just half of Venus lit.

• 1:05:27Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's so cool. Well, I know that you are an earth scientist, and this is a big question on all of our minds. Joel Henderson, Karen Nungasor, Arami Farias, Wondering Wyatt, Lombardo's, Jen Skrul, Alvarez, Kate, Araviktor, and Avios Lee, and Thistle, wanted to know about Earth and Venus. And Kate asked, might climate change increase the likelihood of Earth's atmosphere following the path of Venus? A lot about kind of the climate change. What can we learn about climate change and greenhouse gases here that we are looking at? On Venus.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Venus is a greenhouse planet. And what we can learn is we don't want to go there.

• 1:06:13Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  You know, we don't want greenhouse gases. Now, she's an extreme because we all know that CO2 is such a powerful greenhouse gas. So is methane, but Venus has probably as much carbon dioxide as the Earth. But Earth has locked that carbon dioxide into rocks. So limestones and marbles and those sorts of things are all carbon dioxide. Have lots and lots of carbon dioxide trapped within them. So if we wanted to make Earth like Venus really quickly, we would somehow release all that carbon dioxide.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  So that's going to the extreme. But we are making our planet too hot. Will we make it hot so that plate tectonics will shut down and regulate? Probably not. What we will do to this planet going the way we are is we are going to make it so that humans can't live on this planet anymore. I think the planet is going to go on and without us and we will be a blip and it will probably say, good riddance on that one.

• 1:07:31Speaker 04

  Bye now.

• 1:07:32Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  And so that's what we can learn is that, you know, this is serious and we don't want to go there because it's, we're not going to ruin the Earth, but we're talking about the Earth for us. The Earth as a planet is going to go on. It's whether we're going to be a part of that or not. And the rate we're going, it's not.

• 1:07:52Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Are a lot of, are more space agencies looking to Venus to, as sort of a prediction model?

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Well, people say that for missions to say, I think it's political, frankly. Oh, we'll learn from, and I want to say, no, we don't have to take a mission there to learn more. We, we know what we need to do and we just have to do it. And by saying Venus is going to give us magical answers with that. No, we know what we need to do. Stop procrastinating and do it.

• 1:08:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  We have the data we need. Yeah. Venus is fascinating to study, but not for those reasons.

• 1:08:35Alie Ward?

  Yeah. What is the hardest part about your job? What gets you? It could be petty, it could be huge.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'll first say the most fun part of my job is doing the exploration with open minds, with students, with colleagues, with people in public forums that cause us to just ask questions, which I think is so human. It's just so human to ask questions and that's what's so much fun. What I don't like about it is the science becomes about individuals and about me, me, me, and you lose sight of the data. And it should just be fun to be able to try out different hypotheses and say, oh my gosh, okay, that was wrong,

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  but we got somewhere because we did the data for this reason and that reason. And my colleague, Roger Phillips, who was that Jif physicist who first got me onto Venus, what was so much fun was working with Roger because we could listen to each other, learn from each other, bounce things back and forth. And then we could come up with something and say, blah, blah, blah. And then we come up with other data and say, oh, gosh, we were wrong. And we could actually even put that in the scientific literature. That was an idea at the time. It fit the data, but now we have more data. That was wrong. And that's okay. If you're not making mistakes, you are not doing science.

• 1:10:06Alie Ward?

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  And that's my biggest frustration. And I see that so. So much of hanging on to things that I know people know are wrong. And when we're looking at something so interesting and exciting is how planets work and evolve and interact through time is that we're going to be wrong so much of the time. And that's okay. That's how we learn. But the fun of it is to put things together and you need consistency. And that attitude that science is right. Science is fluid. Science is ever changing. And that's what bugs me the most is, is that not making mistakes, not, you know, not admitting that we're wrong.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  I'm wrong so many times, so, so, so many times. And that's how I learn.

• 1:10:57Alie Ward?

  That's the best message ever. And I feel like even, even for creative fields, like make mistakes, try something. It does not have to be perfect the first time out.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  No, or the 10th or the whatever. You just keep, you know, I'm, I'm a potter. I play with clay. I love it. And it's like, oh, God, I just absolutely blew that. And, you know, I learn from it. Sometimes it takes me several times before I learn from it. But if I didn't make those mistakes, I wouldn't learn. And you're right, it has to go with every bit of life that we're going to make mistakes. And that's how we learn. And that's okay.

• 1:11:33Alie Ward?

  Do you have a favorite thing about Venus that like someone is absolutely disinterested? Like what is your favorite like boom? And then someone's like, holy smokes.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Ah, wow, that's a really interesting question. You know, I think it's different for different people. And so my favorite thing is to talk to people about Venus because there are so many different ways you can surprise them and say, and, and it's never going to be the same for all people. Like thinking that you could fly across the surface is just mind boggling. To think that you could have two birthdays in one day will blow some people's minds. There are so many amazing things that she tells us. And I think that's the fun.

• 1:12:22Alie Ward?

  I feel like I know her so much better now. I feel like she's a friend.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  She is, she, she's a friend. She's a tease. She laughs a lot, you know? She is just, um, you know, she's having a great time up there.

• 1:12:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah. I love this. I'll look for her in the sky.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Yes, and she will smile down on you.

• 1:12:44Alie Ward?

  Yeah, this has been amazing, Vicky. You are just a gem, an absolute gem.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  As are you.

• 1:12:54Alie Ward?

  So, ask planetary people ambiguous questions because that is how you learn and that is how you make friends. So, thank you so much, Dr. Vicky Hansen, for spending your time with me to wax scientific about our new planet of obsession. I love Venus now. You can find out more about Vicky at the links in the show notes. And of course, more links to studies and mission data and photos and books are on our website at alieward.com/ologies/venusology. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm at @Alieward. Ally has one L on both. Thank you again to patrons of Ologies for supporting the show for as little as a dollar a month. Thanks to all those out there in Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Also, heads up, Smologies are shorter, kid-friendly versions of Ologies episodes. They're in their

• 1:13:35Alie Ward?

  own podcast feed. So, just search for Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, wherever you get your podcasts. Please do subscribe. Tell friends. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Avilene Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Arndt-Wiard is the website. Noelle Dilworth works out our trajectories as scheduling producer. Mission captain and managing director, Susan Hale. Jake Chaffee stitches all our data together as editor and overseeing those pieces is lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around to the very, very end, you know I may tell you a secret. This week, secret number one, the evening of January 15th, 2026, in LA, I'm co-hosting like a drink and draw kind of community art and science event with your

• 1:14:17Alie Ward?

  favorite squid expert, Dr. Sarah McEnulty. And tickets are 15 bucks. I'll link them in the show notes, but we only have about 30 tickets left, so you can get them while they are as hot as Venus rocks, folks. It'll sell out pretty quickly. Second secret is that I fully thought Venus was a gas planet until this conversation. I'm not a big planet person. I don't know as much as like a third grader, but I knew gases were involved. I thought maybe the whole thing was gas. And now I know so much more about Venus. And now I care about Venus because I ask more questions. So, let that be. A lesson to us all. So go forth into this dawn of 2026. Do things quickly, do them imperfectly, learn as you go.

• 1:14:59Alie Ward?

  Things worth doing have to pass through these thick, noxious clouds of fear and apprehension. No one is immune to them. Don't let fear waste your precious time on earth. Just go forth, do the stuff. Okay. Bye bye.

• 1:15:13Speaker 09

  Pachydermatology, homology, cryptozoology, lithology, nanotechnology, meteorology, geology, geology, seriology, geology.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  You are beautiful Venus.

• 1:15:35Speaker 08

  Insurance may all seem the same on the surface, but having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm. It's like getting a granola bar with a candle in it. When you wanted a three-layer birthday cake, you wouldn't settle for just any dessert on your birthday. So don't settle for just any insurance. When it comes to getting the help you need, State Farm is the real deal. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 1:15:58Speaker 04

  Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 Jeep Cherokee, a Carnival Cruise vacation, gift cards from DoorDash and Best Buy. Feel free to play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

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