Extended Classic: Cosmic Queries: Venus with Dr. FunkySpoon

Astrobiologist Dr. David Grinspoon and Leighann Lord answer questions from fans about Venus. NEW: 13-minute “Venusian Update” from Dr. FunkySpoon and Chuck Nice about Japan’s “never say die” Akatsuki orbiter and future US missions to our “Evil Twin.”

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21David Grinspoon?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm David Grin spoon. I'm an astrobiologist and I am sitting in as host for Neil Tyson, who is not here. He's off in the cosmos filming his show Cosmos. And I'm joined by my co-host, Leanne Lord.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Yes. You know, I'm so glad you introduced yourself because I'm sitting here going, Neil, you have really changed. You are not how I remember you at all.

• 0:48David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, no, it's I'm not fooling anybody. I'm not even gonna try to. Nobody could actually fill Neil's shoes. Fortunately, nobody has to because we've still got Neil. He's only gone for a while.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  But it's nice to have a guest sort of sit in the big chair.

• 1:02David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, it's fun to be here and it's great to meet you, Leanne.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Nice to meet you as well.

• 1:07David Grinspoon?

  Have the opportunity to talk this afternoon. We're actually doing a segment of Cosmic Queries.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  My favorite segment.

• 1:16David Grinspoon?

  And the topic is actually my second favorite planet, which is the planet Venus.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  I hear you're an expert on that. Is that true?

• 1:24David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's something I've been interested for a long time. I've written a couple of books about Venus. I've never actually been to Venus. But you could call me an expert if you wanted, I suppose.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  You know what? If you've written a couple of books, I think you've earned the title.

• 1:39David Grinspoon?

  Well, thank you. Thank you. I'll take it. I'll take it.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Very good. So Cosmic Queries, I love that because it always gives our fans and folks an opportunity to write in and ask those burning questions and actually get them answered.

• 1:53David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, it's always fun to know what people wonder and what they think about these subjects that I've been thinking about for so long. And you know, every once in a while, somebody stumps you or makes you go, huh, never thought about it that way. And that's really fun, too.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  But then that's an opportunity for another study. It's like, hey, we didn't think about that. Somebody write up the grant papers.

• 2:10David Grinspoon?

  We need more grant money. Call NASA.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Call NASA. Oh, man, that's great. Well, if you're ready, we can, we can jump right in with questions because we, we have many because StarTalk fans are awesome. And we'll, we'll jump in with the first one from Garrick Stemo. And Garrick, man, I apologize if I mispronounced your name and even reassigned your gender. And Garrick would like to know, uh, the history of what we know about Venus and how we came to know it. Dude, that's right up your alley.

• 2:38David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. Well, gosh, you know, but okay, uh, let me launch into an hour long lecture now. But I mean, in short, we knew about Venus long before we had anything like space science because Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon. And so humans have seen it and noted its motions and been fascinated by it for, you know, as long as we've been humans, including some quite sophisticated knowledge by people like the Mayans and other, you know, indigenous people that really observed Venus very carefully and knew a lot about its motions. Some things we've, we've forgotten that scientists today don't even know. People knew a long time ago. And then of course, in the age of telescopes,

• 3:19David Grinspoon?

  we did all kinds of observing and learned that it was bright and, uh, had, uh, clouds and was the same size as the earth. And, you know, started sort of, there's this whole phase of using telescopes and learning that at least in some ways Venus is very much like the earth. And then there's of course been the whole phase of spacecraft where we visited with landers and orbiters and entry probes and started to really learn about Venus as a place and learned that in some ways it's not like the earth at all. It's, it's the same size and nearby, but its environment has veered off and evolved in a totally different direction.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  As I can see from some, some of these very, very poignant questions here that people are asking. Um, and I'll, I'll go on to the next one, uh, from Nelson Say. And he wants to know, and this, this comes off what exactly you just said, what has caused the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus?

• 4:15David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, so the runaway greenhouse effect. One of the striking things about Venus is that in some ways it's so Earth-like. It's nearby, it's the same size, it's the same mass, formed at the same time. It's Earth's twin, and yet its climate, its environment, has gone completely off the charts. It's so hot there, it's 900 degrees, almost Fahrenheit, on the surface.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Yikes.

• 4:35David Grinspoon?

  It would melt just about anything. This microphone would just go pshh into a puddle of metal.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  And just so we're clear, we didn't have anything to do with that. Because humans mess up everything, but we didn't do that.

• 4:45David Grinspoon?

  We cannot be blamed for Venus's climate, yet.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  I'm taking credit for not getting blamed for that.

• 4:49David Grinspoon?

  Exactly, but the runaway greenhouse that is referred to in the question, that's the idea that Venus started off Earth-like. As near as we can tell, it did have oceans and water, and was cooler when it was young. And then as the sun heated up, which the sun has been doing over its history, it passed a point where things got hot enough so the oceans started to evaporate. As the oceans evaporated, there was more water vapor in the air. Water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas. So water vapor in the air makes it hotter at the surface, which leads to more evaporation of the oceans, more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It's a positive feedback, it runs away, it gets even hotter, the oceans evaporate more,

• 5:31David Grinspoon?

  it gets more greenhouse, and when there's nothing to stop that, it's a runaway. And probably it got to the point where the oceans literally boiled off, and all that water vapor in the atmosphere broke up by ultraviolet light. The oxygen streamed off, the hydrogen streamed off into space, and Venus was left ultimately in its current state, which is really hot and completely dry.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  So, to say this as delicately as possible, Venus is sort of going through menopause. Can we say it that way?

• 6:02David Grinspoon?

  You can say it that way, and there's something to that. But it's a menopause that, you know, has a lesson for, I mean, Earth, because it's sort of the ultimate global warming. Venus certainly has a fever, a really, really high, permanent fever, and it's sort of, you know, do not let this happen to your planet. It's the extreme example.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  That's a great title, "Don't Let This Happen to Your Planet", something like Douglas Adams would write.

• 6:29David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah, it's the extreme example in our whole solar system of what can happen with a really extreme case of global warming.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Wow, and now, did I hear correctly that it wasn't anything that Venus necessarily did? This is the sun naturally getting hotter?

• 6:42David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean Venus, take Earth and move it 30% closer to the sun, which gives you twice as much sunlight.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:50David Grinspoon?

  Because the sun, you know, the radiation goes as the square of the distance, as I know you know.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:57David Grinspoon?

  So, so move something 30% closer and it gets about twice as much sunlight. If you take Earth and move it to that distance, this will happen to it. It will go through a runaway greenhouse.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:08David Grinspoon?

  So it's basically what happens to an Earth-like planet where there's just a little bit more sunlight than we have.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Wow. Ouch. Not enough sunscreen for that, eh?

• 7:15David Grinspoon?

  No, no, no, no. It's, it would not have been fun to go through if you were one of those creatures living in the young ocean of Venus.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Which, you know what, I, I know for a fact, and you don't, because you haven't seen these questions ahead of time, that we actually have some questions about that, the possible life forms in a young Venus.

• 7:33David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, that's a good one, and I'm, I'm looking forward to that. So, so when we come back, we'll, with more StarTalk Radio, we will get into questions about life on Venus. In the meantime, you can go to the website, which is star talk radio dot net, and learn more about the radio show, and learn more about what we're talking about, as if we knew.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  [laughing]

• 7:57David Grinspoon?

  And we'll be back in just a few minutes.

• 8:16David Grinspoon?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm David Grin spoon. I'm an astrobiologist, sitting in here for Neil Tyson. And by the way, you can follow me on Twitter, at Dr. Funky Spoon, or my website, funky science dot net. And I'm joined here by my able comedian co-host, Leanne Lord.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Hey, and I, I, I wish my Twitter handle were as cool as yours, Dr. Funky Spoon.

• 8:42David Grinspoon?

  But tell us what it is, so we know.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Uh, well, my Twitter handle is my name, Leanne Lord, and since no one but my parents can spell that, I always send people to my website, which is sort of the portal to me, which is very funny lady dot com.

• 8:55David Grinspoon?

  So Funny Lady dot com. What's our next question? We're talking Venus here.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  We are talking Venus. And to pick up from the last segment, we were talking sort of was there life on Mars? And Matt Ely has a question. What organisms could survive on or underground in Venus?

• 9:14David Grinspoon?

  Well, OK. The basic problem with organisms on Venus, the way it is today, is that heat, the extreme heat of Venus.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  That 900 degrees.

• 9:24David Grinspoon?

  That it's almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit. And it's, you know, organic matter, the stuff that we are made out of, does not survive at those temperatures at all. So life as we know it, made out of organic molecules, absolutely does not exist on the surface or underground on Venus. Because underground, it's worse, by the way. It just gets hotter. You know, planets are hot on the inside. We don't actually know the details of Venus's inside because we haven't had the kind of missions that can measure directly, the geophysical measurements, to know the details. But we know that it's got to get hotter as you go underground because that's just basic physics. That's what planets do. So you might have some more exotic kind of life. People have talked about, science fiction writers have considered, you know, silicon-based life, rocks.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Right, right. I believe that's a question somewhere in here, someone wondering, you know, because of Venus's temperature and the elements and whatnot, you know, or liquid or solid, depending on the temperature, is that an argument for silicon-based life as a possibility on Venus?

• 10:22David Grinspoon?

  Well, certainly, I would say that we don't know enough about the possibilities for life in the universe to rule out other chemical systems. It's easy enough to say, well, life has got to be carbon-based because that's the only thing we can think of that would work. But is that because we can't think of another system? Like, we're not smart enough? Or really because the universe doesn't dream up? Generally, the universe surprises us with what it dreams up. And then we, with our intellect, figure out after the fact, oh, of course, it had to be that way. So I wouldn't rule out other kinds of life. And silicon, you know, there's some problems. Silicon bonds tend to be really stiff, the way silicon bonds, you know.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  So silicon bonds are voguing. I love that.

• 10:58David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, they're voguing. They're Roboto, you know, Mr. Roboto. Whereas carbon molecules, carbon bonds are kind of like, eh. And they flop around and that's the molecules in us take advantage of that flexible structure to do the work, the molecular work of our cells. So I'm not sure about silicon based life, but I wouldn't be so arrogant as to say absolutely we can rule out any kind of life, but it would have to be a kind that we don't know about. There's other parts of Venus, not on the surface, where I suspect there might be possible life.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Even though it's hotter?

• 11:30David Grinspoon?

  Up in that atmosphere, up in the clouds where it's cool and breezy and moist and the kinds of environments that life likes.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Now, in the very beginning, when you were answering this question, you made it clear that today, no way, you know, it's just too hot. But now what about a younger, more robust pre-menopausal Venus?

• 11:52David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, exactly. Before Venus had this horrible mid-planet crisis, when it was a young, strapping, healthy planet, that's an interesting question. It turns out that Venus, Earth, Mars, all three of these sort of sister brother planets had very similar beginnings, we're learning that they all had oceans, warm oceans when they were young. So it could be that Mars, Earth, and Venus all had the conditions for origin of life around the time that origin of life happened on Earth. So did it also happen on Venus? We don't know, but everything we know about the early environment of Venus suggests that it could have had oceans, could have had the conditions for life. And so it may be that Venus started out with a biosphere and then things, you know, it broke bad.

• 12:37David Grinspoon?

  And as the climate went awry, for reasons we've already discussed, that it got to a point where life could no longer exist and went extinct. Or it migrated up into the clouds.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Or in the clouds, is your fantasy. Right, I like that. So it was possible, not now, but maybe in the clouds.

• 12:54David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, absolutely. It seems, you know, we need to explore Venus a lot further and learn what that early environment was like, but we have ideas and constraints and some data about that early environment. It seems as though it was much more Earth-like and Venus lost its oceans and heated up. And when it was young, there's every reason to believe that it could have had a biosphere.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Very, very cool. I'm loving this. I'm learning so much talking to you. I have another question. Of course, there are many. And I do believe, this is from Susan Manovi, and Susan, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that you are a Star Trek fan, based on this question.

• 13:27David Grinspoon?

  Oh, good. I like the sound of this.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Star Trek. Yeah, Trekkies unite. But her question is, would it be possible to terraform Venus? Is there a way to seed the clouds and atmosphere and/or reduce the solar radiation to try and reduce the greenhouse effect? And I'm assuming, find Spock.

• 13:45David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's a great question. I mean, terraforming, the idea of engineering other planets to make them more Earth-like in a place where life could thrive if it's not currently thriving, is a very fruitful idea in science fiction and in science. I mean, we have workshops and talk about this, and how would you do it? And I think it's a very useful thing to think about, even for taking care of our own planet. You know, how would we engineer a planet or consciously control its climate as opposed to unconsciously wrecking its climate? You know, it's a useful thing to think about. With Venus, of course, the problem, as the question alluded to, is how do you cool it off?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:19David Grinspoon?

  And interestingly, this is one thing I've done with some of my colleagues. We do models of the climate of Venus. And there is a stable state that's much cooler than the current climate. If you get rid of some of the CO2, the climate can sort of collapse into a state with much less CO2 and where it's much cooler. So the question is, can you push Venus in a direction and make that climate collapse? And people have come up with interesting schemes, you know, and this is, you know, getting Star Trekkie. But if you throw enough asteroids and comets at Venus and kick up enough dust, then you obscure the sunlight from the surface and cool it off and sort of collapse that environment to make it less intensely hot. And another way people have talked about doing, in fact, Carl Sagan wrote a paper about this, believe it or not, back in the day.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  I believe Carl Sagan did anything.

• 15:05David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah. So Carl proposed that Venus could be terraformed with microorganisms. If you seed the clouds of Venus with the right bacteria that would sort of eat carbon dioxide and

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 15:19David Grinspoon?

  breathe out other things that you could use biology to make the Planet more bio-friendly. So in the long run, as our technology and our command of all these these ways of manipulating the world gets more sophisticated, assuming we don't do ourselves in with those same capabilities.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Always assuming that we have, yeah.

• 15:38David Grinspoon?

  Then, then some of these possibilities may open up to us. And in the long run, we may be able to manipulate the climates of other planets and find a way to cool off Venus. Of course, the problem with Venus, in that case, you cool it off, but there's still, there's no water there. It's, I'm holding this up as a prop.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. For our television audience.

• 15:58David Grinspoon?

  There's, you know, you'd need to find a source of water, and that's another reason why you might want to think about crashing comets into Venus. There's a lot of water in icy storage in the outer solar system. And if you're really at the point where your civilization can move stuff around in the solar system, you could take a bunch of those comets and icy bodies from the outer solar system, crash them into Venus, and presto, you've got water.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Presto. I like that. That's a very scientific term, presto.

• 16:25David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, voila, voila.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  And that would somehow be easier than sort of importing it from Earth. You know, I'm just imagining bottles of water being shipped to Venus.

• 16:35David Grinspoon?

  The problem, if you want to import anything from Earth, you have to launch it off Earth, and that's expensive. And some stuff's already out in space.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  So why not use those resources?

• 16:43David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know what? I would think people would like to crash stuff. That'd be a lot more fun than just looking at shipping invoices.

• 16:49David Grinspoon?

  And we might want to keep our water on Earth. You know, we're fond of it.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  That's still drinkable?

• 16:53David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're rather fond of it.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  We have another question here from Marco Horvat, and he wants to know, if Venus is about our size, why is the atmosphere so dense?

• 17:04David Grinspoon?

  Great question, because, yeah, Venus is Earth's twin, same size. Why don't they have the same atmosphere? Well, Venus has this thick, thick CO2 atmosphere that we already mentioned. And on both Venus and Earth, there are a lot of volcanoes that are constantly belching out CO2 into the atmosphere.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 17:21David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of the main sources of CO2, you know, other than us on Earth. And on Venus, it is the main source. And on Earth, over the long run, CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by Chemical reactions that depend on water. If you remove the water, the CO2 gets stuck in the atmosphere. And that's what happened on Venus. We talked about the runaway greenhouse effect. Once the oceans boiled off, the volcanoes kept going and kept pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. But there was no way for the CO2 to get removed from the atmosphere by those chemical reactions that happen on Earth that depend on water. So while the CO2 at that point got stuck in the atmosphere, and if anything, that just

• 18:02David Grinspoon?

  makes Venus hotter and it gets sort of pegged in the red zone and stuck, it can't escape from that condition. And that is ultimately, billions of years from now, what will happen to Earth as the sun continues to warm up. Oh, great. Nothing to lose sleep over. It's going to be a while, but that's the ultimate fate of our planet is what happened to Venus a long time ago. Well, went ahead. Yeah, exactly. So we'll be back in a few minutes with more StarTalk Radio.

• 18:47David Grinspoon?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm David Grin spoon, astrobiologist, sitting in for Neil Tyson. I'm here with Leigh Anne Lord, and we're talking about Venus, answering your questions.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  And the questions, I love this. I love that the Twitter family is such an active StarTalk fanbase. And we have a question from Richie Ryan, at Richie underscore Ryan at Twitter, and he wants to know, does Earth pollution have the ability to cause a greenhouse effect with atmospheric pressure on the scale of Venus? Like, even if we burn everything, you know, would that come close to the amount of CO2 in Venus?

• 19:20David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, it's a great question. And actually, it's a subject of some current debate among the community of those of us who model climate on other planets with Earth models. You know, if we did the worst-case scenario, burned all of our coal, all of the tar sands, fracked, you know, the Earth to pieces, did, got every last bit of fossil fuels out. Out, frack it all, and burned everything, could we push Earth to a Venus-like state? And we actually don't know, there are different opinions about this. And in some sense, it's academic, because even if we didn't push Earth literally into runaway greenhouse, where the oceans went away, if we did that, we would push Earth easily beyond the point where we could live.

• 20:03David Grinspoon?

  In other words, it's a much narrower range of conditions where human civilization, and even where life can exist on Earth, than the range where you have to go to that extreme of pushing Earth into a Venus-like condition.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:15David Grinspoon?

  But I was at a meeting last summer where there was some debate about this. And some of the scientists who, there's a guy, James Hansen, very famous NASA climate modeler, who's really been sounding the alarm about global warming. And his calculations suggest that if you put all the carbon from all the fossil fuels into Earth's atmosphere, that we could trigger a Venus-style runaway. And other scientists have said, "Well, wait a minute, no, if you consider the clouds and this feedback, because clouds actually form more when there's more water in the atmosphere, but then that helps cool off the Earth, and if you put everything correctly into the model, no, it doesn't quite go to a Venus-like state." So the honest answer is, we don't know. But it's a really interesting question, and I think by addressing and trying to answer questions like that,

• 21:00David Grinspoon?

  we sort of get smarter about how to predict climate, and how to, you know, we flex our climate modeling muscles, and it makes us better at thinking about both other planets and the future of our own planet.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Right, and, but I'm still sort of stunned by what you said, we wouldn't even get that far, we'd be dead.

• 21:16David Grinspoon?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Long before we could even really see if we could really push it to that extent.

• 21:19David Grinspoon?

  Because you're talking hundreds of degrees of global warming. And it's where, you know, the amounts of global warming that we're concerned about with these studies that people are doing, and worrying about what's going to happen to our civilization, we're talking about two degrees, four degrees. You know, if you get up to six and seven, then it's like, whoa, we're really hosed, because we're starting to melt the ice caps and do all these like really dangerous changes. So it's a much larger magnitude that we're talking about before we push it to a Venus-like state. So we don't have to go there to get ourselves into trouble. But nonetheless, it's an interesting question. Because if we do that, by the way, we are dooming all life on Earth. And we are, you know, like, it's easy to say, "We're not going to harm the Earth, we're just harming ourselves," and, you know.

• 22:02David Grinspoon?

  But if you go to that extreme, then actually, we're screwing the whole biosphere, not just human life.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Wow, it sounds like the plot of a future X-Men movie.

• 22:10David Grinspoon?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  I've got a great question here from Tommy Mainz from St. Charles, Minnesota. And Tommy wants to know, what did the Russians do on their trip to Venus during the space race days?

• 22:21David Grinspoon?

  Well, so the Russians actually had a lot of trips to Venus during the space race days. They were very, very successful at Venus.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Really? Are there bars up there? I'm picturing like vodka.

• 22:32David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Passed around liberally.

• 22:34David Grinspoon?

  Exactly. No, it's kind of strange if you look at the history of the space race. We Americans were really successful at Mars and had a lot of trouble getting things. Ultimately, we were successful at Venus, but we were more successful at Mars. The Russians couldn't land a spacecraft on Mars to save their life. They couldn't.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  What?

• 22:56David Grinspoon?

  They couldn't explore Mars their way out of a paper bag. I mean, they threw all these spacecraft at Mars and they all failed. It's actually very sad, the amount of resources the Russians put into Mars. But for Venus, they were really successful. They had orbiters, they had incredible landers. The first landers on Venus were done by the Russians. And all those pictures you've seen about, pictures of these strange landscapes with rocks and, you know, going off to the horizon of this eerie world. The first pictures we got anywhere from the surface of another planet were done by the Russians with these really successful and incredibly, incredibly well-engineered landers at Venus. So the Russians have an amazing history of success on Venus, much more so than we did

• 23:41David Grinspoon?

  in the early days of the space race.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Wow. I know this isn't the question, but you've really now put it on my mind, like, why? Why were they so good at Venus and not Mars? What's that decide?

• 23:51David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Is it any one thing?

• 23:53David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's a great question, and, you know, I think some historians have wondered about this. Those Venora spacecraft that were so successful at Venus, in a way, it's similar to the Russian Soyuz capsules.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:07David Grinspoon?

  That have been so successful with human exploration. You know, just a tough design that they perfected and basically just repeated over and over again. And so the Russians, their approach to engineering, they did a great job solving certain kinds of space engineering problems. And Venus was certainly a place where they were really, really successful. Brute force, not elegant designs, but lots of money, big spacecraft. Let's just keep throwing these massive, they were basically these big diving bells. Not sophisticated spacecraft, but tough and dogged. Let's just keep doing the same thing over and over again until we succeed.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 24:43David Grinspoon?

  And that approach, that Soviet approach, if you will, worked well at Venus. And ultimately, they were very successful.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Wow, awesome. It sounds great for Venus, not necessarily for dating.

• 24:54David Grinspoon?

  Anyways, we, I think, need to take a break now.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  I think we do.

• 24:58David Grinspoon?

  But we will be back in a few minutes with more StarTalk Radio.

• 25:20David Grinspoon?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm David Grin spoon, sitting in for Neil Tyson. I'm joined here by Leanne Lord, and we're talking all things Venus.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yes, we are. This is like one of the most fun cosmic queries that I've done. This is cool. I got a question from Mike Quihano, which is sort of what we've talked about a little, but goes a little bit further, because I wanted to ask this myself. So Mike and I are on the same page. If we could introduce something into the atmosphere of Venus, dissipate that dense atmosphere that you were talking about and reverse the greenhouse gas effect, could it be sustained unaided? Or would it go back to the naturally high heat and dense doomed wasteland we've all come to know and love?

• 25:57David Grinspoon?

  Good question. It's tricky to sort of terraform Venus in a way that it could take care of itself. Because the problem is, there's still that intense solar input, twice the solar input from the Earth, basically.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:14David Grinspoon?

  And so you would have to have something that's cutting that down, either some layer of dust in the atmosphere, or some engineering solution, something in orbit blocking part of the sunlight. I think it's tricky, unless, if you go for the genetic engineering biological solution, one could imagine. You have some organisms who are making use of all that solar energy, powering themselves that way. And part of what they do, part of how they live, involves removing CO2 very aggressively from the atmosphere and keeping things cool. So I'm not going to say no, impossible. I'm going to say it's a tough engineering problem.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:58David Grinspoon?

  And it doesn't seem obvious to me how one would do that, but it's a problem for for the future. It's not something we're even trying to do, or should try to do now.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Um, I got a question here from Marco Horvath, and a simple question may not be a simple answer, who knows? Uh, why does Venus rotate so slowly? Why is she taking her time?

• 27:20David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, Venus has an odd rotation rate. Uh, it's it it rotates. Not only does it rotate really slowly, but it rotates backwards from the direction of all the other planets.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Uh, yes.

• 27:30David Grinspoon?

  So on Venus, if you were on Venus and could see the sun, it would rise in the west.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:37David Grinspoon?

  And set in the east, opposite from Earth.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Wow, okay.

• 27:40David Grinspoon?

  Because it spins around the other way, and it spins around really slowly. Now, the question is, why does it do that?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:47David Grinspoon?

  In fact, it spins so slowly that the day on Venus is longer than the year, which is kind of weird, too. It's a Venus year goes by quicker than a Venus day.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  So it circles the sun faster than it spins on its own axis?

• 28:01David Grinspoon?

  Exactly.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Did I just say that right?

• 28:03David Grinspoon?

  You said that right.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  I love it!

• 28:05David Grinspoon?

  And it spins backwards. So the answer is most simply expressed in three words, we don't know. But of course, being scientists, we're not satisfied with that. We have theories.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:17David Grinspoon?

  And it probably has something to do with the formation of Venus. You know, the spins of all the planets are set largely when they're formed by accretion, by the collision of smaller planetesimals, pieces of planets that come together and smash together. That's how the Earth formed, and that's how Earth and the Moon formed and got their rotation. That's how Mars got its rotation. And Venus probably got its weird rotation by just the randomness of what collided with what and what orientation they were at to leave it. It's spinning in the way that it is, but the pot thickens somewhat with the thickened atmosphere of Venus that over time that atmosphere can absorb momentum from the planet

• 28:58David Grinspoon?

  and exchange momentum and you can even have things like solar tides where the sun pooling around that atmosphere over time is pooling on the solid planet and you may have tides that over billions of years changed the rotation rate of Venus. So there's some people that think that maybe that slow rotation of Venus was not primordial, that is wasn't left over from the origin of things.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:20David Grinspoon?

  But evolved over billions of years due to the effect of that thick atmosphere sort of pooling tightly on the planet.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 29:26David Grinspoon?

  So, you know, again, I'm going to go back to that initial three-word answer. We don't, or four, we don't really know.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  I love that. I really do love that. Or you could just say Venus is dyslexic.

• 29:36David Grinspoon?

  Venus is weird.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Venus is weird, but we love her anyway.

• 29:39David Grinspoon?

  There's a lot of mystery about her, but yeah, we love her anyway. She is the goddess of love after all and beauty. Okay, we have time for one more quick question before the break. So Leanne, what do you got for me?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  I have a question from United States Air Force veteran Mark Esperanza and wants to know since Venus's day is longer than the year, how does it affect any storms and erosion in the planet compared to our planet, which spins so much more rapidly?

• 30:01David Grinspoon?

  Good question. The fact that Venus is a slow rotator compared to Earth, a very slow rotator, does affect the weather patterns. On Earth, you look at a satellite image from space or you look at a weather map and you see all these spinning storm systems, cyclones, and just every kind of storm, all the weather is these spinning systems. And that actually has to do with the rotation of the Earth and the kind of forces that it introduces. Venus, without those spinning forces, has very quiet weather at the surface and very slow wind speeds and almost no erosion that comes from storms. So, excellent question. It is related to the fact that it rotates so slowly. And now I think we are going to take another break and we'll be back in a few minutes with more StarTalk Radio.

• 31:04David Grinspoon?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. Now it's time for the lightning round where we answer the questions that we didn't have time to get to in the non-lightning round and we do them with lightning speed and quickness and hopefully cleverness too. Well, let's not ask for too much, but let's go. Let's hear some lightning questions about Venus.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  All right. Brian Rudd wants to know if we directed a large enough asteroid towards Venus, would it speed up the rotation?

• 31:29David Grinspoon?

  If we directed a large enough asteroid, yeah. I mean, any asteroid's going to affect the rotation and most of them will be trivial. But imagine something like the moon-forming impact that set Earth on an entirely new course and formed the moon. If you had a large enough impact, sure, it would drastically alter the rotation of Venus. But it would have to be pretty large to have that kind of effect.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  All righty. Next question from Stephen D. at Stephen Eamon from Dublin, Ireland wants to know, necessary for any exploration of Venus, in layman's terms, how do heat shields work?

• 32:02David Grinspoon?

  Heat shields work partly through the obvious of just, you know, being something big that blocks out the air and keeps whatever behind it is cold. But there's also a more subtle factor called ablation, where you actually have materials that are designed to burn off, purposefully they burn off, and as they burn off, those reactions absorb a lot of heat. So the actual chemistry of the material is such that as it burns off, it helps keep what's behind it cool.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Nicely done, sir. Next question from Brad Mund wants to know, what would the average astronaut's space suit need to survive a nice stroll on the surface of Venus?

• 32:42David Grinspoon?

  Man, surviving on Venus is not an easy engineering problem for a space suit engineer. Because of that heat, it would need a lot of air conditioning, but it's also, we haven't mentioned this before, it's not only hot, but the pressure's really high. It's 90 times the surface pressure of Earth. It's crushing pressure and searing heat. So it would have to be a tough space suit that could not be crushed in that pressure, and it would have to have a really, really good cooling system. Not an easy thing to design, but human beings are clever and crazy, so I think at some point, we will go to Venus and we'll need to design some pretty good suits.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Fantastic. The next question is from Lacob Jarson. Love the letter switch dude. I've been told Venus doesn't have tectonic plates. If so, what does it have and how's it work?

• 33:32David Grinspoon?

  That's a really good question because as we mentioned Venus is basically the same size as Earth. So you would think that it would have some similar mechanism for getting rid of its internal heat. Ultimately plate tectonics, which is Earth being divided into all these surface plates that are sliding around causing earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. Is the way that Earth gets rid of its internal heat. It's a mechanism for removing internal heat. Venus, you would expect, has as much internal heat. So why doesn't it have plate tectonics? And we're not completely sure, but it probably has to do with Venus being so dry. And you need a certain amount of water in the rocks to have things sort of squish around the way that plate tectonics do. So Venus may be sort of seized up. In that case, it probably loses its heat through volcanoes. What's so funny?

• 34:16Speaker 02

  I know, I'm just having this image of Venus being constipated.

• 34:18David Grinspoon?

  Well, it is. Venus, I think constipation is not a bad metaphor. It used to probably have something like plate tectonics. We think maybe in the deep past, but it got all dried out and couldn't move anymore. And so now it probably loses heat through a lot of volcanoes, basically.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Moving on. Next question from Gabriel Finelli in Sao Paulo, Brazil. What would be necessary if we wanted to send a rover-like Curiosity to search for habitable environments that might have existed on Venus?

• 34:47David Grinspoon?

  People have talked about designing rovers for Venus. And at some point, we probably will want to do that. Because the Russians had a couple of landers. We're trying to design more landers. It's not an easy thing to land, even just to land on Venus because of that great heat and pressure. But eventually you want to not do more than just land. You want to have mobility. That's what's been so great on Mars. Mars is easier, as tricky as it is to explore Mars, because the surface conditions aren't as intense. It's actually a lot easier as an engineering problem. So a lot of the problems on Venus would be the same as the ones on Mars as far as mobility and communications and so forth. But you've also got to deal with designing machines that can work in those temperatures. And so probably the electronics and all the critical components would have to be encased in some sort of structure that would be kept cool.

• 35:30David Grinspoon?

  Through a nuclear reactor, maybe through some other clever means. But that's the basic thing is you either have to keep it cool enough so the electronics don't just fry, or you have to build a whole new kind of electronics that can operate in those temperatures. It's a tough engineering problem, but we do have people at NASA and other agencies that are working on solving that. And sooner or later, we will send a rover to Venus.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Nice. Uh, next question is from Sean Lee. Will we ever be able to get high-res images of the surface of Venus?

• 36:00David Grinspoon?

  That's tricky as far as, it depends what you mean by images. If we're talking about radar images, which is, uh, we had a spacecraft called Magellan that orbited Venus in the 90s and took images using, you, you can't see the surface with, um, visible light, but you can with radar. So we can get higher res with radar. If you're talking actual visible images, then we would have to do it with some kind of roving aircraft that was close to the surface and flying and not getting fried. And the answer is yes. Will we ever be able to do it? Surely. But it's tricky because of the conditions there. You either do it from orbit with radar, or if you want to use visible light, you have to do it from close to the surface, below the clouds, and sort of travel over the whole surface and do aerial photography. So it'll take a while, but we'll do it.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Do you have time for another question?

• 36:48David Grinspoon?

  All right. Unfortunately, I think we're gonna have to wrap this up. So I want to thank you all so much for listening. I'm David Grin spoon, filling in for Neil Tyson. You can follow me on Twitter, at Dr Funky Spoon. And I'd like to thank my co-host, Leanne Lord. Thank you, Leanne.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 37:06David Grinspoon?

  And you can follow Leanne on Twitter, at Leanne Lord. And we'll be back in a few minutes with more StarTalk Radio.

• 37:34David Grinspoon?

  You've been listening to one of our classic episodes, originally recorded for season five of the podcast. I'm Dr. Funky Spoon, AKA David Grin spoon, an astrobiologist, and I'm back now to give you all a Venusian update. I'm calling into the studio from my home, and we've got Chuck Nice joining us today. Hi Chuck, how are you?

• 37:55Chuck Nice?

  I'm great. How are you?

• 37:57David Grinspoon?

  I'm doing all right. Thanks for asking.

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  Excellent, man. I'm glad we're gonna talk about Venus. I know that it's one of the things that you're very involved with, looking at the climate of Venus, and comparing it to Earth, and that tells us, what exactly does that tell us? I was about to tell us what it tells us, but I'm like, why am I gonna tell us when I don't know what the hell I'm talking about? I should let Dr. Funky Spoon tell us, cuz he knows.

• 38:23David Grinspoon?

  Venus is kind of like holding a warped mirror up to Earth. It's almost like looking at ourselves through, you know, through a funhouse mirror, because it's like an alter Earth. It's it's a planet that should be like Earth. It's so, so nearby, so similar in size, and yet it's gone down this very different path. It's our, you know, some people have called it our evil twin. It's hot, it's acidic, it's probably lifeless, and yet it's so nearby, and it's just very strange that it's evolved in such a different path than our home planet.

• 38:58Chuck Nice?

  I like it. Earth, it's Venus, it's the Earth you wanna party with. Yeah.

• 39:05Chuck Nice?

  Evil twin Earth. I'm evil twin Earth.

• 39:08David Grinspoon?

  Home to mother.

• 39:10Chuck Nice?

  Acidic and hot. Yeah, that's exactly how I like my women. Acidic and hot.

• 39:16David Grinspoon?

  I don't know if you would like Venus, but it's, but I don't know, maybe you should get to know, get to know Venus, and then, and then let us know.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Yeah, I might wanna spend a little time with it first. So now, here's the thing. I know, I found out from you, cuz I really... I didn't know this was a real thing. I had heard that there was going to be a mission to Venus, or that they want to make a mission to Venus. But, uh, tell me about that, cuz I'm not sure. Is there a mission to Venus, or is it just that we wanna go to Venus? Cuz right now Mars is like, everybody's Mars crazy. Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars. So is there, is there actually a mission to Venus?

• 39:55David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. Uh, compared to Mars, Venus has been a little bit neglected, both in, uh, our scientific plans and in, in the public discussion. Now, I've got nothing against Mars. I love Mars. I'm fascinated by Mars. I'm so psyched about our missions there. But I do think it's a problem that we haven't explored Venus as much as, as, as we should, because there's a lot we can learn from the comparison. And honestly, the United States has been slacking in the Venus department. We haven't had a mission there, a dedicated Venus mission, since, uh, Magellan, um, in, um, in the 1990s. But fortunately, other nations have been stepping up.

• 40:37David Grinspoon?

  There was the Venus Express mission, which the European Space Agency flew in, uh, two thou- launched in 2005, got there in 2006, and lasted until last year, 2015. It was a great orbiter mission, and, and taught us a lot about the atmosphere, the climate, even a little bit about the surface. And now, there's a new mission by the Japanese space agency, uh, called Akatsuki. It means dawn, which is great, cuz Venus is the morning star, the dawn star. Um, so, um, and, and, and this, this mission, this Akatsuki mission, this Japanese mission, has had an amazing story, actually, that most people don't know, but they should. Uh, i- it's crazy.

• 41:21David Grinspoon?

  They launched it in 2010. It got to Venus.

• 41:26David Grinspoon?

  made it fine across interplanetary space. And then in the 12 minutes when it was supposed to fire this rocket to go into Venus orbit, something went wrong, the rocket malfunctioned, actually kind of blew up. And the poor little spacecraft did not go into Venus orbit. It went spinning helplessly in an orbit around the sun. And that was it, we thought. But it turned out it was on just the right orbit around the sun to bring it back to Venus exactly five years later. It was sort of almost miraculous.

• 41:58Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome.

• 41:59David Grinspoon?

  And exactly five years after it was supposed to go into orbit, which was, uh, made it December 2015, just this last December, uh, they were able to make another try. And even though that main engine was destroyed permanently, they very cleverly used the little maneuvering thrusters, which were not designed for this. They fired them for 20 minutes, all in the same direction, which was again, not what they were designed for, way beyond the design specs. And it worked, they got it into orbit. So now, the Japanese have this, this Akatsuki orbiter in orbit around Venus, and it's just starting to do science. So, so we, the United States don't have a Venus mission right now, but we, humanity, do.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  Humanity does.

• 42:43David Grinspoon?

  And so Akatsuki is just starting to do its thing and tell us some, some, uh, cool new science about Venus.

• 42:48Chuck Nice?

  Well, let me just say congratulations to the Japanese, uh, space program. Uh, and, and for them, sciencing the [BLEEP] out of that.

• 42:57David Grinspoon?

  They did, they did.

• 43:01Chuck Nice?

  I mean, I, you know what's so funny is that that is a theme in so many space movies, where you have to use, uh, secondary or tertiary rockets that are a part of a vehicle, or a part of a, a, a craft, uh, for purposes they were not designed for. Even in Star Trek, they will, when they lose warp engines, they will often find a way to use the impulse engines in such a manner that they weren't designed for.

• 43:32David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, that's exactly what this was like. It was like, uh, Captain, the warp drives out. We're gonna have to try it with impulse.

• 43:39Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly, yeah.

• 43:40David Grinspoon?

  And, you know, the Japanese are very good at that. They've done that with a couple other missions. It seemed like they were dead and then they found some clever solution and resurrected them. So, uh, it's just thrilling that we, uh, we now have a mission, uh, at Venus. Meanwhile, there are actually a couple of American missions which are proposed and on the books and may get to fly to Venus.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, great.

• 44:02David Grinspoon?

  Uh, there's, there's a class of missions we call discovery missions, which are the sort of small-scale NASA planetary missions. Small-scale meaning they cost less than a billion dollars.

• 44:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:13David Grinspoon?

  Um, and there's, there was a recent competition and there were five missions selected to sort of go to the finals, uh, which is what we call Phase A, which means that each team gets like a million bucks to develop the concept further. And then a year later NASA picks one or maybe two to actually fly. And in this recent round of mission competition, there were two Venus missions. So two out of the five that NASA is now considering for their next mission are Venus missions, which is great. And we've never made it that far with a Venus mission in this competition. So those of us in the Venus science community were very hopeful that one, or who knows, maybe even both of these missions might get to fly to Venus.

• 44:56David Grinspoon?

  One of them's an orbiter and one of them's an entry probe that would fly down in the atmosphere and take data all the way down to the surface. And they'd both be really cool. So we're, uh, working really hard on these proposals and keeping our fingers crossed. And it may be that later this year NASA will announce that one of these is actually selected and that we will have a new American Venus mission.

• 45:16Chuck Nice?

  And so why is it, now why is it, uh, David, that, you know, I hear you guys, you know, doctors like yourself and, you know, Carolyn Porco, and I hear, you know, uh, you know, the, the people that we work with here at StarTalk from NASA. And it seems that when I hear these wonderful things that, that everyone's proposing and wants to do. What I don't understand is, why is it that we can't do them all? It seems like, like you, you have, like, we're gonna have to pick one or the other. We might get funding for this or that. Why, why is it that with all the money that we have as, as a nation, you can't,

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  why do you have to pick one frickin', like, is, we're not, we're not a family going on vacation. You know what I mean? Alright, kids, it's either Wildwood or Great Adventure. That's it. Like, we don't have the money to go to both. You get one or the other. What the F is going on that, you know, that we can't land an orbiter, that we can't have an orbiter and a lander on Venus? And that we can't also have a, a mission to retrieve, you know, um, samples from Mars at the same time? What, what is that?

• 46:31David Grinspoon?

  Well, I mean, it's, it's, you know, like the song goes, it's money, honey.

• 46:37David Grinspoon?

  That's what it is. I mean, you know, yeah, we're a rich nation, um, but we, uh, you know, it's always a battle, uh, for priorities. And, you know, if, if it were up to me, you know, the amazing thing is, we could double the NASA budget. It would still be a tiny piece of the national budget. I mean, really tiny piece. And we could do all these missions. So, you know, if I were running things, I mean, I, I feel like it's very important, uh, not just because I'm curious about these places, which I am, but because I think the knowledge, the knowledge we get is very crucial and useful for us, uh, knowing how to manage our own planet and just, uh, you, you know, understanding our origins and who we are and what the heck we're doing here on this planet. I, I think it's really important.

• 47:22David Grinspoon?

  If it were up to me, we would do all of them, but, you know, we're given the budget we're given and, uh, we have to, uh, choose and, and, uh, you know, so there's a competition. And, yeah, it is frustrating because honestly, these, these five missions I mentioned, they're all great missions. You know, one of them is to go to, uh, to, um, a new kind of asteroid, an, on iron, a, a, a met- metallic asteroid and check it out. That would be, that would be so cool. One of them is to go to the, uh, the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which are these, uh, these asteroids that follow Jupiter in its orbit, sixty, sixty degrees behind its orbit, where we've never visited those. Um, two of them are Venus missions. You know, they're, they're all great missions and, and none of them are bad. Anything that's made it that far in the competition, it's worthwhile.

• 48:06David Grinspoon?

  But it's just a matter of limited resources and so therefore we're forced into this brutal competition to try to convince NASA that our mission is the best.

• 48:15Chuck Nice?

  I don't get it. It's like Science Survivor. You know what I mean? It's like you, you, you're taking these things that all of them should be done and you put the scientists against one another and you say, "All right, now tell us why you should..." It's like that show, I forget the name of that show on CNBC where the guys come in and they pitch an idea to these business people and they say...

• 48:34David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's Scientific Shark Tank.

• 48:37Chuck Nice?

  That's the show. It's Scientific Shark Tank. What the, what? That's not, come on, man. That's not cool. Scientific Shark Tank. Come on.

• 48:44David Grinspoon?

  You know, I hate to say it. It is kind of like that. I hate to say it, but you know, there's, there's a brutal aspect to it.

• 48:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's not cool, man. Scientific Thunderdome. Two scientists enter, one scientist lead. With some money to do something maybe good. So...

• 49:00David Grinspoon?

  Well, I mean, the good thing is that the ones that lose the competition, they don't actually get killed. They don't get put to death.

• 49:05Chuck Nice?

  (laughing)

• 49:06David Grinspoon?

  But we don't get to fly our mission, so it's almost as bad.

• 49:09Chuck Nice?

  At least we have that, right? Oh, man. These, these conversations, these little, it's so great when I talk to you, you know, because you're, you're on the cutting edge. You know, we're talking about Venus, we're talking about Mars, where you're, where, you know, astrobiology, all these things. You're so, you know, you're so out there on the edge of, of scientific discovery and I, I, I just love talking to you, man. Thanks so much.

• 49:30David Grinspoon?

  Well, thank you, Chuck. It's always a pleasure, uh, to talk to you about, uh, about anything, really. And, uh, this has been really fun. I guess this means we're out of time. So, uh, this has been StarTalk. Uh, thank you all so much for listening and, uh, we'll be talking to you soon.