Hell: Not just for Children

Parting the Shroud of Earth's Mysterious Twin

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; Page A06
Eons ago, Venus may have been the gentle, tropical paradise that Earthlings once imagined. It was closer to the sun -- but not too close. It was almost Earth-size -- but not quite. And it had plenty of water, even oceans.

But that was then. Sometime in the distant past, the oceans started to heat up and then boiled away. The water vapor hung over the planet like a glove, trapping the heat below and creating a berserk greenhouse effect."

It doesn't matter if there weren't any people causing or provoking it (to be a silly human) to formulate outta control. A chemical mix is a chemical mix whether naturally or to a purpose. We've had plenty of time for purposeful overexposure of our atmosphere to figure out how to recycle a hekk of a lot better.

Today, Venus's atmosphere is 97 percent carbon dioxide, and the planet is wreathed in clouds of sulfuric acid. The planet is apparently condemned to an eternal cycle of global warming, with surface temperatures that hover around 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

There are, perhaps, lessons to be learned here. "Venus is very unpleasant," said Hakan Svedhem of the European Space Agency. "We know the greenhouse effect on Earth is a very interesting topic. Maybe with Venus, we can better understand how our own atmosphere works."

There are perhaps...

I don't care if it's the planet, the silly worlds of men and women or the explosive nature of American nationalism. We're a big, strong and ingenious country. When the U.S. blows up it's chest, fuck yah people knuckledown. Which means they're ready for a fight that we've no Right to win.

Certainly not anymore than anyone else does. Competition ends at brutality boyeeez!

Early tomorrow Eastern time, ESA's Venus Express, a honeycombed aluminum spacecraft carrying seven instruments and cloaked in a metallic gold polymer to fend off the heat, is scheduled to begin a 51-minute rocket burn that will settle it into an elliptical polar orbit.

For the next 500 days, with the possibility of extending for another 500, the spacecraft will probe mysteries that have confounded and fascinated scientists since exploration of the planet first began with NASA's Mariner 2 in 1962.

Chief among them is what happened to turn Venus into a child's vision of hell, with a superheated toxic soup of an atmosphere that is 90 times denser at the surface than Earth's -- about the same pressure as the ocean at a half-mile depth.

Here's a question though; Why a child's vision? A kid isn't likely to even know why rotten eggs smell like sulfure, but they're expected to understand Hell?

Okay.. What's amazing is how much there is to learn about atmospherics studying them on Venus, which is presumably the place where sexaddicts get to go, but with no hormones, so they aren't interested in 900˚ sex. {shakin'head}

Regardless of cultural phobisies ,

There is a lot to understand. Measurements taken by early probes of Venus have made scientists all but certain that the planet once had extensive oceans that heated up and finally boiled off.

Quite probably the resulting cloud of water vapor provided the initial atmospheric blanket that turned the planet into a hothouse. "But where did [the water] go?" asked University of Michigan planetary scientist Stephen Bougher. "Nobody knows."

Heat could break the water into its constituent atoms, and the hydrogen could easily evaporate from the upper atmosphere and escape into space, but "something different" had to have happened to the heavier oxygen, Bougher said in a telephone interview. One possibility is that a magnetic field induced by the solar wind may have swept charged oxygen particles away from the planet, he said.

Venus Express has an instrument that can measure atmospheric erosion and perhaps provide data that will help scientists reconstruct how Venus lost its oceans.

Imagine oceans boiling, for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.. Well, we won't be around that long* if we can't understand how it happens. The sun could heat us up a lot toastier if we just keep mixin' up our atmospheric fuel supply with the deadly quantites of the last hundred years.

I listened to a program a few weeks back where the speaker, of the Pew Center talked about BP's and GE's 10 year goals for carbon emissions reductions. I do think the people with the power to do so are at least starting to take it seriously as in Hey! Start countering this thing now!!!

Who knows what an incredible experience for bio-terraforming skills we'll undoubtedly need in the future. Again, if we're to have one. Like all of them, this mission isn't guarentied.

But the tension peaks during the capture burn that begins about an hour after engineers "slue" the stern of the spacecraft to point the thrusters properly. This delicately timed process, if it goes awry, could end up with the spacecraft missing its orbital "window" and careering off into space.

Alright, Dave Auld's rockin' the house. I got some Dennett to entertain me.

* Of course by then "we" will have evolved into how many other species, no one can tell. Yet.