← Ologies with Alie Ward
Ologies with Alie Ward
Venusology (VENUS) with Vicki Hansen
01:11:06
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?
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- [00:00]
Alie Ward
Oh hey, it's the stranger's dog who just licked your mouth. Alie 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 gradually 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 professor of Earth and Planetary Scientists. They have worked for the U.S. geological Survey and done field work 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 FOL 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 Sarai916, who wrote that the show takes listeners on a magic school bus like auditory journey spanning from the smallest molecules to the largest existential. And Sarai 916, 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 ologist's choosing each week. Thank you to sponsors of the show. As the daughter of immigrants, financial struggles were part of my everyday reality. In high school, I became homeless and had to live in a women's shelter. Thankfully, being an Apia McDonald Scholar enabled me to attend college and begin a new chapter in my life. And now my reality is filled with endless possibilities.
- [02:14]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
McDonald's has awarded nearly $4 million through Apia scholars to support students. Learn more at apanext.com well, the holidays.
- [02:23]
Alie Ward
Have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is Extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year.
- [02:37]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
What do you have to lose?
- [02:38]
Alie Ward
Give it a try atmint mob mobile.com.
- [02:41]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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- [02:51]
Alie Ward
See terms. Okay, from the smallest molecules to the planets themselves. Let's blast off into this instant classic. An episode that had me beaming 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 Venus ologist Dr. Vicky Hansen.
- [03:47]
Interviewer/Host
And so I'm trying to figure out there is an ology for this, right? Like it's, is it venuology?
- [03:53]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Well, you know, that's really an interesting question because some say it's like Venusian or that those are the people. So Venus ology, you know, I think would go just as well as anything then good.
- [04:07]
Interviewer/Host
Are there a lot of people who are 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?
- [04:17]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [04:34]
Interviewer/Host
Wow.
- [04:35]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [04:46]
Interviewer/Host
And which is closer to us. I understand Venus is larger than Mars.
- [04:50]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yes.
- [04:51]
Interviewer/Host
Which is closer?
- [04:52]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Venus is closer to us and Venus is between us and the sun.
- [04:56]
Interviewer/Host
And then we've got Mercury, Venus, us, Mars.
- [05:00]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Mars. Exactly. And then the asteroid belt and then we go out to the bigger planets.
- [05:05]
Interviewer/Host
And how big is Venus in comparison to Earth?
- [05:09]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [05:20]
Alie 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.
- [05:30]
Interviewer/Host
Why do you think people are so hung up on Mars, more so than Venus?
- [05:35]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Well, first of all, they say men are from Mars and women are from Venus. So there we go.
- [05:40]
Alie Ward
Mars, distant red, named for the God of war, Venus, bright in the sky, 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.
- [05:56]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Beauty, figures 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. 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.
- [06:52]
Interviewer/Host
What are those clouds made of?
- [06:54]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 way up there. 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.
- [07:35]
Interviewer/Host
In the clouds.
- [07:37]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
In the clouds. Because the surfaces we'll find out is super hot, super dry, not good for life as we define it.
- [07:45]
Alie Ward
So that's on land, maybe not as.
- [07:48]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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. Oh, 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 in Duluth, Minnesota, for sure. But in the clouds, because they have these 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?
- [08:42]
Alie Ward
Yes.
- [08:42]
Interviewer/Host
I mean, can we go get a scoop of this? How do we find out?
- [08:45]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 of that hasn't been planned yet.
- [09:05]
Alie Ward
So the vapor cloak around Venus may hold the answer. And by answer, I mean aliens. Vicki 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.
- [09:30]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
But that would just be one shot and would just give us kind of one pass. 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.
- [09:44]
Interviewer/Host
Where you come in.
- [09:46]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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. 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, cool off really quickly. Well, the way that that heat escapes is the mode of tectonism and volcanism or tectonics, 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.
- [11:24]
Interviewer/Host
Well, what is a tectonic and how is it different than a plate tectonic?
- [11:28]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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. 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, 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.
- [12:44]
Interviewer/Host
So what's it doing?
- [12:45]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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. 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 tessera.
- [13:20]
Alie Ward
So a tessera 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 of Geology titled Venus tesserae feature layered, folded and eroded rocks tesserae cover about 8% of the surface of Venus, and they're seen mostly around the equator and some of the northern latitudes. They're usually the oldest thing in their regions. They're up to 750 million years old. And scientists think they're caused by volcanic activity.
- [13:58]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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, because that's the earliest record, then when I subduct things, I'm removing parts of the surface, and so 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. 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.
- [14:51]
Alie Ward
I also just want to note that there are so many different formations that aren't even tesserae on Venus's lithosphere or the rockscape, her rockscape. 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.
- [15:21]
Interviewer/Host
Well, what's on the surface? Let's say that I were to get through those clouds. What does it even look like?
- [15:26]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 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. Other places you might be on extensive lava flows like Pahoehoe 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.
- [17:20]
Interviewer/Host
Well, so it has active volcanoes?
- [17:23]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
I would say yes. 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. 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 all of Australia. No, 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? 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 rock. 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. 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 geologically is it active? I'd bet my life on it.
- [19:04]
Interviewer/Host
Well, okay, you told me that way back when you first started studying this, there were a few of you in a room, right?
- [19:12]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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? Because no one knew me from anything except my one colleague at Southern Methodist University at the time and his student.
- [19:29]
Interviewer/Host
And now when they say, where did you come from? Did you tell them Caltech Pasadena?
- [19:35]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 had 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 rheology 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 rheology. Rheology is the study of flow. 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 thing on Venus. And then as 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 gonna be a one time thing, but it's been so fascinating that I can't pull away.
- [21:25]
Interviewer/Host
You stuck around.
- [21:26]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
I stuck around. I stuck around. And then after that was when I learned that, oh my gosh, Venus is. Who's gonna tell me about early Earth, which is what I am really interested in. And Venus has a record of early Venus. Earth doesn't because it's been destroyed by plate tectonics.
- [21:46]
Alie Ward
Oh.
- [21:47]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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. Earth has ripped it apart.
- [22:29]
Alie Ward
I love her. I love her.
- [22:31]
Interviewer/Host
Oh. So what was it about Earth that got you down that path? At what point were you like, I wanna be a geologist, I wanna be a planetary scientist.
- [22:43]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
So pretty silly. More serendipity. I was at Carleton College. I was a chemistry major and doing art on the side. And a friend and I, 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 falling. 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 thinking about majoring in it. Well, Lynn Tendison, 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.
- [23:45]
Interviewer/Host
Did you keep in touch with that professor to say, like, you converted us.
- [23:49]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
You know, she went back to industry. But I did say, you know, Lynn, you got the last laugh because here we are.
- [23:59]
Interviewer/Host
Are you. I have a friend, she's a planetary geologist and she. Her name is Raquel, which is fun because her nickname was Rocky. Yes.
- [24:08]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Growing up. Oh, man. Oh, that's incredible.
- [24:12]
Interviewer/Host
We had her on for the Selenology Moon episode.
- [24:15]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Oh, fun.
- [24:17]
Interviewer/Host
She's wonderful. But she was saying that she always tricks her husband into going on vacations where there's a lot of rocks.
- [24:25]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
That's great. Well, and our family, we have two kids who are now adults, but. 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.
- [24:49]
Interviewer/Host
A lot of geology.
- [24:50]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
We went to Iceland. We all had a great time, but they never complained about going on vacations where there wasn't any geology.
- [24:58]
Interviewer/Host
They've got some great geology.
- [24:59]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Exactly.
- [25:00]
Interviewer/Host
Jokes on them, right?
- [25:02]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yep.
- [25:04]
Interviewer/Host
Well, what can you tell me a little bit about the missions to Venus? Like I, I don't know much about Magellan.
- [25:11]
Alie Ward
Like I'm a blank slate here.
- [25:12]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Okay. So Magellan. So first there were missions where they were looking at radar, but not very high quality.
- [25:20]
Alie Ward
Okay.
- [25:20]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
And then the Russians, Soviets, excuse me, actually put some landers down on the surface Venera. And that, that's really pretty amazing because they did that in the 1960s and 70s. Whoa.
- [25:33]
Alie Ward
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 facts. Venera shares the same root word as the verb to venerate or to regard 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. Yeah, veneer emissions, those are, were really.
- [26:29]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [26:40]
Alie Ward
Wow.
- [26:41]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 had collected four data sets, three of 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. Whoa. In hundred meter per pixel resolution. Is that a lot? 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? Because the radar doesn't see well through the oceans. And 2/3 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.
- [27:58]
Alie 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 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.
- [28:39]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 and 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.
- [29:24]
Interviewer/Host
What does that mean?
- [29:25]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
On Earth, we refer everything to sea level. Yes, but 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.
- [29:48]
Alie Ward
Yeah. So Earth is like a gusher in the center, spinning relatively fast. But Venus, not so much.
- [29:55]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 a do one rotation. Ah, just knock down the microphone. I get so excited. I love it.
- [30:20]
Alie Ward
Honestly, her excitement about Venus makes me feel like Venus is a friend now. It's a beautiful delusion.
- [30:26]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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, her due is not must at all. Right. She's not going to smush at the equator.
- [30:46]
Interviewer/Host
So a day is longer than a year. So that means that it's in darkness and light for so long, right?
- [30:53]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yes, for so long. Exactly.
- [30:56]
Alie 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.
- [31:10]
Interviewer/Host
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?
- [31:22]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Well, yeah, it would be, but you probably couldn't smell because your nose won't work because it's 900 degrees.
- [31:28]
Alie Ward
Yeah.
- [31:29]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
So take your oven, you know, and turn it up so it would rain sulfuric acid. I mean, I've worked with a lab. I don't think that smells like sulfur does. So I don't know about the smell.
- [31:41]
Alie Ward
So this has been a hot ghastly debated 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 wood meeting with 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 onto Blue sky to ask a bevy of smart people about this posting. Any chemist 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 Ludicrous, told me that water is Neither reducing nor oxidizing in 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 sulfurs in the vapor and no one is there to smell it, does it make a stink? Alaska smell is in the nose of the beholder. Now, in light of that, how about the beauty?
- [33:36]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 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. 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 basalts, 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, depth.
- [34:59]
Interviewer/Host
And so is there a huge temperature difference on one side of Venus versus the other?
- [35:04]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 down comforter on steroids. It's very warm. 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 there you are in darkness for so long, as you said, because your days and nights are much longer.
- [35:47]
Alie 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.
- [36:03]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [36:22]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah, it wouldn't be like going under a sun umbrella versus standing in the.
- [36:26]
Alie Ward
Yes.
- [36:27]
Interviewer/Host
Not like that.
- [36:27]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yeah, not all.
- [36:29]
Alie 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 is 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.
- [37:04]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
I would like to see the baby. 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 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. And you can do this for public talks. It's just so fun, 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.
- [37:54]
Alie Ward
Vicki 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.
- [38:01]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 doing any jumping, kiddo. But I'd never thought of it before. But her question, I said, you know what? You wouldn't fall. What? You would not fall because 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.
- [39:05]
Interviewer/Host
No.
- [39:05]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
And she would be like a penguin that she could just sit there and be flying. She could not sink because she would be too buoyant. Isn't that fun?
- [39:18]
Interviewer/Host
That's bonkers. Bonkers.
- [39:22]
Alie Ward
Okay, so maybe at 900 degrees, this would have its drawbacks.
- [39:27]
Interviewer/Host
Well, I mean, I know it's very hot there, but I want to go check it out.
- [39:31]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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, you.
- [39:41]
Interviewer/Host
Know, and do we have any missions even planned coming up?
- [39:46]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 DaVinci. 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 tessera terrain that I said is this very old and unique and distinctive terrain. The other is the Veritas mission. And that is one that is. 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.
- [40:53]
Interviewer/Host
And do those circle and use radar as opposed to getting through those clouds?
- [40:58]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [41:10]
Interviewer/Host
It'll go there because it's going to burn up.
- [41:12]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
It's going to burn up. Exactly. Remember I said that Venus rotates very, very slowly.
- [41:17]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah.
- [41:18]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
So normally we think about things going around. Okay. And you can go around things both in a polar orbit or an equatorial orbit.
- [41:26]
Alie Ward
So over the top and underside or around the middle. But the spacecraft, Vicki says, doesn't even have to move much. Just kind of like sitting on a bench and watching a carousel go by.
- [41:38]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [42:03]
Interviewer/Host
Oh, wow.
- [42:04]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
To give us this incredible global picture. Isn't that elegant?
- [42:09]
Interviewer/Host
Yes.
- [42:10]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
And they fully knew that at some point, we're going to get so close that we're just going to get sucked right in. And, you know, there goes Magellan. Magellan is now one with Venus. Very poetic.
- [42:22]
Alie Ward
Before this planned 1994 crash into Venus, Magellan had arrived in her orbit in 1990 to make detailed measurements and also using aerobraking into the cloud 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.
- [42:44]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [42:55]
Interviewer/Host
I love it. I have some great questions from listeners. Can I ask?
- [42:58]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. No. I don't like questions. No.
- [43:01]
Alie 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. We'll donate to them, as well as Vicki'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. Okay, finally, finally, we put out episodes about ocd. And by now, you know, OCD is not just about liking things organized or liking things in color order. It is a serious. It's a highly misunderstood condition. It can show up in so many sneaky ways. In the episode, we talk about how OCD can be managed and treated with the right kind of therapy, which is why I want to talk about nocd. So with the right kind of help, a specialized therapist who gets what you're experiencing, is trained to treat it. OCD can become so much more manageable at NOCD. Every therapist deeply understands OCD. NOCD is covered for over 155 million Americans. And they make sure that between sessions you're supported. They have in app tools, therapist messaging, they have support groups putting out. The OCD episodes were really important for me because a few years ago I was diagnosed with it after years of thinking it was just anxiety. And getting the right therapy has helped so much. And it's been really heartening to hear how much these episodes have already helped people with OCD and people who know others who are suffering from it. So if you're ready to start getting help from a therapist who truly understands OCD, visit nocd.com to book a free call. That's nocd.com oh Ollie. Ollie came to me as a potential sponsor and I wrote back all caps. I take Ollie every day. Ollie, I love you. I love you. Ally loves Ollie. I've had doctors recommend certain supplements like I take their goodbye stress literally every day and a half for years. For me, I'm looking for that Gaba and L Theanine. I love that Ollie is easy to take. They taste good so I remember to take them. And also is a big dork who likes to research what I'm taking. I love that Ollie has science science back supplements which help my brain and bod on a daily term. Also your assigned female of birth, Ollie knows that women are dealing with enough okay? So they make it simple to find some good solutions that fit your needs. They have again, science backed supplements that support women's wellness. Multivitamins libido support vaginal probiotics. They have these mango gummies that are delish. They have a clinically studied probiotic that supports your gut and your digestive health and your immune system. And yes again, mango. Bring it on. Easy to take. So yeah, Ollie, they're in my gut every day. So science backed wellness can be simple. Head to o l-y.com and start supporting your gut and overall well being with solutions that are easy and delightful. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. So is my entire life. I've used Squarespace ever since I started this podcast. So whether you're just starting out or you're are scaling your business, Squarespace is an all in one website platform. It's designed to help your business stand out and succeed. They give you everything you need to offer your services to get paid all in one place. Whether you're doing things like consultations or events, you can show the world what you do with this great customizable website. It's designed to help grow your business. You can get paid on time. I love that they have on brand invoices, they have online payment, all of the things that you are overwhelmed to do Squarespace can handle. You can also streamline your workflow. They have built in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools which are huge right now. Again, I love Squarespace. Whether you are starting from the ground up and you just need a simple website or if you're a business and you want better, more streamlined portals, Squarespace, they know I love them. You know I love them. So head to squarespace.com sl ologies for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code ologies to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Go do it. Listen, it's a new year. You just got through the holidays. I'm with you. I feel you. 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That's drinkag1.com Ologies Drink ag1.com Ologies Ologies is sponsored by Strawberry Me. So every New Year's Eve I like to sit down and write what I want for the year ahead. And then I put it in a jar with my favorite rocks. Don't worry about the jar or the rocks. It's so helpful to write down what you want for career growth. But sometimes the next step is difficult. Inertia is real, but nothing really changes unless you change it. And Strawberry Me career coaching can help you get out of that slump or help you start on a new path. They match you with a certified career coach. It's a real human. It's not an AI with questionable motives. And your career coach can help you strategize guys, they listen to what you want, they help you create a plan and then this is so important. They hold you accountable so you don't just think about the thing when you do the thing. And I've used Strawberry Me and they've helped me break things down into smaller steps and I see that I can stretch myself a little creatively. I can do a live show maybe here or there, and having someone who understands performance anxiety but still encourages me to keep going and tackle things has been really helpful. So if you're waiting for the right moment moment to level up, this is it. Go to Strawberry Me ologies and get 50% off your first coaching session. So that's Strawberry Me Ologies. 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.
- [49:39]
Interviewer/Host
This is one I should have asked up front, but Erenaby, Scott, Umaya, Sam, Megan the librarian, RJ Doidge, Kaya and Jasmine wanted to know E Renabee asked why have we gendered the planets? Why do we say she when we talk about her?
- [49:58]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Well, I don't know why we 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 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.
- [50:30]
Interviewer/Host
Surface is she referred to as a she or earn it?
- [50:33]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 but you know, for me, for Venus we haven't even scratched the surface. We don't know 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 totally personal and a lot of people don't care. And some people, it gets a bee in their bonnet. Yeah.
- [51:09]
Interviewer/Host
Oh, I like it.
- [51:10]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
I do too.
- [51:11]
Alie Ward
I think it's cute 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, 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 region 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, 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 hurt enough. We both had reached our limits. Then his wife cries and begs him to comfort her and a book about 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 who didn't know much about astronomy or evolution on Earth.
- [53:17]
Interviewer/Host
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?
- [53:28]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 onto 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. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That was like, yeah, I don't associate that with Venus, the planet. She's just above all that.
- [53:55]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah, exactly.
- [53:56]
Alie 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, Venusian allies, and a bunch of space age movies and comic books. Well, in spite of all that, I'm.
- [54:17]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [54:40]
Alie Ward
Annalee Newitz is the author of the Terraformers. And Vicki 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 Vicki, who says that she loves anything that makes one think in different ways and that it's a really fun book. So anyway, Annalee, journalist and science author, and now using they them pronouns, reached out to chat planetary geology, who wrote.
- [55:03]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 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 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 science fiction reader.
- [55:42]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah, I mean, truth is more fascinating than fiction to me.
- [55:46]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
It is. To me it is.
- [55:47]
Interviewer/Host
What about private missions? Kelly Shaver and Milan Niecki 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?
- [56:01]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 energy. 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.
- [56:38]
Alie Ward
So Vicki does not yearn for the bouncing among Venus's hot clouds. She's like, I'm to going good.
- [56:43]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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, 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, and you could do this with someone who's got extra change to throw around. You know, 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.
- [58:28]
Interviewer/Host
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?
- [58:36]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
How does that work? Oh, also 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. Yeah, 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 and. 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 can accept it.
- [59:20]
Interviewer/Host
And it's nuts that the Soviets were able to do this in the 60s.
- [59:24]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
I mean, well, that is nutty. And 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 mindboggling what they did. And you know, you can say, and people do complain about the data and it's like, well, 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 is mind boggling what they did truly like, you know, amazing.
- [60:12]
Alie Ward
And two first time question askers, Emma Kirkmeyer 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?
- [60:25]
Interviewer/Host
Would the sulfuric acid, would the acid rain destroy a lot of that?
- [60:30]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yes. Yeah. So when we're looking at all the electrons, the heat and the caustic environment are just going to 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 or instruments much safer and out of that caustic environment than if you're landing on the surface.
- [61:13]
Interviewer/Host
Well, what about the past of it? Melena K. First time question asker says longtime listener first time question asker Carol Young, as well as Thistle Businger, Nick Ryder, Michael Ara, Victor Lilly wanted to know, in Milena's words, is there any truth to the idea that Venus was once habitable? Could it ever become habitable once again?
- [61:35]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 from further billion years, 3.5 billion years.
- [62:07]
Alie 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 in a millennium is a thousand. A billion years has a name, it's called a Gigantis.
- [62:35]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 is 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. 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 culture. And Venus doesn't have plate tectonics. And if she was ever to develop it, it probably had to be early in her history 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.
- [64:08]
Interviewer/Host
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 bugging a rock 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.
- [64:31]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 environment environments, 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 sometime open minds are harder to come by than the data. 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, Z instead of A, B, C as we want to force it into.
- [65:25]
Alie Ward
On Earth 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.
- [65:37]
Interviewer/Host
Some people asked about. A lot of people asked about Venus.
- [65:41]
Alie Ward
Associated with love and astrology.
- [65:44]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
What's not to love? Right.
- [65:46]
Interviewer/Host
Does that come up in conversations a lot? Are people like, oh my God, in my sun house?
- [65:52]
Alie Ward
She nodded like a bobblehead going down a gravel road?
- [65:55]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah.
- [65:56]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yes, yes.
- [65:59]
Interviewer/Host
I don't know much about that myself.
- [66:00]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
But I don't either.
- [66:04]
Interviewer/Host
And is to find her in the sky, is it like look for just the brightest star in the morning or evening?
- [66:11]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [66:20]
Alie 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.
- [66:40]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
So Mars, because it's away from us and the sun, it can be, see it, 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 Venus will sometimes appear brighter and other times less bright because. 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, 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. Venus lit.
- [67:44]
Interviewer/Host
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 Nungasser, Arami Farias, Wandering Wyatt Bardos, Jen Squirrel Everz, Kate Arav, Victor and Aviosli 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?
- [68:22]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yeah. So Venus is a greenhouse planet. And what we can learn is we don't want to go there.
- [68:30]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah, yeah.
- [68:31]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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. 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. 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.
- [69:48]
Alie Ward
Bye now. Yeah.
- [69:50]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
And so that's what we can learn is that, you know, this is serious and we don't want to go there because 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 what. Whether we're going to be a part of that or not. And the rate we're going, it's not.
- [70:09]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah. Are more space agencies looking to Venus as sort of a prediction model?
- [70:20]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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 know what we need to 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. Yeah, we have the data we need. Yeah. Venus is fascinating to study, but not for those reasons.
- [70:52]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah. What is the hardest part about your job? What gets you. It can be petty.
- [70:57]
Alie Ward
It can be huge.
- [70:58]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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. And it should just be fun to be able to try out different hypotheses and say, oh, my gosh, okay, that was wrong. But we got somewhere because we did the data for this reason and that reason and my colleague Roger Phillips, who was that geophysicist 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 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.
- [72:23]
Interviewer/Host
Oh, I love that.
- [72:24]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
And that's my biggest frustration. And I see that 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 as 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. I'm wrong so many times, so, so, so many times. And that's how I learn.
- [73:15]
Interviewer/Host
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.
- [73:23]
Alie Ward
Time out.
- [73:23]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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, and that's okay.
- [73:50]
Interviewer/Host
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.
- [74:01]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
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.
- [74:40]
Interviewer/Host
I feel like I know her so much better now. I feel like she's a friend.
- [74:45]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
She is, she, she's a friend. She's a tease. She la. You know, she is just, you know, she's having a great time up there.
- [74:55]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah, I love this. I'll look for her in the sky.
- [74:59]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
Yes. And she will smile down on you.
- [75:02]
Alie Ward
Yeah.
- [75:03]
Interviewer/Host
This has been amazing. Vicki, you are just a gem, an absolute gem.
- [75:08]
Dr. Vicky Hansen
As are you.
- [75:11]
Alie Ward
So ask planetary people ambiguous questions because that is how you learned and that is how you make friends. So thank you so much, Dr. Vicki 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 Vicki 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@alieward.com Ologies Venusology. We are at Ologies on Blue sky and Instagram. I'm Alieward. Allie 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 Ologies. Mer also heads up. Smallogies are shorter kid friendly versions of Ologies episodes. They're in their own podcast feed, so just search for smallogies S M O L O G I E S Wherever you get your podcasts, please do subscribe. Tell friends. Aaron Talbert Admin Zoologies Podcast Facebook group Avileen Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth works out our trajectories as scheduling producer. Mission Captain is Managing Director Susan Hale. Jake Chaffee stitches all our data together as editor and overseeing those pieces as Lead editor. Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and if you stick around till the very very end, you know I may tell you a secret this week. Secret number one the evening of January 15, 2026 in LA, I'm co hosting Like a Drink and Draw kind of community art and science event with your favorite squid expert, Dr. Sarah McAnulty. 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 asked more questions. So let that be a lesson to us all. So go forth into this dawn of 2020 26. Do things quickly. Do them imperfectly. Learn as you go. 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. Pachydermatology, Cryptozoology, Litology, Gem Technology, Meteorology, Cognology, Serology, Selenology. You are beautiful Venus.