The sweet thing about my little diversion with Venus past few days is that it’s such a good reminder and example of how serious science actually works, as opposed to the showman’s make-believe contrarian-science.
When an outlandish statement is made - scientists (or communicators) can take a curious, skeptical, thinking person through the lines of evidence that lead to such and such a conclusion. Along the way teaching all sort of details, along with an awareness of caveats and limitations. It’s not a bunch of flimflam that depends on making clowns out of opponents while disregarding true evidence and facts, the way your contrarian is dependent on doing.
After listen to a shocking science tale, one is left with the knowledge to start doing a little homework, in order to support or dismiss what others told us. Collecting more information will either corroborate or challenge claims made.
Why do I trust it? Because the community of scientists had already been weeding out the trivial and incorrect from the factual and plausible. Doesn’t make it perfect - but it’s the way to do the best we can with what we have.
Sure beats faith-shackled thinking, with it palpable nonsense. Where someone, rather than a collection of evidence sets the agenda and anyone who doesn’t hold to that doctrine becomes an enemy, to be treated with extreme prejudice.
Astrophysics > Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
[Submitted on 2 Aug 2016]
Was Venus the First Habitable World of our Solar System?
Michael J. Way, Anthony D. Del Genio, Nancy Y. Kiang, Linda E. Sohl, David H. Grinspoon, Igor Aleinov, Maxwell Kelley, Thomas Clune
Cornell University - https //arxiv org/abs/1608.00706
Present-day Venus is an inhospitable place with surface temperatures approaching 750K and an atmosphere over 90 times as thick as present day Earth’s. Billions of years ago the picture may have been very different.
We have created a suite of 3D climate simulations using topographic data from the Magellan mission, solar spectral irradiance estimates for 2.9 and 0.715 billion years ago, present day Venus orbital parameters, an ocean volume consistent with current theory and measurements, and an atmospheric composition estimated for early Venus.
Using these parameters we find that such a world could have had moderate temperatures if Venus had a rotation period slower than about 16 Earth days, despite an incident solar flux 46-70% higher than modern Earth receives. At its current rotation period of 243 days, Venus’s climate could have remained habitable until at least 715 million years ago if it hosted a shallow primordial ocean.
These results demonstrate the vital role that rotation and topography play in understanding the climatic history of exoplanetary Venus-like worlds being discovered in the present epoch.
Mysteries of Venus –“First Habitable Planet in the Solar System?”
Posted on Jun 5, 2019 in Astronomy, Science - DailyGalaxy.com
https //dailygalaxy com/2019/06/hidden-mysteries-of-venus-was-it-the-first-habitable-planet-in-the-solar-system/
…
James Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, is convinced that whatever they find, whether is be that Venus was formerly an ocean world or that it’s tectonically active today, it will be “beyond our wildest dreams. We need to find out. Because she’s waiting to tell us something and I would hate to miss the boat.”
Momentum is building to explore Venus, in part because scientists say it could hold the secret to understanding what makes a planet habitable. “Venus is like Earth in so many ways,” observed Stephen Hawking. “A sort of kissing cousin. She’s almost the same size as Earth, a touch closer to the Sun. And, she has an atmosphere that could crush a submarine.” Venus today is a hellish abode where surface temperatures reach more than 400 °C and deadly clouds of sulfuric acid float through the sky.
“If researchers could decipher why conditions on Venus turned so deadly”, writes Shannon Hall in Nature, “that would help them to assess whether life might exist on some of the thousand-plus rocky worlds that astronomers are discovering throughout the Galaxy.”
So what went wrong with the once water-rich Eden? Although Earth and Venus began in a similar fashion” writes Hall. …
