SciShow Tangents - Venus

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

We kick off Season 4 by getting up close and personal with Earth's other, less popular, more mysterious neighbor: Venus!Head to https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]Venera missionshttps://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1970-060Ahttps://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/chronology_venus.html[Fact Off]Venus tables & Maya Codex of Mexicohttps://www.mesoweb.com/articles/Coe_etal/Fourth_Codex.pdfhttps://www.brown.edu/news/2016-09-07/mayacodexhttps://www.inah.gob.mx/boletines/7497-inah-ratifica-al-codice-maya-de-mexico-antes-llamado-grolier-como-el-manuscrito-autentico-mas-antiguo-de-americahttps://www.news.ucsb.edu/2016/017062/mayan-momentPhosphene/ammonia on Venus (and microbial life possibility)https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/938538https://news.mit.edu/2020/life-venus-phosphine-0914https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-life-clouds.htmlhttps://news.mit.edu/2021/newer-nimbler-faster-mission-venus-search-signs-life-clouds-sulfuric-acid-1210https://venuscloudlife.com/venus-life-finder-mission-study/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7381915/https://www.pnas.org/content/118/52/e2110889118[Ask the Science Couch]Pictures of the surface of Venushttps://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/v09_lander_proc.htmlhttps://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/venera-13/in-depth/https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/sun/parker-solar-probe-captures-its-first-images-of-venus-surface-in-visible-light-confirmedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ueMGZTezfYhttps://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/exploring-the-planets/online/solar-system/venus/magellan.cfmhttps://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3728https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe-instruments[Butt One More Thing]Venus cloacina goddesshttps://drainfast.co.uk/blog/cloacina-goddess-sewers/https://books.google.com/books?id=SYqFBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA128#v=onepage&q&f=false

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. And also our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. I was listening to SciShow Tangents in the car on the way to school with my son this morning. Now, oftentimes we walk, but not when it's negative two. And he was really enjoying it

because it was the butts episode, which was an absolute blast for him. Anytime you say the word butt, he thinks that that is a height of, like it does not require any butt humor around it. It's just the existence of butts. So he's having a great time. In fact, we dropped him off and he was like, can you pause it and we'll finish when I get home? Oh, it's a five-year-old.

My heart. But right before we dropped him off, it was the advertisement for Preply, which Sam did, lovely job. Thank you. And in that advertisement several times, the phrase private tutor is uttered, which Oren thought is the best, funniest thing he'd ever heard.

Even funnier than butts? Funnier than butts. He kept saying, like Sam would say private tutor and Oren would go, private tutor. And I'm like, where did you, why do you even know that's funny? It was pretty good. He's developing a very good sense of humor.

And I'm a little bit frustrated that I, I did not realize that the phrase private tutor was funny until I was well into my thirties. I feel like. I didn't know until you just said it. It's got tutor right in it. But it's, it's a person who

toots only privately. There aren't those people exist. We gotta get him on our show. Oren? Yeah. He is hilarious.

I'm looking forward to him doing a little work on the Project for Awesome though this episode will come out after that. So hopefully he

did charm the crowds and raise a bunch of money during the Project for Awesome. Oren got canceled unfortunately during the Project for awesome or and got canceled unfortunately during the project i have a question for both of you are you private tutors i mean if we're talking about farting in front of people i would never fart in front of anyone or poop in a

public bathroom so no that's super wow that's a i guess he's we have a private tutor here are you you i could count on two hands how many times I've pooped in a public bathroom at least. It's only through in extreme circumstances. Oh, yeah. Got to be real bad. What's the home toot situation then, Sam? Me? Oh, I don't really, honestly.

I don't toot that often. You're not a tutor. I'll let them go at home, though. You know, whenever they're available. Sarah, are you a private tooter? Yeah, I think if we consider the home bubble private, then yes, I'm a private tooter also.

Inside the home bubble, you're a pretty public tooter. Inside the home bubble, pretty public tooter. You kind of got to be. You can't really hold it. You can't hide it. Yeah, some people really aren't.

Even around their family, they're very private tutors. Now, around my parents, I don't know. I don't feel like it's okay to tutor around my parents. I agree. It's like household only because you're forced to live with me, and so then you're forced to deal with my farts. We have to continue on with our episode because every week here on SciShow Tangents

we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for Glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with a traditional science poem

this week from Sam. I can't help but wonder if Venus, where it just scooted a smidge away, from the sun's ultra violet meanness, could we pay it a visit today? How much closer till clouds of acid became fluffy and marshmallow white?

Could the surface be lush and placid instead of causing your skin to ignite? Could Venusian critters scamper in vast fields of alien blossoms? And could we travel in space-borne campers to see sights exotic and awesome? But alas, Venus is where it is. It's not a great place to vacation. If you went there, your eyeballs would fizz and your lungs melt upon inhalation. So please keep in mind all

the while as venus's harshness we discussed give or take a few million miles that easily could have been us wow wow we're getting better at this i was this time i was actually like i'm gonna write a poem i know how to do that the first time in three years or whatever how long we've been doing this that i thought that you're like i i well i know how to i know how to do that. The first time in three years or whatever, how long we've been doing this, that I thought that. You're like, I know how to crank out a great Venusian fairy rhyme. Yeah. Sari, what is Venus? I feel like this one's pretty easy. I've got a specific answer for once.

A specific answer. Yeah. It's a planet and it's the second planet from the sun in our solar system. It's Mercury, then Venus, then us. A lot of Sam's poem summed it up. It has a thick, toxic atmosphere, toxic to us at least, that is filled with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. And it's actually hotter. It's the hottest planet or world in our solar system, even though Mercury is closer to the sun.

Because it's got such a big atmosphere, right? Is that why? Yeah, the atmosphere holds on to the heat. Yes, it's like specifically an atmosphere with compounds in it that trap heat really well. If it was a little bit closer to Earth, could you live there? I don't think so like there's no and and hank can correct me if i'm wrong i i don't think there's any particular like it would still be kind of like a toxic mess if it was slightly farther from the sun if we grabbed onto it and yanked it into earth's orbit now it would still be a toxic mess. Dang. But potentially, if the same planet with the same geology and geochemistry

happened much farther from the sun, it would be a very different place. But I am not enough of an exogeologist to have any idea the ways in which it would be different. I was just reading about it, and I was thinking, dang, we're so close. It feels like we're so close to having a little friend. I gotta say, it would be so cool to have a friend. Yeah. That close by. It'd be so cool to be in a solar system with two habitable planets. Totally possible. Probably

happened to a lot of aliens where they were like, looked up in the sky and they were like, oh my gosh, that one's got swimming pools we should go visit she's gonna see our neighbors Venus was the first planet to be explored

by a spacecraft I think NASA's Mariner 2 flew by Venus on December 14th 1962 and so like

what if it flew by and then someone waved back and was like what up that'd be so exciting our whole history would be different And so like what if it flew by and then someone waved back and was like, what up? That'd be so exciting.

Our whole history would be different. It's like, oh, we send a spacecraft out and then there's a guy there. I feel like we'd be mean to them. I hope not. Well, the nice thing is they're pretty far away. It'd be hard to be mean for a while. I guess that's true. We'd just be rubbing our hands like, I can't wait to go be mean to them.

But at the moment, we really don't know how to do that. Other weird things about Venus is that it has what's called retrograde or backwards rotation relative to the Earth. And most of the planets in our solar system. And we're not entirely sure why. We think it may have flipped on its axis at some point or like slowed down and stopped and then started rotating the other direction. Just because. And another weird thing, I had to like triple check that I read these numbers right. A day on Venus lasts longer than a year, which is very brain bendy and like make time feel fake uh so it takes just spins real slow yeah it's been so freaking

slow but it's not it's not like a day is a year like if it was like mercury is where it's tidally locked a day is uh a little more than 243 earth days and a year on venus is only about 224 earth days that's so close we are very confused about a lot of things uranus spin on its side rolls around the sun that's weird venus spin backward but real slow why some probably big smack probably happened some kind of big smack kind of the only thing going on up there right just smack mostly yeah just all smacking yeah

it's not like there's like somebody who could decide to make a planet go faster or slower unless it's a simulation then that's exactly the kind of thing

that we'd be doing you know I would do that gotta keep them guessing yeah you would be pushing like the plus and minus speed buttons

just to freak people out you gotta make the moon the exact same size as the sun in the sky just by complete coincidence you gotta save your game first just in case you destroy all life in the universe then you reload and you say i won't do that again i know i always save before i do something big yeah i yeah i know i know how to be a omniscient god great is there do we know anything about the origin of the word venus aside from the fact that it is a goddess yes well it is a goddess uh which i'm only gonna pronounce like that as though i'm forgetting the gender of the Roman goddess. Yeah, Venus is the Roman goddess of love and beauty.

And I think Venus was a word before it was applied to the goddess. I'm not sure. There's a lowercase Venus in the etymology dictionary that I look at, which means like love or loveliness or beauty or charm. And that's from the Proto-Indo-European root, W-E-N, which I think is when, but maybe ven, because when you get Germanic, then W's or V's, everything's mixed up. So the word might have been weenus for a while?

That's fun. Could have been, Sam. Could have been. When, it means to desire or strive for and and so that is tied to words like wean like you're weaning off of something because it's desirable or win or wish but it's also tied to things like venom which i think is interesting so as far as i can tell venom used to be applied to like a drug or a love potion or like charm or seduction before it was like toxin um so that's that's kind of cool i mean that was fascinating and also it led to the wonderful situation of venus possibly being originally venus and we could we can go ahead and say that like

weenus is the hottest planet weenus is it rotates backward weenus has very long days and also all words that start with ven should should start with ween so you've got weenamus ween gents weenereal disease weenereal disease great ween triloquists Weenereal disease. Weenereal disease, great. Weentriloquists. All right, what are we doing? We're making SciShow Tangents. That means that it's probably time for us to move on to the quiz portion of our show. This is going to be the Tangents.

Ween is true to our fate. So do the moon and the stars shape our fates? No. So do the moon and the stars shape our fates? No. But they can still have a tremendous influence on our lives, as exhibited by the transit of Venus, the rare moment when Earth, Venus, and the sun line up and we can see Venus traveling as a black dot across the sun. And these transits come up in pairs, like our most recent pair in 2004 and 2012. But these pairs are spaced super far apart. The next transit of Venus

isn't slated to occur until 2117 and 2125. I guess we're going to call that 2125 when we get there. When we get there, when someone gets there. When Oren gets there, maybe. The following are three stories of how the transit of Venus has impacted people, but only one of those facts is true. You're going to have to tell me which one it is.

I'm going to stop saying Venus now because as funny as it is, eventually we've got to save it for later. Fact number one, bad math. During the 1639 transit of Venus, a group of German astronomers worked together to follow the transit from different locations in an attempt to improve navigation for ships. However, due to a notation error, their calculations ended up being off and several expeditions that used their results ended up lost. Damn right. Oh no.

Or it could be fact number two, colonizing Australia. For the 1769 transit of Venus, a British expedition was sent to Tahiti to build an observatory and track Venus' movement across the sun. And after the transit was done, the expedition explored the area more, coming across Australia in the process and claiming it for the King of England. Or Fact Number 3. Murder For the 1874 transit of Venus, two American astronomers from the Transit of Venus Commission found themselves in competition with each other to decide who would be sent to an observatory in Nagasaki to photograph the transit.

To ensure that he would join the expedition, one of the astronomers killed the other one. So which is it? Is it bad math leading to lost expeditions colonizing australia because we went to tahiti to do a venus thing or venetian murder for good signs because i want to be the one to go which one wow it's one of those which is wild i feel like i read little snippets of all of these because i had to read every single damn thing about venus to find a freaking fact now i'm very confused yeah i i remember reading about a guy who went to go observe the transit of venus around tahiti or australia and then he missed it and then he stayed longer and by the time he went back to england his wife remarried his estate got sold they just

thought he was dead because none of his letters made it back somehow and so i feel like that's what i read too i feel like this one is made out of all three of these are made out of that one so i don't know what the hell to do there was also a murder and there was there was also a murder and there was also a bunch of lost expeditions. Yeah, the twists and turns of it. Humans are so wild that any of these could be true. Especially old scientists when to be a scientist, you mostly just had to be rich and a vagabond. You could just go around and do whatever to try and make a discovery. and you could just go around and do whatever to try and make a discovery.

So I'm going to say, though, I'm going to narrow it down through pure guess and say I'm going to guess the stars, the navigation one, because I feel like Venus is so bright in the sky, of course we would use it for navigation. Yeah, that seems like the easiest answer. But it's so boring. I want it to be one of the other ones. I don't think it could be the murder one. I feel like I would have seen that.

I want it to be the Australia one. So I'm going to go with that one. And I am excited to tell you both that on June 3rd, 1769, Captain James Cook and the rest of the Endeavor expedition observed the transit of Venus, the stated purpose of their journey. I cannot believe I didn't know this. The goal was to collect the timing of how long it took Venus to cross the sun, and their data, when combined with measurements collected in other parts of the world, would help define how far Venus is from the Earth, which would help astronomers calculate the size of the solar system.

However, this is amazing that this is how we learn all these things. Cook's mission was not entirely astronomical. He also had a secret set of instructions from the British Admiralty to see if there was a giant continent in the South Pacific that could be seized for the King of Britain. Scientists in the 18th century thought there must be some kind of large landmass in the South to balance out the large mass in the Northern Hemisphere. They were wrong about that, but they were right that something was there. Absolutely wild. Cook did not find the large continent expected by those scientists,

but he did land on the coast of Australia and decided, yeah, that's ours, leading to the European colonization of Australia. And while the expedition was able to record the transit of Venus, their measurements were impacted by the black drop effect, which is a sort of fuzziness around Venus when it's observed near the edge of the sun which makes it hard to accurately measure the start and end time of the transit technology since then has made it easier to to see past that effect but basically they

didn't get the data that they wanted to figure out the size of the solar system very effectively but they did get australia wow get in quotes they did they did say this is mine now they did steal australia yeah yeah so so uh i wasn't able to lure either of you in with the tale of murder and indeed there has been no murder uh but there are there were lots of examples of people being sent out on research teams specifically for Venus transits, but nobody got so enthralled with that that they decided to do a murder. But the fact number one that Sari went with is fascinating. The 1639 transit of Venus is considered to be one of the first

scientifically recorded transits, thanks in part to Johannes Kepler. Kepler's work on the elliptical orbits of the planet led to him publishing the Rudolfin tables, which were tables of the locations of the Sun, Earth, and a bunch of planets, and they were basically the information needed

to predict a Venus transit that was going to happen in 1631 and in 1639. However, Kepler was like, I'm almost there. It's 1630, and my tables say that it's going to happen next year. And then he up and died. Oh, no. However, two British astronomers, Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree,

studied his tables and realized that another transit was coming up in 1639. So they missed the first one because he died. But then the 1639 one, they got the information. So they set up to record the transit from separate locations in the United Kingdom. And from Crabtree's location, about 40 minutes of the five to six hour transit would have been visible, though it would have been fully visible in America. So while astronomers would become interested in tracking the transit of Venus to improve navigation, I don't think anyone used the measurements to do any actual navigation, and it definitely didn't lead to lost ships. Poor Kepler. Man, the lives we lead. Well, he got a lot done. It's kind of sad that he was probably really looking forward to this and being like i want to know if my tables are right and then died oh man you know you just gotta you

gotta think to yourself like the moment when you're like am i gonna die before this freaking thing happens i do think that way about video games pretty frequently yeah yeah i feel that way about a lot of book series where i'm like i is the author going to die or am i going to die who's going to die and i'm not going to get a copy of this thing oh well congratulations sam on getting the correct answer and now it's time to head off onto the break and then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back! Everybody get ready for the Fact Off.

Our panelists have all brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks to the fact that I think will make the best TikTok video. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. Humans have been launching spacecrafts toward Venus since 1961. If you include all planned flybys, orbits, landings, and probes, we've had Venus in our sights 50 times. However, they were not all successful attempts. Some of them have been, like a spacecraft in the Soviet Venera family in 1970 that was the first in history to land on another planet

and successfully return data back to Earth. It told us about Venus's temperature and pressure and wind. Which Venera mission, though, was the first to return data after landing on another planet? I think I know this because I researched it for the science. Well, not this particularly. I researched images of Venus for the science couch. But I have not scrolled down to my notes section.

So it is based on my knowledge from a week ago. Actual knowledge, knowledge you have written down. Yeah. But I'll let Sam guess first, and then I'll guess. And I don't know. Wow, okay. I don't know, five. That sounds like a good.

It's a great guess. Yeah. I think it's eight. Well, fortunately for Sari, eight is closer to seven than five is. But only just. I have a horrible memory. This is why I take notes.

It was Venera 7. And boy, Venus missions are tricky ones. But I'm excited to hear. I won't get into it because I don't know what you're about to tell me. So, Sari, would you like to go first and tell us your fact or do you want Sam to do it? Oh, I'll share my fact because it has to do with the theme of the episode thus far, which is Venus from Earth. Yeah, it's from Venus, in fact. Oh, I hope so.

So even though objects in our solar system can seem so far away and relegated to the study of people with fancy telescopes, Venus is actually one of five planets that you can just look up and see, and it can actually get pretty bright. So a lot of the science history about Venus that gets retold, at least in English language information sources, is about missions from space agencies, how European astronomers made estimates about our solar system, or even how the name originated in Roman mythology, all of which we've talked about this episode thus far. But it's not like other humans just didn't notice or think about Venus. In fact, observations of Venus played a key part in early Mesoamerican forms of timekeeping. I'm sure there

are oral traditions and other indigenous ways of knowing that carry on this knowledge, which is a whole other can of science history worms to unpack. But to keep it simple for this podcast, one collection of written documents that have survived colonization and time are the Mayan Codices. other can of science history worms to unpack, but to keep it simple for this podcast, one collection of written documents that have survived colonization and time are the Mayan Codices. For a while, only three were authenticated by scientists and archaeologists and named for the cities where they're being held in Europe, the Paris Codex, the Madrid Codex, and the Dresden Codex. But then there's a fourth codex, a weird sibling that surfaced in a private collection in the 1960s, so also looted, which is not surprising. It's not a lot to look at.

It's just 10 pages of an estimated 20 total on pounded bark paper that have been pretty waterlogged and ripped up. The calculations and illustrations have a rougher style than the other three. And for decades, many anthropologists were wary that it was a forgery. So others dug deeper. And in a collaborative study with scientists from multiple institutions and the National Institute for Anthropology and History in Mexico, what's now known as the Maya Codex of Mexico, or MCM for short, was authenticated just in 2018. So it was authenticated by radiocarbon dating, which as far as I can tell, wasn't effective or possible with the others. I think it might have to do with the coatings that were used with them, like the painted coatings to preserve the texts, but also maybe the materials they were made out of.

And we think that the MCM was created between 1021 and 1154 CE, making it the oldest legible pre-Hispanic manuscript in the American continent. And its Venus tables and mathematical notations were a huge part of this authentication process. The anthropologists argued that maybe the MCM, while a little rough around the edges, was more of a shorthand to help share the scientific and cultural significance of Venus across different Mesoamerican groups and provide notes for what you should see in the night sky across several generations. It's a time capsule of Mayan mathematics, the bars and dots and numerical groupings that vary a little bit between texts, as well as that place and time on Earth relative to Venus. After all, the Maya peoples were and are not a monolith, so it's cool how the MCM deepens

our understanding of their understanding of Venus, and my hope as we continue to untangle the threads of science history, is that we keep exploring how people across the world were all like looking up at the night sky and making calculations. Super cool. I'm looking at it. And of course, I understand nothing. Weirdly, I did a bunch of research on my innumerals for my book.

But so I understand some of that part, oddly enough. But I do want someone to explain it to me. I want some person who knows the most about this thing to get on a podcast with me and just tell me. Because I look at this and I'm not like, that must be about Venus. Is it this thing with all the guys drawn on it? Some guys drawn on it, yeah. What are the guys doing, huh? Those are all different Mayan deities.

So anthropologists think that they linked particular gods, like different cultures linked different gods to different cycles of Venus. And like the gods that they linked

to those cycles often reflected like the cultural understanding of the time. So like in the MCM Codex, everything has to do with like a lot of war and destruction because it was in the time of colonization and like things were very scary there. So I think a lot of the gods that are depicted there are more like destructive oriented, whereas

in like the Dresden Codex, which is much longer. It's like 78 pages or something and like a much more elaborate book with a lot more like explained out calculations as opposed to the shorthand of the MCM. Then like the gods are more varied and are drawn in like a more beautiful style according to anthropologists. They got some nicer guys. Yeah, they got some nicer guys in there

because they were less stressed out about the world, maybe. And they were basically projecting where Venus would be in many future years and other astronomy things. For like a century, I think, out. And so I think the meaning of why they were planning and how they used the book was kind of up in the air. And this is where they think that some codices were used to predict what was happening and map out cultural events. And this one was more, their guess is that it was more like a reference text. So less predicting and more like, okay, we can kind of know what time of year it is based on what it was in the past and just kind of capturing that, based on what it was in the past and just kind of capturing that,

as opposed to we're going to try and predict way far ahead what's going to come and when the world is going to change and in what way. Fascinating. Sam, can you beat the secret fourth codex? So everyone's always talking about Mars. Like, oh, was there life on Mars? Oh, wow, there's water and stuff on Mars. Maybe this dirt has old dead microbes in it. Wow. But if you're looking for some good potential extraterrestrial mysteries, you might want to take a look at a little planet called Venus. So in September 2020, a paper came out. And if you're a fan of SciShow Space on YouTube,

you might remember this, revealing that phosphine gas had been found via spectroscopic images in the atmosphere of Venus. Phosphine is a nasty, poisonous gas that can be made in non-organic ways, like I think it comes out of volcanoes or something. But there seemed to be so much of it on Venus and Venus's atmosphere that the simplest explanation was that it was created via biological process, possibly by microscopic living things in Venus's clouds, which, as I mentioned, I think at some point before, are in large part made of sulfuric acid. So this wasn't sold by the authors of the paper as like proof of alien life on Venus, just that that was like one of the more logical explanations was that why there was so much

phosphine. Then a few months later, another paper came out from another team who ran some simulations based on the original team's data and found that the radio waves that the first team used to discover the phosphine were also absorbed by sulfur dioxide. So the conclusion of that paper was that the whole phosphine thing was a mistake and that there was possibly not even any phosphine on Venus at all. Thus, no life. SciShow Space also talked about that. But what SciShow Space didn't report on was a paper from late 2021 with yet another weird Venus atmosphere mystery. So researchers have been noticing for decades a few weird things about Venus's atmosphere. For one, there's a lot of water vapor and oxygen in it that they couldn't really explain. And also the higher up in Venus's

atmosphere you got, the less acidic the clouds got. According to one researcher, it went from being like battery acid to being like stomach acid. So the leading theory for that for a long time was that, and maybe still is, I don't know, was that minerals from the surface were being swept up in big wind storms

into the clouds and neutralizing the acid. But in 2021, the paper proposed an alternate explanation that also took into account another anomalous, anomalous's atmosphere, the ammonia that Venus probes had been detecting in the atmosphere since the 70s and that researchers also hadn't really been able to explain. So ammonia would neutralize the sulfuric acid in the clouds and that chemical reaction would explain some of the other weird stuff like the oxygen. And the new research also concluded that the amount of dust required for the cloud acid neutralization would be like super astronomical. by cloud-borne microscopic organisms in order to make the nasty acid clouds

that they live in more livable, like how some bacteria that live in digestive tracts create ammonia to deacidify their surroundings. So like the phosphine paper before it, the researchers aren't pointing to this as proof of life, just that ammonia producing life is one of the maybe more plausible explanations for what's going on up there.

And luckily we might not have to wait very long to find out, because MIT is planning, it's Sari's people, maybe Sari planned this mission, I don't know. No. They're planning to launch a privately funded three-part mission called the Venus Life Finder Mission in 2023 that will drop some laser shooting devices and balloons through Venus's clouds to try to figure out what the heck's going on up there if there's ammonia there's phosphine and then they'll also attempt to return with a sample of venus's atmosphere to earth and maybe there'll be little guys in there

and we and we'll finally get to wave to them it doesn't seem a little fishy to me that they were like phosphine must be life and there was like actually no phosphine that's not a thing and they were like well ammonia and oxygen must be life those different people weird acid gradients must be the ammonia at least we know is up there i really do i would i would love for there to be life on venus i don't see any reason why there wouldn't be look it's got energy it's got well i see some reasons why there wouldn't be. Well, yeah. It wouldn't be like fun, exciting life we get to go hang out with. Yeah. I remember the paper being like, so they turn into spores and they get really hardy when they go down and then they come back.

And I was like, oh, all this stuff could work as long as there was like a way for it to get started, which, hey, we don't even know how it happened on Earth. So what do we know? Yeah. But I like it. And I especially like this news about this sample return mission and whatever they're doing with lasers. I'm super into that too. They're shooting some lasers down there.

It's going to bounce off some stuff and they'll be like, there, that's that. And that's that. That's how they're going to bully the little microbes. They're going to shoot lasers at them and be like, ha ha, you got zapped. No, all of Venus. They're just going to be shooting. They're going to the little microbes they're gonna shoot laser out and be like ha ha you got no all of venus they're just gonna be shooting they're gonna be like we're from earth where things don't suck laser laser gosh well i have to choose a winner for the episode i'll say this sam you made it hard for me to make a TikTok about this because I'm always so scared to expose the children to ideas that they're going to misinterpret.

Yeah, I think that's fine. I'll take the L just so that people aren't like, wow, Hank said there's life up there. Because there are no ones saying there's life up there. They're just saying they can't eliminate that possibility yet. And Sari, I really liked your introduction about how we, of course, always imagine astronomy through a very one perspective lens. So I'm going to award you the win, but can you overcome Sam's previous advantage? And I don't know the answer to that question. So in order for me to settle it once and for all, I'm going to ask you another question. And that question is this one. What is the hottest temperature on Venus?

Oh, no. In Fahrenheit, just to mess with you. Well, that's good for me. 960 Fahrenheit. 960. We have one vote in for 960 Fahrenheit. 960. We have one vote in for 960 Fahrenheit. Will Sam Schultz counter with a number that is more correct than 960 degrees Fahrenheit? 1,000 Fahrenheit.

Oh, my God. There is the winner of the episode. The answer is 880 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, baby. You could have got above or below. Yeah, baby. You could have got above or below. That's 471 Celsius for our non-American slash wherever else Fahrenheit is used friends.

And that means that it's time to ask the science couch. We've got some listener questions for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. This question comes from at Denko Nova, who asks, when was the first time the orange surface was observed under the clouds? Who was the first to do it? When did people start thinking maybe the white stuff is atmosphere and not ground? That's a great point. I love looking a little bit deeper back and saying like, there's all this stuff that we know now. But of course, we didn't initially know that we were looking at that and when you're looking at it you think that's probably what the planet looks like it's fuzzy fuzzy white color maybe a little yellow and then you get closer and

you're like oh i guess the main thing when you realize its atmosphere is when it changes frequently but i don't know to what extent we can tell that. I couldn't find a solid answer to when we figured out it was atmosphere and not ground. There was a lot of misconceptions about planets, like the whole Martian canals and whatnot, as we were looking up at the sky and being like, what are those weird shadows? And I think somewhere between that and actually sending things into space, we were like, maybe other planets have atmospheres and like are cloudy in addition to the ground so i can pinpoint a date where someone was like ah atmosphere but we do know when we first observed the ground yes and this is why i knew

things about the venera mission because it was the former Soviet Union landers were the first to observe the surface of Venus and the first to observe the surface of any planet in the solar system. They beat out the U.S. observing Mars by about nine months. The first photo ever taken from the surface of another planet, which was Venus, was Venera 9 on October 22nd, 1975. And a lot of the Venera missions, they sent up in twos. So, and this is to my best knowledge, they would send up probes. So, one landed and then the next landed about three days later. So, the second could act as like a signal booster for the first one to help send

data back because the temperature and surface pressure were so intense that Venus melted and crushed the landers within like a couple hours. So you had this very short window of sending atmospheric and service data. And so in order to like really make sure it got back to Earth, they sort of like tethered the communication systems of two landers one after another. But I think still the second lander was able to send things back. So I don't know how much it helped. But so Venera 9 was the first close-up photograph of the planet's surface. But as far as I can tell, it was a black and white photo, presumably because the transmission of digital images at that point, they were just taking in brightness and using brightness to generate the image out of black and white, where you can go from brightest white to darkest black.

And so you get a texture of the surface of Venus and the rockiness, but not necessarily the color. Then in December 1978, Venera 11 and 12 landed on Venus. They sent back data on the atmosphere, but their lens caps didn't pop off, basically. So they tried to take pictures, didn't work. The instruments didn't work. A poopy time for everyone. But then in March 1982, that's where the flashy images came. There were color panoramas combining red filter, green filter, and blue filter images. So basically, instead of just taking brightness, there were three separate images taken. Well, four if you count just brightness, but with a red filter, with a green filter, with a blue filter. And the way that they do that is they like take brightness data with the filter on and

that gives them like a rgb hex code basically of like how much red is in the picture how much green is in the picture how much blue and they combine them all and that gave like the weird orangey otherworldly color that we know of so march 1982 i guess is when we when we observed the orange surface. And then since then, it's just been like bits and pieces. NASA's Magellan mission was in 1989. It produced the first high-resolution global map of Venus, but every image from Magellan is false colored, so it's also just inputting brightness. In 2016, Japan and JAXA sent out a mission to gather infrared images after orbiting around Venus. And now the Parker Solar Probe, which is technically a mission to image the sun, but it's doing flybys of Venus along its way to adjust its orbit, as of February

9th, 2022, so just a couple weeks ago, sent back its first visible light images of Venus, which I thought was cool. So the Wide Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR, they were just like, what happens if we point this towards Venus? And instead of using it to observe solar storms, which is what it was designed to do, what if we just Like solar storms, which is what it was designed to do. Like what if we just see what it can take in off of the light off of Venus? And it revealed a faint glow from the surface that shows like distinctive regions that match up with the topographical maps we've created. But also kind of like a luminescent ring of the atmosphere and like oxygen in the atmosphere, which is pretty cool. of the atmosphere and like oxygen in the atmosphere,

which is pretty cool. That is so recent of just like, we just took some fresh off the presses pictures of Venus. Yeah, these are wild pictures because it is clear. One thing that is clear to me from looking at these is that this is not a probe that was designed to take pictures of Venus. And also just like how, we kind of like did venus a bunch and we're like actually that's too that's too tough and maybe not that interesting but it would be so like the

universe to be like now no life on mars but turns out venus all about those little microbes bring on bring back some of that stuff from the surface and hopefully you don't really find out that they can eat your flesh or something. That was the word about the hell of it too. Bring your vacuum up there but then come back and let them out in some kind of Tupperware

or something so that they don't get to you. Yeah, keep them in Tupperware. You have to have that patented burp. Yeah. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thank you to at DeejDart, at Ooblil,

and everybody else who asked us a question for this episode. That's what it says, right? I guess so. Those are just great sounds that came out of your mouth. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents. There, you can become a patron. You get access to things like our newsletter and our bonus episodes,

which are very fun and totally not logical. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful, and it lets us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes, along with Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistants are Deboki Chakravarti and Emmett Douster. Our sound design is by Our executive producers are And we couldn't make any of this, of course, without our patrons on Patreon.

Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Roman mythology had a lot of different deities. For instance, they were so freaking proud of their sewer system that they had a goddess of the great drain named Cloacena, who we think was named after the Latin word for sewer, cloaca, or purify, cloare. If the Romans' butts were too powerful and their poops too gnarly, they sought her help to unclog the pipes.

But for some long-forgotten reason, some Romans merged this goddess with Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, creating a shrine of Venus Cloacena, where you presumably worshipped when you wanted a hot wife and a regular poop. So I guess we can think of our sister planet as Venus for short, or Weenus, but now in my heart of hearts, she will be Venus Cloacena, the beautiful sewer of the solar system. This is the thing. We never appreciate the people who actually add value.

It's only the flashy ones with all the drama yeah we're so focused on Hera and Hercules and Athena is stabbing each other

a bunch Cloacene is out here making shit work yeah people weren't going to war every day they were sitting

on the dang toilet hoping that something was gonna get squeezed out