Stuff You Should Know - How Venus Works

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Venus is so hot lead would melt on the planet’s surface. It spins backwards. Its year is shorter than its day. Venus is amazingly awesome.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there and Jerry is lurking in the background like a total creep which is super appropriate for Jerry

and this is Stuff You Should Know. Have you been singing the song all day? Venus as a Boy? How can you not sing that song? I don't know. I mean I guess you could be singing that shocking blue song, Venus, that banana rama covered. Oh no, that's the one that I was talking about. Oh, I was talking about the Bjork song Venus as a Boy. Oh, no, no, no, sorry. That was thinking of. That's a good one. I'm Neil Venus. Actually, funny enough, like honestly, that had not popped into my head and now I won't be able to get it out. So thanks a lot. I thought of you yesterday. I was someone some, I don't even know who it was. It was just one of those dumb Facebook posts that comes into your feed said, all it said was, now the final countdown by Europe is in your

head. That's all it did. It was like, is that Josh? Wow, that's amazing. That's the catchiest song of all time. It was pretty funny. That's great. So Chuck, we're doing Venus and I was like skimming the House of Worksite looking for articles and I started to see, I saw this one article about how Venus is starting to get some love again from the space agencies and how little we actually know about it. So I was like, this, you know, we've never done one on Venus. We don't usually do planets yet. Maybe we should eventually do all the planets over time. But this is a pretty good place to start because the more I dug into Venus, the more I was like, this is one of the most interesting planets of all time actually. Yeah, like, you know, it's described in this article

that you put together as a hellscape and when you start reading it to it, it's like, wow, you will melt and boil if you get near it or be destroyed. You won't even get near it because this whole ferric acid in the clouds will destroy you. Yeah, and your teeth. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, not a hospitable place, but possibly once was. Yeah, which makes the whole thing even more compelling. It wasn't always like this, you know, it's like the mom and what's eating Gilbert grape when she sees as a Juliette Lewis and says, I wasn't always like this. And Juliette Lewis says, I wasn't always like this. It's just like that. It is basically, except on a planetary scale. Yeah, and I think the cool thing about Venus too, which we can put a pin in this, but

we're starting to gain more interest in Venus now because it could offer a peek into our own bleak future as a planet. Yes, just like you said, put a pin in that. Yeah. And smoke it in your head. Right. So it's weird that Venus is this hellscape now that we understand it because it's a very ancient planet as far as human consciousness of it goes because it is so bright. It's actually the third brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon, then comes Venus. So like humans have been able to see it long before we had anything like telescopes or anything like that. And in fact, as far back as I think 1660 BCE or the 1600s BCE, the Babylonians were tracking it and they call the Ishtar after the goddess of love and war.

After the movie. And then, yeah, then they would say it, Ishtar black. And then some would go, hey, it's not as bad as everyone says. That's right. And then that person would get shouted down. And then the whole cycle would start over again. Yeah, it went by quite a few different names. It was Ishtar. Before the Hellenistic Greeks came along, they thought it was actually two different stars. So it was known as both Vesper, the evening star and Lucifer or Phosphorus, the morning star. And then eventually, Pythagoras said, it's just one star, everyone. And can we settle on a name? And the Hellenistic Greeks said, how about Aphrodite? And then, of course, the Romans came along said, no, we call it Venus.

That's right. And that's where we've settled, because the western world is modeled on the Roman world, I guess. But Venus, the idea that it is this feminine planet that it has to do with love and beauty, it really is in stark contrast to how we understand it today, since we did start really exploring it in the 1960s. But even still, if you look at some of the details of Venus that have been named by people, apparently, almost all of the features on Venus are named after women. Like, there's a crater named after Sacagaway. There's a canyon named after Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. So it's all about feminine beauty. But it's also like this crazy hellscape that'll make your teeth fall out and burn you alive. So it's a real paradox in terms,

do you know what I mean? Totally. It is the second planet from the sun, which makes Venus our little neighbor, and which also means that if Venus is getting sunlight, it's getting that light a couple of minutes before we do. I love that. It is terrestrial, so it's made of rocks and solid things as opposed to being like a gas planet like Jupiter and Saturn. And there's also a boundary between the surface of the planet and the atmosphere. So, you know, it is like Earth in some ways, but also not like Earth in a whole lot of ways. Well, I mean, it is often called Earth's twin, and then sometimes Earth's toxic twin. I think that's an Aerosmith reference. But because it is closer to the sun than we are, it's one planet in, its orbit actually is between

us and the sun. It falls within our orbit around the sun, which means that to us here on Earth, Venus seems to have phases like the moon does, which is pretty cool. Yeah, I think Galilee figured that out in 1610. Galileo, yeah. Oh, you know on a first name basis? Yeah, he and I go way back. I could bail them out of jail once. You just call them galley? Yeah, the gal or Gigi. Gigi. So, yeah, when Venus is on the opposite side of the sun, it's in full phase, and then it looks like it's in the new phase when it's between the Earth and the sun. Yeah, and every once in a while, our alignment with Venus and the sun is like a perfect line. And it just happened in 2012, and I don't think I bothered to look because I don't remember looking,

but the next time it's going to happen is 2117. And unless aging researchers really have some sort of breakthrough, I'm not going to be around to see that. You didn't look, and you call yourself a friend of galley, of Gigi. Yeah, I know. He would be so disappointed. He'd be so disappointed in me. Come on, Josh, just to look into the sky. Right. So Venus is, they call it the Earth's twin for the similarities, and not the differences, obviously, even though, like you said, it's an evil twin. It's about the same size. It has about 80% of our mass, but is almost a perfect sphere because it is a slow roller. The Earth spins, obviously, everyone knows, very quickly, revolving once every day, almost every 24 hours exactly, 23 hours and 56 minutes, which means, of course,

that that centrifugal motion is going to bulge the equator. So we're technically an ellipsoid in shape, but Venus spins very, very slowly once every 243 days, Earth days, that is, it spins on its axis. It's the slowest spinner in our solar system and a really kind of perfect little sphere because of that. Yeah, it doesn't produce that bulge because it's so slow. The unsightly bulge. And also because of that same slow spin, it has an iron core and molten mantle, a lot like Earth does. And through that rocky core, that metallic core, Earth's magnetic field is produced, but it's also produced because it spins so fast. Well, even though it has the same kind of core and mantle that the Earth does, Venus spins so slowly, it can't produce

a magnetic field, at least one that's not very strong. I think Venus's magnetic field is 1510 thousandths of a percent the strength of Earth's magnetic field. They got nothing. Nothing. Like you try to use a magnet up there, it's just going to melt in your hand, you dummy. Don't even try it. And you're dead anyway. Yeah, exactly. There are some pretty cool theories about some interesting aspects of Venus. One is, and this isn't a theory, this is a fact, Venus has no moon, but one of the theories is that Earth's moon used to orbit Venus, but our gravity was so strong, we just came in and said, that's ours now, we'll be taking that moon. I know, imagine seeing that moon approach out of nowhere too, it'd be like melancholia, you know?

Oh my god, that movie. I love that movie, did you see it recently? Not too recently, I mean, I loved it too. I'm glad you didn't say I enjoyed it, because that's a movie not to be enjoyed. Right, exactly. I read this article once, it was um, I think it was titled like Lars von Trier is campy, and they were basically like everybody's taking Lars von Trier incorrectly, like this is all, he's like a huge jokester, like this is all in jest. And once since I read that, I was like, I really started to appreciate his stuff a lot differently. Yeah, I mean, those are, a lot of his films are tough to get through. Yeah, tad. Dancing in the dark, what a party that is.

Once you realize that it's like a joke, or at least as far as Lars von Trier is concerned, it's a joke, like it definitely, it's just easier to take and watch, and it's actually kind of funny in some spots. But is that true, or were they just sort of theorizing? I don't know that they had him quoted as saying like, yeah, you got me, but they made such a strong case that it's tough to not see it that way. I'll see if I can dig it up and send it to you. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Okay. All right, so no moon, Earth perhaps took the moon. Another really interesting thing that has sprung a few different theories is that the backwards spin of Venus relative to Earth. And this is interesting in that

some scientists say, yeah, it's backwards, because it used to spin relative to us the same, then it slowed down and stopped and started spinning the other way. And we can tell this because it's slowing down again. They measured it 16 years apart. And at the end of that run, it spun 6.5 minutes slower, which is a lot considering the Earth's rotation slows only by about 1.8 milliseconds every 100 years. Yeah. So that's the one theory. Others said it's not and never did quote unquote, spin backwards. It just got knocked 180 degrees on its axis, so it looks backwards. Yeah, like the planet got flipped upside down somehow. And so to us, it looks like it's spinning backwards, but it's spinning the same way it always has.

And they're like, well, how would the planet get knocked upside down? The obvious idea is a planetoid or meteor or something like that, striking it in just the right spot, which is the right force, that it flipped the planet upside down. Another one is that Venus's atmosphere is so thick. How thick is it? It's so thick. You took my line. It's possible the sun can create gravitational tides, like tides in this atmosphere, and that these tides started sloshing back and forth at some point and got so forceful and strong that they eventually flipped the planet over. I think this is a really good start. How do you feel? I think it's pretty great, actually. And I have one more fact I want to give out, Chuck, about the day relative to the year.

So you know how the day of Venus is 243 Earth days. Yeah, this one's a little bit of a head twister. Well, it turns out that Venus orbits the sun in 225 Earth days, which means that the Venusian day is longer than the Venusian year, which is a pretty amazing fact in and of itself. It's pretty yucky. But because Venus spins backward relative to the direction it orbits the sun, sunrise to like a day-night cycle from sunrise to sunrise is actually only 117 Earth days, because the sun kind of catches up with Venus in its spin. So it's not a 243 day stretch between sunrises, it's actually 117. So there's three big numbers you need to remember for Venus. Day-night cycles 117 days, the year is 225 days, but the day is 243 days.

All relative to us, of course. Well, yeah, I mean, what else counts? Nothing. So a minute ago when I said, I think we're off to a good start, I was kind of lying, something felt missing. But now we're really off to a good start. I think so, too. So we'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the surface of this weird hellscape right after this. Or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there

for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke,

but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, surface of Venus, a lot of clues, because we're still trying to figure out Venus. And like you said, it's getting more interesting to us more recently, which is kind of cool. But there are clues kind of everywhere. The surface of Venus is one clue that maybe something pretty big did happen, and it's sort of recent past, because Venus is about the same age as Earth is, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.8 billion years old. And they look at impact craters to sort of gauge how old the planet might be, like how many things have hit it over time, because they know about how often that might happen. And you know, these are good rough estimates. But when you look at Venus, the crust of Venus

basically looks like it's only a few hundred million years old. So like maybe up to 800 million, maybe as little as 180 million years old. So that is a big clue that like, yeah, something happened to kind of remake the surface of Venus at some point, which is really, really interesting. Yeah. I mean, Earth's crust is much younger than the planet itself, but Earth has plate tectonics, which you know, basically is crust recycling. Venus doesn't have that. So it is significant that the crust is that much younger than the rest of the planet. And it's also made up mostly of basalt, which I think in the history of stuff you should know, the 13-year history, it's the first time I said it correctly right off the bat.

Instead of what? What did we used to say? Basalt or basalt? Basalt. I love a little sprinkle of basalt. It's chocolate ice cream. Yeah. It's old bay mixed with salt. Oh man. So, which is volcanic rock, which makes sense because Venus has the most volcanoes of any planet in the solar system, something like 1600. Yeah, that's alarming. I think some of them, they might even still be active right now. So, but it's weird that the crust would be that old, because it's like why would have, you know, all the volcanoes been erupting at around the same time in such measure that it would have remade the entire crust of the planet. It's a head scratcher, as you say. It is. The surface of Venus has some huge mountain ranges. Some as high as Everest.

They have a couple of gigantic highlands the size of Australia and South America. You mentioned all those volcanoes, which is just remarkable, like the most volcanic planet in our solar system for sure, right? Yeah, by far. I mean, I think Earth only has like 1597. They have about the same gravity as we do here on Earth. So, you'd feel about the same weight, but there's a little caveat there because of their dense atmosphere, which we're going to talk about a little bit more in a minute here. There's tons of surface pressure. So, if you were, there's no way you would be alive on Venus, but if you happen to be, let's just say, it's about 90 times the pressure that we have here on Earth. So, it would be like you're

about a full kilometer down underwater into the ocean. Yeah, which is kind of crushing. I was like, oh, you'd be crushed like a tin can. And actually, that's not entirely true. I think the diving record is a little deeper than one kilometer. Right. So, a human can withstand it, but it's not the kind of thing you want to do. And when you combine it with all the other issues that you've got going on now that you're standing on Venus somehow, that pressure would probably actually be the least of your worries. The biggest worry would be the heat. Yeah, you would have a lot of trouble with the heat because here's another fun fact for you. Mercury is the planet that's closest to the Sun. It's 23 million miles closer to the Sun than Venus is, but Venus is the hottest planet

in our solar system. Chew on that for a second. Yeah, and that'll all be clear here in a second. We're kind of dancing around it, but it's going to be fun, so just wait. But in the 1960s, and we'll also talk about the various sort of spacecraft that the USSR and NASA has kind of sent up to explore, but the Mariner 2 recorded, did a little flyby and recorded surface temperatures, temperatures between 300 and 400 degrees. And it turns out that may be about half. I think recently they calculated it's probably more like 880 degrees Fahrenheit, which basically will melt almost anything. Definitely aluminum, zinc, and lead for sure. Yeah. So, it's super hot, and there's a tremendous amount of pressure at surface level. And I read this article from,

I think it might have been space.com or NASA, I'm not sure, where a UC Boulder astronomer, planetary scientist named Kevin McKedrick, said, you can feel what it's like on Venus here on Earth. Heat a hot plate until it glows red, place your palm on its surface, and then run over that hand with the truck. I didn't get that quote. He was saying it's very hot, and there's a tremendous amount of pressure. That hot plate is an 880 degree, so is it? No, but I mean, really, I think once you reach a certain temperature and you're placing your hand on it, I think red hot is that line where it's like after that, it doesn't really matter. He was trying to be, you know, he's trying to appeal to the common person.

I think so. They take an extra class or two now in planetary science where they're like, yeah. Normies? You know. All right, so I guess we've been dancing around, like, why is it so hot if it's not as close to the sun as Mercury? How can it be that much hotter than Mercury? And it is because Venus is an environmental nightmare, basically, and which is one reason why we're a little more interested now, because it gives us a peek, like I said, to what could happen to us in a very long time, but it is a CO2 nightmare on Venus. Yes, so Venus is locked into what's called a runaway greenhouse effect, and I actually talked about it in The End of the World with Josh Clark in the natural existential

risks episode, but the kind of the broad strokes of it is that the greenhouse effect, you want to have some degree of the greenhouse effect where you have visible light coming in from the sun, warming the planet, and then the planet re-releases some of that heat back through the atmosphere as infrared heat, and not all of it gets re-emitted. Some of it is captured by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and this is actually, like I was saying, you want to have this. This is a beneficial thing because it prevents wild temperature swings between day and night. There's like a nice average temperature that you're going to keep throughout the day and throughout the night because that atmosphere is acting like a blanket, preventing all of the heat from re-escaping. So you do want

some greenhouse gas, but what Venus is teaching us is that there's a point where you can reach this this point of no return where your greenhouse gas or greenhouse effect just goes haywire and becomes and gets locked into a positive feedback loop that is positive only in the most academic sense of that term. In no way is it a good thing at least as far as life or habitability goes. Yeah, and Venus hit this tipping point a few hundred million years ago. The atmosphere got really hot. They basically think the oceans literally boiled off, because there used to be oceans and rivers and it used to be a lot more earth-like, but these oceans boiled off. It turned the atmosphere into water vapor, which just made the problem a lot worse because that's another greenhouse

gas, and it just sort of accelerated this thing. And then eventually that water vapor was broken apart by radiation from the sun, by this ultraviolet radiation. And all this hydrogen escaped into space left behind oxygen, combining with that carbon. And what you've got is, oh, what, 96% carbon dioxide and no water vapor in the atmosphere? No. And so earth has, I think, 0.04% carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and we still are able to maintain like a healthy greenhouse gas effect. Yeah. So the fact that it's a runaway greenhouse effect that seems to have made Venus into this hellscape that it is, that's what kind of makes it a cautionary tale, or at least something that's worth investigating much more deeply to find out like, how did it reach this point? Like,

where was that tipping point? Because here on earth, we're contributing atmospheric CO2 more and more frequently thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. So it's like, okay, did it hit that point when it reached like an atmosphere of 80% carbon dioxide or 0.008? What's the difference? And it really matters to us here on earth. Because at some point, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 or other greenhouse gases becomes enough that visible light can come in, infrared heat won't go back out, and you've got that runaway effect that just locks it in, and you're in big trouble. So we need to find that out. And it's a good thing that people are starting to talk about exploring Venus now again for the first time in a while. Let me ask you a

question. The end of the world with Josh Clark, is that available on Apple Podcast or wherever you find your podcast? You know, Chuck, as far as I know, wherever you find podcasts, you can find the end of the world with Josh Clark, a 10-part series. They don't pull it like Netflix after they're done with you? I don't think so. I haven't checked on it in a little while. I'd be very dismayed. No, it's an excellent series. And if this kind of thing turns you on, then you can listen to that. And then quite a few other ways that we might all become extinct. Or if me just speaking for 45 minutes in a monotone turns you on, then you're going to like it as well. That's right. So that's why it's hot on Venus. That's why you would just melt if you managed to reach the surface

of Venus. But you wouldn't even manage to reach the surface of Venus because of that atmosphere that we're talking about. You talked about our teeth. Along with nitrogen, the biggest component of the atmosphere of Venus is sulfuric acid, which we call battery acid. And yeah, your teeth would be the least of your problems because your skin would burn, your lungs would explode. And just these massive clouds blanket Venus full of these lightning storms in sulfuric acid. And it's literally like something out of a sci-fi movie. Right. And if up to this point you're like, meh, prepare for this. The Venus member spins on its axis once every 243 days. It's a Venusian day. But the upper atmosphere is so

volatile. Yes. The clouds that make up the upper atmosphere spin around the planet once every four days. They're moving that fast, faster than any tornado here on Earth I saw. But then down below, toward the surface, the winds are just like a few miles an hour. So that difference in wind speed creates huge vortices. And apparently there's a vortex that has not fallen apart that stayed raging for a very long time now at the South Pole of Venus. And they don't foresee any time when it's going to stop. So there's huge lightning storms, clouds of sulfuric acid that form vortices in this atmosphere that at surface level is the same surface pressure or the same pressure that you would find one kilometer down in Earth's

oceans. Yeah. And then consider that for several billion years, Venus was a lot like us. Like I said, it was habitable. It was fairly temperate, had oceans and rivers and streams and was kind of balmy. And it was this greenhouse, the runaway greenhouse gas effect that kind of made it into this hellscape. And like I said, it's a big reason we're going, hmm, maybe we should look into Mars, but also look into Venus. Yeah. So I didn't know this, but there was another Space.com article that did a good job of kind of chronicling some of the history of exploring Venus. You know, growing up as a Cold War school kid, they didn't tell us like, oh, by the way, the Soviets just had a great breakthrough on Venus the other day. Let us tell you all about it.

I don't remember hearing any of this stuff to you. No, but I think that's a great little dramatic teaser. Oh, okay. So let's take a little message break and we'll tell you what the Ruskies were doing in the 1960s right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Hard podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born,

it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, I can't take it any longer. My teeth are falling out from the suspense. Yeah, so I didn't learn about this in school either. But in the 1960s to the 80s, the USSR, they were into Venus. They were checking it out with pretty decent regularity through their Venera and Vega programs. And some of these milestones that they hit are some of the first milestones in just space exploration period, not only for Venus. In October of 67, Venera 4 was the first probe to ever beam data back from another planet, from the atmosphere of another planet. And that's when they said, whoa, super hot.

Very thick. It was a great Russian. Was that good? No. Yeah. They, I think the Venera 4 technically did make a hard landing. The parachutes, of course, melted. And this thing actually transmitted data for about 20 minutes with photographs before it melted into nothing. And then I think a few years after that, Venera 7 had the first soft landing on any planet other than Earth, another first in visiting our solar system, like before we did stuff like that. Yeah. Well, I did not realize it, but apparently Venus is the first planet humanity's ever visited, which is pretty cool. I mean, not personally, but you know,

we sent some machines up there as our emissaries, you know? Right. In 1982, Venera 13 recorded the first ever audio on the surface of another planet, which is pretty cool. Vega 1 and 2 missions in the mid-80s deployed balloons into the atmosphere to make measurements. So a lot of what we know about Venus came from these early Soviet explorations. But it's not like the, you know, the United States just completely ignored Venus. We did have some interest in it. I think we had the first ever flyby of Venus with our Mariner 2 probe back in 1962, I believe. Yeah. That was the one I mentioned earlier that recorded what seems like a half accurate temperature of Venus. But there was also the Mariner 5 and the Mariner 10 in 67 and 74.

And then we started to get a little more intense with it. In 78, we launched an orbiter and a multi-probe, the Pioneer Venus orbiter and the PV multi-probe. And I think the multi-probe sent four different things, four entry craft into the atmosphere in December. And then the orbiter, you know, did its thing. It orbited, kind of studied things from a safer distance until 1992. Yeah. So we're getting some stuff on Venus, but then it just kind of went away. We stopped researching it actually after Magellan, which was launched in 1989 from the space shuttle, which by the way, I was reading like the official accident report on the Columbia crash. And it is just, it's jarring, but it's amazing what this just, you know, scientific

explanation of it, really dry technical stuff, still can like really jog your imagination and kind of put you like in the catastrophe, even though they don't seem to be trying to. It just, for some reason, it really kind of gets you in the right way. Is all that stuff just online? Yeah. Yeah. It's like just, you know, 400 page document about what exactly went wrong, exactly when down to, you know, I think maybe the, the desise second, if not the millisecond. Geez. Yeah. They really, they really dug into it. I still never saw that documentary. It's still out there. It's gonna just, it's stirring. It's gonna just knock you on your butt. Have you seen 12 years of slave yet? No. No. I know. You're going to ask you that like once a

year. You have homework this weekend. Oh, I know. But anyway, as I was saying, Magellan was launched from the space shuttle in 1989 and it was kind of hanging out monitoring Venus until 94. And then after that, and even kind of a little bit before that, just the focus on Venus kind of started to die in no small part because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, right? Yeah. I mean, they were, they were way more into it than we were. And then, you know, it collapsed. And so a lot of that stuff stopped. NASA said, you know what, you get a lot more out of your exploration dollar by going to Mars because it's, it's way more hospitable than Venus is. And so we can use these robots and now, you know, with Mars landers and it's just amazing like the stuff that we're

bringing back from Mars. Yeah, USA. Yeah. But as a result, Venus was sort of like cast aside because it's just, it's tough. I think that Venera 13 and 82 has the record for the longest man-made object ever on Venus. And that was two hours before it melted. Yeah. That's it. And that's a lot of dough to sink into something that, you know, like, and, you know, that was when 82, we could, I'm sure we could get something up there for, for more hours than that now, but I'm not sure how much longer. No, but we need to figure it out. And the only way to figure it out is to start going back there. Right. And so, so we are, I think this, this month, June 2021, NASA said, hey, everybody get this, we've got two visits planned, two missions planned for Venus by 2030.

There's the Veritas mission, which has a bunch of different scientific instruments named in its name. It's a big acronym. There's also Da Vinci plus, which sounds like a new streaming service for maybe PBS. And they're both going to be going by 2030, but it's not just the United States who has its eyes trained on, or sights trained on, on Venus. Europe, the ESA has a Venus program in the works. India does as well. Russia does as well. And there's a private company called Rocket Lab that's going to be sending something up there by 2023 actually. Venus is literally hot right now. It is. I have seen it in the news. And I think, did you mention how the old House of Works website that we worked for had a really recent article on, on this, right? Like why we were poking around?

That's what initially caught my attention about it. Okay. Did you see the thing though? Also, there was a big, a big to do. I think in June of 2020, or at least sometime in 2020, there was a bunch of press on Venus because some British researchers said, hey, we were examining the, the Venusian atmosphere with a radio telescope. And we found a biosignature, phosphine. And everybody said, what are you talking about? And they said, no, really, check it out. So they wrote this paper. And it does make kind of sense to an extent that, that you might find life at some port, some like point in the Venetian atmosphere, because parts of it are, you know, the same temperature and air pressure as you'd find on earth. But it also

just makes zero sense because it's just so inhospitable too, you know? Yeah. I mean, it would have to have really evolved to be able to survive. And again, maybe possible. But then some other scientists came along because they, you know, they smelled something rotten. And they said, let me see those papers. And they, they looked them over and they said, you know what, we're not going to say this is, we're not going to falsify this and say this is definitely wrong. But maybe you might have gotten this confused with sulfur dioxide instead of phosphine because they, these chemicals both absorb radio waves at a similar frequency. And everyone sort of has made this mistake at some point, guys. So rookie mistake. You shouldn't feel too bad. But it's

probably sulfur dioxide. It makes a lot more sense. But like, like I said, they didn't definitely shoot it down. And I think it just sort of piqued everyone's interest to kind of get going again. And with these, you know, with these radio telescopes, we can finally, you know, I think for a long time we couldn't even see anything at all because of the telescopes that we had, right? Yeah, it's just blanketed by the super thick atmosphere that light can't even penetrate any longer. So now that we have radio telescopes, we can see a lot more clearly into it. But yeah, we're just on the very beginning cusp of starting to study it. And it is possible that there is that, that was a biosignature and the Brits didn't get it wrong because it would

have to be a low oxygen, like an anaerobic type of life. And that's exactly the kind of organism that produces phosphine. So it's not like it's been settled like you were saying, but the, it's just tantalizing, you know, just in addition to learning more about Venus and maybe the lessons it can teach us about what we need to do or not do here on earth, the idea that maybe there's some weird rando life swirling around at hundreds of miles an hour and the Venusian atmosphere just, it's like, yeah, let's, let's go check Venus out now. Yeah, I feel like I never hear about space programs from many other countries except for like China, the US and, and the old Soviet Union. Yeah, I never hear about the Brits exploring space. Well, they're with the ESA, I

believe. So they just all got together? I think so. And then, yeah, India has its own program now too that's pretty ambitious as well. So what about Japan? Do they have a space program? Yeah, they have a space program. I don't remember what it's called, but they definitely do. There's a lot more collaboration than there used to be during the Cold War from what I understand. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because we're trying to solve global problems here and, you know, Venus might hold the key to some of those. Yeah, it's, it's our Venus. It's our fire. What's our desire? That's right. You got to go listen to Venus as a boy too. You're gonna love it. There's also Venus and Fur, Velvet Underground. And then Venus, I can't come up with a good joke, so we'll just forget about it.

I really beat it out. Bob Newhart style. Yeah, if Bob Newhart would have finished the joke, that's why I'll never fill his shoes. Right. If you want to know more about Venus, well, then just look skyward and see what you think and maybe do a little research too while you're at it. And since I said look skyward, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Pog's military follow-up because we heard from quite a few military members already and it was, in our real time, it was just released earlier today from service people who were quite fond of the little Pog currency that they had over there. Long time listener guys, love the show. Just listened to the episode and thought I'd write in. I was in the Air Force for just shy of a decade when you mentioned the

Army and Air Force exchange services Pogs and it brought me back. Instead of using coins, they would give you these Pogs as change. So if you bought something for, oh, 95 cents, the cashier would give you a five-cent Pog. Subsequently, if you bought something for 93 cents, they would still give you a five-cent Pog because there were no one-cent Pogs. So they rounded down, I guess. It's gonna be cheap. So you would frequently lose money on those transactions. I remember being frustrated when I first experienced this. If I remember correctly, there being only five-ten and 25-cent Pogs. That's all I saw. Yeah, five-tens and 20s. I remember having stacks and stacks of these Pogs while overseas and I rendered them completely worthless.

Looking back, I'm sure I could have bought a dollar worth of Pogs and exchanged them for real US currency, but the thought never crossed my mind. I think they owe me some money. I wish I would have remembered my Pog days. I was also way into Pogs in the 90s because that would have been a good way to pass the time while over there. Thanks for always being there on my hour commute to work. I look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays every week. P.S. My family was moving recently and I was going through an old box of my things and found a loan Pog with Maggie Simpson on it. Nice. Not sure why I decided to keep that one after all these years, but I did and that is from Jeff. That's an awesome email. Jeff, thanks a lot for that one. Agreed.

If you want to get in touch with us like Jeff did and tell us about the Pog you found or what your tour of duty was like or anything like that, you can get in touch with us via email at stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, k-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.