Not Safe For Humans
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a furious deathworld of extremely deathy death!
So, I’ve explained that this sketch is associated with extreme hellishness, so what do you think it is? It’s the planet Venus. I realized Venus was out last night, and also it’s been years since I actually sketched it, so I got out my telescope and pencils and got to work. This planet is very, very hard to draw, and my sketches have never done it justice, but this is probably the best so far. The “spikes” coming out of Venus are actually beautiful golden light, but they’re very difficult to draw properly. Unlike what Venus would be like if you were ever unfortunate enough to live there, viewed from afar, it’s extremely beautiful. In fact, so beautiful is it, that if aliens spied it in their telescopes, they would probably set a course for it. And when they got there they would be extremely disappointed. But who knows, maybe because of differing alien biologies they’d be happy in a place where it rain sulfuric acid?
When I first got my telescope, I was under the impression that only the moon had phases. But I soon learned that Venus has phases aswell, and it can be quite enjoyable to look at how much it changes, sometimes you see only a thin sliver of a planet. Anything that is closer to the sun from your perspective has phases, so if you lived beyond the orbit of Neptune, every planet in the solar system would have phases from your point of view.
Venus has captured my imagination for most of my life. It’s like, this is the best I can describe it. It’s like the episode of Father Ted on the plane, where Father Dougal is next to a “DO NOT PRESS!” button. He fights the urge to press the “DO NOT PRESS!” button. He fights with all his might! But alas, he gives in, and the plane is put in terrible peril. To me Venus is a giant “DO NOT PRESS!” button. It rains sulfuric acid. “DO NOT PRESS!” Surface temperatures are hot enough to melt lead. “DO NOT PRESS!” The atmospheric pressure on the surface is so strong that you would be crushed instantly. “DO NOT PRESS!” It’s lucky I don’t have access to a spacecraft, or yeah, I would be there right now, and that would be the end of me.
But it didn’t always used to be this way. Venus used to be a lot more like Earth, as this video explains:
And Mars used to be a lot like Earth. So Venus began to boil, and Mars began to freeze, and Earth decided to be the responsible one and, not become either a boiling hellscape or a freezing hellscape. So it’s thanks to the fact that Earth decided to be sensible and not try to be trendy like the other planets in our neighbourhood that we are alive today.
In theory it is possible to fly around Earth so fast that it would always be daytime. Eventually you would have to stop to refuel, but theoretically it could be done. So, if you were on Venus and you had access to a plane. No actually, no need for a plane, or a car, or even a skateboard. If you wanted to experience unending daytime on Venus, all you would have to do is walk. That’s how slowly this weirdo planet rotates. Also the sun rises in the West and sets in the East. That’s right, this trendy poser of a planet rotates slowly backwards.
But something about Venus calls to me. I want to walk along its terrifying surface and climb Maxwell Montes:
But why? Even with advanced technologies to keep me alive, none of this sounds pleasant. Maybe it’s the DO NOT PRESS! button. Maybe deep inside of all of us there is a DO NOT PRESS! button that must be appeased.
So the surface of Venus isn’t too nice, but what about high up in the atmosphere? If you were to start on the surface and start ascending, the higher you go, the lower the temperature would get and the lower the atmospheric pressure would get, in principle it would be possible to live a relatively pleasant life in airships, in extremely Earth like conditions. Weirdly enough, the skies of Venus might actually work out to be the most habitable for humans, more so than the surface of Mars:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161019-the-amazing-cloud-cities-we-could-build-on-venus
And speaking of Mars, Mars is usually the planet that is prioritized for exploration via space probes, which is understandable, it’s the easiest to get to, and Mars doesn’t eat space probes the way Venus does. The Soviet Union sent many landers to Venus, and while they managed to send images back of the surface, none of them lasted very long. But in recent years there has been renewed interest in the DO NOT PRESS! button in our own neighbourhood, this is in part because of the controversial idea that there is phosphine on Venus, but what this means, or indeed was phosphine discovered at all, has been heavily disputed.
But the 2030’s will be an exciting time for Venus, because during that decade, three space probes will be sent there! ESA will send a probe called Envison, and NASA will send two called Veritas and Davinci+:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57416589
I hope they find out why what started off as an amazing dream of a world became a nightmare. I hope when I’m looking at Venus through my telescope twenty years from now, I will understand more about this strange beautiful and terrifying wonderful hellworld. I hope in the coming decades rovers travel across the surface of Venus, because this planet warned us to keep our landers and rovers safe by sending them to other places instead, but if we ignore the warning and proceed anyway, who knows what wonderful things about this bizarro planet we might learn!
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