who first proposed that Venus would be a very hot planet with a relatively

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campbelp2002

New member
As I recall from news items at the time, that fact was discovered by unmanned space craft actually measuring it. It came as a complete surprise to all scientists, none of whom had previously proposed that that might be the case.
 
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campbelp2002

New member
As I recall from news items at the time, that fact was discovered by unmanned space craft actually measuring it. It came as a complete surprise to all scientists, none of whom had previously proposed that that might be the case.
 
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suitti

Member
I'm pretty sure that data came first. Perhaps it was RADAR data from Earth. The temperature was measured.

It was a bit of a shock that Earth's twin sister is uninhabitable.

But is it? It turns out that if you go high enough in the atmosphere, so that the pressure is similar to the Earth's surface, it's also a reasonable temperature. So perhaps we could colonize Venus right now - in air ships. Big balloons. Of course, there's still absurd winds, and sulphuric acid, and other stuff to deal with. I mean, we don't colonize Earth with air ships... even though we could.
 
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zee_prime

New member
A good question. I was born in 1948 and I remember in the 1950s an astronomer named Patrick Moore was on TV in Britain. He said that spectroscopic studies showed that there was CO2 in Venus' atmosphere, and that surface pressure was quite high so perhaps Venus had seas of soda water. About that time, my favourite science fiction hero, Dan Dare, in the Eagle comic, captures a dinosaur in Venus' tropical jungle in a story. A few years later the Russian Venera probe landed on Venus and transmitted long enough to indicate that the surface temperature was way above the boiling point point of water and the pressure several times Earth's sea level pressure. Venus is perpetually under cloud cover, so this and the thick atmosphere means that there isn't much temperature difference between the sunward and night sides. So it was the Venera probe in the 1960s that put an end to speculation that Venus is habitable.
 
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zee_prime

New member
A good question. I was born in 1948 and I remember in the 1950s an astronomer named Patrick Moore was on TV in Britain. He said that spectroscopic studies showed that there was CO2 in Venus' atmosphere, and that surface pressure was quite high so perhaps Venus had seas of soda water. About that time, my favourite science fiction hero, Dan Dare, in the Eagle comic, captures a dinosaur in Venus' tropical jungle in a story. A few years later the Russian Venera probe landed on Venus and transmitted long enough to indicate that the surface temperature was way above the boiling point point of water and the pressure several times Earth's sea level pressure. Venus is perpetually under cloud cover, so this and the thick atmosphere means that there isn't much temperature difference between the sunward and night sides. So it was the Venera probe in the 1960s that put an end to speculation that Venus is habitable.
 
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