Images: The Blue is NOT water. The Blue is topography. If there were water on Venus, like all water everywhere, it would flow "down" into the Blue areas. Images of Planet Venus: from NASA, Magellan Program.

If we could "move Venus," and terraform it, the false color could represent water. But you will find, explained below, the image on the left is what is beneath Venus's sulfuric acid clouds. It has been that way from the beginning of Venus.

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You keen-eyed Venus experts! You will note that both images cover the same area, the same hemisphere. If you are one who pays attention to detail, you will see that the right image is inverted . . . or is it the left image that is upside down? For this kind of detail, I was not going to rotate either image 180 degrees.

Insolation W/M^2, at Luminosity, at planet.

This table contains an additional value for those who do not “accept” the "brightness" of the Sun as it is computed in the best model humanity has of how the sun reached it's current state and luminosity. It is truly difficult to have the Sun "cool" for Venus, "warm" for Mars and "comfortable" for Earth, and life through any reasonable range of life supporting conditions. If anything, as the Sun has warmed through the lifetime of the Solar System, the Sun is the "constant" in the story of terrestrial life.

 

Planetary Insolation Past and Future Sun's Luminosity % of present Venus W/m^2 Earth W/m^2 Mars W/m^2

Sun 4.567 Gya 60%	1568.3	820.6	353.5
Sun 4.567 Gya 70%	1833.7	959.4	412.4
Sun Present 100%	2613.9	1367.6	589.2
Sun 1.1Gy 110%	2875.3	1504.4	648.1
Sun 3.2Gy 134%	3476.5	1818.9	783.6

 

I have calculated and added to this table above the values for an initial cool main sequence "start" at 60% current solar luminosity, (instead of the solar model that seems to best fit with a Sun main sequence start-up of 70% of current luminosity) and with the 60% adjusted insolation I have calculated accordingly what wattage of insolation would reach the three planets for each average planetary distance. This is to show that even with the Sun dimmed by 40% of its current luminosity, Venus would still have been too hot for life -- for any extremophile brand of life you want to imagine -- to have begun on Venus.

The most important reason that Venus could NEVER have had life start on it -- is the high initial solar "wattage" for Venus.

Even if you take the 40%-off value for the Sun's main sequence burn and compare it to something you know, like Earth's current weather, and what drives it, you get a sense of the values. i.e., 1568.3/1367.6 = 115% more W/m^2than Earth receives now. So, if you think about the fact that the value 1568 Watts per square meter is maybe not that hot, hey, put that idea out of your head since there is nothing really compelling about any cool Sun start-up! The REAL value from the Solar model was, 1833.7/1367.6 = 134% for Venus's initial conditions -- which would have been from day one, or the first few million years -- it just never was a place for water. When Earth's solar insolation "wattage" reaches 1818.9, in 3.2 billion years, the oceans of Earth will have boiled away, Hydrogen to space, Oxygen combined with whatever it can, and mostly it will be Carbon. Earth's CO2 atmosphere will be heavier than Venus's, roughly 90 weight atmosphere's mass, equivalent now to a pressure depth of 3000 feet beneath the sea.

For how long was the surface a hot slough of silicate magmas? By the time the Sun turned on with fusion, Venus was still hot from accretion; and the Late Heavy Bombardment was still millions of years ahead. By even some of the hardest-nosed-fellow's estimates, it took some time on Earth for life to "begin", maybe on the order of a few hundred million years.

If it takes time and the right temperature conditions, and water -- Venus never had a chance.

These are hard-nosed folks, so you won't find any Darwinists saying life started about the same time Venus started cooking. The Sun lit Venus with 134% of what we get here on Earth, from the beginning. Or: Does it take some "time" for life to "evolve?"

1. Did Venus ever have Oceans?
No! Not ever.

2. Did Venus ever have abundant life-aiding water clouds?
No! Not that it really matters.

3. Did "Life" ever have a chance on Venus?
No!

And that is unfortunate. Venus is of the right mass to be a second Earth, an Earth 2 -- if it had coalesced in a different part of the Solar System.

4. Did Venus ever have a surface that would be hospitable to any of the living "extremophiles" we are discovering on Earth?
NO!

For good reasons, we believe Venus initially had the same relative "general" chemical and elemental composition as the Earth, but Venus came together, “accreted,” just a little closer in to the Sun than Earth.

And that made all of the difference!

Importantly, realize this: Venus was always too hot. Like the rest of the planets, it started hot, and molten. It accreted hot, and cooled hardly at all while the Sun was turning from proto-star to Main Sequence - - to hydrogen to helium fusion. Venus began hot, stayed hot, and will become even hotter as the Sun warms.

What are the key arguments against Venus ever giving Life a chance?

Again, with emphasis! Only One Compelling Argument, really: Venus was, is, and always will be "Too Hot," parked where it is. Venus is too close to the Sun, and the Sun is getting hotter.

What time brought . . . the inner planets . . .

Below, I recount an aspect of the formation of the terrestrial planets with the idea and intention of outlining things about age dating and the temperature of Venus 4.567 billion years ago.

"Our" Earth and Moon, the planets Venus, Mercury, and Mars -- were all formed in major and largest gross proportion -- at about the same time. From a standpoint of the inner planet’s major characteristics -- these were pretty well established withing the first 50 million years of the solar system’s formation.

These initial and enduring quantities, qualities, or aspects -- consist of: the body’s gross mass; gross elemental composition; orbital characteristics (eccentricity of orbit, perihelion); and momentum - both orbital and rotational. Also characteristics of major importance are the spin axis of the bodies; that is, the rotation of the Earth and Mars; the tilt, the spin, pro-grade or retrograde -- are also important for the analysis of the secondary characteristics – but were all initially established during the first 50 million years of formation

Certainly, the Earth-Moon system has changed since then, and the 2/3 tidal lock of Mercury’s rotation and revolution about the Sun all took longer than 50 million years to become what they are now. But their evolution was defined and constrained by the initial conditions.

What happened with the Sun before the steady, long-lived fusion of hydrogen to helium began? What do we think we know about this time? This is that time when the Sun traversed from proto-Sun to the Main Sequence.

We do have a very good model of the Sun. And we observe and study statistically many similar stars through their light; through their spectra. Even though you are a distinct individual, and the Sun itself is a unique star among stars – like the doctor who examines you – who also looks at the statistical information gathered from the rest of mankind, astronomers also do a similar statistical analysis in looking at the distant stars and comparing them to our Sun.

The model of the Sun I am using is an adaptation of the model developed by Sackmann, Boothroyd, and Kraemer (1), which outlines the Sun’s past and future.

One thing we know is that nearby the Sun a supernova occurred. That supernova may have played a significant part in stimulating, or even ‘causing’ or expediting the collapse of the cloud of gas and dust that became the Sun. The solar model describes the transition from collapsing volume of gas to star. As I have posted a review of this process on Xomba, I recommend reading the article "The Suns Future." I will not delve much into the model here, but supply initial values that describe the Sun’s current and past model characteristics, which allow prediction.

The Sun forms We start with the molecular cloud that becomes the Sun, collapsing . . .warming itself by squeezing itself . . .

As the collapse of the molecular cloud continued the proto-Sun produced prodigious amounts of energy, from gravitational contraction. It gets rid of the energy by radiating it from its shrinking proto-star surface. But to get to the surface, the energy is carried by convection!

The removal of the great energy of gravitational compression is done by convection. The tremendous heat of the interior of the sun is being transferred outward by convection not by radiative transfer to the collapsing sun's 8 solar diameter surface. This vast radiating surface area glows at 4400 K and warms the solar nebula with 20 times the energy the Sun radiates now.

The best Sun model we now have takes 48,000,000 years for the Sun to traverse from proto-star to main sequence star fusing hydrogen to helium. Many things happen in the 48 million years the Sun takes to start its very long lifespan. All of the silicate and iron bodies are accreted, and all were hot with the luminosity 20 times what it is now. The Sun was a red hot glowing gas body, a ball of mostly hydrogen, shrinking and collapsing into a real star.

During the 48Myr ignition, events in the inner solar system were hot and busy. During this 48Myrs, the inner planets accreted. We know now that in the very first 30Myr of this solar ignition period, the Earth and Moon formed, with the Moon having been splashed out of the Earth some 10Myr or so after the Earth's accretion entered high gear.

There was a supernova nearby where the Sun formed. The supernova contributed all sorts of heavy elements, and many of them were radioactive and decayed in small amounts of time. . .

Hafnium(182) becomes tungsten(182), half every 9 million years.

Enough lithophilic radioactive hafnium(182) existed while the molten magma was differentiating to be attracted to the melted silicates and be associated with them.

Lithophilic means "rock like" and this means the lighter portion of the materials and elements that formed the earth. Hafnium is lithophilic with an electron structure that causes it to be lumped with and attracted to other element groups with a similar electron structure. In this regard, it is differentiated and joins the molten lithophilic elements -- while the mass of materials it is associated with is in molten, very fluid form.

This differentiation is gravitationally driven,letting the heavy elements and compounds "sink" to form the Earth's core, while the lighter silicates and other lithophilics floated above in the mantle and in the eventually solidifying lightweight, light density thin solid crustal materials. This lithophilic association locked what ever radioactive hafnium (182) into the silicates where they had been attracted when crustal "rocks" solidified. If the Hafnium so locked is the 182 species, it is radioactive, and in 9 million hears half of this isotope from the supernova turns into Tungsten (Wolfram) which really would rather be with the siderophile elements like iron, nickel, cobalt. But in the solid crust, it can't migrate, so it is stuck there with the lithophiles.

In the 9 million year half-life of hafnium (182) the decay product, tungsten(182), which left to itself in a melt, will head for the siderophile rocks with iron, cobalt, nickel, is now stuck there in the silicate rocks because the hafnium through decay is now tungsten.

How MUCH of the original radioactive hafnium (182) is now left from the original contribution of the supernova? Without doubt, we can say. Not a single atom!

It works like this . . . in the first 9 million years since it was formed in the supernova, half of the hafnium turned into wolfram, good old tungsten (182). The next 9 million years, another half is gone, so we have one quarter of the original hafnium produced in the supernova, and so on . and so on . . . so in 55 million years, 6 half-lives have transpired, and the original amount is down to 1/ 2^6 or 1-64th of the original amount. In 4.567 billion years there have been 507.44 half-life cycles of 9 million years each, so the fraction left is now 1/ 2^507.44 or 1.759^-153 part of the original amount of hafnium (182) built in the supernova, and provided to the solar system.

If some super-universe could contain 5.684 x 10^152 atoms of Hf (182). The last one would be decaying now.

It is thought the Universe contains ~ 10^80 atoms. Through this, you see that the hafnium (182) given to the solar system by the nearby unknown supernova 4.567 Billion years ago, is all tungsten now. That tungsten is out of place. (Most tungsten is found where it ‘belongs’, but read on.) That is why we can say the accretion phase was over in about 50 million years. If the planet had been melted, in a molten state through the period of ignition, the tungsten would have migrated out of the silicates. But it was pretty solid by 50 million years of age from accretion, let alone the point of ignition of the Sun.

We humans mine a lot of this Tungsten that was thus trapped in the crust.

The fact tungsten is mixed into the silicates constrains the length of time of the accretion, and the surface solidification, and coupled with other information suggests Venus was always too hot for life. Refer to the Table with the colored cells. The 60% solar output is a "fiction."  It is used for a point of departure for discusion -- pointing out that Venus was always hot.  Too hot.-- for our kinds of life. 
 

 

Planetary Insolation Past and Future Sun's Luminosity % of present Venus W/m^2 Earth W/m^2 Mars W/m^2

Sun 4.567 Gya 60%	1568.3	820.6	353.5
Sun 4.567 Gya 70%	1833.7	959.4	412.4
Sun Present 100%	2613.9	1367.6	589.2
Sun 1.1Gy 110%	2875.3	1504.4	648.1
Sun 3.2Gy 134%	3476.5	1818.9	783.6

 

However, I put the fictional 60% luminosity in the table, because I wanted to show the coolest Venus ever could have been with the Sun's output diminished by 40% demonstrates that even then, Venus was still too hot for any life-temperature we are familiar with, including extremophiles.

 

The 'real' watts/square meter value for Venus when the Sun “turns-on” is the yellow one in the table. A considerably higher value than the fictional 60% luminosity. In, other words, from the beginning of Venus’ planet-hood status, it was too hot for an ocean. Too hot for water -- too hot for life.

The Earth’s “yellowed table value” is hi-lighted since that will be the wattage the Sun places on Earth 1100 million years in our future. At that point the Earth’s oceans start to migrate into the Earth’s atmosphere in a substantial way. That amount of energy puts water vapor clouds high enough for the ultraviolet to work on the water molecule and break it into free Hydrogen and Oxygen. That is what would have happened on Venus with even the Sun’s fictional 60% turn-on luminosity!

When younger, I had hoped there really was a window. Yet, it would be a tragedy if life started and burned up in a couple of hundred million years. Venus was never like Earth, never hospitable.

I won't argue there was ever enough time for an ocean to form on Venus. Any original water, and it is doubtful water was ever there in liquid quantity, would have vanished early, early in the warming of the Sun. Venus was too hot to start with. In the late bombardment when perhaps lots of comets could bring water to Venus, it appears Venus would have been too hot by then to accumulate water. Water then would boil to the top of the atmosphere, UV from the Sun would dissociate the molecules and the hydrogen would largely escape to space.

What time could bring . . .

In the fullness of Mankind's possible species lifetime, and possible future, we might want to use the lifeless hell-hot Venus as a new abode for Earth-life. IF we could engineer “moving” Venus, we could “terraform” it. Venus would serve as a viable world for several billion years beginning “now” if moved. And if you can move Venus, you can bring water. But it is a waste of time to bring water to the hot kettle of Venus now, where it is, especially with the heater in the middle turning it self toward “high.” Move Venus, then bring the water. That is engineering on a scale only advanced intelligence could accomplish. But it is ‘simply’ top scale engineering, like building a new really large viable human habitat.

If we could master the power and energy to move Venus, we could move Earth because we, too, are too close to the Sun of the future. For us and Earth-life to have a long future, we need to move Earth. Earth life could use another abode about a billion years from now. Venus has been truly sterilized. We could contaminate it usefully if we could move it. Of course, our ‘lease’ on life and the real estate around the Sun is short term in the scheme of things.

Somewhere down the road of time ahead, we might want to move both Venus and Earth to a tide locked orbit face to face around each other somewhere out there beyond the orbit of Mars, or maybe combine Mars and Venus and an ice-moon of Saturn’s for water ... Heck, throw in chunks of Earth’s moon for construction materials. The new Venus would mass more than Earth.

In a subsequent article I will examine some of these ideas a little further. And Life? Yes, let’s consider life on Earth and Venus and Mars – and elsewhere.

Elsewhere is very large. We at least have to be considerate of “elsewhere,” because that is where the most of the things that ”are”– actually are. Elsewhere.

These surface images are radar constructions. The Russians landed their Venera probes and remarkably showed a place like Dante's Inferno, sans the flames often imagined.

Perspective View of Venus (Center Latitude 15 Degrees S., Center Longitude 129 Degrees E.)

Impact Crater 'Jeanne

 

---------ProtoSun through Earth's Ocean's BoilOff--------- Stage Time Mass Luminosity Temp. K Radius

1-ProtoStar	0 Gyr	1sol	19.95 Lsol	4400	7.71 Rsol
2-Ignition-Main Sequence	0.048 Gyr	1	0.7015	5586	0.897
3-Sun Present	4.567Gyr	1	1	5780	1
4-Earth moist Greenhouse	5.66 Gyr	1	1.10	5793	1.05
5-Earth's Oceans Boiled	7.56 Gyr	1	1.33	5843	1.13