Sarah Rugheimer

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so the Venera probes landed on Venus.

Soviets are the only ones who have landed on Venus.

And I think it's crazy just to even think about how difficult that is.

Venus is really hell on Earth or hell on Venus, shall we say.

The surface temperature is 460 some degrees Celsius over 860 degrees Fahrenheit below.

The pressures are 90 bars, so like 90 times what Earth is.

So getting that probe to the surface at all and then having it function at all was a major engineering feat, you know, and it lasted, you know, the first couple, I think, lasted tens of minutes and the last one lasted, you know, a little over two hours.

And then we got these photos of what is a desolate, desolate planet that we would never want to go to.

And I think, you know, in the early days of our imagination, people thought Venus might be another Earth.

It might be beautiful.

It might have civilizations on it, like the early science fiction writers, because in many ways, Venus is very similar to Earth.

It's the same size, same mass.

It's a little closer to the sun, but they didn't really understand that that would cause its temperature to be so hot.

through a runaway greenhouse effect, which is what we're hoping to avoid.

the real deal.

It's a real deal.

And we actually think that Venus was habitable in its early surface, our early life.

So even up to a billion years ago, we think that Venus was maybe habitable, had oceans.

And indeed, then at some point, that additional heat that comes from the greenhouse effect and from our sun caused all of the water to boil off and huge amounts of CO2 to be released from the surface.