The Universe TV - Michio Kaku - Carl Sagan TV - Solar Empire TV - Jay Melosh - Journey to the Edge of the Universe TV - Brian Cox TV - Earth's Evil Twin TV - David Grinspoon - Stephen Hawking - How the Universe Works TV - Jim Al-Khalili: Secrets of the Solar System TV - Neil deGrasse Tyson - Secrets of the Universe with Tim Peake TV - The UnXplained: Mysteries of the Universe TV -
Venus and Mercury: Two hostile planets that in the history of the universe have suffered very different fates ... Both demonstrate the horrors of the planets that have gone horribly wrong. The Universe s1e7: Mercury & Venus the Inner Planets, History 2007
It turns out Venus is less an exotic sister to Earth and more like an evil twin. ibid.
As a result of this retrograde rotation the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. ibid.
Venus is the hottest planet in the whole solar system. ibid.
Carbon Dioxide – CO2 – makes up 95% of the Venuvian atmosphere. ibid.
Venus has many more active volcanoes than we do. ibid.
The atmospheric pressure on Venus is 90 times greater than Earth. ibid.
Venus: Despite all of its romantic connotations it still has some truly horrific weather conditions. Oppressive heat with greenhouse effect gone wild. This is one planet continually trying to cool itself off with no success. The Universe s2e15: Wildest Weather in the Cosmos, History 2008
These toxic rains are some of the worst you will find in space. ibid.
With carbon dioxide trapped for ever in the atmosphere it has a greenhouse effect gone wild. All that heat creates condensation. And clouds thick with sulphuric acid. ibid.
Life itself may actually exist in other types of truly weird clouds. Venus: the second planet from our sun has a hot hellish surface. Yet strangely the temperature in its clouds which hover at an altitude of about thirty miles could be cool enough for life to exist. The Universe s3e10: Strangest Things, History 2009
Life as we know it needs water. The clouds of Venus contain water in the form of concentrated sulphuric acid. ibid.
Here’s the irony. Venus is named from the goddess of beauty. The source of the beauty of Venus is one of the most potent acids known to science. In other words women are not from Venus. Michio Kaku
We had a picture of Venus revealed. And boy, were we shocked! We found a scarred surface, a volcanic surface. Michio Kaku, How the Universe Works s2e1: Volcanoes: The Furnaces of Life, Discovery 2012
The clouds turn out to be not water but a concentrated solution of sulphuric acid. Even in the high clouds Venus is a thoroughly nasty place. The clouds are stained yellow by sulphur. There are great lightning storms. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Heaven and Hell, PBS 1980
Venus is a dead suffocating super-greenhouse ... It hides behind thick clouds ... Venus has a parched rocky surface borne from ancient volcanism, remnants of old lava flows now broken into boulders. Solar Empire: A Star is Born, Discovery 1997
Venus has some of the largest volcanoes anywhere in the solar system. And furthermore the lava flows are planet-wide. Jay Melosh, planetary scientist University of Arizona
The Venus Express space probe is telling us these dazzling clouds are made of deadly sulphuric acid. That the planet’s atmosphere is choked with carbon dioxide. Journey to the Edge of the Universe, National Geographic 2008
It’s the brightest point of light in our night sky. So similar in size to our own world this planet has been called Earth’s twin. This is Venus: orbiting closer to the sun, Venus was named for its shining beauty. But our planetary twin hides its true identity beneath a thick blanket of cloud. Over the last four and a half billion years Venus has turned into an unimaginably oppressive world. The atmosphere is so dense that the pressure is crushing – it’s ninety times the atmospheric pressure than on Earth. Brian Cox, Wonders of the Solar System: Dead or Alive, BBC 2010
It’s covered with floods of solid lava just like we see in India but on a scale many thousands of times larger. We’ve also counted over fifty thousand volcanoes. The most on any planet in the solar system. Venus is a similar size to Earth. ibid.
The night sky is ablaze with stars, hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone, many larger, brighter and more majestic than our sun. On the scale of galaxies and stars, the planets of our solar system are little more than grains of sand caught momentarily in the light of the sun. But on those motes of dust for over four billion years great stories have played out unseen. Brian Cox The Planets I, BBC 2019
Today, Mercury is the closest of all, enduring the sun’s full glare. Further out lies Venus, choked by a thick atmosphere. Then, Venus’s neighbour Earth. And farthest of all, Mars, a cold desert world. Together they form the only rocky so-called terrestrial planets in the solar system. ibid.
Each appears to have a moment when it enjoyed almost Earth-like conditions. Every one of our rocky neighbours has a story of what might have been. ibid.
The orbits of the planets are not stable over very long timescales. ibid.
Venus: 108 million kilometres from the Sun. A world which at first sight has the potential to be much more Earth-like … Venus is a vision of hell where no life can survive. ibid.
Venus: Earth’s evil twin. Tts clouds made of battery acid. At almost 500° Celsius its surface is hot enough to melt lead. Earth’s Evil Twin, 2009
A hostile desert. Lots of dust. And no water. Venus resembles its twin Earth in many ways. Similar in size and composition they were probably formed from the same cloud of gas over four billion years ago. ibid.
The surface is so hot rocks glow in the dark. ibid.
There’s a giant upside-down twin tornado permanently existing at the pole of Venus. David Grinspoon, Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus. Stephen Hawking
Our galaxy a billion years from now. A planet shrouded in turbulence and dense clouds. Buried deep below an alien landscape. The surface scorched, the temperature sky-high, the pressure unbearable. This is not a distant extraterrestrial world, this is Earth, this is our future. We know it to be true because Earth has a twin: Venus. And Venus has already descended into Hell. How the Universe Works s4e2: Venus: Earth’s Evil Twin, Science 2015
Venus: the stuff of nightmares. The conditions on Venus are amongst the most inhospitable in the solar system. ibid.
Venus once harboured oceans. ibid.
‘Venus has tens of thousands of volcanoes.’ ibid. Phil Plait
‘We figured out the reason Venus is so bright and apparently featureless is because it’s completely covered in clouds.’ Jim Al-Khalili, Secrets of the Solar System III: Venus: Living Hell? David Grinspoon, BBC 2020
Before 1975 no human had ever seen an image from the surface of another planet, let alone Venus … a Russian mission. ibid.
Venus was found to have a very odd rotation. The planet seemed to be rotating backwards very slowly. A day on Venus is longer than its year. ibid.
Mariner 2 also made another startling discovery: there could be a hint that all was not well with Earth’s twin. Unlike our planet with its north and south magnetic poles, Venus doesn’t have any significant magnetic field. ibid.
Magellan provided an unprecedented view of the Venusian surface … a world of volcanoes of all kinds. ibid.
But down at the surface of Venus, things are altogether much calmer and deeply weird. ibid.
Can we terraform Venus? ibid.
Venus is in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey: The World Set Free XII, National Geographic 2014
Venus is about 61 million kilometres from Earth. One day here is equivalent to 243 Earth days. Secrets of the Universe with Tim Peake s1e1: The Planets, Channel 5 2023
Volcanoes scar the surface of a rocky planet hidden under thick clouds of acid rain. While unimaginable heat makes life impossible. Welcome to Venus. The UnXplained: Mysteries of the Universe I, History 2024
Could we turn our neighbour into another Earth? ibid.
It’s a bright diamond that shines above the horizon. ibid.