Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Venus

Episode Date: September 7, 2020

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writer/podcaster Soren Bowie (‘American Dad’ on TBS, ‘Quick Question with Soren and Daniel’ podcast) for a look at why the planet Venus is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Venus, known for being a planet. Famous for being planet number two in the solar system, pretty sure. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Venus is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I am not alone. My guest this week is your pal and mine, Soren Bui, is on the podcast. The great Soren Bui.

He's here. And by here, I mean he's in Los Angeles and we're taping over Zoom. But you know what I mean. I'm so glad I get to talk to him. Soren is a writer for American Dad, the TV show on TBS. And that's a really great cartoon if you have not seen it. I don't know if everybody knows that necessarily. It's amazing.

It's one of my favorite animated shows. Like it has a lot of interesting lore and development over time and really funny jokes. It's great. Sorin is also a former colleague of mine at the former workplace crack.com. And among many amazing things he did there, he did one of my favorite web series ever made where he played an astronaut in like a solo situation out in space. He also wrote one of my favorite articles just on the internet ever, which is about the meaning of space exploration and the history of it, and how it ties into love that we feel for one another. I know that doesn't sound like a comedy article.

Somehow he had great jokes alongside those great observations. It's just one of my favorite things. So whenever I think space, I think of my old buddy Sorin. He has a passion for it and really brings that into this show. Also, Sorin co-hosts a podcast. It's a podcast called Quick Question with Sorin and Daniel. And it's with the great Daniel O'Brien. That's the Daniel in there. I sort of figure you all know about that podcast. It's a podcast called Quick Question with Sorin and Daniel. And it's with the great Daniel O'Brien. That's a Daniel in there. I sort of figure you all know about that podcast.

Or I am thrilled to be the bearer of the good news that Sorin Bui and Daniel O'Brien have a podcast. I really am glad that I get to tell you that. I feel very special. And if you learned about me from crack.com, you know how exciting that podcast is. And also, you know how exciting of a guest this is. I get to talk to Sorin Bui. I know him well. I'm always glad to talk to him, and I'm so glad we did this. Also, I have gathered all of our zip codes and I've used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples, acknowledge Soren recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino or Tongva and Keech and Chumash peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations,

native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about the planet Venus, the second one in your diorama of the solar system that you made in grade school. Some people draw a big poster. I feel like we all just find out that it exists and never think about it again. And a planet that has kind of secretly been at the center of a lot of astronomy and space exploration and history of the entire world. And it's also just real freaky. You'll hear about that right away. So please sit back or stand on like the observation platform of your Bespin Cloud City in Star Wars, because that is surprisingly

relevant to today's planet. And either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with the one and only Sorin Bui. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Sorin Bui, it is so good to see you. As I was just saying off mic before, even though we're using computer microphones, you know what I mean. Yeah, no, I can see you. I can physically see you right now.

We're doing this on a Zoom. This is actually the first podcast I've done where I get to look at the other person, which I'll tell you, I'm not going to be focusing so much on you. More just myself the entire time because I'm always I looked so strange in zoom calls oh i can't help but just look at myself in my room and think about what sort of information i'm giving out with each thing that i do i also smile a lot which i'm not too keen on uh for the listener soren has wood to the left of him and to the right of him is different wood he seems to be building a lot of things right now i got a lot of irons in the fire. These are going to be a bench.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And then those over there were a separate project where I had to take off all those off the bottom of my bed. You know what? I'm describing things in a room that only you can see. This is not going to work for a podcast. Well, you can move on. I let us down this path.

It's working for me. On every episode of the show, before we get into talking about the topic, I ask the guest what is their relationship to it or opinion of it. And with today being the planet Venus, I partly picked you for this one because I think of space when I think of Soren. I love space. I'm just going to put that in your mouth right now. What an honor it is to be thought of along with the likes of space.

Thank you so much. Yeah, I know Venus, but only through, you know, I mean, I knew it in like seventh grade when we had to learn about it, but then also revisited it in my son's books because I've got a five-year-old who is very into planets. Venus just happens to be one of them. Certainly it's not his favorite. He's into Neptune, but that's where all my new cursory knowledge comes from. I'm curious how a five year old picks their favorite planet and why Neptune. Do you know? Color. Yeah, it's blue.

Oh yeah. Yeah. He likes blue. That's as simple as it gets. Blue was my favorite color to the point as a kid growing up where I like only wanted blue foods, which is basically the blue raspberry Slurpee at 7-Eleven. Like that's it. That's what you could get. Yeah. It's blue raspberry Pop-Tarts.

And that's kind of all you could get. Or cotton candy bubble gum. And that's it. Right, right. He also likes it a lot. We talk about it in terms because we say how far we love each other. And so like we'll say you uh i love you to the end of the earth or like he would be like i love you all the way to neptune

because neptune is the furthest planet so like it's always a stop in that game so he he knows it pretty well oh man my my heart just expanded that was that was great um you've you've ramped up your venus knowledge a little bit for your son, but otherwise it's on the list of grade school planets, which I think for me before researching it, it was also kind of that. I was like, oh, yes, number two. I'm smart. I know this.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much all anybody, if that, that anybody knows. Because you don't need to. There's nothing in your life that changes whether you know more about the solar system. Right. It doesn't do any, it doesn't do any practical good. Yeah. Other than that, I know that there's no real relationship I have to Venus. It is, it has, doesn't bother me and I don't bother it.

Right. A cool neutrality all around. There's peace. Yeah. We've got no problem with each other. There's no beef there. Well, on every episode of the show, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics

in a segment called, I Come From a Landown Number. Where statistics flow and men chunder. where statistics flow and men chunder. I love Colin Hay. That was wonderful. Exactly right. And that name was submitted by Jonathan Momsen.

We're going to have a new name for this segment every week, submitted by listeners like you. Make them as silly and wacky as possible. Less good, the better. Submit your name for the numbers and statistics segment to at SIFpod on Twitter or to Sif pod at gmail.com and yeah that one came to us from an australian listener hello australian listeners i don't know that they recognize the word hello it's good day there i think i have immediately burned my bridges with australia oh no uh i can do an australian accent for just one word ask me to ask me a question where i can say no to alex hey soren do you have enough wood no

no it's like seven syllables how did that happen that's amazing that's it's a very hard one oh learn stuff every day it's great well And we have numbers and statistics that make the planet Venus very fascinating. And one of them is the number 95%. And that's the approximate size of Venus compared to the Earth. Venus is 95% of Earth's size. So it's almost as big and very similar. And then the gravity is about 90% of Earth. And that's according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Well, why are we so jazzed about Mars then? Venus sounds like it's way more, way more simple or maybe more similar to Earth than Mars. Yeah, that's a very, that's a very perceptive, like way people felt about it until they kept looking closer at it. Because yeah, it's like, we've especially learned that Mars has less than half of our gravity.

And so they even think that if people spent a lot of time there, they'd start to get the issues that astronauts get on long haul space stuff, where your bones disintegrate and everything. Not disintegrate, but you know what I mean. Yeah, you see your muscles start to atrophy and your bones, you lose all your bone density. Yeah. But Venus is Earth-shaped and Earth-gravity-ish. And I think not everybody knows that. And then from there,

it gets incredibly strange in every way. Next number here is 243 Earth days. 243 Earth days is the length of one day on Venus. That's a long day. That's how it works. And also a day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. And it's the only planet like that in the solar system. It's, as far as I know, the only planet that we've confirmed that about. A day on Venus is 243 Earth days, and a year on Venus, so of course the planet going all the way around the sun, is just 224.7 Earth days. So it's about 20 days longer of a day than a year. If that isn't a confusing way to describe it, I feel like I said the word day a hundred times, but I think people get it. That's too long. That's too long of a day and too short of a year. Okay. I'm changing my tune on Venus. I was into it for a second there. And now it's just, this is insane. Well, I put the hospitable stat first. So I'm like,

I'm like a weird real estate guy who's like trying to get you to buy land, but don't do it. Bad idea. I think it's just fascinating to know that any planet can work that way, where it rotates so slowly but goes around its sun or star fast enough that the days are longer than years. Like that's not, it's just like a mind-warping, mind-blowing concept for us here on a normal Earth, you know? Yeah, because you'd have so many seasons stacked into each other so quickly. Yeah. It would be complicated to live there. I think I'm deciding now.

Next number is 90 times higher than earth. Okay, nine, nine, zero, 90 times. And that is the air pressure on Venus. So the air pressure is earth air pressure times 90. I mean, according to space.com, that means that the air pressure on Venus is about the same as the water pressure on earth, about half a mile or one kilometer under the ocean. Ooh, wait, can I even survive that? Or would just crush my skull? Yeah. Any, any of us would just get like exploded pretty quickly. Yeah, I think we'd have to be in some kind of submarine type craft. Yeah.

Yeah, I want one of those big steel suits that they used to go to the bottom of the ocean in that like Cuba Gooding Jr. had to wear in that one movie and walk across a courtroom. You know what I'm talking about? Is it like, it's not a diving belt, but it's like the big rounded tubey thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the weird.

Yeah, I want one of those. Like that one Bioshock guy. That's a gaming reference, right? Yes, yes. It's that guy. Yeah, yeah. And the movie SpongeBob SquarePants, the antagonist in that. Oh, yeah.

Who comes and collects them. Basically, all of them should meet up on Venus and leave us alone, right? Get out of here. Yeah. And then the last thing to remember statistically about Venus, and also for your suit, the number here is 870 degrees Fahrenheit or 470 degrees Celsius. Those are positive. 870 Fahrenheit, 470 Celsius. That's a normal temperature on Venus, according to space.com.

They talked to Sue Smrekar, who is a scientist at JPL, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And she said, quote, the surface is hot enough to melt lead. So don't bring your lead unless you want it to be all goopy. You know, we've landed stuff there, right? And we didn't, it didn't immediately melt. Yeah, I'm, we have landed it mostly in the sense that the Soviets did. Oh, okay. And it doesn't last very long. We, I mean, humanity. Yeah, yeah. We're all on the same team on this little rock. it mostly in the sense the soviets did oh okay and it it doesn't last very long we i mean humanity

yeah yeah we're all on the same team on this little rock yeah yeah it's a weird planet because like anything past the asteroid belt it's mostly gas planets you know and you think of them as just oh it's it's a useless ball of gas but venus is solid we could do so much and no it's horrible it's really crazy all right oh no't know i've you've talked me out of venus let's get back to mars it goes the wrong way too right oh yeah yeah i should mention that with the the days and years thing yeah it goes it rotates the opposite direction of earth and many other planets it's dumb dumb yeah speaking of like austral Australia with the toilets or whatever, it's like that. It's crazy.

This is a Venus and Australia podcast, really rapidly. That's what it's becoming. I have no problem with that. We'll find the similarities. I'm sure there are a lot. Yeah, yeah. It's very hot. Rocky.

Hot Rocky, yeah. Far away, yeah. Well, and in terms of the difficulty of being on Venus, that takes us into our first takeaway of the episode. Takeaway number one. Venus is covered in hell clouds. That's my term for them. No scientist says that, but they are like the worst clouds I can imagine are the entire atmosphere and sky of Venus all of the time.

That's what's going on. What are they made of? So they're made of sulfuric acid. I was afraid of that. Anything else, I'd have been fine, but I just don't like it. I don't like sulfuric acid. Doesn't agree with me. Is it? Because I did not take a ton of chemistry in school. So when I hear sulfuric acid, I think of like villains in spy movies dumping it on people or some other kind of like cartoony kind of use of it. But that's my main association with it is you don't want to be around it that way. Yeah, it would burn you instantly, burn your skin. And

then it also, it doesn't smell too nice, Alex. The sulfur aspect of it makes it not smell great. Yeah, it is H2SO4. So there's four whole oxygens in there, but it's not good in spite of that. And yeah, it absorbs water and reacts to water and human exposure to almost any quantity of it is dangerous if not fatal. And that's what the clouds surrounding the entire planet of Venus are made of. They're thick and opaque, and they make it so that Earth-based astronomers have never been able to see the surface of Venus with telescopes. They had to send, you know, like space probes and other craft like that in order to see the surface at all. That must have been so exciting.

I could just picture like wanting to see a planet like that, knowing that you only have perpetual storms around it and thinking, we got to see what's underneath. And like the day that it happens and you get whatever your little rover is or whatever lands on the surface to take pictures of it, you get those back after the 16 hour wait or whatever it is. And you're like oh it's rocks it's just rocks we did we did all

that for rocks right rocks and hell clouds and that's it like that's all we uh one source for this is it's a another podcast it's called in our time they had a cambridge oxford and university college london experts all on and they talked about how if you're on the surface of Venus, it would probably just look kind of orange all the time. Yeah. Mainly because of when light gets through these clouds, that's how it looks. Like an orangey-yellow color everywhere. You couldn't even terraform something like that because you can't add water to it because

the sulfuric acid just f***s up the water. Like, did Venus ever have water? Did they know? Yeah. Man, you would be a good Venus scientist. These are all the questions. These are the important things. Venus is freaky a lot because of its clouds, because they trap enough heat to create what's called a runaway greenhouse effect. And so the theory is that Venus did used to have water, and partly because it spins so slowly, but also partly because carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, almost all of the water just got wiped off of the

planet. There's a tiny bit of water vapor in the atmosphere, but their atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide. Earth's atmosphere is way less than 1% carbon dioxide, and we're concerned about it. So Venus's is 96%, and that's why it's insanely hot and probably wiped out any oceans it used to have. Oh, man. What a bummer. It had such potential. Yeah. Astronomers couldn't see the surface, so they just put a bunch of hopes on it because they're like, oh, it's the size of Earth, it's covered in clouds. Like, it must be some rainforest planet that'll be full of, like, amazing soil and, like, cool animals I can ride and it's going to be the best. And then they get there and it's just, like, burning.

It's a really hard place to be. They're like, all right, well, what's next? Let's find something else. Let's find another planet. What's Gazelle 525 doing? Yeah, right. something else let's find another planet what's gazelle 525 doing yeah right like like completely as far away as possible where venus is the closest planet to us and then we had to be like ah no no good no good we'll move on and there's also there's like a cool strain of science fiction writing like i think i think the first fiction i read with venus was these ray bradbury stories

where it was right before probes in the 1960s showed us that it was all rocky and terrible. So he would write these stories where it's just there are people on it and it's this endless rainforest, endless rainfall planet. And the rain sort of makes them insane psychologically in the story. Yeah. But it's like otherwise nice. It's good. What's that called? Oh, dang it.

I have to link it. I think it might just be called the long rain or something. It's, um, it rains perpetually. And there's one guy who gets so mad from it that he just puts his mouth, he opens his mouth and puts it up towards the sky and decides to drown himself. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember that story. Yeah. And so that was what humanity was like hoping. Not the, not the going psycho part, but the, oh, it'll just be this lush planet. And instead it's clouds of sulfuric acid. And then also it does rain on Venus, but the rain is sulfuric acid. And then also it evaporates before it ever gets to the ground because the planet is so hot. So the clouds are just raining acid inside themselves all of the time,

which is very scary to think about. This is sort of how I pictured, like Doom is how I'm picturing it, when I used to play that game. Oh. You familiar with it? Yeah, like, the whole landscape is just a bad color and kind of freaky. Yeah, it's all, it all looks wrong. It's all kind of this, like, hazy yellow.

I mean, granted, I'd be pretty pumped to find so much life that they have in Doom, but yeah, it's, it's's just it looks like hell it's just hell what if nasa was like so the probe found life it's all demons um i don't know if anyone's excited or not or or what but yeah uh it doesn't look like they can get off the planet which is good but do we want to go our top experts are working on level four uh there's a really hard there i see the body armor but i don't get to it anyway that's nasty for you that's what we're doing um i don't know if it's helpful we found a trap door behind what seems to be a nazi flag i don't know if that's like a holdout from wolfenstein it's very strange see that that's the thing if we do find a planet like that we send the robot

hitler because clearly he's comfortable there like then we have a use for him fine right put chain gun hands hitler on that planet and see if he can terraform for us and also uh with these clouds there are there are more ways they're crazy. One of them is that they move. So this is this very slow spinning planet, Venus, but the clouds move incredibly fast. According to Universe Today, the top layer of the clouds reach a speed of 355 kilometers per hour, which is the same speed as the jet stream on Earth.

And then as you get lower, there's this middle layer where they reach speeds of more than 700 kilometers per hour, which is faster than the fastest tornado ever recorded on Earth. It's faster than that all of the time, just whipping in circles around the planet. You know what they don't have, though? Avalanches. So there's a plus. There's one natural disaster they don't get. Do they have earthquakes? Probably not.

I think you're really focusing on the negative here. I was hoping you were doing like Colorado or or california pride where you're like well i've been through some stuff too so i don't know well yeah i'm look i've come from the school hard knocks to venus get out of here venus get out of here you dumb morning star. Who gives a shit about you? And then also with the clouds, so there's also two new things we discovered about the clouds that are recent findings about why they're crazy. And one of them is that we just found a lower layer of the cloud that is like a super cloud in the sense that it's 4,660 miles long,

which is about 7,500 kilometers. And it zooms across the surface of the planet at 203 miles per hour, or 328 kilometers. And it's also been there since at least 1983, according to scientists. So based on recent probes and recent studies, we knew about the bad clouds and then the worst clouds in the middle, and now there's this lower layer of cloud that's just one giant mass and like extra sweeping across the whole surface of the planet. Okay. So is sulfuric acid flowing? Where is that? Which cloud is making the sulfuric acid? The top one? They're all made of it. No. Perfect. But in particular, the middle one is full of it. Basically,

the entire atmosphere of Venus is like carbon dioxide gas and then sulfuric acid clouds. That's basically all of the material there. And it's not a great space for like a human, but none of us are there. So I guess it's okay. I can do what I want. It's nice to see from a distance. One more thing about these clouds is that there is a pretty recent study, and also it fits in with just general theories people have had before, suggesting that the clouds of Venus might have like alien microbe life in them, and possibly a whole lot, which is cool and also kind of like, I guess on some level, freaky if you're scared of alien germs. Well, that's very cool. like, I guess on some level, freaky if you're scared of alien germs.

Well, that's very cool. There could be life in the clouds of Venus? Yeah. So there was first just like the theoretical way, according to Andrew Coates, University College London, who was on the In Our Time podcast. Like if you get high enough in the layers of the clouds, the temperature is not too bad and the air pressure is not too bad. And there's a tiny bit of water up there so there could be like extremophile bacteria like kind of like how there's extreme bacteria in the vents of the oceans or other other kind of hard places to be and then there was a study in 2018 in the journal astrobiology that said that we see a lot of like fluctuating color and shade appearance in the clouds. And one thing that could explain it is just massive amounts of airborne germ life,

which I read as meaning just like seas of it up there, which would be pretty freaky. But when we observe the clouds, we see changing shapes and colors, and that could be one reason. Oh, interesting. That's fascinating. Yeah. You know what you should do? You should have those from oxford and cambridge on this show and doing this not me i don't i am not helpful well i i was going to book the germs but they were busy uh orbiting venus or whatever and so you know we're doing what we can

they will you got to feel bad for them. They've got long days over there. Their Google calendar is just germ. Like, it's just pillars of that every day. That's that. For 247 hours or whatever it is. Oh, right. Yeah, it's just this huge, it wouldn't make any sense as a Google calendar. Don't even try to build a Google.

You need to, you need a whole new design. Silly. Well, and one more thing about the clouds that brings us into takeaway two. The thing is that Venus's clouds reflect away more than half of the sun's light. So less than half of the sun's light even gets down to the surface because the clouds are so thick and so reflective, which brings us to takeaway number two. Venus sparked the science of astronomy with bad consequences for an entire continent. Led to real tough stuff in the region of Australia in particular.

Oh, we're back in Australia. Jesus Christ. Okay. It's on my mind. Yeah, this is a very Australia show. Oh, okay. So how did it destroy Australia? I don't understand.

I made that kind of a long takeaway. Let's start with, there's kind of two things here. There's like ancient astronomy, and then there's the race to see the transit of Venus, which is going to be the thing that ends up messing with Australia. The thing with Venus being fun to early astronomers is that you can see it without a telescope. And you can also see it during the day, because it's very, very bright. And also, since it's a planet that's close to us, it's often in the sky. Yeah. So a lot of early astronomers were like, one thing I know is that I keep seeing this bright thing that I'll call the morning star and the evening star when it's actually a planet. And not, not two different stars, you dumb Greeks. That was a thing in my son's book. It was like the, the dumb Greeks thought that there was an

evening star and then a different morning star. And I realized it was just going around the other side of our planet. Yeah, that's right. I also, I'm excited that children's books are teaching kids that the Greeks were dumb. Because yeah, they thought there were four elements. They were idiots. Good. Admittedly, a new take.

Athens, not the birthplace of thought after all. Pretty dumb, everybody there. Just imagining just like a children's history book, like Athens, city of morons. And then you open it up and it's just dunking on all of them. Like Pericles, no good ideas. Everybody thought this Socrates guy was so smart. That dummy ate hemlock. Yeah.

Everybody knows you don't eat hemlock. Yeah, bad for you. Come on. That will kill you. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne.

I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests

as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Yeah, and so that's all exactly right. And there's a thing where Venus and just you, a person, can observe this.

Venus has two phases, sort of like the moon has a bunch of phases where it's waxing and waning and full and new and so on. Venus has one phase where it appears in the morning sky and another phase where it appears in the evening sky. And so that's why its name is pretty ancient, because the phases each last about nine and a half months. And so the Romans named it after Venus, the goddess of love, because that cycle sort of matches human pregnancy. Like that nine and a half month cycle of being morning or evening. And then the Sumerians also associated it with Ishtar, which was their love goddess. Like a lot of cultures, not all of them, but a lot of cultures said, there's like a pregnancy element to this morning evening star thing we're gonna do that that's very cool well i had no idea that's why they named it after uh venus yeah and we're getting

that also from in our time yeah is this uh this general thing and it's not universal but it is way smarter than i expected a planet name to be i usually just figure they're kind of random and based on who who the big gods were you know right just pointed to all the heavies and they're like, all right, you get to be that one. You get to be that one. Because in the Greeks, that morning star, they called it Lightbringer. But when it's translated, whatever that ancient Greek is, translated to Latin. This is also my son's book, by the way, which makes it sound like it's a very smart book. It's not. That means Lucifer. That was what the Greeks called it.

Yeah, a lot of this stuff just sort of filters down to us in the present. And then we're like, I don't know, that's what it's called. But they're like, no, I thought it through. It was a whole deal. Yeah. Sure you did. It's fine. Nobody cares.

We're not going there. We already know that. Call it whatever you want. And then in other cultures, too, Venus was something they either observed or prioritized. In ancient Chinese astronomy, Venus was called the golden planet of the metal element. And then in Mayan astronomy, the cycles of it were tracked very extensively in almanacs. And according to the New York Times, if you go to Chichen Itza and look at an observatory there that's been called El Caracol, it has a bunch of sight lines designed specifically

just to observe Venus. Like that's the whole point of parts of the structure. There's even, there was a paper in 2007 by Ray Norris, who's a researcher at CSIRO, which is Australia's National Science Agency. And he says the Y'all New People of Australia called Venus Banumbir and had a belief that it is a goddess who came across the sea during the dreaming. And then they tracked Venus's cycles well enough to hold morning star ceremonies when it would first kind of reappear in its new cycle. So they're all points of the world people are like, I can see that, I can calculate it, let's do it. Like long before we had lenses or points of the world. People are like, I can see that. I can calculate it. Let's do it. Like long before we had lenses or any of the other fancy telescope stuff.

It's objectively the second coolest thing in the sky at night. I mean, there's the moon, which is very cool and fun. Yeah. But Venus is definitely the next because it's so bright all the time. Yeah. You can't look at the sky without being like, oh, what's that one? So I get it. I get why every single culture has a thing for it yeah yeah but it's it's what's interesting to me is not only that they were like they didn't just assign some mythology to it they're like hey there's a crazy

thing here's a good story about it they wrote they did that but then they were also like but also let's just track this thing and see what it does like there was like some real science to every single portion of it where they're like, okay, yeah, this is the goddess of birth, all that good stuff, but also we need to know how long it's in the sky for because there's got to be some predictability here. That was early astronomy.

It's very exciting that they were doing that. Yeah, exactly. It's a really cool commitment to actually figuring it out. It's also one source I drew on here, they just pointed out the general obvious thing that they had way less light pollution than we do. So also it was just easier for people to see Venus and see everything else in the sky.

You had a much more interesting night sky to look at. Maybe that's why. So when I said earlier that it's the second most interesting thing in the sky, I live in Los Angeles, and it's one of maybe five things in the sky at night. So yeah, it's like number two on a list of five i guess other people had like the milky way to look at things like the big clouds of stars above them i guess that would have been more exciting you're like well you got the moon venus the hollywood sign uh you got you got those like beams of light over a premiere in a cartoon.

There's not a lot to see here. There's a lot of planes, a lot of helicopters. I can offer you a lot of information on those. Should we talk about that instead? That reminds me of a very, it's my favorite story about the brightness of Venus, because now that we've researched that, I have this. There was a time in 2012 where there was an Air Canada pilot who was flying over the Atlantic. And apparently he was sleepy and apparently not paying very close attention. And he mistook Venus for an aircraft. So he was flying his Air Canada plane. He saw Venus. He thought that is an oncoming aircraft. And they like dove toward the ocean to try to avoid it and like took evasive action. And he was radioing in like,

what do I do about this light that's coming toward us? But it was just a sleepy pilot. And apparently 16 passengers and crew were injured and they had to like, like do a lot of paperwork and figuring it out afterward. He just mistook the very bright planet of Venus for a whole nother plane. What a great realization that must've been later when they actually did all the research and everything like okay well let's try and figure out what it was okay i think we've landed on what it is it's a planet and he was like oh yeah now that you mention it that it was sort of planet life

how is everybody are they okay i thought it was a plane with clouds all over it. What? Okay. But and so Venus has this like central place in all of astronomy. And then there's one exciting story that then ends up having a lot of world consequences, where there's an astronomical phenomenon that Venus does that the entire world tried to measure. Because there's something called the transit of Venus. And the most recent one was in 2012. I'm realizing that I don't think I took the time to see it. Have you heard of the like the transit of Venus? No. So that is when it's like, it's purely an Earth perspective thing. But it's when the Sun and Venus and Earth line up in a way

where it looks like you can see a little dot going across the front of the sun if you look at it safely and that's venus like crossing our view of the sun during the day or night or whenever it's like a cute little eclipse yeah yeah i guess that's kind of cool i'm just i mean we have such great eclipses we've got a moon venus you wouldn't know anything about that but we have a moon here you see venus doesn't have any moons right and it does not have any moons yeah it's just you're like of course it doesn't idiot yeah so yeah so the transit of venus has been happening, because just the way the orbits line up and everything, it happens once in a while. It's also on a really weird frequency where Venus and Earth's orbits are sort of on different angles. And so, long story short, we'll get a transit of Venus twice eight years apart.

So there will be a time, for instance, we had one in 2004, and then we had one in 2012. Like, that was the pair of them. But after that pair, it doesn't happen again for at least 100 years. So the next transit of Venus is in the year 2117. And if you're listening to this then, go check it out. Good job. But so it's a very, very rare phenomenon. And it was first seen by Europeans in like a sciency era in 1639, that the astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks observed one in England. And then in 1716,

the British astronomer Edmund Halley, who's like, you know, Halley's Comet and everything, he wrote a 10 page essay. And he wrote it in Latin, because he wanted to reach as many people as he could. And I guess that was the move in 1716. You're like, oh, everyone studied Latin in Europe. We'll do that. But he wrote an essay that said, look, I calculated the next one. It's in 1761, and then there's another one eight years later. We need to make sure to see that from as many places on the Earth as possible

because if we put all those calculations together, we can figure out exciting stuff like how far the earth is from the sun and where we are in the universe and like it'll be an amazing finding but we need to like hurry up and put people everywhere you know 40 or so years from now uh to do this and hayley like knew he would be 104 years old when that happens so on his deathbed he was like i really hope this transit of venus thing works out i worked really hard to like get people going for it uh and then a bunch of european countries worked together to send astronomers to as many distant corners of the world as they could that's awesome that everybody like all i know certainly a lot of those countries

did not like each other but they're all kind of working together to be like dude this is for a higher purpose we're gonna learn about something bigger than ourselves here. So we have to work together. That's like, when the good guys have to team up with the bad guy. I love it. Yeah, it was it was teamwork and also competitive. And a lot of this is coming from a book called Chasing Venus, the Race to Measure the Heavens by Andrea Wolfe, who's a British writer and design historian. But in particular, the British government and science community really got going on sending people to do it because they found out the French were doing it. They didn't like each other, and so that's why they bothered. It was like, oh, well, if the French are doing it, we have to beat them. She describes it also as a situation where like these countries are they don't like

each other they don't speak the same language they're often at war with each other like in the 1760s when this happened like britain and france fought a bunch of wars but they also worked together on this thing and she also says their systems of measurement also didn't even match most of the time like england germany austria norway all had different units for what they called a mile and then france had such a complicated measurement system that different French towns measured things differently from each other. So it was really hard for the world to work together. They didn't have the metric and America thing we have now. That's awesome.

That's very cool. I had no idea. But somehow it f***ed Australia, huh? Yeah. And so then the trouble is, so what ended up happening is there's that pair every eight years of two of them. The 1761 observations, they kind of did okay. And then they were like, 1769, we got to nail it. Like, this is the one. And observers from five different countries observed it from Europe, North America, India, and Tahiti, and got a pretty good measurement of how far the Earth is from the sun. The Tahiti measurement came from Captain James Cook, who was a famous British sea explorer. And his first major voyage was not to explore the South Pacific.

It was to go see the transit of Venus from the South Pacific. And then like, if you get around to it, please see if there are any continents down here. And then he established British Empire contact with Tahiti, Eastern Australia, and New Zealand. And then just all of imperialism happened from there to those places. Oh, wow. So that was originally just to see Venus cross in front of the sun. Yeah. I was just amazed that that was the whole reason that Australia became like this exile for Europeans and the British prisoners was because of Venus. And especially being American, I just sort of assumed that the explorers were mainly trying to find land. But this voyage that led the British Empire to be the first Europeans to come to Australia in particular

was for astronomy stuff, like to figure out how close we are to the sun. That's fascinating. I have nothing to add other than to say that that's really interesting. But so hello again to our Australian listeners. Keep featuring you today. That was a lot of the story of that place.

And we're also going to link an article called Captain Cook wanted to introduce British justice to indigenous people. Instead, he became increasingly cruel and violent by Shino Kaneshi, Australian Research Council Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Because James Cook has like statues, but he shouldn't. He's a bad guy. Yeah. Yeah, he's kind of a bad guy. Yeah. Yeah.

He's kind of a problematic history. Yeah. And from there, we'll go into the final takeaway of the main episode. Takeaway number three. Venus exploration might be the all-time greatest success of the Soviet space program. Wait. So, okay. They've put a lot of their energy into exploring Venus?

Never knew this until I was looking into what's going on with the planet Venus. The Soviets are famous for Sputnik and first person in space and things, but they did an amazing amount of work exploring Venus for the rest of humanity. When did they do this? From 1961 all the way to 1983, so 22 years there, From 1961 all the way to 1983, so 22 years there, the Soviet Union sent 16 probe missions to Venus. It was called the Venera program. Venera is just the Russian word for Venus. And it was some really cutting edge and relatively impressive space probe work, especially because Venus is such a horrible place for anything to be, including a probe.

So they must have just melted a bunch of stuff on the way that they yeah yeah something did that they like spent years trying to get i just do we know how long it takes to get anything to venus do you have that just like off the top of your head must be about as long as mars right so with i know that with current nasa rocket technology it takes about 100 days to get something to venus especially because the sun's gravity pulls you toward it oh um so their their rockets weren't as good then. But it's still relatively fast. That's faster than Mars. That's really fast. That's faster than I thought it would be. Yeah. And then yeah, so I'm sure that the first things that they sent there, they sent through the clouds, and they just got nuked. And they were like, Okay, well, let's build something

else. Let's see. Nickel, maybe does nickel have a higher melting point it's been hard to find exact sourcing on precisely why the soviets were so excited about exploring venus but it has to be that optimism we were talking about before of oh it's covered in clouds and it's earth-shaped and well i can't wait to find this wonderful garden and and they didn't find it but they're a lot of why we know it's not that uh at all they did for them that i guess we i begrudgingly salute them i just proceed us into this being a pro-soviet podcast like thank you comrade exactly uh folks stalin was good and did no famines um really awesome yeah so the takeaway is stalin not as bad as you thought he was you owe him a thank you yeah and so they had 16 missions and there were a couple key ones there

was one called venera 4 that was the first earth spacecraft ever to return data from inside another planet's atmosphere so in 1967 it immediately immediately found how crazy Venus is below the atmosphere, well, inside it. And then the probe Venera 8 was able to survive on the surface of Venus for almost an hour, withstanding crushing pressure 92 times stronger than Earth's surface. And then we got our first ever pictures of Venus's surface in black and white from Venera 9 and 10, and then also in color from Venera 13. This was like a pretty effective program for showing us exactly what's going on there and why we shouldn't go. You sent me the pictures, and I looked at them, and I'm going to say not much to write home about. It's sort of a rectangle picture of rocks,

and that's what's going on. Yeah, I'm trying to think of what to equate it to it just looks like maybe like death valley like if you're just gonna look at the ground on death valley and it is also when i think of probes or rovers or something going to a planet i think of those mars rovers yeah and when when nasa sends them it's a lot of oh the rover's still going for a few more weeks that's pretty cool and all these venus probes it's like we have a few minutes like snap snap snap crushed that's it alex i have uh something for you oh a while back the uh unsinkable robert brockway did an article on cracked a website where you and i used to work a long time ago that was about the sounds of planets the sounds that they make and i went back and listened to time ago that was about the sounds of planets, the sounds that they

make. And I went back and listened to the sound that Venus makes. And I was like, oh, my son has a toy that makes that same sound. And so I brought it with me and I can play it for you. This is thrilling. Let's do it. And listen to the noise it makes. That's almost like identical to how venus sounds it sounds like you're something's about to leap out of the shadows and kill you yeah at every single moment it's just like these like tense strings and like it's on an ominous noise if i remember right at least a few of those space sounds were also creepy like that like i guess space just sounds creepy but this also contributes

to my belief that like venus is like if a planet was a monster like if just an entire planet we had fangs and teeth and scary winds like that's it yeah you have to wonder how many times the russian scientists were just like let's just like give up on this one don't go stop sending stuff there we don't want it to know we exist right as soon as it finds out it's gonna just come by oh boy okay well and also with what the the rest of the soviet space program was like i feel like they're underrated for this venus stuff and overrated for almost everything else. Because they have a lot of firsts, but it's a lot of stuff that the US did immediately after them and was just getting around to. And they let a lot of cosmonauts die because they're not a nice government and they kept a lot of things secret from their own public. It's not a great

program to me. But this Venus thing they did on the side nobody knows about is great. Really good work. Yeah. When it wasn't jeopardizing human life, it turns out they're doing some really good work out there. Right. Yeah. Without the death part, they can really get down to it. I like it.

Yeah. When they weren't leaving cosmonauts out in the middle of the Siberian wilderness to be eaten by wolves when they crash landed. Then it's, you know, you look past that some really great venus work honestly man yeah now i just want to link people to that gun that they brought for when they land and no one can help them and the animals come to try to eat them that's a real thing yeah they had an actual there was a space-issued gun that they had yeah Yeah. And also, as far as I think it's really great that anybody explored Venus, and if the Soviets were the ones to do it, good. Because also, there's a few things we'll link about the importance of studying Venus in general. Because for one thing, according to

Paul Sutter, who writes for space.com, he describes Venus as like prototypical of greenhouse gases getting out of control. And so there might be instructive lessons for, you know, Earth, another planet that has greenhouse gases. And it's also something that's useful for finding out if there are other Earth-like planets out there, because according to Carolyn Crawford at Cambridge, Venus teaches us that a superficially Earth-like planet can be extremely unlike earth. And so that's very, that's a very helpful lesson for looking at stuff that's extremely far away.

Like if it, cause it could be like Venus where it's the same size and it has clouds or some other like little things that are like earth. But then when you get down to it, it's crazy. It's, it's a whole nother thing. Yeah. Those Goldilocks planets aren't all they're cracked up to be. I feel like you could do a lot of work for avoiding global warming on our planet if we could just convince the russians to send like an oil barrel up there and plant it just put it out there halfway in the ground and then send it some

something that could take pictures be like oh oh man there was like a whole society here they must have done this look greenhouse gases got out of control here they killed everything we got it we can't become venus i could go a long way just totally fraudulent evidence i'm dumb enough to believe it yeah i'm dumb enough i'd i'd fall for that i, oh, yeah, we got to do something. I got to start recycling more. The planet is covered in Republican politician skeletons. I don't know why, but it's something instructive for the rest of us. That's what I think.

Totally unfair. It's doable. It's all fair. Don't think. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic, NASA Project Havoc. Let me say that one more time. There is something called NASA Project Havoc. Let me say that one more time. There is something called NASA Project Havoc. That is a real NASA idea. Visit sifpod.fun to hear about what the heck

that might be and back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the planet Venus with us. I use that verb exploring in this thank you every time, and it feels extra epic with a whole planet. Anyway, here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Venus is covered in hell clouds. Takeaway number two, Venus sparked the science of astronomy with horrific consequences for an entire continent, specifically Oceania. And takeaway number three, Venus exploration might be the all-time greatest success of the Soviet space program. Those are the takeaways.

Also, please follow our guest. Soren Bui writes for American Dad, and that is on TBS in the United States. It airs on Mondays at 10, 9 central, and it's very funny. Please watch it. There are new episodes going on right now when this podcast drops, like that same Monday. And then, holy cow, Soren Bui co-hosts a podcast with Daniel O'Brien every week. It's called Quick Question with Soren and Daniel. It is very fun and warm, and it is just a nice place to be.

Search that name, Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, in your podcast app. There's also a link to it in the links for this podcast episode at sifpod.fun. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article from Scientific American. It's called The Other Red Planet, How the Soviet Union Scored an Interplanetary First at Venus 45 Years Ago. And that's by Rachel Kaufman. An amazing British radio show it is called In Our Time. It's a BBC radio production, and then it's distributed free worldwide as a podcast. And their episode about Venus featured three experts, Carolyn Crawford of Cambridge, Colin

Wilson of Oxford, and Andrew Coates of University College London. And then, of course, like all episodes of that show, it was hosted by Melvin Bragg. And then one more source I really want to highlight because it is an amazing breakdown of the actions of Captain James Cook and the ramifications of James Cook for an entire area of the world. Australia, New Zealand, lots more of the South Pacific, and eventually the Hawaiian Islands. It's an article called Captain Cook Wanted to Introduce British Justice to Indigenous People. Instead, He Became Increasingly Cruel and Violent. It is by Shino Kaneshi, who is an Australian Research Council research fellow at the University

of Western Australia. That's an article that we did not get into the details of on the show, at least partly because a lot of the details are grisly. James Cook committed some pretty atrocious acts, very on purpose in his life. And so I almost don't want to burden you with that unless you're in like a space to hear it. But the link is there to find out more about this figure that is seen as a Columbus type in all of the senses. So I highly recommend that and all the rest of our sources this week. Find those and more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. The Budos Band's next album is called Long in the Tooth.

It releases October 9th, and you can get your copy at daptonerecords.com. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. See more of Burt's art on Instagram at Burt Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks also to

Sorin Bui for like a whole lot of things, especially in these past couple months, because I mean, they've been hard on everyone in all kinds of different ways. I've had a great deal going on the last few months. Sorin has also had a great deal going on the last few months. And he's still found the time to kind of help me process a lot of things that have happened, especially professionally. He didn't have to do that, but he's the kind of guy who would. And so I'm really grateful to him for it. And extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons.

I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.