Venus's Surface May Be 1 Billion Years Old 107
dptalia writes, "For a while scientists have believed that Venus's surface is fairly young, having recently been covered by lava 1 to 3 kilometers deep. However, more study into photos sent back by Magellan seems to show that the cataclysmic volcano theory is wrong. Now scientists are postulating that Venus's surface may be a billion years old and could be probed to determine the history of the planet."
Robotic Lander (Score:1)
Not impossible, but it'll be a lot to consider.
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The Russian landers were built with insulating systems designed to buy them a couple of hours before being overwhelmed. That is indeed a Hard Problem.
Maybe we need to just buy a flare-riding ship, which carries a small black hole onboard that functions as a billion-ton heatsink. Anybody got the number for the Daedalus Club?
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No no, you're overlooking a significant detail. Portable size black holes are not cold, they're extremely hot due to Hawking radiation. So you wouldn't want to have one with you on Venus of all places. Pluto maybe, but not Venus...
However, a suitable amount of cryo-cold neutronium in a high-pressure container, now that just might do the trick... Negligibly small surface area m
Re:Robotic Lander (Score:5, Funny)
+1 Funny. :-) (Score:1)
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Pretty please?
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For your viewing displeasure: The Day After Tomorrow (2004) [imdb.com]. IMDB plot summary: "A climatologist tries to figu
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Cooling (Score:2)
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Mercury [noblemind.com] (boils at 356.58 C)
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Mercury would be better for solar flare observation.
we can send people (Score:2)
To walk on the surface:
Use a phase-change material, possibly plain water ice, to keep people cool while they walk about.
The pressure is rough, but doable. It's 94 atmospheres worth. In terms of water depth, it's about 1000 meters or 3000 feet. You need to use a mixture of oxygen, hydrogen, and either helium or neon. (to avoid explosion, you don't add the hydrogen until your total pressure is such that the par
Nuh-uh! (Score:3, Funny)
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Unfortunately, this teensy bit of elementary school logic is lost on the more frothy-mouthed "supporters" of my faith. God help them!
I make a habit of mentioning this because I'm tired of fundamentalist wackos getting all the attention in this debate, and I do not take your la
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You got me laughing there. It seems to me that it's the most "basic" reflex of all to invent a Big Daddy who's watching over everything, including my spelling in this post, all the planetary life wiped out by geological cataclysms and asteroid strikes, and the 700,000 Iraqis who are now dead because Haliburton shares needed a boost.
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The point of Christianity is that there are no innocents. God is perfect and holy, and because of our sin, God is justified in letting everyone of us suffer. He is not obligated to any of us, and it's His Grace that allows us to be saved f
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Eternal damnation that he created, just to torture us, unbelievers/sinners/people he does not like, for eternity. That's sick, not perfect!
And by the way, who created this perfect being?
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Who created the stuff that participated in the Big Bang?
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Probably, no one. But as I scientist, I get to ask that question and engage in a serious search for answers that will undergo critical theoretical and emperical testing.
That's the difference between science and religion. Christians believe in god based on no creditable evidence, and asking "who created god" is heresy--to ask that question puts you outside of the limited, narrow bounds of religion. Scientists believe based on plenty of strong evidenc
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Both Science and Religion can help a person understand that his or her mind is too small to know everything and that we never will know everything. It's the subsequent assumptions that a person makes that will distinguish him or her from a superstitious (and frequently dogmatic) lunatic.
The Earth's mu
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So you think that the Bible doesn't have any good moral guidelines in it? Even if it were all a work of fiction (which I don't believe), it's still a good source of practical knowledge on how to relate to others. It's because of the Bible that I gave up 4 spring breaks in college to work in a homeless shelter, serving food and cleaning up after drug addicts instead of partying in Cancun with all of
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The Jewish-Christian writings were written over a long period of time by a bunch of different blokes. Their "guidelines" aren't consistent, are often unclear, and range from quaint to obsolete. It's a mess. I don't believe that a sane Creator would write so badly. But then, I don't believe that a s
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That the philosophy of Jesus has been distorted, twist
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At best, a religion can give a person a philosophy for facing tough times. A positive attitude helps people survive prolonged exposure to doctors and in general makes things seem easier to endure.
Unfortunately, so do insanity and dementia. So the challenge for the Faithful is to prove that they're not insane or demented.
When I see religious zealots condemning scientific research and killing people in
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= = =
Terrahertz, I appreciate your considered reply. I want to let you know that I read the references you cited.
At best, a religion can give a person a philosophy for facing tough times. A positive attitude helps people survive prolonged exposure to doctors and in general makes things seem easier to endure.
Unfortunately, so do insanity and dementia. So the challenge for the Faithful
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Unfortunately, so do insanity and dementia. So the challenge for the Faithful is to prove that they're not insane or demented.
I agree that a challenge exists, but I don't think it's for the innocent to combat a presumption of guilt when it comes to insanity or dementia. In my vocabulary, atheists really are "God p
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In other words, I am saying that if you are going to believe in something that you can't see or demonstrate (your "faith"), you need to demonstrate that you're not nuts. You can have your bugbears and superstitions, but you had better not think that they or the "voice in your head" can justify your deciding to kill someone. (I mean don't mean the "tu" you, by the w
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I disagree with all interpretations of the Gospels that permit the taking of life under
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This makes it possible for you to live in a society where murder is not the norm.
But there have been societies -- and religions -- where murder ("sacrifice", conversion of the infidel, extirpation of heresy, Holy War) has been acceptable. You're saying they're all wrong and you're right. Some of these societies still stand strongly today. And more such will exist long after th
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also you got me going there : and the 700,000 Iraqis who are now dead because Haliburton shares needed a boost.
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I also find this type of debate annoying and pointless, but since you chimed in so will I. The free will "argument" is trivially easy to demolish, but I'm too bored right now to expend the effort. I will point out that the free will argument completely ig
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Personally, I do believe in God, but at the same time I choose not to judge anyone else based on what they do or don't believe. So long as I don't have to hide what I believe in, I really don't care what other people believe or think. And to terrahertz (911030) I like the way you put it, fits well with my point of view.
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Sheesh, I doubt the wafers cost 3 cents. What sort of mathematics are you doing there? More like 10 for a penny.
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Brilliant!
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Science isn't really a quest for truth. It's more of an intentional and directed quest for falsehood. For example, it can never be "proven" that gravity exists, "it's all just an exceedingly unlikely random occurance" is always a possibility. What science can do is tell you that certain things are false. For example, Aristotle said heavier objects move to the ground faster than lighter objects. Galileo, or so the story goes, showed this to be false by dropping unequal weights from a tower. Newton said
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You gonna lend me the plane?
Oh, I'm supposed to take your word for it? How is that different than taking the word of people who do carbon dating "proving" that the world is older than 6,000 years? Feh. Like you can't fly in a circle above a flat plane. This "spherical Earth" stuff is all a bunch of Satanic lies
You either understand that the w
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Which begs the question: can the creator make a choice?
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The insult should be taken by moderate, rational Christians because the special consideration faith and superstition are given, even to moderates paves the way for firebrand Creationist idiots to swing freely under that cloak of well-intentioned respect for others' beliefs.
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old samples (Score:1)
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A fascinating prospect to be sure, but entirely dependent upon the nature and composition of the crashed/impacted material; high Venusian surface temperatures combining with the highly noxious and corrosive atmosphere pretty much eat or melt away simple ores and many other types of materials. Russia's Venera and Vega spacecraft and NASA's Pioneer are probably little more than slag now, maybe even mostly evaporated into the thick atmosphere as trace elements.
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We don't need Venus for that, we can already see very old rock samples from the very beginnings of the solar system. They are called chondritic asteroids [wikipedia.org].
Basically, chondrites are rocks that have been floating around in space since before the solar system was formed. From this we can deduce the bulk chemical composition of the Earth, among other things, because the solar system formed when the planets and the Sun accreted out of a cloud of chondritic dust particles. Many asteroids in the solar system (inc
Read the article! (Score:3, Informative)
The thread title is misleading!
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Not photos - radar images! (Score:3, Informative)
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I take infrared photos with my camera. Infrared, although not visible to humans, is a form of electromagnetic radiation. If I want to take a photograph of something when there's not enough electromagnetic radiation around, I can use an IR light source. The IR light source sends out electromagnetic waves. Those electromagnetic waves bounce off the objects I'm photographing and come to the camera and I take a picture.
Because of phase interference, th
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I go to sleep for one night, and they change the Standard Model and no one tells me. So what are microwaves, and why aren't they electromagnetic radiation like gamma and UV and IR and radio?
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Photography derives from: photo + graphos = light + drawing. I assume that by light they mean the visible light spectrum. But of course photographs aren't "drawn", so perhaps my literalist interpretation is too narrow.
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Now, a recent "photo," where the position of dark matter was calculated by measuring the gravitational lensing it caused -- I wouldn't try to argue that was a photograph. The photons did not bounce off the material being imaged -- they were rer
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If we're going to be pedantic about the narrow Greek definitions, maybe we should call it a mikrokimatagraph
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The article summary implies that the discovery was made by studying photos - which is the common shorthand for images created by the passive capture of visible light. It also misinforms anyone not familiar with Venus or the Magellan mission into thinking that its been mapped similarly to how we mapped all the other objects in the solar system from orbit. Venus is unique - and the way the most accurate atlas of its surface was created was unique as wel
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I have photos of my son which were made with sonar.
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In synthetic aperture radar you have a one-dimensional antenna. There is no lens or focusing
Color me confused. (Score:2)
Okay, so the previously-held theory was that Venus's surface is ~500 million years old.
But wait!
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That's the old evidence. The new evidence is further down. It says the lava deposits are not deep enough for the old theory to be true.
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Moo (Score:1)
This would make the Scientologists unhappy (Score:2)
Strap yourself in! It's Velikovsky time again!! (Score:1)
the Solar system has not always been in the configuration we observe it today
(Mercury - Venus - Earth - Mars - Dunno - Jupiter - Saturn
and Venus a comet from outside the Solar system. According to Velikovsky the current configuration was arrived
at through a series of planetary cataclysms which expelled Earth from the Saturn system and locked Venus into
today's orbit around th
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ULTIMATE Proof that Intelligent Design is RIGHT! (Score:2)
1. Scientists (the people who are always wrong) had this theory ("just a theory") about the age of the planet's surface. It was wrong, as science usually is.
2. They did some more REAL research into the problem and found that they were wrong and that the planet turns out to possibly be 1 billion years old which is real