How Venus Works

Oh no, that's the one that I was talking about. Oh, I was talking about the b York song Venus as a boy. Oh no, no, no, sorry, I was thinking of It's a good one. I'm mel Venus actually funny enough, Like, honestly, that had not popped into my head and now I won't be able to get it out. So thanks a lot. I thought of you yesterday. I was someone some don't even know who it was. It was just one of

those Facebook posts that comes into your feed said. All it said was now the final countdown by Europe is in your head. That's all it was like, is that? Josh, Wow, that's amazing that's the catchiest song of all time. It was pretty funny. That's great. So, um, chuck, we're doing Venus. And I was like skimming the House of Work site looking for articles and I started to see I saw this one article about how Venus is um starting to get some love again from the space agencies, and um,

how little we actually know about it. And so I was like this, you know, we've never done one on Venus. We don't usually do planet yet. Maybe we should eventually do all the planets over time. Um, but this is a pretty good place to start. Because the more I dug into Venus, the more I was like, this is

one of the most interesting planets of all time. Actually, yeah, like, uh, you know it's described in this article that you put together as a hell escape, and when you start reading get to it, it's like, wow, you will melt and boil if you get near it, or be destroyed. You won't even get near it because the sulphuric acid in the clouds will destroy you, yeah, and your teeth. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, not not a hospitable place, but possibly once was, yeah, which makes the whole thing even

more compelling. It wasn't always like this, you know. Um, it's like the mom and what's eating Gilbert grape when she sees um is it? Juliette Lewis and says I wasn't always like this? And Juliet Lewis says, I wasn't always like this. It's just like that it is, basically, except on a planetary scale. Yeah, And I think the cool thing about Venus to which we can put a pin in this but um, we're starting to gain more interest in Venus now because it could offer a peak

into our own bleak future as a planet. Yes, just like you said, put a pin in that and smoke it in your hat. Um. So it's weird that Venus is this hellscape now that we understand it, because it's a it's a very ancient planet as far as human consciousness of it goes, because it is so bright. It's actually the third brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the moon, thanks comes Venus. Um. So like humans have been able to see it long before we

had anything like telescopes or anything like that. And in fact, as far back as I think sixteen sixty BC or the six hundred BC, um, the Babylonians were tracking it, and they called the Ishtar after the goddess of love and war after the movie. And then yeah, then they would say it Ishtar black, and then some would go, hey, it's not as bad as everyone says, that's right, and then that person would get shouted down, and then the whole cycle would start over again. Yeah, it went by

quite a few different names. It was Ishtar, uh they you know, before the Hellenistic Greeks came along, they thought it was actually two different stars, so it was known as both Vesper the evening star, and Lucifer or Phosphorus the morning star. That's right. And then eventually Pythagoras said, it's just one star everyone, and can we settle on a name? And the Hellenstic Greek said, how about Aphrodite, And then of course the Romans came along said no,

we call it Venus. That's right, and that's where we've settled because the the Western world is modeled on the Roman world. I guess. But Venus, the idea that it is this feminine planet, that it has to do with love and beauty, Uh, it really isn't start contrast to how we understand it today. Since we we did start really exploring it in the nineteen sixties. But even still, if you if you look at um some of the

details of Venus that have been named by people. Apparently almost all of the features on Venus are named after women, Like there's a crater named after Chicago Way, there's a canyon named after Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, so it's it's all about feminine beauty. But it's also like this crazy health gape that will make your teeth fall out and burn you alive. So it's a real

paradox in terms, you know what I mean totally. Uh. It is the second planet from the sun um, which is makes Venus our little neighbor, and which also means that if Venus is getting sunlight, it's getting that light a couple of minutes before we do. Uh. It is terrestrial, so it's made of rocks and solid things as opposed to being like a gas planet like Jupiter and Saturn.

And there's also a boundary between the surface of the planet in the atmosphere, so you know, it is like Earth in some ways, but also not like Earth in a whole lot of ways. Well it, I mean, it is often called Earth's twin and then sometimes Earth's toxic twin.

I think that's an Aerosmith reference. But um, because it is closer to the Sun than we are, it's one one planet in it's orbit actually is between us and the Sun. It falls within our orbit around the Sun, which means that to us here on Earth, Venus seems to have phases like the Moon does, which is pretty cool. Yeah, I think Galilee figure that out in sixteen ten Galileo. Yeah, Oh, you're on a first name basis. Yeah, and I go away back. I can veil him out of jail once.

He's just call him Galley, yeah, the gal or Gigi. Uh so. Yeah, when Venus is on the opposite side of the Sun, it's in full phase, and then it's looks like it's in the new phase when it's between the Earth and the Sun. Yeah, and every once in a while, our alignment with Venus and the Sun is like a perfect line. And it just happened in two twelve, and I don't think I bothered to look, because I don't remember looking. But the next time it's gonna happen

is seen. And unless aging researchers really have some sort of breakthrough, I'm not gonna be around to see that you didn't look, and you call yourself a friend of Gali of Gigi. Yeah, I know you would be so disappointed. It'd be is so disappointed into me. Come on, the jos just look into the sky, right, Uh? So, Venus is they call it the Earth's twin for the similarities, um and not the differences obviously, even though like you said, it's an evil twin. It's about about the same size.

It has about of our mass, but is almost a perfect sphere because it is a slow roller. The Earth spins, obviously, everyone knows, very quickly, revolving once every day every twenty almost every twenty four hours, exactly twenty hours and fifty six minutes, which means of course that that centrifical centrifugal motion is going to bulge the equator. So we're technically an ellipsoid in shape. But Venus spins the very very slowly once every two dred and forty three days earth days.

That is, it spends on its axis. It's the slowest spinner in our solar system and a really kind of perfect little sphere because of that. Yeah, it doesn't produce that bulge because it's so unsightly. And also because of that same slow spin, it has an iron core and molten mantle a lot like Earth does UM and through that that that's that rocky core, that metallic core UM. Earth's magnetic field is produced. But it's also produced because

it's spin so fast. Well, even though it has the same kind of core and mantle that the Earth does, Venus spin so slowly, it can't produce a magnetic field, at least one that's not very strong. UM. I think venus Is magnetic field is fift ten thousands of a percent the strength of Earth's magnetic field. Nothing like you try to use a magnet up there, it's just gonna it'll just melt in your hand, You dummy, don't even try it, and you're dead anyway. Yeah, exactly. Uh. There's

some pretty cool theories about some interesting aspects of Venus. UM. One is, and this is in a theory. It is a fact Venus has no moon. But one of the theories is that Earth's moon used to orbit Venus, but our gravity was so strong we just came in and said that's ours. Now, we'll be taking that moon. I know, imagine seeing that moon approach out of nowhere to would be like melancholy. You know, Oh my god, that movie. I love that movie to just see recently, uh not

too recently. I mean I loved it too. I'm glad you didn't say I enjoyed it, because that's the movie enjoyed, right exactly. I read this article once it called it was um I think it was titled like Lars von Trier is campy, and they were basically like everybody's taking Lars von Trier incorrectly, like this is all He's like a huge joke, sir, Like this is all in jest. And once since I read that, I was like, I

really started to appreciate his stuff a lot differently. Yeah, I mean those are a lot of his films are tough to get through. Yeah, Dad, what you what a part that is once you realize that it's like a joke, or at least as far as large von Trier is concerned, it's a joke, like it definitely, it's just easier to take and watch and it's actually kind of funny and something.

But is that true or were they just sort of I don't I don't know that they They had him quoted as saying like, yeah, you got me, but they made such a strong case that it's tough to tough to not see it that way. I'll see if I can dig it up and send it to you. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Alright, so no moon. Earth perhaps took the moon. Another really interesting thing that has sprung a few different theories is that the backwards spin of

Venus relative to Earth. And this is interesting and that some scientists say, yeah, it's backwards because it used to spend relative to us the same then it slowed down and stopped and started spending the other way. And we can tell this because it's slowing down again. They measured it sixteen years apart, and at the end of that run it spuns six point five minutes slower, which is a lot considering the Earth's rotation slows only by about

one point eight milliseconds every hundred years. So that's the one theory. Others said it's not and never did quote unquote spin backwards. It just got knocked a d and eighty degrees on its axis. So it looks backwards. Yeah, like the planet got flipped upside down somehow, and so to us it looks like it's spinning backwards, but it's spinning the same way it always has, And they're like, well,

how would the planet get knocked upside down? Obvious idea is a planetoid or a meteor or something like that striking it in just the right spot, which is the right force that it flipped the planet upside down. Another one is that the um that Venus's atmosphere so thick. How thick is it? It's so thick it's possible the Sun can create gravitational tides like tides in this atmosphere, and that these tides started slashing back and forth at some point and got so um forceful and strong that

they eventually flipped the planet over. I think this is a really good start. How do you feel? I think it's pretty great actually, And I have one more fact I want to give out chuck um about the the day relative to the year. So you know how the day of Venus is two d forty three earth days. Yeah, this one's a little bit of a head twister. Well, it turns out that Venus orbits the Sun in two hundred and twenty five earth days, which means that the

Venusian day is longer than the Venusian year. Which is a pretty amazing fact in and of itself. Because Venus spins backward relative to the direction it orbits the sun sunrise to like a day night cycle from sunrise to sunrise is actually only a hundred and seventeen earth days because the sun kind of catches up with vn Us in its spin, So it's not a two dtree three days stretch between sunrise. It's actually a hundred and seventeen. So there's three big numbers you need to remember for

Venus day night cycles. A hundred and seventeen days, the year is two D five days, but the day is two hundred forty three days, all relative to us, of course. Well yeah, I mean what else counts nothing? So a minute ago and I said, I think we're off to a good start. I was kind of lying something felt missing. But now we're really off to a good start. I think so too. So we'll take a break and we'll talk a little bit about the surface of this weird healthscape.

Right after this all right, surface of Venus A lot of clues because you know, we're we're still trying to figure out Venus, and like you said, it's getting more interesting to us more recently, which is kind of cool.

But there are clues kind of everywhere. The surface of Venus is one clue that maybe something pretty big did happen, and it's sort of recent past because Venus is about the same age as Earth is um somewhere in the neighborhood of four point eight billion years old, And they look at impact craters to sort of gauge how old a planet might be, like how many things have hit it over time, because they know about how often that might happen, and you know, these are good rough estimates.

But when you look at Venus, the crust of Venus basically looks like it's only a few hundred million years old, so like maybe up to eight hundred million, maybe as little as a hundred and eighty million years old. So that is a big clue that like, yeah, something happened to kind of remake the surface of Venus at some point,

which is really really interesting. Yeah, And I mean Earth's crust is much younger than the planet itself, but Earth has plate tectonics, which you know basically is crust recycling. Venus doesn't have that, so it is significant that the crust is that much younger than the rest of the planet. And it's also made up mostly of basalt um, which I think in the history of stuff you should know the thirteen year history. It's the first time I said it correctly right off the bat instead of what we

used to say basalt or basil, basalt, basalt. I love little sprinkle of basalt cream. Yeah, it's old bay mixed with salt man um so uh, which is volcanic rock, which makes sense because Venus has the most volcanoes of any planet in the Solar System, something like six hundred.

That's they might even still be active right now. So so, but it's weird that the crust would be that old, because it's like, why would have you know, all the volcano has been erupting at around the same time in such measure that it would have remade the entire crust of the planet. It's a it's a head scratcher, as you say it is. The surface of Venus has some huge mountain ranges, some as high as Everest. They have a couple of gigantic highlands um the size of Australia

and South America. You mentioned all those volcanoes, which is just remarkable, Like the most volcanic planet in our Solar system for sure, right, Yeah, by far, I mean I think Earth only has like nine seven. Uh. They have about the same gravity as we do here on Earth,

so you'd feel about the same weight. But there's a little caveat there because of their dense atmosphere, which we're gonna talk about a little bit more in a menu it here, there's tons of surface pressure, so if you were there's no way you would be alive on Venus. But if you happen to be, let's just say, it's about ninety times the pressure that we have here on Earth, So it would be like you're about a full kilometer down underwater into the ocean, yeah, which is kind of crushing.

I was like, oh, you'd be crushed like a tin can, And actually that's not entirely true. I think the diving record is a little deeper than one kilometer, so a human can withstand it, but it's not the kind of thing you want to do. And when you combine it with all the other issues that you've got going on now that you're standing on Venus, somehow that pressure would probably actually be the least of your worries before it

would be the heat. Yeah, you would have a lot of trouble with the heat because, Um, here's another fun fact for you. Mercury is the planet that's closest to the Sun. It's twenty three million miles closer to the Sun than Venus is. But Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system. Want that for a second. Yeah, and that'll all be clear here in a second. Um, we're kind of dancing around it. But it's it's gonna

be fun, so just wait. But in the nineteen sixties, uh, and we'll talk also talk about the various sort of spacecraft that the USSR and NASA has kind of sent up to explore. But the Mariner too recorded did a little fly by and recorded surface temperatures, temperatures between three d and four hundred degrees uh. And it turns out that maybe about half I think recently they calculated it's probably more like eight hundred and eighty degrees fahrenheit, which

basically will melt almost anything. M well, definitely aluminum, zinc, and lead for sure. Yeah. So, um, it's super hot, and it's there's a tremendous amount of pressure at surface level. And I read this article from I think it might have been space dot Com or NASA. I'm not sure where you see Boulder Astronomer Planetary scientists named Kevin McKay drake said, you can feel what it's like. I'm Venus

here on Earth. Heat a hot plate until it glows red, place your palm on its surface, and then run over that hand with the truck. I didn't get that quote. He was saying, it's very hot and there's a tremendous amount of pressure. I think degrees so is it no? But I mean really, I think once you reach a certain temperature and you're placing your hand, I think red hot? Is that that that line where it's like after that? Doesn't really think he was trying to be you know,

he's trying to appeal to the common person. I think so they take an extra class or two now in planetary science speak, their yeah you know, all right. So I guess we've been dancing around like why is it so hot? If it's not as close to the sun as mercury, how can it be that much hotter than mercury?

And it is because Venus is a an environmental nightmare basically, and which is one reason why we're a little more interested now because it gives us a peek, like I said, to what could happen to us in a very long time. But it is. It is a a CEO two nightmare on Venus. Yes, so UM, Venus is locked into a run what's called a runaway greenhouse effect UM, and I actually talked about it in the End of the World

with Josh Clark Um in the Natural Existential Risks episode. UM. But the kind of the broad strokes of it is that the greenhouse effect. You you want to have some degree of the greenhouse effect where you have um visible light coming in from the sun warming the planet, and then the planet re releases some of that heat back through the atmosphere as infrared heat, and not all of it gets re emitted. Some of it is captured by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And this is actually, like

I was saying, you want to have this. This is a beneficial thing because it prevents wild temperature swing between day and night. There's like a nice average temperature that you're going to keep throughout the day and throughout the night because the atmosphere is acting like a blanket preventing all of the heat from re escaping, So you do want some greenhouse gas. But what Venus is teaching us is that there's a there's a point where you can where you can reach this this point of no return

where your greenhouse gas greenhouse effect. Um, it just goes hey wire and becomes it gets locked into a positive feedback loop that is positive only in the most academic sense of that term. In no way is it a good thing at least as far as life or habitability goes. Yeah, and Venus hit this tipping point a few hundred million years ago. Um, the atmosphere got really hot. They basically think the oceans literally boiled off. And you know, because there used to be make oceans and rivers and it

used to be a lot more earth like. But these oceans boiled off turned the atmosphere into water vapor, which just made the problem a lot worse because that's another greenhouse gas. And it just sort of accelerated this thing. And then eventually that water vapor was broken apart by radiation from the sun, by this ultra violet radiation, and all this hydrogen escaped into space, left behind oxygen combining with that carbon, and what you've got is, oh, what

carbon dioxide and no water vapor in the atmosphere. No, and so Earth has I think point zero four carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and we still are able to maintain like a healthy greenhouse gas effect. So so the fact that that it's a runaway greenhouse effect that seems to have made um Venus into this hell escape that it is, that's what kind of makes it a cautionary tail or at least something that's worth investigating much more deeply to find out, like how did it reach this point?

Like where was that tipping point? Because you know, here on Earth we're contributing atmospheric CEO two more and more frequently thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. So it's like, okay, you know, did it hit that point when it reached like uh an atmosphere carbon dioxide or point zero zero eight?

You know what's the what's the difference? And it really matters to us here on Earth because at some point that the the atmospheric concentration of c O two or other greenhouse gases becomes enough that visible I can come in, infrared heat won't go back out, and you've got that that runaway effect that just locks it in and you're in big trouble. So we need to find that out. And it's a good thing that people are starting to talk about exploring Venus now again for the first time

in a while. Let me ask you a question. The End of the World with cho Josh Clark. Is that available on Apple podcast or wherever you find your podcasts? You know, Chuck, as far as I know, wherever you find podcasts, you can find The End of the World with Josh Clark. Attend part series. They don't pull it like Netflix after they're done with you. I don't think. So I haven't checked something in a little while, I'd

be very dismayed. Now it's an excellent series, And if this kind of thing turns you on, then you can listen to that and then quite a few other ways that we might all become extinct. Or if me just speaking for forty five minutes in a monotone turns you on and you're gonna la that's right. Uh So, that's why it's hot on Venus. That's why you know you would just melt if you've managed to reach the surface of Venus. But you wouldn't even manage to reach the

surface of Venus. Because of that atmosphere that we're talking about. You talked about our teeth. Along with nitrogen, the biggest component of the atmosphere of Venus is sulfuric acid, which we call battery acid. And uh yeah, it would uh, I mean, your teeth would be the least of your problems, because you would your skin would burn, your lungs would explode. Just these massive clouds blanket Venus, full of these lightning

storms in sulfuric acid. And it's it's literally like something out of a sci fi movie, right, And if up to this point you're like prepare for this. The Venus member spins on its axis once every two and forty three days, it's a Venutian day. But the upper atmosphere is so um uh yes, that the clouds that make up the upper atmosphere spin around the planet once every four days. They're moving that fast, faster than any tornado

here on Earth. I saw. Um. But then down below, towards the surface, the winds are just like a few miles an hour, So that difference in wind speed creates huge vortices. Apparently there's a vortex that has not fallen apart that stayed raging for a very long time now at the south pole of Venus, and they don't foresee

any time when it's going to stop. So there's huge lightning storms, clouds of surf sulfuric acid that formed vortices in this atmosphere that at surface level is the same surface pressure for the same pressure that you would find one kilometer down in Earth's oceans. Yeah, and then consider that for you know, several billion years. Venus was a

lot like us. Like I said, it was habitable, it had you know, it was fairly temperate, had oceans and rivers and streams, and was kind of balmy, and it was this greenhouse runaway greenhouse gas effect that uh, that kind of made it into this hell escape And like I said, it's a big reason we're going maybe we should look into Mars, but also look into Venus. Yeah.

So I didn't know this, but um there was another space dot com article that did a good job kind of chronicling some of the like the history of exploring Venus. You know, growing up as a Cold War school kid, they didn't tell us like, oh, by the way, the Soviets just had a great breakthrough on Venus. The other let's tell you all about it. I don't remember hearing any of this stuff to you, no, but I think

that's a great little dramatic teaser. Okay, so let's take a little message break and we'll tell you what the what the Rooskys were doing in the nineties sixties right after this. Okay, Chuck, I can't take it any longer. My teeth are falling out from from the suspense. Is that Bob Newhart thing again? Uh? Yeah, So I didn't learn about this since well either, But in the nineteen from like the sixties to the eighties, the USSR was, uh,

they were into Venus. They were they were checking it out with pretty decent regularity through their Venera and Vega programs. And some of these milestones that they hit are some of the like first milestones in just space exploration period UM, not only for Venus UM and sixties. Seven October sixty seven, Venera four was the first probe to ever beam data back from another planet from the atmosphere of another planet. And that's when they said, whoa super hot, very thick.

It was that good? No, yeah, okay, uh they I think the Veneera for technically did make a hard landing. The parachutes of course melted and this thing actually transmitted data for about twenty minutes with photographs before you know, it melted into nothing. And then I think a few years after that, the Nara seven had the first soft landing on any planet other than Earth. Another first in in visiting our Solar system, like before we did stuff

like that. Yeah, well I did not realize it, but apparently Venus is the first planet humanity has ever visited, which is pretty cool. I mean not personally, but you know, we sent some some machines up there as our emissaries, you know. UM in n Venera thirteen recorded the first ever audio on the service of another planet, which is pretty cool. UM. Vega one and two missions in the mid eighties deployed balloons into the atmosphere to make measurements. So a lot of what we know about Venus came

from these early Soviet explorations. UM. But it's not like the you know, the United States just completely ignored Venus. We did have some interest in and I think we had the first ever um I buy of Venus with our Mariner two probe back in nineteen sixty two, I believe, Yeah, that was the one I mentioned earlier that recorded um

what what seems like half accurate temperature the Venus. But there was also the Mariner five and the Mariner ten in sixty seven and seventy four, and then we started to get a little more intense with it, and seventy eight we launched uh an orbiter and a and a multiprobe, the Pioneer Venus orbiter and the the PV multiprobe, and I think the multiprobe sent four different things for entry craft into the atmosphere in December, and then the orbiter

you know, did its thing. It orbited, kind of studied, studied things from a safer distance until nine. Yeah, so we're getting some stuff on Venus, but then it just kind of went away. We stopped. We stopped researching it actually after Magellan, which has launched from the Space Shuttle UM, which by the way, I was reading like the official accident report on the Columbia UM crash, and it is just it's jarring, but it's amazing what this just you know,

scientific explanation of it. Really dry technical stuff still can like really jog your imagination and kind of put you, like in in the catastrophe. Even though they don't seem to be trying to. It's just for some reason, it really kind of gets you in the right way online. Yeah. Yeah, it's like just you know, four page document about what exactly went wrong, exactly when down to you know, I think maybe the the deaths of Second if not the milliseconds. Um, yeah,

they really, they really dug into it. Documentary. It's still out there. It's kinna just it's stirring. It's gonna just knock you on your But have you seen twelve years of slave yet? No? You're gonna ask you that like once a year. You have you have homework this this weekend. But oh I know. Um. But anyway, as I was saying, Magellan was launched from the space shut in and it was kind of hanging out monitoring Venus until and then

after that, and even kind of a little bit before that. Um, just the focus on Venus kind of started to die, in no small part because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, right yeah, I mean they were they were way more into it, into it than we were, and then you know, that collapsed and so a lot of

that stuff stopped. Um NASA said, you know what, you get a lot more out of your exploration dollar by going to Mars because it's it's way more hospitable than Venus is, and so we can use these robots and now you know with Mars landers and it's just amazing, like the stuff that we're bringing back from Mars. But as Yeah, but as a result, Venus was sort of

like cast aside because it's just it's tough. I think that Venera thirteen and a T two has the record for the longest man made object ever on Venus, and that was two hours before it melted. Yeah, that's it. And that's a lot of dough to sink into something that you know, like and you know that was when a T two we could I'm sure we could get something up there for for more hours than that now, but I'm not sure how much longer. No, but we

need to figure it out. And the only way to figure it out it is to start going back there. And so so we are I think this, uh, this month June NASA said, hey, everybody, get this. We've got two visits planned, two missions planned for Venus. By um there's the Veritas mission, which has a bunch of different scientific instruments named in its name. It's a big acronym. There's also Da Vinci Plus, which sounds like a new streaming service for maybe PBS, and they're both gonna be

going by. But it's not just the United States who has it's it's UM eyes trained on our sites, trained on on Venus, Europe UM, the E s A has a Venus program in the works, India does as well, Russia does as well. And there's a private company called rocket Lab that's going to be sending something up there by three. Actually, Venus is literally hot right now. It is. I have seen it in the news and I think, uh,

did you mention how the old house stuff works? Website that we worked for had a really recent article on on this right like why we were poking around? That's what initially caught my attention about did you see the thing? Though? Also, um,

there was a big big to do. I think in June of or at least sometime in there was a bunch of press on Venus because some British researchers said, hey, we were examining the Venusian atmosphere with radio telescope and we found a bio signature phosphine, and everybody said, what are you talking about and they said, no, really check

it out. So they wrote this paper, and um, it does make kind of sense to an extent that that you might find life at some port, some like point in the Venetian atmosphere, because parts of it are you know, the same temperature and in air pressure as you'd find on Earth. But it also just makes zero sense because it's just so inhospitable too, you know, yeah, I mean it would have to have really evolved to be able

to survive. And again, maybe possible. But then some other scientists came along because they, you know, they smelled something rotten and they said, let me see those papers. And they looked him over and they said, you know what, we're not gonna say this is We're not going to

falsify this and say this is definitely wrong. But maybe you might have gotten this confused with sulfur dioxide instead of phosphine because they these chemicals both absorb radio waves that are similar frequency, and everyone sort of has made this mistake at some point. Guys, he shouldn't feel too bad, but it's probably sulfur dioxide. It makes a lot more sense. Um, But like like I said, they didn't definitely shoot it down, and I think it just sort of piqued everyone's interest

to kind of get going again. And with these you know, with these radio telescopes, we can finally you know, I think for a long time we couldn't even see anything at all because of the telescopes that we had, right, Yeah, it's just blanketed by the super thick atmosphere that light can't even penetrate any longer. It's so um. Now that we have radio telescopes, we can see a lot more clearly into it. But yeah, we're just on the very

beginning cusp of starting to study it. And it is possible that there is that there was a biosignature and the Bridge didn't get it wrong, um, because it would have to be a low oxygen um like anaerobic type of life, and that that's exactly the kind of um organism that produces phosphine. So it's not like it's been settled, like you were saying. But um, the it's just tantalizing,

you know. It's just in in addition to learning more about Venus and maybe the lessons it can teach us about what we need to do or not do here on Earth, the idea that maybe there's some weird rando life swirling around at hundreds of miles an hour in the Venusian atmosphere. Just it's like, yeah, let's let's go check Venus out now. Yeah, I feel like I never hear about space programs from many other countries except for like China, the US and in the old Soviet Union. Yeah,

I never hear about the Brits exploring space. Well there with the E s A, I believe, so they just all got together, I think so. And then um, yeah, India has its own program now too. That's pretty ambitious as well. So what about Japan? Did they have a space program? Yeah, they have a space program. I don't

remember what it's called, but they definitely do. Um. There's a lot more collaboration than there used to be during the Cold War from understand Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, because we're trying to solve global problems here, and you know, Venus might hold the key to some of those. Yeah, it's it's our Venus, it's our fire, what's our desire? That's right. You gotta go listen to Venus as a

boy too. You're gonna love it. Uh. There's also Venus in fur velvet underground and then uh, Venus, I can't come up with a good joke, let's just forget about it and really beat it out Bob Newhart style. Yeah, if Bob Newhart would have finished the joke, that's why I'll never fill his shoes. Uh. If you want to know more about Venus, well, then just look skyword and see what you think, and maybe do a little research to while you're at it. And since I said look Skyword,

that means it's time for listener mayoel. I'm gonna call this Pug's Military follow up because we heard from uh quite a few military members already and that was in our real time. It was just released earlier today from US service people who we're quite fond of the little pog currency that they had over there. A long time listener guys love the show. Just listen to the episode

and thought i'd write in. I was in the Air Force for just shy of a decade when you mentioned the Army and Air Force exchange services POGs, and it brought me back. Instead of using coins, they would give you these pods as changed. So if you bought something for oh nine cents, the cashier would give you a five cent pog. Subsequently, if you bought something for ninety three cents, they would still give you a five cent pog because there were no one cent POGs, so they

rounded down. I guess it's gonna cheap, uh, So you would frequently lose money on those transactions. I remember being frustrated when my first experienced this. If I remember correctly, there being only five, ten and twenty five cent POGs. Yeah, five tents and twenties. I remember having stacks and stacks of these POGs all overseas, and I rendered them completely worthless. Looking back, I'm sure it could have bought a dollar worth of POGs and exchange them for real US currency,

but the thought never crossed my mind. I think they owe me some money. I wish I would have remembered my pog days. I was also way into POGs in the nineties because that would have been a good way to pass the time while over there. Thanks for aways being there on my hour commute to work, I look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays every week p s. My family was moving recently and I was going through an old box of my things and found a loan pog

with Maggie Simpson on it. I'm not sure why I decided to keep that one after all these years, but I did, and that is from Jeff. That's an awesome email, Jeff, thanks a lot for that one, agreed. Uh. If you want to get in touch with this like Jeff did and tell us about the pog you found, or what your tour of duty was like, or anything like that, you can get in touch with us via e mail at stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you

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