DeeKnow’s Grotto

Venus : 2nd rock-from-the-Sun - I spent the evening talking crap with my flatmates Cock and Sash last night over a few bottles of cider. Whilst solving many problems of the world we also discussed the possibility of Human life on Earth being seeded from one of our planetary neighbours.

We often hear talk of missions-to-Mars, conspiracies about apparent signs or presence of civilisations past (or present) on Mars, but one the thing that intrigues me is that we never discuss the feasibility of our migration to Earth from our nearest neighbour, Venus.

"It is the brightest object in the sky except for the Sun and the Moon.  Like Mercury, it was popularly thought to be two separate bodies: Eosphorus as the morning star and Hesperus as the evening star, but the Greek astronomers knew better." - source

Venus has a chemical composition that is similar to Earth, it's a similar size (~6000km radius), has a mass much like our own, closes within 50 million kilometers from us at its nearest (Mars is 70 million km distant) and was once thought to be covered in watery oceans.

This might sound ideal but as it turns out, Venus isn't exactly high on the hitlist of places to settle any time soon. It has a very dense atmosphere which makes surface level pressure very high (about 90 Earth atmospheres), there are many layers of cloud above ground-level composed of nasty sulfuric acid, much of the surface of Venus is covered by lava flows  and large and active volcanoes, and there are strong (350kph) surface winds whipping about the place.

Another interesting thing about Venus, is that it rotates in the opposite direction to Earth and very slowly (once every 243 Earth days). It takes a little less than that to make its way around the Sun, and its rotation is balanced such that we can only ever see the one side of the planet from Earth. Kind of like the dark-side-of-the-moon, more popular conspiracy fodder.

We Earthlings have dispatched over 20 unmanned missions to inspect the planet since the 1st Russian fly-by in 1961 so a shit-load is now known about the planets make-up, and it looks like my theory about migration to Earth from there is just a load of old bollocks. It sure was fun to talk about in a drunken fashion though !!!  :-)

5:43:06 PM