I hate how Venus is always depicted without its atmosphere. Lame!

I think that's your mom.

Venus is really cool. Had Venus and Mars traded orbits/locations while they formed it would be Earth 2.0 today. It's almost a clone of Earth in so many ways that are critical to habitability. Unfortunately we ended up with one scorching, super-pressurized rock and one boring, dusty rock.

THEY LIED TO US

It'd need its own strain of life to be like Earth today. Earth wouldn't be like Earth without it influencing it.

That's true but even if Venus in a further out orbit was lifeless it would still be much more interesting to study and better for human colonization than Mars
>radius is almost the exact same as Earth, about 20% less mass than Earth
>90% Earth gravity
>Venus' atmosphere >implies it had a lot of water at one point
>volcanically active
>weak magnetic field but it's possible this was caused by the effects of being so close to the sun
Compare that to Mars, which is basically just the moon except bigger and red with a huge mountain and a huge canyon

This whole thing is strange. We have an average Solar system as far as we know and in this system we have three planets that probably hosted life at some point.* Of course this is just speculation as we don't have evidence at the moment, but if that's the case where are the other civilizations? Even if we count everything from the slowness of evolution to cosmic and societal disasters of intelligent populations we should see at least a few of them even in the Milky Way.

*plus a Europa

>in this system we have three planets that probably hosted life at some point.
What.

I don't think we know enough about other systems to say whether or not our system is "average." We've only been searching for life for a few decades, which is nothing in cosmic terms. The first exoplanet wasn't even confirmed until the 90s. Plus, it's possible intelligent life is very rare or they aren't advanced enough to send/receive radio signals or they are advanced but just don't care about space. Or maybe any nearby intelligent civilizations already went extinct. I'm really excited for more exploration of Enceladus and Europa. If either one has life, no matter how primitive, that would be huge for our understanding of extraterrestrial life. It would mean the universe is likely teeming with life if multiple worlds in our own system host life.

That sort of bugs me too. It's pretty like a pearl and radar images don't do it justice at all. But nobody cares about venus since the 80's so it's all lost.

We also have several moons that possibly have life on them.

Yeah, I have no idea. I suspect that, through negligence of the anthropic principle, most scientists vastly overestimate the chances of *sustainable* life developing on a given world. I suspect that many lifelike entities might have independently popped into existence at come point in this universe, but as sustainable, reproducing, evolving beings?

Venus, Earth, Mars and the moons.

By that you presume that the Solar system and terrestial life is special.

What reason is there to think any of those (besides Earth) has ever hosted life?

As I said, it's a speculation and I think it's not a wild one. It doesn't matter though, three planets and at least one moon in the habitable zone is enough itself.

underrated post

If they are there, they are hiding. You need to be pretty stupid to let yourself be easily detected by similar intelligent or more intelligent species.

hope vsauce makes a video on that XD

>mfw 2000+17 and still no mars colony

If there are conditions that life can emerge, given enough time, probability that life emerges approaches 1.

I've always been a fan of the old "Venus has clouds and is hot there fore Venus is a tropical jungle" trope from old SciFi.

That + getting rkv'd early is my headcanon.