Our Sister Planet

What did you learn about Venus - sometimes called our sister planet - when you were in school? Unless you are still in school, chances are that at least some of those ‘facts’ have changed.

Venus has been called Earth’s twin, because it is similar to Earth in size and mass. Venus’ diameter is 7,520.8 miles, only 396.7 miles smaller than Earth’s. Its mass is 81.5 % of Earth’s. But in other ways, they are not very alike at all.

Venus is still the second planet from the Sun, it is still named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. It orbits the sun in 224.7 Earth days. A Venus day is 243 Earth days, so its day is longer than its year. It also rotates in the opposite direction as Earth, so on Venus, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. It still does not have any moons.

Venus has the densest atmosphere of the 4 inner planets, which consists of more than 96% carbon dioxide. At Venus’ surface, the atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of Earth, or roughly the pressure found at 3,000 ft underwater on Earth.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, with a mean surface temperature of 863°F. Mercury is closer to the sun, but Venus is hotter. It is shrouded by an opaque layer of clouds of sulfuric acid. It may have had water oceans at some point in the past, but they would have vaporized due to a runaway greenhouse effect. That water vapor would have photodissociated, and the resulting free hydrogen swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind because Venus doesn’t have a planetary magnetic field. It is postulated that the surface of Venus is a desertscape interspersed with slab-like rocks and is periodically resurfaced by volcanism.

In my youth, I remember reading books and short stories that postulated that Venus weather included perpetual rain, and that Venus was a water planet. In both cases, humans from Earth had colonized Venus. But given the updated information on Venus’ atmosphere and surface, colonization may have to wait until some type of reclamation can happen. Perhaps remove some (a lot!) of carbon from the atmosphere, and set up some type of artificial field around the planet to keep the solar wind from removing any more of the lighter elements from that atmosphere. If we can lessen the green-house effect, then maybe the volcanism will also settle down a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus

Waste Not, Want Not

Years ago, people started talking ‘disposable’. We became a ‘disposable’ culture, in that whenever something didn’t work anymore, we were expected to toss it and get a new one. Shall we blame NASA for that mentality? After all, every time they sent someone or something into space, they had to build a whole new rocket, new capsule, and who knew what.

I hate to blame NASA. I believe in NASA, although I sometimes chaff at how slow their progress can be.

I don’t want to blame NASA, so I blame business. It’s a conspiracy, you know. Business figures that if they sell you something you want and need, but which quickly ceases to work, you’d be back to buy another. And then another.

How long does a ball point pen work? I’m not talking about expensive pens, I’m talking about the cheap ones you buy in packages of 10 or 30, that your workplace buys by the cratefull. They don’t last long. When was the last time you put an ink refill in one? You probably don’t; you just toss it and pull out a new one. They’re cheap, and you don’t even think about it, do you?

Well, pause right now and think about the hundreds, thousands, millions of dead ball point pens taking up space in landfills. Think about what remains of each one; a drop or two of ink, a tiny bit of metal, and the rest is plastic.

One or two million drops of ink would, I assume, eventually lose its ‘moisture’ into the surrounding compost, the color components forming bits of color. Millions of bits of metal would corrode at some point, possibly forming a metallic ‘lode’ for future people to dig up and use.

But what about the plastic? What’s the half-life of plastic? What does it form, if and when it finally breaks down? From what I’ve gathered, most plastics don’t break down in landfills. Some break down when exposed to sunlight for days on end, but when they do, they form nasty toxins. There are newer, ‘biodegradable’ plastics, but they don’t degrade well in landfills, either; they degrade in compost where heat is present. So, millions of plastic pens are thrown into landfills where they will probably remain dead pens for a heck of a long time. If they do manage to degrade, they will form toxins to sicken any plants or animals that ingest them.

Long after I’m dead and gone, all those ball point pens I’ve thrown away will be out there, forming toxins. That is not the kind of legacy I wanted.