NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: In its infancy, Earth was a primeval hell, a lifeless planet bombarded by massive asteroids and comets. The moon, much closer to Earth, loomed large in the sky. The moon, much.
But still, we look to our planetary neighbors for places to visit and maybe even live. And has all the attention nowadays: it's so hot right now, with everyone practically climbing over each other's rockets to get there in to build a nice little red home.But what about? It's about the same size as the Earth and the same mass.
It's actually a little bit closer than Mars. It's definitely warmer than Mars. So why don't we try going for our sister planet instead of the red one?Oh, that's right: Venus is basically hell. Dante's journey. It's hard to not exaggerate just how bad Venus is.
Seriously, imagine in your head what the worst possible planet might be, and Venus is worse than that.Let's start with. If you think that the smog in LA is bad, you should take a whiff of Venus. It's almost entirely carbon dioxide and chokingly thick with an atmospheric pressure at the surface 90 times that of Earth. That's the equivalent pressure of a mile beneath our ocean waves.
It's so thick that you almost have to swim through it just to move around. Only 4% of that atmosphere is nitrogen, but that's more nitrogen total than there is in the Earth's atmosphere.And sitting on top of this are clouds made of sulfuric acid. Yikes.Sulfuric acid clouds are highly reflective, giving Venus its characteristic brilliant shine. The clouds are so reflective, and the rest of the atmosphere so thick, that less than 3% of the sun's light that reaches Venus actually makes it down to the surface. That means that you will only vaguely be aware of the difference between day and night.But despite that lack of sunlight, the is literally hot enough to melt lead, at over 700 degrees Fahrenheit (370 degrees Celsius) on average.
In some places, in the deepest valleys, the temperature reaches over 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius), which is enough for the ground itself to glow a dull red.And speaking of day and night — Venus has one of the in the solar system. For one, it rotates backward, with the sun rising in the west and setting in the east. Second, it's incredibly slow, with one year lasting only two days.Additionally, Venus once had that shut off long ago, and its crust is locked.Yeah, Venus is hell.Related:Straight to the inferno. So how did Earth's sister end up so twisted?Because Venus is made of pretty much the same stuff as our Earth, and has roughly the same size and mass, scientists are pretty sure that, back in the early days of the solar system, Venus was kind of nice. It probably supported liquid water oceans on the surface and white fluffy clouds dotting a blue sky. Actually, quite lovely.But four and a half billion years ago, our sun was different. It was smaller and dimmer.
As stars like our sun age, they steadily grow brighter. So back then Venus was firmly planted in, the region of the solar system that can support liquid water on the surface of a planet without it being too hot or too cold.But as the sun aged, that habitable zone steadily moved outward. And as Venus approached the inner edge of that zone, things started to go haywire.As the temperatures rose on Venus, the oceans began to evaporate, dumping a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere. And as that atmosphere grew thicker, the conditions on the surface grew even more hellish.The atmosphere might even have had enough drag to literally slow down the rotation of Venus itself, giving it its present-day sluggish rates.Once this process was complete, which probably took 100 million years or so, the potential for any life on Venus was snuffed out.And here's the worst part about the story of Earth's twisted sister. This is our fate, too.
Our sun isn't done aging, and as it grows older, it grows brighter, with the habitable zone steadily and inexorably moving outward. At some point within the next few hundred million years, the Earth itself will approach the inner edge of the habitable zone. Our oceans will evaporate. Temperatures will spiral upward. Plate tectonics will shut off. Carbon dioxide will dump into the atmosphere.And by that time, our solar system will be home to not just one hell but two.Learn more by listening to the episode on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on and on the Web at. Thanks to @rosstrower, Russel S., and @papermonster12 for the questions that led to this piece!
Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul and.Follow us on Twitter.
According to game logs there are total of eight ways for the character to get killed:death by oxygen - Die by running out of oxygen, can be done as early as mission #1death by bomb - Die by a bomb/dynamite, the Research complex leveldeath by flower - Grabbed by a 'flower creature'death by zombie - Pulled underground by a 'zombie-hand' root creature. Not sure but this one could be What Was That? (Something mysterious kills you)death by pike - Stabbed by a root creaturedeath by rock - Crushed by rock in the Foothills missionGravity Kills (Die from a hard fall) - Can be done on almost all levelsBurned (death by fire) - Think only on the Inferno level you can die this wayWhat puzzles me is that you get achievement for only 3 (What Was That?, Gravity Kills, and Burned) of them.
What makes these three so important they are awarded acievements while you get nothing for the other five? More so with the Burned achievement which is almost impossible to avoid on your first run of the Inferno level while at the same time for death by bomb or death by flower one has to make a deliberate effort to die this way.