h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mr Monk,
I enjoyed reading your Moronic Inferno piece but I was a little confused by the sentence ending "...plankton can't build their exoskeletons without the acid making them fall apart". If you read it again I think you'll see what I mean.
At the end of your piece, I think it's a mistake to say to your enemies "...do us all a favour, stay silent..." because a) they won't stay silent and b) only by defeating their arguments point by point can you eventually defeat their aims. Remember that there are some very stupid people out there - e.g. those who believe that cigarette smoking is not harmful or injurious to health and try to convince the rest of us of this 'fact'. Such is human nature.
I think I'd be tempted to delete the references to the Pope and the American film star. I don't see that you gain anything there. By the way I'm not religious in the normal sense and I'm also not a Hollywood movie junkie. Therefore I have no axes to grind. But there will be those out there who will delight in going off on these tempting tangents in order to distract you from your main thrust.
LL

ps
- are you sure about Venus when you say it "was once probably a world very much like ours"? Please check. I'm pretty sure it has always been a "vision of Hell".

I think it probably was a world like ours, once. When the Sun was dimmer, it would have been very much like Earth is today. And the future of Earth is that of Venus now. Depressing, eh?

I've made those changes you suggest.

When you say "I think it was probably..." they'll get you! You've got to be 100% sure. Check in Patrick Moore or NASA or Hubble or some place like that. It's the first time I've ever heard the suggestion you're putting forward. Have heard that Mars 'may possibly once' have been like Earth, with oceans, rivers, vegetation, but have never heard it put forward for Venus.
I think the future for Earth is another major Ice Age brought on by the collapse of the ocean currents caused by the warming of the seas and their dilution with fresh water from melting ice and permafrost in the Arctic latitudes. The Ice Ages are believed to be caused by Global Warming but as Al Gore points out with his 600,000 year ice samples never has Global Warming proceeded so rapidly as at the present time.

I've stuck in a reference to where I got the information about Venus. I could even send you the article as a PDF if you like.

If you've got a solid reference you'll survive the storm!

Well, if you want the article, my email address is on my PS...

Cheers. I've just printed it!

I wonder that if I sent you an e-mail, I could get a copy of that article also?

I'd be quite interested in that.

DK

Yes, although don't spread it about as I'm sure what ther are some copyright implications.

Lucky: I haven't received an email from you. I don't know if you've sent it, or whether it's an over-zealous spam filter at my end.

For what it’s worth with reference to your comparison between Earth and Venus, while there are similarities in the physical make up of Earth and Venus I'm not sure that you can use Venus as an example of what GW holds in the future for us here. There are some similarities but the root cause of Venus’ hothouse atmosphere is not the same as that of GW here.

My Boy's Own book on water retention tells me that the general consensus about Venus is that it may well have had water/oceans in its early life but that its proximity to the Sun put paid to that very early in the planet’s life.

The greater heat at the planet’s closer proximity to the Sun caused higher surface temperatures and a greater concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere. This in itself would bring about an increased greenhouse effect but Venus lost nearly all of its water due to photodissociation, where the greater u/v radiation split the water molecules to their components of hydrogen/oxygen and the hydrogen element evaporated off into space. Therefore without water there was no likelihood of life being established in the first place, and consequently no fossil deposits to lock up the carbon.

So an atmosphere of carbon dioxide predominated with no modifying process to soak it up leaving it in the atmosphere.

Volcanic action on Venus has also largely ceased. What evidence there is shows that the planetary surface dates back about 500 million years almost everywhere. It is thought that this is due to a slow build up of heat trapped below the lithosphere which creates a cataclysmic overturning of the crust and a resurfacing of the planet with an upwelling of magma periodically.

This seems to be at odds with the article you cite hence my interest in it.

We seem to be at cross-purposes.I meant I'd printed the Moronic Inferno on h2g2. I had always understood that Mars was once 'a bit earthlike' and that Venus was always a sulphuric hotbed with a 98% carbon dioxide atmosphere under high pressure - 90 times the earth's pressure. It's 108,000,000 km from the sun compared with earth at 148,000,000 km so would be a bit for water and vegetation I'd have thought, even if the sun was a bit 'cooler' - which we don't know.

bit 'too hot' for water - I meant to type.

Well, I've just sent the SCIAM article to Deke and I'm sure it can do a much better job of explaining Venus' climate than I can. You're welcome to have a copy, if you like.

You could get more theories by posting a question about Venus on the h2g2 Ex pages. I'm sure you'd get a whole bunch of theories.

I'm closing down now. We're off to the hills "from whence cometh my strength". Back whenever!

Ciao, LL