Venus – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Let’s Take a Moment to Appreciate Where We Are

A meteorite believed to have originated from the planet Mercury sold for $4,780 at a June 2010 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Our sun formed from a cloud of dust and gas around 4.6 billion years ago. The force of gravity generated by the sun’s vast mass keeps a family of planets and other bodies trapped in orbit around it. Together, the sun and all these bodies make up our solar system.

Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are the solar system’s inner planets. On the face of it, they are worlds apart – but underneath the surface, it is a different story. The inner planets all formed from the same material when the sun was formed. All are a mix of rock and metal, with interiors that are roughly divided into layers. The heavier metals are concentrated at the center, while the lighter rock is on top. Each of these planets was bombarded by asteroids and comets early on and each has been affected by volcanic activity. Mercury’s heavily cratered face still bears the scars, but the surfaces of the other three have changed over time.

Mercury is the smallest and closest to the sun. It is a lifeless world that has barely changed in 3 billion years. The entire surface is pitted with craters formed when asteroids crashed into it. Mercury orbits the sun more quickly than any other planet, but it rotates slowly; for every two orbits, it spins around just three times. So a “day” on Mercury (sunrise to sunrise) takes 176 Earth days. Such long days and nights give it the greatest temperature range. During the day, it is hot enough to melt lead and at night, cold enough to liquefy air.

Venus is sometimes referred to as Earth’s twin due to size and similar internal structure. But the two worlds are very different. The surface is hotter than a pizza oven, its air pressure is a crushing 90 times greater, and it’s covered by volcanos. It is permanently overcast, which causes a greenhouse effect. Venus spins more slowly than any other planet and in the opposite direction (clockwise). One orbit of the sun takes 224.7 Earth days.

Mars is the second-smallest planet in the solar system and is half the size of Earth. The average surface temperatures is minus 81 degrees, which makes it a frozen desert world. However, it wasn’t always dry since riverbeds show that water flowed here a long time ago. Mars may have been warm and wet enough for life to have flourished. The “Red Planet” nickname comes from the reddish color of its iron oxide (rust). It has a crust made of solid rock like Earth.

Third from the sun, Earth is the largest of the inner planets. It’s the only planet with liquid water flowing on the surface. Our vast oceans, land and two polar ice caps are all supported by a thin rocky crust. The crust is broken into seven huge segments and many smaller ones. Called tectonic plates, these giant slabs of rock creep slowly over Earth’s surface. Earth completes a spin every 24 hours, but it isn’t entirely upright. Its axis is tilted 23.5 degrees, so as it travels around the sun, one hemisphere and then the other is tilted toward the sun. This is what causes the seasons.

Fortunately, for us, we are exactly the perfect distance from the sun to maintain the temperature ranges to support the only known life in the universe. Just one degree of tilt or distance would have a profound effect. It is similar to Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ porridge … not too hot and not too cold. Personally, I like it here … a lot!

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

There Might be a Reason We Haven’t Met Little Green Men

Alien life forms as envisioned by Al Feldstein for the 1952 cover of *Weird Fantasy* #16. This original cover art realized $50,787 at a May 2012 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

I was discussing with friends the famous Fermi paradox, which raises the question: Why haven’t we detected signs of alien life, despite high estimates of probability – such as observations by the Kepler telescope of planets in the “habitable zone” around a Sun-like star and calculations of hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy that might support life?

Now, astrobiologists from Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Earth Sciences say they have the best answer: Because life on other planets would likely be brief and would become extinct quickly from runaway heating or cooling.

“The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra, lead author of a paper published in Astrobiology. In fact, “early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive. Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable.”

For example, about 4 billion years ago, Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox. Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, while life on Earth played a leading role in stabilizing the planet’s climate.

The authors name this near-universal early extinction the “Gaian Bottleneck,” which also leads to the prediction that the vast majority of fossils in the universe (found in future meteorites, for example) will be from extinct microbial life, not from multicellular species such as dinosaurs or humanoids that take billions of years to evolve.

So far, that is the case.

The aliens are silent because they’re dead.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is President and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

There May be a Ninth Planet (Not You, Pluto)

This oil on board by Chesley K. Bonestell titled Solar System realized $7,170 at a June 2007 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

“There might be a ninth planet in the solar system after all, and it is not Pluto.” — The New York Times, Jan. 21, 2016

Our solar system consists of the sun and a family of planets and other bodies trapped in orbit around it by the force of gravity.

Our sun formed 4.6 billion years ago. Vast amounts of matter were attracted by the developing star, but not all of it was absorbed. A tiny fraction of leftover material – a mere 0.14 percent of the solar system’s mass – formed a disc of gas and dust encircling the newborn star. Over millions of years, the grains of dust in this disc clumped together, growing into ever larger bodies.

Eventually, they grew to the size of planets, pulled into spheres by their own gravity.

In the inner solar system – where the sun’s heat was too intense for gases to condense – planets formed from rock and metal. In the outer solar system, gases condensed to form much larger planets.

Today, our solar system has eight planets, more than 100 moons, an unknown number of dwarf planets (e.g. Pluto) and countless millions of comets and asteroids.

The four small, inner planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Our home planet is the only place known to support life, thanks to the liquid water on its surface and its PRECISE distance from the sun that provides just the right amount of heat.

Four gigantic planets dominate the outer solar system, very different from the rocky inner planets. These strange worlds are huge globes of gas and liquid, with no solid surfaces.

Mighty Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest in the solar system, so big that it is 2.5 times more massive than all the other planets put together (1,300 Earths could easily fit inside Jupiter’s volume).

Its strong gravitational pull greatly affects the orbits of the other bodies in the solar system.

In 1665, a great red spot was first noticed that turns out to be a giant storm (bigger than Earth) that has been raging for over 350 years. Several craft have visited Jupiter, including Galileo, which orbited from 1995-2003.