Seldom has a planet undergone such a drastic image change within a year as Venus. Hyped a year ago as a refuge of possible life, it is now said that Venus may have always been a hostile hell. We remember: Last autumn, the discovery of the possible biomarker phosphine was reported amid great media noise. One imagined the existence of microorganisms in the moderately tempered clouds of Venus, where they could have fled to after the surface of their home planet had become increasingly hot and inhospitable due to a massively self-reinforcing greenhouse effect.
There was something comforting about the picture: even if one's own living space perished, it would be possible to develop a new habitat and secure one's own existence. NASA and ESA took the question of life on Venus as a motivation to decide on new missions there. However, the idea of cloud-based bacterial colonies has now evaporated; the phosphine discovery was probably the result of sloppy data analysis.
And the most recent Nature study now also deprives the last of the romantics of the justification for enjoying the possibility of Venus life, as it could have arisen in potentially Earth-like Venus oceans a few billion years ago. The basis is a new climate model. This suggests that the water vapor in the atmosphere of young Venus was never able to condense in liquid surface water, but rather formed a dense layer of cloud on the night side of Venus, which heated the planet more and more. Unlike the earlier modeling, this model does not start with the existence of liquid water on the surface of Venus.
If this initial condition is true, the history of Venus would have turned out differently than previously thought.
But what about the Venus missions that wanted to look for traces of life?
Well, instead, they can now look for traces of water in the Venus rock.
If successful, there could be the next image change of Venus towards the end of the decade.
And maybe a new reason for daydreams.