The Untitled Venus Project

I’m not a resolution person. I’m not great at planning long-term projects, which a resolution is by definition, and even worse at follow-through. So I long ago stopped trying.

And yet, this time of year does get you thinking about goals, or at least thinking about finding meaning and happiness, which are sometimes the same thing. Something I’ve missed doing is writing. Writing is both a creative outlet and the only way I can consistently think clearly. I stopped having time to write when I was getting my PhD, and things haven’t gotten better since I graduated and got a job.

I thought putting this blog page on my website would help, but I’ve had trouble feeling inspired. My mind feels muddy, and it’s felt muddy for quite some time. For me, writing is thinking. It’s been difficult to clear the water enough to form coherent thoughts, let alone develop original ideas. Even now, writing this, is not as easy as it used to be.

I realize, though, that writing is a muscle. I haven’t exercised this muscle in a while, and it’s getting weaker and weaker by the day. I want to start thinking clearly again, and I think Venus will help me.

Part of my day job as an outreach astronomer is writing a series of lectures, one a month for the entire year. Last year one of the lectures was about Venus. I’m not an expert on the Solar System, but part of what I like about my job is that I get to teach myself a bunch of stuff that I missed.

I was struck by how much we don’t know about Venus. Why are there so few craters on the surface? Why does it spin backwards? Where did its atmosphere come from? Why is it so dry? None of these questions have particularly satisfying answers. So much of what we hypothesize about Venus is based on what we know about Earth. It’s thought that Venus has the same bulk density as Earth, but the interior of Venus must be different, somehow, because it lacks a global magnetic field, which implies something different going on inside the planet. What exactly that looks like and how we got here are gaping holes in our knowledge of the Solar System.

And it’s not only the Solar System. Astronomers have found exoplanets in the “Venus Zone,” the runaway greenhouse boundary of the host star. Understanding Venus will help us understand these “exoVenuses” and these exoVenuses will help us understand what our own Venus was like in the past.

In the next decade or so, we’ll start to answer some of these question, as NASA and the European Space Agency are sending three missions to study Venus from the interior to the top of the atmosphere.

in the meantime, I want to learn as much as I can about Venus, and I want to put what I find out here. Since I don’t have a planetary science background, I expect this will involve teaching myself quite a bit of geology and chemistry. My goal is to write one piece a month on Venus’s mysteries and how we Earthlings can go about making sense of our sister planet.

I may succeed, or I may not. I’m going to try not to beat myself up if this project doesn’t quite live up to what I have in my head. I’m gonna take a year-long deep dive into something I don’t know much about and it should be interesting either way.