Review: Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet
Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet by David Grinspoon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I think what I liked best about this book is the author’s (fleeting but refreshing) attitude of exploration for exploration’s sake. Venus’ surface is so hot that it glows red in the dark, there’s but a trace of water in the atmosphere, and it rains battery acid. We’re probably not going to live there anytime soon (besides the fact that we’d be moving 30 percent closer to the life-giving time bomb we orbit)… but we should go nonetheless!
He does spend a good deal of time talking about the historic significance of Venus in various cultures around the world, trying to give the reader an anthropological imperative to care. I just thought it was interesting. Despite its prominence in the cultures of our species and its teasing proximity, it’s crazy to think that we couldn’t penetrate the dense cloud cover to see the surface of Venus in detail until the early 1990s!
It’s very interesting to hear how the Russians actually led our exploration of our "twin planet" during the early Cold War years, before JFK set our sights on human exploration of the moon as the ultimate middle finger to the Ruskies.
As usual, some of the best science we have done as a species had war as an impetus. I guess we’ll take what we can get. The sad truth of it all is that nations don’t posture by flying space missions anymore, letting researchers ride wave after wave of fear-induced funding. Now governments just cut science funding and spend the money on weapons. Booo!
Later he likens Venus’ CO2-saturated atmosphere to a possible future Earth if we continue to plunder this planet, but this environmentalism hook seemed a little perfunctory to me. Ninety percent of the time Grinspoon sounds like a space nerd just excited to be able to talk about planets for a living… and it makes me jealous.
