No carbon Dioxide on Venus
Immanuel Velikovsky wrote a book “Worlds in Collision” in which he suggested that ancient texts told of considerable close encounters of Mars and Venus with the earth had taken place in recent times. He specifically stated that Venus had been born out of Jupiter and as a result predicted that Venus would be very hot and Jupiter would have considerable radiation. These claims were found true when for the first time telescopes examined them. Up to that date, 1950, astronomers had no interest in the planets, chacterized by the statement ‘We don’t do dirt.” However these claims forced the creation of a new discipline, Planetary Science, in every university in the world. In order to prevent Velikovskys method of using ancient myths, a prominent astronomer hired and funded a new PhD student, Carl Sagan to publicly contest the works of Velikovsky concerning Venus and Jupiter. Sagan claimed that Venus was hot because its atmosphere was primariy carbon dioxide, a known absorber of infrared radiation which created a “runaway greenhouse effect” to explain Venus’ high temperature and that Jupiter was a gas planet out of which a solid new planet Venus could not be born. Not surprisingly Sagans guesses became the “standard model” which every university in the world was forced to adopt to be considered legitimate. This view was supported by the hiring of earth scientists as planetary scientists, with backgrounds from Charles Lyell, imagining that all earth’s geology had taken place over billions of years, a uniformitarian view the opposite of Velikovsky’s catastrophism, which implied that developments happened in sudden spurts of activity like the creation of Venus and its immediate effect on Earth.
The immediate influence of the “standard modal” became obvious with the most detailed mission called Pioneer Venus. Based on Sagan’s idea of a runaway greenhouse effect, all of the scientists were convinced ahead of the mission that they would get reading from the descending mass spectrometer showing carbon dioxide at every elevation, but upon descending to 50 km, (98 degrees) the carbon dioxide channel 44, received no counts. Initially panicked they became convinced that droplets of sulfuric acid had clogged the two input leaks to the mass spectrometer. Then suddenly at 31 km where the temperature was 200 degrees counts in channel 44 began again, ‘proving’ to the scientists that the higher temperatures had evaporated the ‘sulfuric acid’ that had blocked the inlet leak. Another quirk which finally solves the problem of Venus’ atmosphere is the molecular weight of carbon dioxide (9.02 Da ) versus carbon mono- sulfide is not stable at room temperature but at 200 degrees as in the atmosphere of Venus it has a molecular weight of 9.07 Da. That means that what was counted as carbon dioxide at 31 km altitude were CS , not CO2, which has never been considered, and Sagan’s greenhouse effect is not valid. Unfortunately planetary science will proceed with new missions assuming ths atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which could render many experiments invalid. Read: ” Miracle: The Creation of the Earth” for the whole picture.
