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and not Mars that is the true sister planet of Earth. Nevertheless, this
planet, dedicated by the ancients to the goddess of love and sensuality,
long retained her mystery beneath a thick concealing veil.
Even the best telescopes of Arrhenius's day showed just a dazzling,
brilliantly white lustre. Arrhenius thought that the thick cloud cover
was of water vapour. On this basis, he calculated that the planet was
warm—about 47 degrees Celsius on average, and very humid ('about
three times that of the Congo'). The planet, he said, was dripping wet,
with dense rain clouds giving rise to violent rainfalls that poured
down rapidly, eroding river valleys into the wide Venusian oceans.
These conditions, he said, would support life, and he speculated on
abundant but simple plant life that grew rapidly, and died and decayed
equally rapidly, amid swamps that might have resembled the Carbon-
iferous coal swamps of an ancient Earth.
This vision helped spawn, over much of the twentieth century,
many Venusian science fiction epics where the breathless drama is set
among jungles and seas. This was usually done quite shamelessly and
with little concern for scientific veracity, as by Edgar Rice Burroughs
(best known for the Tarzan topics). His hero, Carson Napier, irst
wound up on Venus by accident after aiming for Mars (he had forgot-
ten to allow for the Moon's gravity), and then proceeded, on that
exotic water world, to do battle with pirates and zombies and the hid-
eous Cloud People, all the while wooing the fair Venusian princess
Duare. C. S. Lewis got in on the act with an ocean-covered Venus as
backdrop for a clash between good and evil in
Perelandra
. Even such a
scientifically literate science fiction writer as Isaac Asimov could set
his 1950s epic
Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus
(memorable for a giant
carnivorous orange patch that catches its prey using a jet of water) on
a temperate, water-rich, habitable planet.
If you really want to find out what a place is like, though, you
have to go there. Our understanding of the solar system has been
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