Life Lessons from Hell-House Venus
Hold a grain of sand up to the night sky at arm’s length. There are thousands of galaxies in that miniscule fraction of the heavens. Galaxies like ours hold hundreds of billions of stars—a good portion of which host planets. And a number of these are in the “habitable zone,” that just-right distance from a star where the temperature might fall between zero and 100 degrees Celsius, the right conditions for liquid water. Perhaps for life too.
But the habitable zone is often misunderstood. A planet within the habitable zone may not host water, or be even remotely habitable. There are countless other factors at play—some of them buried deep below the surface. “The habitable zone is a useful concept for astronomers,” says Noah Tuchow, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who studies the effect of the habitable zone on planets. “It’s best thought of as a hypothesis.”
A hard lesson in these odds sits just next door to us, in our solar system.
Venus might have once been very much like Earth.
Venus perches on the edge of the traditional habitable zone around our sun. Yet life—at least —would not enjoy modern-day
