A short guide to Venus Revised 2026 Edition

by Steve Hurley

The planet Venus is our nearest neighbour, the planet closest to the Earth in size and internal composition, and the brightest natural object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. Often called Earth’s sister planet, Venus is a mysterious object whose secrets were not unlocked until the 1960s. The first chapter focuses on how Venus appears from Earth. The 584-day cycle where Venus goes through a full set of phases like the Moon is explained in detail. The fact that Venus’s phases can only be explained by a heliocentric theory and not the geocentric theory, something which was very important to the development of astronomy, is discussed. I then talk about the early depiction of Venus in 1950’s science fiction as a world on which exotic life forms could survive. However, exploration of the Venus by spacecraft, discovered a harsh hostile world, where the surface temperature is nearly five hundred degrees Celsius and the atmospheric pressure is a crushing 92 times that of Earth. Despite this I will argue later in the book that it is possible to terraform the planet to make it more Earth-like and may be desirable to do so. I discuss the ‘transit of Venus’, an astronomical event in which Venus appears to cross the surface of the Sun. Observations of the transit of Venus were critical to the development of astronomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The remainder of the book discusses what humans would need to do to live on Venus. The idea of 'floating cities' is discussed and terraforming is explored in detail and how the challenges posed by such a hostile environment could be overcome.

156 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 25, 2018

Reviews

[Stuart Aken · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short volume is packed full of facts about our nearest planetary neighbour. The author is a scientist who studied Maths and Astronomy at Warwick University and gained a PhD in Astronomy through Manchester University. He writes a popular science blog – www.thesciencegeek.org, recently renamed as www.explainingscience.org – which is well worth visiting for anyone interested in the planets and the solar system.
The book covers such topics as How Venus Appears as Seen from Earth, Its Early Depiction in Works of Science Fiction, and Its Reality as discovered by a series of exploratory craft. The Transit of Venus is given a chapter of its own. The author goes on to discuss the obstacles to living on Venus, how it might be terraformed, and its lack of a magnetic field and how that might be corrected.
Finally, there’s a comprehensive glossary, some addition data in the form of table and other facts from NASA, and a bibliography.
That the book was written by a mathematician is evident in the easy way he deals with the complex maths needed to explain aspects of the planet – much of it over my head, but I’m happy to accept his conclusions.
The book is well written, informative, entertaining and surprisingly easy to read. It’s an excellent resource for anyone interested in Venus, a planet associated with a mythical beauty. And it’s an essential guide for writers in the science fiction field. A good read.