Underneath those luminous clouds that reflect back 80% of incoming sunlight, "the most important single quality distinguishing Venus from Earth", writes planetary scientist David Grinspoon, "is the near total lack of water there."

The details are foreboding. At its surface, the Venusian atmosphere is 90 times denser than Earth's, or about the same as being 1 km (0.6 miles) beneath terrestrial oceans. The average surface temperature (470 degrees C, or 870 F) is hot enough to melt lead. At night, amidst distant lightning strikes high in the clouds, the ground would glow a faint red.

Venus' surface is the hottest in our solar system, despite being twice the distance of Mercury from the Sun. Or as Dr. Grinspoon illustrates: "You could fry an egg on the sidewalk, but you'd have to do it quickly, before the sidewalk melted."

Venus has no tilted axis, and thus no winter, summer, nor any seasonal change. A relatively gentle breeze of a few miles per hour at the surface builds to a cloud-top gale that swirls like perpetual hurricanes: 350 km/hr, or 210 mph. While rather quiet geologically for the last few hundred million years, today's Venus is still volcanically active. Its terrain is marked by several large shield volcanoes, and is covered with solidified lava flows.

Because of its slow rotation, the Venusian day and night each last 59 Earth days, or about two Earth months."The portrait of Venus, as a verdant, rainy, overgrown swamp planet-perhaps complete with tree ferns and jungle animals-", writes Dr. Grinspoon, "became widespread in the popular and scientific literature through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries."

When one considers that as recently as 1955 -just a few years before the dawn of the space-age, the famous British astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle, considered Venus to be covered planetwide in oil, apparently our nearest neighbor still has many secrets left to reveal. [Hoyle speculated upon what became known as 'Hoyle Oil': "Venus is probably endowed beyond the dreams of the richest Texas oil-king".]

"We know, for sure, that there are signs of life at a few places on Venus," writes Grinspoon. "We know because we left them there-the smashed, corroding remains of our inquisitive machines. The most recent addition to this smattering of Earth-junk is whatever is left of Magellan".

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