What If You Stepped Onto Venus?

You look up at the brightest light in the evening sky, take one step, and you are standing on it. You walk through air as thick as a liquid, watch metal melt on a rock, find the machine that got here first, sit through a sunset that takes days, follow a glow in the dark to a river of lava, climb the highest mountain on the planet, and leave under a balloon filled with ordinary air. The readout in the corner is real the whole way. The surface is 464 °C, day and night, and the air presses 92 times harder than at home, like standing 900 metres under the sea. Venera 13 was built to last 32 minutes there and lasted 127. One day and night on Venus take 117 Earth days. About 85,000 volcanoes have been mapped. Nobody has seen lava on Venus or the inside of its clouds, so those parts of the video are a guess, not a picture of the real thing. The suit that keeps you alive is made up. Fifty-five kilometres above that surface it is 27 °C, with about half the air pressure you are breathing now. The worst place we know of and the most Earth-like place we know of beyond Earth are the same planet, 55 km apart. 0:00 One step 1:00 The air 1:50 What melts 2:40 Venera 13 3:40 The longest day 4:35 Night and lava 5:25 The mountain 6:10 Through the clouds 7:00 55 km up 7:55 Earth's twin 8:40 Home Sources: NASA Venus Facts; NASA NSSDCA Venus Fact Sheet; Hahn & Byrne 2023 (volcanoes); Herrick & Hensley 2023 (Maat Mons); Schaefer & Fegley 2004 (metal frost); NASA NTRS 19860018820 (Vega balloons); Way et al. 2016 and Constantinou et al. 2024 (oceans). #whatif #venus #space #science #planets