The Venus we imagined

Long before anyone asked what the clouds of Venus hid, Chinese poets gave the planet two names. The ode Da Dong in the Book of Songs pairs them: 'In the east there is Qiming, in the west there is Changgeng.' Qiming is the opener of brightness at dawn, Changgeng the long-continuing star at dusk, and a 2016 Beijing Evening News column points out that both are Venus. The planet as a whole was Taibai, the great white, for its colour. The Chinese space account Our Space adds that in the Western Han Sima Qian matched its whiteness to metal in the five-phase scheme, which gave Jinxing, the metal star. With the other four planets known in ancient China, the Sun and the Moon it made up the seven luminaries, which still name the days of the week in Japan. The names outlived astronomy. Lu Xun's mother recalled that a monk gave the writer the Buddhist name Changgeng, while his brother Zhou Zuoren was called Qiming: 'the two stars never meet', she said, although, as the column notes, they are the same planet.

Venus never strays far from the Sun, whose glare hides it by day unless it stands well clear in transparent air. Li Xudai, an astronomer writing for the Chinese edition of National Geographic in 2024, calls such sightings normal, but explains that seeing Venus by day, 'Taibai seen by day', was a bad sign for the emperor: the Sun stood for the ruler, and a planet competing with its light suggested he might be replaced. 'Taibai crossing the sky', when Venus could be seen both before and after noon as it crossed the meridian, signalled the fall of a state. His example is the summer of 626. According to the historical record he summarises, Venus crossed the daytime sky on 29 June and 1 July, a court astronomer secretly told the emperor Li Yuan that the Prince of Qin would take the empire, and on 2 July that prince, Li Shimin, ambushed his two brothers at the Xuanwu Gate and killed them; three months later his father handed him the throne. The Beijing Evening News column adds that the Shiji had assigned Venus to Qin, the western land the prince took his title from.

Astrology gave Venus a body. The same column cites a text on averting calamities of the seven luminaries for the earliest image of the Venus deity, a woman in a yellow skirt wearing a cockscomb crown and playing the pipa, who after the Ming became the white-bearded old man Taibai Jinxing of Journey to the West. A silk painting from Cave 17 at Dunhuang, dated by its inscription to 897 and now in the British Museum, shows the older figure: Venus in white with a bird on her head, playing the pipa beside the Buddha of Blazing Light and the other four planets. Those names have since been written onto Venus itself. Among the long channels that the International Astronomical Union has named on the planet are Tai-pe Valles, glossed in its gazetteer as the Chinese name for Venus, a 400 km system near 11 N, 156.5 E, with Kinsei Vallis for the Japanese name and Kūmsong Vallis for the Korean one, all three approved in 1997.

Western science reached its own warm, wet Venus by calculation. In Stjärnornas öden, published in Stockholm in 1915 and in English in 1918 as The Destinies of the Stars, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius worked out an average temperature for Venus of about 47 °C and a humidity about six times the average on Earth. From that he concluded that everything on Venus must be dripping wet, and that the ground beneath its rain clouds lay almost windless. 'A very great part of the surface of Venus is no doubt covered with swamps,' runs the English edition, like those in which Earth's coal was laid down but some 30 degrees warmer. Life there, in his view, was luxuriant but low, mostly vegetable and much the same everywhere, while the slightly cooler poles would breed higher forms whose culture would spread toward the equator as the planet cooled. His account ends with a Venus that might one day be the Babylonians' queen of heaven as the dwelling place of the highest beings in the solar system.

By the 1950s the water picture was under siege. Donald Menzel and Fred Whipple of Harvard College Observatory opened their June 1955 paper, The Case for H2O Clouds on Venus, by conceding that the clouds were then almost universally blamed on something other than water. The objections were real: spectroscopy found almost no water vapour, radiometers put the cloud tops near 250 K, and H. C. Urey had argued that water would help rock lock carbon dioxide away as carbonate, so a planet so rich in carbon dioxide ought to be dry. Menzel and Whipple answered with B. Lyot's polarisation measurements, which among the substances Lyot knew only water droplets fitted well, and with a geological twist: if oceans covered the entire surface, a thin layer of carbonate on the sea floor would soon stop the reaction and leave the carbon dioxide in the air. They concluded that present-day oceans completely covering the planet could produce the observed clouds. The same year Fred Hoyle, in Frontiers of Astronomy, argued that Venus had begun with more hydrocarbons than water, that the oxygen freed from its water had been used up oxidising them, and that the excess might remain as oceans of oil under a perpetual smog of oil droplets. Venus, he wrote, 'is probably endowed beyond the dreams of the richest Texas oil-king.'

The measurement that upended the debate came from a radio dish in Washington. On 34 days between 2 May and 23 June 1956, around inferior conjunction, C. H. Mayer, T. P. McCullough and R. M. Sloanaker of the US Naval Research Laboratory aimed the laboratory's 50-foot reflector at Venus with a sensitive radiometer working at 3.15 cm. The apparent black-body temperature came out at about 620 ± 110 K in early May and 560 ± 73 K near conjunction. That was more than twice the 235 to 240 K that infrared radiometers found at the cloud tops, and well above the 408 K that Wildt had estimated in 1940 as the greatest surface temperature solar heating could produce. In the paper, received in July 1957 and published in January 1958, the three were careful. They declined to say where the radiation came from, allowed that at least part of it might come from the surface, and judged a hot ionosphere unlikely because it would need electron densities orders of magnitude above those in Earth's atmosphere.

For six years the heat had competing explanations. Summing up in 1964, the Mariner 2 radiometer team noted that ground observers had found a brightness temperature near 600 K at wavelengths of 3 cm and longer but only 350 to 400 K at 8 and 4 mm. Most theoretical discussions, the team wrote, assumed or tried to justify a hot surface, among them papers by A. H. Barrett and E. J. Öpik in 1961 and by Carl Sagan in 1962. D. E. Jones proposed in 1961 that the radio heat was thermal emission from the ionosphere; others blamed electrical discharges in the atmosphere (Tolbert and Straiton, 1962) or instabilities in the ionospheric plasma (Scharf, 1963). Sagan's case rested on the greenhouse effect. Owen Toon, who worked in his laboratory, credits him as one of the first to recognise that a massive greenhouse effect warms the surface of Venus, and traces his interest in the planets to childhood reading of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The test was built into a spacecraft. In 1960 a microwave radiometer was proposed for Mariner A to settle where the emission came from; when the Atlas-Centaur rocket fell behind schedule the mission shrank to the 447 pound Mariner R, and the radiometer to two channels at 19 and 13.5 mm. The deciding evidence was at the edge of the disc. Near the limb a radiometer looks through a longer slant of atmosphere, so a hot surface under an absorbing atmosphere should fade toward the edge, while a hot layer high above should not. On 14 December 1962 Mariner 2 swept its beams across Venus three times, and the 19 mm channel showed the limbs cooler than the centre by far more than the beam geometry could explain. The team, which included Jones, concluded that the radiation originates at or near the surface.

Mariner 2 did not end every doubt at once. In 1967 J. B. Pollack and Carl Sagan were still publishing a critical test of the electrical discharge model of the microwave emission, and the design of Venera 4 still carried a trace of the ocean. One account in the epizodsspace record says its capsule would have stayed afloat if it came down in an ocean, which few believed in, and that a 'sugar head' device would then have signalled the splashdown. Shubin's chronicle in the same collection records that the Academy of Sciences gave the designers a surface pressure of 1 to 10 atmospheres and a temperature of 475 degrees, and that when the capsule was reworked in May 1967 the sugar lock came out while the buoyancy stayed; in Shubin's own reading, the buoyancy was by then meant for a fall on Earth. The answer from the ground came from Venera 7, which landed on the night side on 15 December 1970. A telemetry fault left only its temperature channel working. NPO Lavochkin gives 475 ± 20 °C at the surface, and a pressure of 90 ± 15 atmospheres calculated from that temperature record and earlier probes' data. The clouds once read as water turned out to be sulfuric acid; how that was established, starting from Lyot's polarisation curves, is on The Atmosphere of Venus.

Novelists and visionaries had been visiting Venus since the seventeenth century. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction traces Venus through planetary tours by Athanasius Kircher (1656) and Emanuel Swedenborg (1758), whose inhabitants, in the manner of Fontenelle's, tended to be gentle and ethereal in keeping with the goddess of love, and it names Achille Eyraud's Voyage à Vénus, published in Paris by Michel Lévy in 1865, as the first novel concerned specifically with Venus. Eyraud's narrator brakes his fall with propulsion cones and lands in a meadow of tall grass under dazzling light. When a listener objects that Venus must be very hot, the narrator's answer is the scientists' logic in miniature: its atmosphere is far cloudier than ours, and a thick veil of white vapours sends the sunlight back into space, shields the ground from burning rays and brings abundant rain.

The pulp magazines turned the clouds into a stage set. Otis Adelbert Kline's The Planet of Peril ran in Argosy in 1929, and Edgar Rice Burroughs began his own Venus series with Pirates of Venus, serialised in Argosy in 1932. Robert A. Heinlein made Venus a fertile, sickly world of fungus-ridden swamps in 'The Green Hills of Earth' (1947) and two later novels. A second tradition made Venus an ocean. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) gave future humanity a winged life on its floating islands, C. S. Lewis set a new Eden on islands of floating vegetation in Perelandra (1943), Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore housed the last humans in undersea keeps in 'Clash by Night' (1943) and Fury (1947), and Isaac Asimov, writing as Paul French, published Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus in 1954. Ray Bradbury's 'Death-by-Rain' (1950), retitled 'The Long Rain' in The Illustrated Man (1951), kept the jungle version under weather that never relents.

Writers in the socialist countries used the same clouds for different lessons. Stanisław Lem's Astronauci (The Astronauts, 1951), his first novel about interplanetary travel, sends an expedition to a Venus whose inhabitants had prepared to attack Earth but destroyed themselves beforehand in a fratricidal war. It was filmed as The Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern; 1960 in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1959 in The Guardian), though Lem later judged his first science fiction novels to be without value. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's The Land of Crimson Clouds (Strana bagrovykh tuch), about a tragic expedition to a pitiless Venus, grew from an idea Arkady had around 1951, and a letter of 10 December 1952 shows the science seeping in: Boris had written that the water on Venus had vanished, and Arkady asked in reply what the cloud cover could be if there was no water, and whether the planet could then be inhabited even by burdocks and ants. The manuscript sat at the children's publisher Detgiz for two years before going to the typesetters in April 1959, while editors demanded that the brothers remove at least some of the corpses. Aleksandr Kazantsev's novella Planet of Storms, later reworked as Grandsons of Mars, sent a Soviet and American expedition to a Venus much like Earth in the Jurassic, and became the basis of a film.

Pavel Klushantsev, a popular science director at the Lennauchfilm studio in Leningrad, had a feature about a Moon expedition approved in 1959. After a bitter fight with the screenwriters, writes Evgeny Kharitonov in an essay on Klushantsev's career (printed in the magazine Esli in 2002), Kazantsev's novella became the basis and the heroes set off for Venus instead of the Moon. Planet of Storms was shot at Lennauchfilm in 1961, according to the Bryansk news agency RIA Strela, which on 12 April 2022 marked 60 years since its premiere in the region's cinemas, putting that premiere in 1962; Kharitonov writes that it reached the big screen in 1961. Its Venus is wet, volcanic and prehistoric, with a hovering car, a robot called John, a carnivorous flower, lizard-like natives, a dinosaur, a pterodactyl and an eruption, and a closing twist that suggests intelligent life after all. Kharitonov records that the culture minister Ekaterina Furtseva wanted to cut a scene in which the woman left in orbit weeps ('A Soviet woman cosmonaut cannot cry!'), and that critics savaged the film while audiences loved it; in a St Petersburg television report Klushantsev's production manager Aleksandr Kharkevich remembered queues at the Znanie cinema on Nevsky Prospekt for about half a year. Twenty-eight countries bought the distribution rights.

In the United States Roger Corman bought the film and cut it into two new pictures. Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), credited to John Sebastian, a pseudonym of Curtis Harrington, kept much of the Soviet footage, dubbed the cosmonauts, swapped the woman in orbit for Faith Domergue and added Basil Rathbone as a scientist in a transmission room, according to Douglas Buck's account in Offscreen. Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women followed in 1968 under the name Derek Thomas. Its director, Peter Bogdanovich, told The A.V. Club in 2002 that Corman had dubbed the Russian film as Storm Clouds of Venus, that AIP would not buy it unless women were added, and that he shot for five days and directed about ten minutes of the result. The makers of the original went uncredited, and Georgy Zhzhenov appears in the American titles as Kurt Boden. By the first version's release, Mariner 2 had already flown past the real planet.

Once the surface was known to be hot and dry, writers lost interest, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes, and the old Venus survived mainly as farewell. Larry Niven's 'Becalmed in Hell' (1965) showed the intimidating new world, while Roger Zelazny's 'The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth', published the same year, took an ornate leave of the planet of the great ocean, and Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison gathered the old stories in 1968 under the title Farewell, Fantastic Venus! Later novelists turned to remaking the planet, in Pamela Sargent's terraforming saga begun with Venus of Dreams (1986) and in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 (2012). In 2015 Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin edited Old Venus, an anthology of new stories set on the traditional Venus of science fiction and science fantasy, half a century after science had retired it.

Parts of the imagined Venus have returned as serious questions. Whether the planet held oceans early in its history is still argued: a modelling study posted in April 2026 concluded that its carbon dioxide atmosphere does not by itself show whether Venus had a temperate past. The question is covered on Did Venus Have Oceans?. Whether anything could live in the clouds, a possibility H. Morowitz and Carl Sagan raised in 1967, is on Life on Venus. The oldest names needed no correction: Qiming still rises ahead of the Sun and Changgeng still follows it down, and they are still the same planet.