🪐☄️✨🔥🌡️⭐
medium prune

Earth has a twin. It went horribly wrong.

Same size. Same rock. Same birthday. One of them is a lead-melting acid nightmare and it is not us.
scroll
🏀✨🌍
Start here

Hold a basketball. Congratulations, that is Earth.

Yes, the whole planet. Try not to drop it.
🔵🟡📏
Now meet the twin
EARTHVENUS

Venus is the same ball with a bit of air let out.

Earth 12,742 km across. Venus 12,104 km. 95%. Nothing else out there is this close to us in size.
⏰🤔🌀
Guess before you scroll

A day on Venus lasts how long?

243 days to spin once. 225 days to loop the Sun. You would have a birthday before you finished a Tuesday.
☀️🧭
🔄
wait what

It also spins backwards. On Venus the Sun rises in the west, and it takes about two months to do it.

NASA planetary fact sheet
👆✨🪐
Poke the twin

Five things about Venus. Tap one and it talks back.

yes, tap all five
So here is the awkward question

Two planets. Same size, same stuff, next door neighbours. Why is only one of them nice?

HOTTER THAN MERCURY · AND MERCURY IS TWICE AS CLOSE TO THE SUN • HOTTER THAN MERCURY · AND MERCURY IS TWICE AS CLOSE TO THE SUN • HOTTER THAN MERCURY · AND MERCURY IS TWICE AS CLOSE TO THE SUN • HOTTER THAN MERCURY · AND MERCURY IS TWICE AS CLOSE TO THE SUN • HOTTER THAN MERCURY · AND MERCURY IS TWICE AS CLOSE TO THE SUN • HOTTER THAN MERCURY · AND MERCURY IS TWICE AS CLOSE TO THE SUN •
🔥🌡️🫠🔥
464
degrees celsius, at the surface

Hot enough to melt lead. Everywhere. All night. Forever.

Lead gives up at 327C. Venus is not even breathing hard.
🍗💨
🍖
kitchen tip

Venus would cook a Sunday roast in about four seconds. Then it would keep going, because nobody on Venus knows how to turn an oven off.

🎚️🔥
Drag it

Slide from your sofa down to the surface of Venus.

your sofavenus, ground level
🫁🌊
Head to head

Squeeze test. How much is the air leaning on you?

Earth
1x
Venus
92x
Standing on Venus feels like standing 900 metres under the sea. Your lungs would have opinions.
🛰️📸🇷🇺
VENERA 13, MARCH 1982

The Soviets landed there anyway, because of course they did.

Venera 13 was built to survive 32 minutes. It lasted 127.
It sent back colour photos of an orange rock desert, then went quiet. It is still down there, slowly becoming a puddle.
🔥☠️
Take a walk

Tap the dots and see how far you get.

Tap a red dot. Go on.
💧☁️🔥🌡️
How a twin goes wrong
Venus probably had oceans. Actual water, for maybe a billion years.
It sat a bit too close to the Sun, so the sea started to steam off.
Water vapour traps heat. More heat, more vapour, more heat, more vapour.
The oceans boiled dry, the carbon had nowhere to hide, and the door locked behind it.
This is the runaway greenhouse. There is no undo button.
🌧️🧪😵
☔
weather report

It rains sulfuric acid on Venus, but the rain never lands. It evaporates halfway down, mid air, out of sheer heat. The planet is too hot to even finish raining.

💨🌬️
4
days for the wind to lap the planet

The whole atmosphere spins about 60 times faster than the ground under it. The clouds are in a hurry. The rock is not.

And yet it is the prettiest thing in our sky. Those acid clouds are brilliant reflectors.

The evening star is a poisonous pressure cooker. Romantic.
Brightest object up there after the Sun and the Moon.

Same size. Same start. One thermostat, stuck.

That is why we keep staring at it. Venus is not an alien world. It is the other outcome.