Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan

which the radio emission came from somewhere else–from an ionized layer in the atmosphere of Venus, or from electrical discharges between droplets in the clouds of Venus, or from a hypothesized great belt of rapidly moving electrically charged particles surrounding Venus (like those that, in fact, surround the Earth and Jupiter). These latter models permitted the surface to be cold by placing the intense radio emission above the surface. If you wanted sailing ships on Venus, you were a cold-surface model advocate.
    We systematically compared the cold-surface models with the observations and found that they all ran into serious troubles. The model in which the radio emission came from the ionosphere, for example, predicted that Venus should not reflect radio waves at all. But radar telescopes had found radio waves reflected from Venus with an efficiency of 10 or 20 percent. To circumvent such difficulties, advocates of the ionospheric model constructed very elaborate hypotheses in which there were many ionized layers with especially constructed holes in them to let radar through the ionosphere, hit the surface of Venus, and return to Earth. At the same time there could not be too many holes; otherwise, the radio emission would not be as intense as observed. These models seemed to me to be far too detailed and arbitrary in their requirements.
    Just before the remarkable spacecraft observations of Venus of 1968, I submitted a paper to Nature , the British scientific journal, in which I summarized these conclusions and deduced that only the hot-surface model was consistent with all the evidence. I had earlier proposed a specific theory, in terms of the greenhouse effect, to explain how the surface of Venus could be at such high temperatures. But my conclusions against cold-surface models in 1968 did not depend upon the validity of the greenhouse explanation: It was just that a hot surface explained the data and a cold surface did not. Because of my interest in exobiology, I would have preferred a habitable Venus, but the facts led elsewhere. In a paper published in 1962, I had concluded from indirect evidence that the average surface temperature on Venus was about 800 degrees F and the average surface atmospheric pressure about fifty times larger than at the surface of Earth.
    In 1968, an American spacecraft, Mariner 5 , flew by Venus, and a Soviet spacecraft, Venera 4 , entered its atmosphere. By the year 1974 there had been five Soviet instrumented capsules that entered the Venus atmosphere. The last three touched down and returned data from the planetary surface. They were the first craft of mankind to land on the surface of another planet. The average temperature on Venus turns out to be about 900 degrees F; the average pressure at the surface appears to be about ninety atmospheres. My early conclusions were approximately correct, just slightly too conservative.
    It is interesting, now that we know by direct measurements the actual conditions on Venus, to read some of the criticism of the hot-surface model published in the 1960s. The year after receiving my Ph.D., I was offered, by a wellknown planetary astronomer, ten-to-one odds that the surface pressure on Venus was no more than ten times that on Earth. I gladly offered my ten dollars against his hundred; to his credit, he paid off–after the Soviet landing observations were in hand.
    Theory and spacecraft interact in other ways. For example, Venera 4 radioed its last temperature/pressure point at 450 degrees F and twenty atmospheres. The Soviet scientists concluded that these were the surface conditions on Venus. But ground-based radio data had already shown that the surface temperature must be much higher. Combining radar with Mariner 5 data, we knew that the surface of Venus was far below where the Soviet scientists concluded Venera 4 had landed. It now appears that the designers of the first Venera spacecraft, believing the models of cold-surface theoreticians, built