"There are two little planets that I call weenie beans here; Mercury and Mars."-Vicki Hanson
Skip ahead to 7:45.
It's always a good sign when a speaker opens up with something very very basic. That usually means something eschewed is about to get called into question! In this case the spoiler is the premise that the lithosphere is not an atmospheric layer of a convecting planet. From Convections point of view, it is.
This is more of a panel than a lecture, it involves a lot... of corny humor. They might be stoned, but are probably nerds doing public speaking in a room full of people they know. There aren't a lot of slides, but there are a fair number of quotes to timestamp by. It's a very good proof of what the actual Venus scientists are thinking and doing. These are they.
- Hansen actually says a lot of noteworthy bits. Like she's been teaching undergrads via short blurbs for years and years. "What was Earth like before plate tectonics? We would like to know." At 15:00. That sums up her talk nicely.
- Slide at 16:58, this slide illustrates the point of view shift, Venus crust is just a conductor between two convective forces therefore its just like an air-filter, collecting chemistry between the two convective forces. A very ergonomic point of view within the limitations of what actual probes can actually do.
- At 18:00, "Most of the planet sits at the same elevation." A sound bite that is more on point than the slide it comes with. Her style is a very interesting, very auditory way to teach. I'm personally bad at auditory learning.
- 22:10 "A lot of the Soviet missions to Venus were great successes while the missions to Mars were failures, and the converse was true for the US,[so from early on we were building on...'the history']." From a different panelist.
- 29:14 "If you cooked off everything on the Earth, everything on the surface gets put into that atmosphere."
- 31:50"[Venus had a resurfacing event] and when it did this it churned up a lot of materiel into the atmosphere."
- 32:50. Note that the new term "Tessera" meaning the continent-like highlands of Venus, has now entered the vernacular. "We think those are the ancient rocks on Venus, that will help us tell about climate." He's talking about granite. It's buoyant among basalt, and we do not know how so much of it appeared so quickly in the crust of Earth. Any granite detection will be a huge deal. Better than Aliens.
- 36:16 "Right now there is some debate as to whether Venus is in a stagnant-lid, or mobile lid regime."
- 50:33 "What is the actual chemistry of a lava on the surface?" Note that this question is disclaimed, as in the coming probes can't help much. But this is what they are fighting over behind the scenes.
