
Consequences of Tidal Dissipation in a Putative Venusian Ocean - Breadmaker
http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-384066
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clebio
Skimming just the abstract:

> Consequently, an ocean tide on ancient Venus could have had significant
> effects on the rotational history of the planet

The implication seems to be that we could answer whether Venus once had water,
based on the orbital history of the Earth (over very long time frames), I
guess?

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blackhaz
I may be wrong but I don't think so. It is not suggested in the article. You'd
need to know precisely how fast Venus was spinning when it had oceans.
NewAtlas [0] interprets this as ancient ocean possibly being the culprit of
Venus' extremely slow rotation period (~243 d.)

[0]: [https://newatlas.com/ancient-venus-ocean-slow-down-
rotation/...](https://newatlas.com/ancient-venus-ocean-slow-down-
rotation/59808/)

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rwallace
> The associated tidal torque is about 2 orders of magnitude below the present
> day Venusian atmospheric torque

That never occurred to me before this moment, but of course the dense
atmosphere would tend to exert some tidal drag. The above sentence indicates
the atmosphere alone suffices to explain the slow rotation.

But that would seem to flat-out contradict everything else said here. The
atmosphere, not the ancient ocean, is the explanation. What am I missing?

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ncmncm
I think a subtext here is that the moon has saved Earth from that fate.

Such a moon must be very rare, for rocky planets in the Goldilocks zone. There
is a plausible argument that life would not have developed at anything like
its pace, without.

That might resolve the Fermi paradox, unless warm gas-giant moons are common
and not all bathed continuously in ionizing radiation.

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ncmncm
I would have titled it "posited", not "putative", I think.

