Planning a vacation to Venus, nothing is as it should be here on our twisted alien twin. Beneath the clouds, it's the only planet in the solar system to rotate backwards and it does so very slowly.

 

The sun, if you could see it, rises in the west and sets in the east. An entire day here lasts for 8 earth months which is longer than the Venusian year.

 

Venus, you can walk around the planet faster than the planet rotates.

 

The sky above is as heavy as it looks, loaded with CO2.

 

Venus' cloud cover is mostly made of carbon dioxide. On the earth, we have the same amount, but it's tied up in rocks like limestones just tied up in grits. On Venus, all that carbon dioxide is in the air.

 

It's the differences between these worlds that are so intriguing. That's because four and a half billion years ago, Venus and earth started out as planetary twins.

 

They were formed right next to each other. They are very close to each other in the solar system. They have similar sizes.

 

Not only that, we now know that the planets were exchanging material early on, that Bits of earth were falling on Venus and that's what Venus was falling on earth. So, if life started on any of these worlds, it may well have spread among them through these little chips getting knocked off from all the impacts that were happening now but all the big collisions……