Life on Ancient Venus

[CreativeCatastrophe]

This is all purely speculation for fun! I'm no expert on these things, so please excuse any errors there may be in anything I say.

Some theories state that Venus once had as much surface water as Earth, and that the lack of a magnetic shield allowed cosmic bombardment to eventually burn away the oceans, creating the runaway greenhouse effect that we now see in present Venus. So my question is - if ancient Venus once had a habitable atmosphere and temperature, would it have developed life forms similar to Earth, but unique? Intelligent life? Since it could have had a more earth life environment for anywhere between 200 million years to a couple billion, it seems to be a possibility.

And what would it be like, if so? A single revolution of the planet takes some 224 Earth days, so there would be no day and night as we know it. It would likely be much more humid than Earth due to the oceans evaporating at a faster rate. Would there be an oxygen rich atmosphere (if so - giant bugs!)? How would the weather patterns be? Most likely storms along the line of the dark and light side, and some interesting ocean currents due to one side being warmer than the other. There would be no seasons due to a fairly nonexistent axis tilt. The sun would be much younger and dimmer - that would play into how plant life/animal life would develop as well.

If there was intelligent life, how would their environment shape their culture? What would they look like to live in an environment that is similar, but also uniquely different from Earth's?

 

Essentially I'm trying to paint a detailed picture in my head of what ancient venus may have been like. I don't know enough of the science to paint a completely accurate one - which is why I'm bringing it here to see what you all think! I can't seem to find a lot of articles out there about this, probably because there is no real way to prove what it may have been like until we can gather more data on the surface.

 

My husband and I have been talking about this for a couple days and having fun with all the weird stuff we've been coming up with so I'd love to hear what you guys can come up with!

Edited August 28, 2014 by CreativeCatastrophe

[Moontanman]

One of the major hypothesis is that Venus was hit by another planet at an odd angle and it's rotation was reversed, if that happened it might have set up a hot house simply by vaporizing the planetary crust. this would have resulted a hot house from the very start that the slow rotation of the planet just amplified.

 

Collisions are thought to have been frequent and the angle and directs of collisions were important, Mercury would appear to have been hit so hard it threw off most of it's crust. Venus probably merged with one of it's late impactors and the Earth was hit at an angle that caused much of the crust to be splashed out into space to eventually become our moon.