Who first proposed that Venus would be a very hot planet with a relatively constant temperature?
A good question. I was born in 1948 and I remember in the 1950s an astronomer named Patrick Moore was on TV in Britain. He said that spectroscopic studies showed that there was CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere, and that surface pressure was quite high so perhaps Venus had seas of soda water. About that time, my favourite science fiction hero, Dan Dare, in the Eagle comic, captures a dinosaur in Venus’ tropical jungle in a story. A few years later the Russian Venera probe landed on Venus and transmitted long enough to indicate that the surface temperature was way above the boiling point point of water and the pressure several times Earth’s sea level pressure. Venus is perpetually under cloud cover, so this and the thick atmosphere means that there isn’t much temperature difference between the sunward and night sides. So it was the Venera probe in the 1960s that put an end to speculation that Venus is habitable.
