Venus
Venus is the second planet of our solar system.
For a long time, the notion that Venus, which is closer to the Sun than Earth and entirely cloud-covered, would be considerably warmer and wetter than Earth but still largely habitable, was popular, especially among science fiction writers, but even among planetary scientists. The planet was imagined to be covered with tropical rain forests and coral seas; some people imagined it to be inhabited by dinosaur-like creatures.
This idyllic image, however, was brutally shattered in the 1960s when observations with both improved Earth-based instruments and interplanetary probes revealed that the planet is very hot - about 475°C at the surface - and not at all wet, with a massive carbon dioxide atmosphere exerting a crushing pressure about 90 times that on Earth at ocean level, and that the cloud deck consists of sulfuric acid. These results ended all speculations about life on Venus.
Some people entertain the notion that the planet could be terraformed in the future, turning it into something like what it used to be imagined to be like, but most planetary scientists remain sceptical.
