-Welcome to exploration in the 2020s.
We're going to send women to the moon,
and we're going to return samples from Mars.
And we're about to launch humanity's
greatest space telescope -- the James Webb.
And in this time of looking back to look forward,
I want to look out to the planet Venus.
And I want to take you there through the eyes of an explorer
and through what I think will matter to people.
Some of us think of Venus as the missing link.
But before I go there, I want to remind you
why we explore beyond Earth.
In these very difficult times here on our planet Earth,
on our spaceship, why, as we look at our beautiful --
our beautiful spaceship, planet Earth,
do we need to think of the bigger context in space?
And I like to share this as I begin
because it kind of connects us all to the bigger cosmos...
because as we look at space and our place in space,
we're reminded that it colors our lives,
the history of life on Earth, every second of every day.
And how we're here, why we're here is part of that journey.
And so, it's been said by some -- I'm just quoting them --
that single-planet species don't survive.
So as we extend ourselves into space
and learn from our neighboring planets like Venus,
we're exploring, like many of you
who explore the great places on Earth.
So, let's go to Venus. You can see her in the night sky
if you're looking out at night on a clear night right now.
She's the second-brightest object.
Historically significant,
and she is a planet with a story yet untold.
And so I hope tonight I can fill in some of the gaps
and tell you why some of us are just so passionate about Venus.
A planet with an atmosphere so big,
we think it's the record book of that planet.
It's the fingerprints of the history of another world
just like our own.
So, let's go back 500 years for a minute.
Remember that, 500 years ago,
while da Vinci was finishing his great opuses
in art and science and technology,
while Magellan was starting his grand voyage around the Earth,
the first orbit, we, in that heyday of the Renaissance,
were just thinking about our world in new ways.
And 470 years later,
NASA's mission known as Magellan
mapped the planet Venus using exquisite technologies,
putting a face on Venus that was otherwise covered by clouds.
And, today, we're getting ready in the next year
or so to launch telescopes that will take
the taste of atmospheres of planets around other stars.
And for that, some of us think,
I think in the spirit of da Vinci and Magellan,
that we need to think about our own Venus, too,
because she may help us understand
what we see out there in deep space.
So come with me as we think about Venus,
because we live here on Earth
on a profoundly magical ocean planet.
We're going back to the moon with women,
with robots, with commercial.
We're going to bring samples back from Mars
to ask the questions "Are we alone?"
So why should we worry about Venus?
I think because Venus is that special place
that we haven't thought about enough.
Sometimes there's a missing link.
And I would like to submit to you tonight
that as we prepare for these great voyages
of people to new places
and to new places on Earth, that we should think about Venus.
So, here we are on our biocentric world, Earth.
It's a pale blue dot to astronomers, perhaps.
It's an ocean world.
And next to us is Venus on one side,
inbound from Earth toward the sun, and Mars looking out.
And Mars is definitely a future home,
a place where we will go with women and men.
Spacecraft are there now, the Curiosity rover.
But what about Venus?
And I think we're beginning to hope beyond just magical musings
that Venus was a world that may have had life.
I'm sorry. May have had oceans, prospects for being habitable,
some scientists think even life, and a story
that needs to be connected to our own and Mars...
because here, on Earth, we know our planet
has been a life-bearing world for billions of years.
But on Venus, that record, if it ever existed,
may tell us about a similar pathway, a destiny.
And so, for some of us, what's happening to Venus today,
versus what happened a billion years ago
before the dinosaurs in that microbial stage of Earth life --
What happened to Venus 3 billion years ago
may be important ingredients
into how life works in our universe.
So let's take a voyage.
Now, to me, as a scientist,
and many of my colleagues, we have a Venus problem.
And I mean that in the sense
that what we think we know about Venus
is a patchwork, a quilt work of glimmers of wonderful things,
stories that would support oceans,
active crust, volcanoes, habitable atmospheres,
but none of them are complete. It's sort of half-baked.
So, let's take that voyage now and see what we can learn.
So, first, I got to remind you --
I mean, we're talking about the Renaissance here,
500 years ago -- Why are we so fascinated?
Partly because you can't miss Venus.
If you see the moon and you look up
and you see the next brightest thing,
very often, when she's visible, it's Venus.
She wanders across the sky,
often the brightest thing you see when there's a new moon.
There is no moon, so we see Venus.
And she wanders around the sky from the morning start
to the night start in a resonance with Earth.
And, of course, the great artists of the Renaissance
painted the Venus from the art take.
So Venus is kind of part of our DNA.
And we see the history of Venus
the way we will look for planets around nearby stars.
Several years ago, Venus transited our sun,
and we saw -- You see that black circle there with the red arrow.
That's Venus going across our sun.
If we were a telescope in orbit around Proxima Centauri Beta
and you looked, then you could track that transit
and measure the chemistry of the Venus atmosphere,
which is what we do now as we look for exoplanets.
So Venus is there to see in all of her glory.
And she's a big planet. She's Earth-sized.
She's an Earth-sized planet.
Earth-sized in mass, almost in density.
She has a very peculiar pattern around the sun.
Her day is longer than a year.
She rotates backwards relative
to Earth and Mars and the planets.
No seasons, she sits straight up like a top,
and no magnetic field.
She's really the atmosphere planet.
And when you look at her atmosphere,
today, it's a hothouse run amuck.
A pressure cooker at the surface with temperatures
that are like your pizza oven.
The atmosphere is toxic --
carbon dioxide, a little bit of nitrogen and argon,
a little, tiny bit of water vapor.
If you were on the surface of Venus today,
it would be like being in a submarine
half a mile deep in the ocean.
The winds in the atmosphere, where the clouds are, 50,
60 kilometers up, swirl around like a giant jet stream,
always moving west,
moving faster than its rotation rate.
And at the surface, though,
it's like the tranquil deeps of the ocean.
So, we don't know anything about
that lower 100,000 feet of that Venus atmosphere.
Everything we have are glimmers
from missions from the '70s and '80s.
We know the cloud deck is corrosive,
and we know that at the surface, you wouldn't see the sun,
but it would be like a really cloudy day.
So, this is the Venus we know today.
Very exciting, very mysterious.
In fact, more like your oven than you might imagine.
So, today, 60 degrees here in the eastern United States.
The surface temperature on Venus is, you know,
870 Fahrenheit, 450 centigrade.
Really not a place we can imagine going.
And yet we're hungry to understand that Venus,
because we've been confused by her throughout history.
TV shows 50 years ago
painted Venus as a swamp with crazy aliens.
Now, when you look at Venus from the standpoint
of what it might seem if you were standing there,
this is the rogues' gallery of planetary panoramas.
On the left, you see Venus
as studied by the Soviet landers of the '80s.
And then we see our ocean planet,
our beautiful moon, where women and men will be going back.
The Mars planet, where we seek signs of "are we alone?"
And Titan, where a mission known as Dragonfly will go.
Look at Venus.
It's a very different world.
And we've really only seen it up close
four times in the history of women and men.
So, the other thing about Venus that's really peculiar
and kind of a neat, fun fact if you're playing "Jeopardy!"
or any other games is, that lowermost atmosphere
the lower 50,000 feet of the Venus atmosphere,
is not a gas like you and I know.
It's not steam.
It's not the kind of carbon dioxide you'd find
when dry ice sublimates.
It is a supercritical gas
that's under such pressure and temperature,
it acts more like a fluid.
It's only 14 times less dense than water.
It could actually conceivably carve channels
the way density currents do in the ocean.
This is the Venus we have to get to know.
It's an engineering challenge.
And it's, I think, within reach as the people of this planet.
So, the big question --
Venus and Earth are the same size
in the same neighborhood of this special solar system we live in.
Why are they so different?
And everything points to Venus, a climate state run amuck,
a planet that you wouldn't want to walk on or live on,
and our beautiful, habitable Earth.
Why did they work differently?
Why did Mother Nature give us this control experiment nearby?
That's the big question. How can we tell?
We've mapped Venus with radar.
We've been there with probes. The last U.S. probe -- in 1978.
So it's interesting when you think about that,
because very often when we look at Venus,
do a Google search on Venus,
you'll come up with beautiful artists' pictures
of what it might look like.
These kind of landscapes that look vaguely like places
we would know in Iceland and the Azores,
the seafloor, with mountains looming in the misty distances.
Venus is still an artscape, an art project.
Hence some connection to Leonardo da Vinci
for people like me.
We want to change that.
We want to make it an exploration scape
where we can imagine going.
And over the last 60 years, 40 missions have gone to Venus,
the first by the Soviet Union.
Visited the surface for the first time in the '70s.
Our one mission to the atmosphere of Venus was in 1978.
It was a Multiprobe/Orbiter mission known as Pioneer Venus,
and its big probe transited the atmosphere,
but was unfortunately
not completely successful in its transit
in making the measurements that we need.
The Soviet landers, the Veneras and Vegas, landed on Venus
in the '70s and '80s, and they provided our data
that we use to look up close at Venus.
I was lucky enough to work with colleagues in Russia
then, Soviet Union, in part of my PhD thesis.
Our own mission named after the Portuguese explorer Magellan
mapped Venus from orbit in the '90s,
and we have not been back since.
This is the planet whose exploration history
is incomplete.
This view is an artist's rendering
we commissioned in 1986
after the last landing spacecraft on Venus
from the Soviet Union, known as Vega 2.
And this is it. It landed on the night side
in the dusky dark of that world,
where we think the surface may even glow.
So, no one's been back since.
35 years -- no missions to the surface of Venus,
no missions to the atmosphere.
And yet we have the tools
to see that world in a way that will pop like Mars,
like Titan, like other worlds, like the moon.
Now, I had to show this picture to show
that I've sort of been thinking about Venus
perhaps way too long.
This is a spacecraft known as Venera 13,
a model from a museum in Moscow.
And next to it is a graduate student with, um,
I will admit, pretty poor shoes,
perhaps not the best clothing.
But why did students like me across the ages,
actually, the last decades, care?
Was it the wonder of exploration?
The discovery possibility? Our curiosity?
The need for better clothes?
I don't know. But these missions in the '70s and '80s
gave us the hope that we could get to Venus.
These four pictures are the sum total
of the backyard-sized views of the surface of Venus
collected by the Soviet Union in the '70s and '80s.
They show landscapes, we believe, that could be volcanic,
the way those are on the ocean floor of Earth.
They are very different than things we've seen
on other worlds.
They don't look like the moon.
You can even see the bust of Lenin in the pictures
in lower scale in that little pentagon
in honor of the Soviet voyages.
None of these missions lasted for more than a couple hours.
But this is our data.
This is what showed us the Venus at human scale.
Some of us think it's time to go back.
Meanwhile, in the United States,
anchored by great questions coming out of the '70s and '80s,
we mapped Venus exquisitely with the Magellan Radar Mapper,
built at NASA's JPL.
Its mission -- in the course of 3 1/2 years,
map Venus at 100-meter scale, the scale of a football field,
a soccer pitch.
Named for Magellan, the great explorer
who did the first orbit of Earth.
Magellan showed us Venus, the hills and dales,
the rolling plains that make up most of the surface,
the mountains, places that are amongst the most exotic
in our solar system.
It showed us Venus is an interesting world
that doesn't follow our terrestrial playbook.
And so, this radar view shows areas that are low in blue
and high in reds and whites.
It's colored by how radio waves see through the clouds
to see the surface.
One of the most exciting places on Venus
is the high mountains of Maxwell
in the region known as Ishtar Terra.
Some of us think of Ishtar as the Tibetan Plateau of Venus.
This is a region on Venus about the size of Australia.
It sits at 60 degrees north.
And it's notable for its high mountains,
known as Maxwell Montes,
which rise 11 kilometers above the plains.
That's taller than Mount Everest,
than Mauna Kea is from the seafloor.
And these mountains may be coated with unique minerals.
They may be formed very dynamically, but we don't know.
Our views are from Magellan and other orbiters,
not from being there.
This is the kind of enigma of Venus.
For Mars, we know the big mountains.
We're learning about them on Pluto even,
but not so much for Venus.
The volcanoes of Venus are just unbelievable.
Maat Mons, one of the big granddaddies of them all,
rises over 5 kilometers, 15,000 feet.
It looks a little bit like the Kilimanjaro of Venus.
This radar map, in perspective of Maat Mons, attests
to the fact that it may be a kind of hotspot volcano,
perhaps operating like Hawaii on the Earth.
But, again, we don't know. Are these volcanoes active?
What could they tell us
through the lens of the atmosphere?
Do they leave their gas signature?
When we study Venus, it's kind of like CSI does Venus
with our forensic tools.
So, what we've learned about Venus over the last 50 years
is, it doesn't follow our playbook.
It does not have an intricate network of plates
that jumble and jostle,
producing the kind of mountain ranges of the Andes,
the volcanic island chains of the Hawaiian, the Tonga,
that produce all the beautiful things we know of.
Of course, the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas.
Doesn't work that way.
It may have at one point, but it doesn't today.
It's a planet that may operate more like a one-plate planet,
where its crustal motions are different.
Maybe they once were like Earth's,
but the record today is different.
It's also a world with landscapes
that are pretty exotic, almost enigmatic.
We see most of the surface
seems to look like the kind of volcanic plains
we know on Earth, we know on the moon, we know on Mars.
There's very few impact craters. The surface is young.
Some of its surface reminds us of the kind of floors
we'd see at a basketball court --
a parquet, a tessera.
And these mountains are amongst
the most unknown in the solar system.
There's no other place that has the textures they have.
So we see Venus as a magical mystery tour.
Relative to what we know about Mars and the moon,
she's still so enigmatic.
We know more about Mercury, thanks to the MESSENGER mission
and now BepiColombo going there, than we do
about our nearest neighbor planet,
which, today, is only 90 million kilometers from Earth,
about five light minutes away,
so you can see her in the sky.
We have evidence that Venus may be doing really exotic things,
such as having volcanoes that erupt.
I wouldn't be surprised if Venus is actively erupting today,
belching gases into its atmosphere
that we could detect. We see evidence of that
in some places that you can see listed here.
So, what if Venus were active today volcanically?
Like our seafloor; like volcanoes
that have recently erupted in the Philippines, like Taal;
like the great volcanoes of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
That would change the way we see that world
and what we can measure.
And that would be a key clue to another dynamic world
like our own.
The other thing about Venus --
and this is my only kind of strange spaghetti slide --
is, when we think of Venus -- and our atmosphere,
over on the left, next to Venus',
where spacecraft have gone --
most of the atmosphere on Venus
is essentially chemically unexplored.
When we look at the chemistry we think we see,
most of it is guesswork from the kind of chemistry lab work
you would have done in high school or college.
And so these squiggles that you see
in the big plot in the middle, they're our best guesstimates
of what might the atmosphere be telling us.
We think it probably doesn't work that way.
We don't have the data, and it's always up to having the data
to ask the questions.
Explorers explore out of curiosity,
collect the information to be there,
to see there, to know there.
We need to do that for Venus.
So, what might we learn?
Well, let's look at our Earth again for a second. What are we?
We're an ocean world with a dynamic atmosphere
full of water vapor and aerosols.
Our planet's controlled by the dynamics of water.
It's why we need to study Earth,
because it informs how we look at these other worlds.
And then there's Venus.
The ultraviolet view you see at right
from the Japanese mission Akatsuki
shows us this beautiful world with mystery chemistry,
with cloud decks that superrotate,
and a surface we don't see.
How does Venus work?
She's really rather brazen and peculiar, if you ask me.
So, when you think of Venus and Earth,
well, they're the only two planets of their type
in our solar system.
And that's important.
They have interiors that may be hot.
They may be convecting.
They have thin crusts that may be deforming,
perhaps volcanoes,
and very limited impact records to look at.
They haven't been around that long --
their surfaces, that is.
They're a tale of two worlds.
So when we compare them to Jupiter and Saturn,
the big gas giants Neptune and Uranus,
or even to Mercury, Pluto, and the smaller worlds,
they're in a unique class.
In some ways to better know ourselves,
we do need to think about Venus and how she worked in time.
So let's think about it.
Let's play the tape backwards, as Stephen Jay Gould once said.
That early Venus in the region of the solar system
where Earth was,
only about 30, 40 million kilometers from Earth,
probably looked a lot like this.
Like we imagine our early Earth.
A maelstrom of oceans forming, being collected.
Volcanism, giant impacts big enough
to make things bigger than Texas.
This was the early Earth.
And then, after that period of Late Heavy Bombardment,
of oceanic formation, the planet stabilized.
Early Earth, early Venus, and maybe the Earth and Venus
like worlds beyond light-years from our world
that we're now starting to get to know
with missions like TESS, like Kepler, like CHEOPS.
Maybe this kind of early planetary world
is something that we can get to know by looking at Venus.
The records of this on Earth are gone.
That first 600 million years of Earth has been eradicated.
We look at it through the glimmers of history.
May be preserved in the topsy-turvy Mars,
and maybe Venus is the clue.
The Venus of today?
Well, we're not sure.
Maybe it's a volcano scape with active volcanic plains,
with interactions of its big massive atmosphere
with the rocks making minerals that are exotic.
What would the Venusians think?
Well, we don't know. So we want to find out.
That lower 30,000 feet of Venus,
the troposphere of Venus, is as unexplored
as anywhere in the solar system, less well-known than Pluto,
thanks to the magical mission of New Horizons
that Alan Stern led.
So, some of us want to get back.
So what do we want to do?
Well, the first thing we want to do
is compare Venus to the worlds we know.
And when you look at the time history,
you know, as scientists, sometimes we're also historians.
We look at things in the history of epochs
and eras where life was on Earth,
the dinosaurs, the pre-dinosaurs.
You can see the column there in the middle with Earth.
The moon. We have ages defined by impacts.
Likewise on Mars and now Mercury.
Even on Pluto.
On Venus, we have one column with one line.
We can do better because there's a story in there.
And, you know, someone once said,
"Maybe there's a pony in there."
So let's go find the pony that is Venus,
is what I would say to all of you.
And we can do that in many ways.
Now, let's look at the lenses we would use to look for that pony.
In science, we organize questions
and hypotheses through lenses.
The lenses we use -- Was a planet
ever environmentally good enough
to be habitable by the kind of life we understand,
microbial or bigger?
That's a question.
What was the climate state like?
You know, we worry about our climate on Earth,
our environmental history.
The Mars climate story is fascinating.
What was the climate of another atmosphere-bearing planet like?
What was the crust like?
Those landscapes, those volcano scapes.
How did that work?
And how might this world, this planet
be like other worlds that we're going to start seeing
better and better as we go through the '20s
and '30s with telescopes like James Webb, like WFIRST,
like all the ones that'll be launched?
So, for Venus, we can look at all these questions at once.
The next missions to Venus will do that,
and they'll connect Venus to the destiny space of our own planet.
Not tomorrow or a couple generations,
but across the epochs of time.
And so, these are the questions we use.
And one thing I'm reminded -- 100 years ago,
in the front page of The New York Times, a scientist said,
"Life on Venus. We should go look."
That was 100 years ago in the era of,
you know, the beginnings of the Roaring Twenties,
coming out of the First World War.
That's what we were thinking then,
when Robert Goddard first started thinking
about his rockets here in the United States.
The Venus atmosphere in the clouds today
has conditions that are not unlike
those near the surface of the Earth,
except for its chemistry.
Its pressure is like that at the surface of the Earth.
Temperature -- 20 degrees C.
There's chemistry there
with droplets of sulfuric acid and other species.
What if that world could have been habitable
in that region or elsewhere?
Now, we don't know this. This is a pure theory.
Some scientists have worked on some great cases for that.
We just don't know. We don't know
the chemical-boundary conditions to even ask that question.
But what if we could? Would that be worth doing?
Asking about the limits to life as we understand it.
And life on Earth works in many phenomenal places
where you least expect it.
In the deep earth
miles deep underground in mines, life is found.
In hot springs and vents and fumaroles
like at Yellowstone, in Iceland,
in the Azores, in Philippines today at Taal,
life ekes out a living.
It's in the sarcophagus at Chernobyl.
So if we now study life in all of these extremes
through the lenses of these biologists
that look at extremophile life, microbial life, how tough it is,
why not ask about whether this process
could have worked on Venus?
So, when we rack and stack Venus over time,
over the long history of time, what do we see?
Well, if you just took the amount of volume
on a planet in its atmosphere, its oceans, its crust,
where you could stick the kind of life,
the microbial life, that dominates our world --
we're all too aware of that today in this time --
what would you see?
Well, this simple graphic shows with the green balls
the amount of volume of places
where microbial life could have been.
Venus has a large real estate today in the atmosphere,
in the past perhaps in oceans,
that Venus may have been a microbial bonanza.
But we don't know. We don't have the records,
the measurements to understand.
On Mars, we think maybe.
It's worth looking and bringing back samples,
to ask that question.
Were those biosignatures preserved?
On Earth, it's everywhere.
On Titan, we're gonna go look with Dragonfly.
Europa, the ocean under the crust,
we've got to go look, with missions like Clipper.
So, what about Venus? If this is even vaguely the case,
this is calling us to the planet Venus.
And then there's the question of water.
In the atmosphere of water,
if you took every little bit of water vapor,
you would squeeze out the same amount
that we have as in the atmosphere of Earth.
But the problem is, on the crust,
in the crust, there is none.
On Earth, there's 100,000 times or more water.
So where is the water? We need to know.
We need missions sent by smart women
and men with great engineering and technology
to go there and ferret out this question --
Where's the water?
Where is the missing water in the Venus system?
How could we tell?
So, there's a lot of ways of telling.
And, actually, as we speak today, scientists,
including those in New York, Michael Way
and Tony Del Genio, are publishing papers
about what might have been this special Venus.
Venus may have been an ocean world
for longer than any other planet except Earth that we know about.
It may have been. We don't know for sure.
Obviously, that's why we need missions.
But if it were, based on what we can do today
with computer models and glimmers,
wouldn't that be cool?
A world that went through 3 billion years of oceanic history
to turn into the hothouse of today.
So, what we need -- measurements to see this world
in 21st-century light
so the girls and boys, the women and men of the '30s
and '40s will have a place to figure out.
So one of my jobs is to invent that future.
And, today, two missions are candidates
in a competed program that NASA runs called Discovery.
One of them, I'm lucky enough to be part of with my team,
led by women and men smarter than I'll ever be,
which we named after Leonardo da Vinci.
And this is one of two candidate missions
that could fly to Venus in the '20s.
And our mission, DAVINCI+, is a mission
to explore those chemical reservoirs
by going to the atmosphere of the planet,
by measuring its scales
as good as those as a rover on Mars
can measure in that atmosphere.
Our mission is a flying chemistry laboratory rover
that also includes a part of a mission
to orbit the planet and study its clouds
and surface from above, putting all that together
in an observing system to see,
how did the oceans of Venus work,
or were there any?
What was that atmosphere history like?
Why is it in this climate state?
What is the history of that atmosphere?
How would we know a Venus if we saw one around
another star beyond our solar system?
This mission and others being studied in Europe,
in other places in the United States,
in Russia are what we're going to do in the next 20 years.
We don't know which will go. Maybe them all, maybe none.
But if they go, they will change how we see Venus.
So, what would the Venus look like if you were standing on it?
So, last summer, I visited a great volcano
that I happen to know and love in the islands
known as the Azores, part of Portugal.
And this is a view which I've colored the color of Venus
to show you the kind of landscapes
that some of us imagine on Venus today.
Rockscapes of lava and ash and dust
blowing around at high pressure.
This is a view of a place.
And this is maybe what we'd see at Venus.
Our DAVINCI mission could take photographs like this
as we descend through the clouds.
Other missions would look at it differently.
But this may be what the Venus would look like
that we could experience in the next decade.
So, the big why for Venus -- She's the missing link.
We need to measure her state variables.
We need to take stock of her.
There's no meteorites from Venus on Earth.
We need to get into the atmosphere again,
where we haven't been for almost 50 years.
That's the laboratory.
That's the experiment that Mother Nature gave us.
We have the tools, folks. We're ready.
The women and men of today have built those tools.
They're working on Mars. They're going to go to Titan.
We've flown them to the moon.
We're ready to take them to Venus.
We're ready to ask those questions as we speak.
So our kids will see the answers.
We're ready to take Venus,
where we define a whole zone relative to parent stars,
and make it pop and come alive.
Today, astrophysicists,
looking at what they can tell about planets
around nearby stars, have defined a Venus zone.
Over on the left, you see the parent stars --
our sun right there, brown dwarf.
6,000 degrees Kelvin is what our parent star does.
We live with that star, and you see Venus, Earth, and Mars
if you draw a line across from the left to the right.
Venus is in the Venus zone,
a zone that could have once been habitable with oceans,
all the right stuff that Earth has, that Mars may have had,
but doesn't anymore.
We're discovering that Venus zone may ebb and flow.
But Venuses may be the former Earths.
We may be able to see more Venuses than Earths
by looking at the upper atmospheres of planets
around nearby suns with the James Webb Telescope
and the telescopes that come beyond.
We're celebrating 30 years of the Hubble Space Telescope.
In a year or so, we'll launch the James Webb.
And then, coming in the late '20s and '30s,
more telescopes will see farther
into this magical zone of exoworlds.
They may be everywhere, and a large fraction of them
that we can see may be Venus-like.
So to understand them, we need to understand our own Venus.
So, from the top down, from the top of the atmosphere,
from the surface,
we will know that world so we can see what the Venuses
out there beyond our solar system are telling us.
And those exoplanets that look like Venus
may show us different states of the Venus
that today is that hothouse, that climate run amuck.
So, coupling what our telescopes,
our astrophysics tells us,
what our ground-based telescopes tell us,
to the Venus we can go explore that's just next door,
five light minutes away, is going to change
how we see ourselves in the solar system, I predict.
So, I would say to you, as we think about Venus through time,
over 4-plus billion years,
can we afford not to visit her soon?
We learn by analogy as we explore.
We go to the deeps of the oceans,
to the mountains, to the volcanoes.
We do those things as people and as explorers.
Venus presents an exploration opportunity for us
to extend ourselves as women and men
as we thought about 500 years ago.
500 years ago, we orbited this Earth.
Daring mission by Magellan and Elcano.
500 years ago, da Vinci left his legacy -- vision,
art, science, technology.
We're still inspired by it.
Venus is a masterpiece as yet unfinished.
The discoverers are ready to build on what we know,
to build on what we are going to know
from great new telescopes, to put her into her place
and inform how we work.
Today, in this era of exploration in space by NASA,
by Europeans and Japanese and Australians, Canadians,
Russians, Chinese, all the peoples of this planet,
we explore to inspire, innovate,
to interconnect ourselves beyond our home planet.
And as the Rolling Stones once said,
maybe time waits for no one.
I would say Venus waits for no one.
We have to let our wonderment get us back there.
As we look at the night sky
and imagine women on the moon in a few years,
which I know is gonna happen, and it's gonna be amazing
as we do that, there's little Venus hiding behind the moon,
calling us, beckoning us, "Come and see me, too.
I have a lesson to tell you about."
I promise you, people listening to this,
that lesson is going to be spectacular.
It's going to be beyond our wildest dreams.
We just have to go.
So, let me conclude by saying thank you for listening.
Thanks to all the explorers that have given us the wisdom
to consider even doing this stuff.
On to Venus.