Destination Venus --"Was It the First Habitable Planet in the Solar System?"
“Venus is like the control case for Earth,” said planetary scientist Sue Smrekar with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory echoing recent research that suggests that Venus might have looked like Earth for three billion years, with vast oceans that could have been friendly to life. “We believe they started out with the same composition, the same water and carbon dioxide. And they’ve gone down two completely different paths. So why? What are the key forces responsible for the differences?”
Image credit: Venus as seen by the Akatsuki probe’s ultraviolet imager. ISAS and JAXA Wikimedia(CC BY 4.0)