VENUS AIN’T THE KIND OF PLACE TO RAISE YOUR KIDS: But climate models show it might once have been hospitable to life.

While Venus now has very little water in its atmosphere, it could have had oceans as deep as 525 meters (1,700 feet) billions of years ago. The atmosphere was likely far less thick and toxic, too. The Goddard team plugged all of those factors into climate models used for Earth, and they showed that it had a mean surface air temperature of 11 degrees C (52 degrees F), with max temperatures at 95 degrees F. That means that several billion years ago it could have been just as likely to support life as Earth, if not more so.

Climate models are notoriously unreliable, even about the planet we can measure directly. But this is at least some fascinating conjecture about our solar system neighbor.