@starlalilymoon:
Oooo, epic! I don't know why I like Venus a lot, but I guess maybe because it's so mysterious. Do you think maybe Venus had some life before the planet got the runaway greenhouse effect? And do you think there might be some life on there now, where it evolved to survive the harsh temperatures? The reason I say that is that there are creatures that the bottom of the ocean that survived the harsh conditions there, so I wonder if it would be the same for Venus?
Seems like there's a decent possibility it once had life. Mars too, for that matter (probably even more likely in that case). Whether either of them still do have "extremophiles", as they're called, is hard to say. Even if they can survive extreme conditions, could they survive those particular extreme conditions? If there was once more life on either of those planets, was it around for enough time to extremophiles to evolve to adapt while other life died out, and continue adapting as conditions continued to change? Guess it's what we hope to learn. Mars seems to have a higher chance than Venus, but it sure would be interesting if either or both of them did.
Yeah, aren't like lunar eclipses super common? More common than solar eclipses?
Depends on how you look at it. Solar and lunar eclipses (and this includes the different varieties of each–partial, total, and annular solar eclipses, and penumbral, partial, and total lunar eclipses) happen somewhere in the world pretty much equally often. If you have some version of a solar or lunar eclipse, you'll always get a version of the other type of eclipse two weeks before and/or after that. (E.g. we just had a total lunar eclipse, and at this upcoming new moon, there will be an annular solar eclipse.)
However, if you were to pick one specific location on the Earth, people at that one location would see lunar eclipses more often than solar eclipses throughout their lifetime, because lunar eclipses can be seen by a much wider range of people (basically, anyone who can see the moon during that time, i.e. anyone who's on the nighttime side of the Earth), while solar eclipses happen in more specific places (especially total solar eclipses, which cover a very narrow area of land on the Earth).
The math works out such that you'll have two years in a row where there will be four lunar eclipses that are at least partial (and usually, at least 3 if not all 4 of them are total), then the next two years, there won't be any total lunar eclipses (only penumbral or partial), and then the next two years will have four partial or total ones again, and so on.