If you're into hard sci-fi and you're looking for a good read, they actually dropped a pretty good recommendation with that reference at the end - Larry Niven does a great job of blending real-world theories like Dyson spheres and advanced propulsion drives, with some of the more far-flung standards of the genre like an intra-planetary teleportation grid.
Sorry, I think my phrasing might have been kind of weird - I was referring to the weights of H2 and N2 relative to CO2, which weighs a whopping 44 grams per mol.
…Although, I just did some quick estimates last night, and “almost twice as heavy” was still pretty far off. CO2 is much closer to 1.5x the weight of N2 than double the weight of N2.
I’m not a scientist, but one could argue that it’s likely that all three planets had nitrogen, but only Earth still has it.
I don’t know much about Venus, but I know that part of why we have way more atmosphere than Mars is due to Earth’s magnetic field. Earth has a much stronger magnetic field than Mars, and it does a pretty good job of shielding us from the solar wind; meanwhile Mars has been slowly trickling atmosphere into the void for ages because it lacks that shielding.
Given that CO2 is actually super heavy, it makes sense that Mars would lose almost everything else first. You mentioned H2, but it’s also almost twice as heavy as N2 - because of this, nitrogen would concentrate at higher altitudes, eventually becoming exposed to the solar wind as lighter gases were stripped away.
As for Venus… Again, I’m not an expert, but a quick search suggests that it has a weak magnetic field as well. With a primarily CO2 atmosphere and a weak magnetic field, one could infer that Venus is in a similar position to Mars, and any significant nitrogen that may have been in its atmosphere has simply been stripped away by the solar wind.
I would assume that nobody makes thermal paste out of anything terribly reactive, but… That .gif looks like something out of a NileRed video.
IIRC, gallium makes aluminum get super brittle, which might cause it to crumble like that; but the foaming makes me think that the heat sink might have managed to oxidize all the way through, and it’s aluminum oxide reacting with the cleaner.