Venus. Earth’s twin. Approximately the same size. Comparatively located in a temperate orbit around the sun.
Earth’s evening star. The brightest object in observable space besides the sun and moon. A glowing beauty named for a Roman goddess. Namesake of one of the best athletes of all time.
Uninhabitable planet. The atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. The mean surface temperature is 464C (867F). The cloudy miasma reflects romantic light upon the Earth like ice cream of the cosmos. From this distance we bask in the planet’s companionship of albedo light when we face the darkness. Science says Venus is dead beyond rehabilitation and any interest in its history constitutes an astronomical post mortem inquiry into what in geophysical hell made it evolve so wrong and how long ago. Somehow in its clouds and acid muck it hides its evidence of demise, but some proof exists at high altitudes that long, long ago Venus could have sustained life as we know it.
In measures of millions of years a few millenia here and there unaccounted for could make or break a planet struggling to balance an ecosystem struggling to sustain against abuse by one or more life forms competing for survival. Nobody wants to explore the surface of Venus for evidence of past civilizations long extinct. It’s a sci fi projection of imagination to suggest sometime long ago when nobody on Earth was keeping track a civilization such as the human race once emerged on a verdant planet we now call Venus and over the course of a kind of anthropocene period and runs of bad geological luck the planet went to hell. Look how it is now.
Earth has endured its own evolutionary kicks. Who would have taken dinosaurs seriously in the days of the Holy Roman Empire, but today we project back to a whole age and era when such creatures may have dominated all wildlife on the planet until an asteroid smacked prehistoric siberia or the mexican yucatan and crashed the weather so badly the climate wiped out enough dinosaurs to create coal and petroleum over the time it took for mammals to arise and rediscover its place in the universe.
In the 1980s there was a song called The Final Countdown that sang “Oh, we’re heading for Venus” which I used to think was a clue the band, Europe they called themselves, didn’t know what they were singing about because no sensible space emigrant on Earth would aspire to Venus. But now I hear that song as a warning. Maybe they were saying the direction human civilization was headed in its treatment of the planet was Venus.
Here on Earth we quibble over temperature increases of fractions of degrees, whether the variations are realistic measures or hard trends. Sea levels rise in inches. Forests burn by the mega acres and it smokes across the land. Rain withholds itself. The mammals who try to keep order haven’t far to point out crises of existential significance. Earth’s dinosaurs didn’t care if Venus was a democracy or dictatorship. Firearm crimes alone undermine people’s trust in the next guy. How bad did the people of Venus let themselves go before they passed a tipping point? When did their air and water get so bad it couldn’t be saved? What worldwide catastrophe sealed the destiny of Venus? If their civilization’s technology was advanced enough to bring about its planetary destruction, did they consider colonizing space? Could they have come to Earth?
Buffalo Kelly 