Posthuman Blues

Planet Venus: Earth's 'evil twin'

Through Venus Express, scientists hope to understand better the mechanics of climate change on our own planet.

"Earth can certainly take a very uncomfortable step towards Venus, though it's not likely to go all the way," comments Fred Taylor, Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, UK.

"The point is, we're moving in that direction and many of the constituents and mechanisms involved are the same. Even a few degrees change in temperature can be a disaster on Earth."

When asked, most politicians refute the need for space exploration because, in their opinion, the money needed to finance manned missions to the planets would be better spent directly serving the people. We're told, again and again, that there are too many problems afflicting Earth to warrant the novelty of scientific discovery.

In fact, the opposite is true. We direly need insight into how planets like Mars and Venus became the wasted worlds they are if we're to prevent Earth from succumbing to a similar fate.

This isn't a particularly difficult concept to grasp, and I suspect the politicians who diminish the need for a robust program of comparative planetology intuit this, at least on some level. But space exploration has yet to become a political issue; it lacks the seeming immediacy of more "down-to-Earth" sound-bites.

I've maintained that climate change won't become politically relevant until large numbers of people start dying. Then I realized that the dying has already begun, and that unless one regularly reads the European press, one would never imagine that global warming had migrated from the comfortable sphere of the theoretical to workaday reality, promising to drown cities and wreak havoc with our ecosphere while too many governments look on in autistic stupor.

Ultimately, my fear is that by the time crewed missions to Mars are urgently necessary in order to assess our Earth-bound climatological predicament, it will be too late. The time to launch is now, while we're not yet paralyzed by a regular seasonal parade of Category-8 storms. We're confronted with a choice: to wallow in deep shit or welcomingly accept even deeper shit -- a layer than may well smother us in the womb.