A Short Walk to Venus

The fantastic game of monetary cutthroat was described as the process of 'thrift and accumulation'; the outright fraud as 'enterprise'; the gilded extravagances of the age as colorless 'consumption.' Indeed the world was so scrubbed as to be unrecognizable.

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 19531

Venus: her principal attributes are a scallop shell and dolphins (she was born from the sea), a flaming heart, torch and magic girdle (to kindle love), and the red rose (stained with her blood).

Hall's Illustrated Dictionary of Symbols in Eastern and Western Art, 19942

Venus is a planet much like earth. But you wouldn't want to live there. You couldn't. Having a 'sister' planet might make earth feel less alone in the incomprehensible vastness of space. But Venus' differences should be enough to make us tighten our grip on our own, still oddly hospitable home.

Venus and earth share roughly each other's size and heftiness. Venus is our nearest neighbour, passing closer to earth than any other planet. Though, at 39 million kilometres away, you won't feel the breeze as it passes. When Venus does go by every 584 days, it also disappears from view, turning its dark side toward us, lying too near the sun.

Until space exploration began in the 1960s human knowledge of the planet's surface was arrested at the 'made of cheese?' level. Dense cloud cover prevented real observation. People speculated that the clouds hid a lush tropical world. A world where all the possible forms of life were fuel to fantasy. But the planet, the brightest celestial body in the night sky after the moon, has always been a muse. It was an early navigation point for finding out where we lie in the galaxy. The planet fed mythologies in ancient civilisations worldwide. Study of Venus supported the Copernican revolution that reshaped our view of the solar system. It forced us to realise that we were not the centre of creation.

Now it stands as a silent warning to respect the arbitrary fluke of earth's liveable atmosphere – a fragile balance of gases that makes human society possible. Behind this warning lies a new revolution in thought, every bit as radical as Copernicus'. It holds another view that will set fundamental boundaries around how we live. It leads also to a profoundly different way of seeing the world. Compared to recent decades, it shows a world turned upside down, one where the global rich are seen to be massively in debt to the poor and not the other way around.

When in 1962 the Marina and later the Venera space probes, respectively from the United States and the former Soviet Union, began investigating the surface of Venus, it became obvious that we would not soon be shaking hands with our planetary neighbours. Beneath the thick clouds of sulphuric acid, temperatures on the planet's surface were over 400 degrees centigrade. Considerably higher, about double, the heat you would use cooking anything in a household oven. Research revealed that Venus was so hot because it had experienced an extreme greenhouse effect. The same effect that, to a lesser extent, earth is experiencing right now.

The greenhouse effect is exactly what it sounds like. The atmosphere acts like a greenhouse trapping heat that would otherwise radiate away into space. Some greenhouse effect is a good thing. It is necessary to create the conditions for life. Too much, however, like too much of many otherwise good things, can be fatal for fragile species like ours.

Venus is closer to the sun and has a denser atmosphere. The powerful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is its most common atmospheric molecule. All of these help make Venus hotter than earth. Some believe that both planets when young may have had similar atmospheres, the result of volcanoes belching out gases. Yet today they could barely be more different. On earth the atmosphere contains 78 per cent nitrogen which is not a powerful greenhouse gas. Venus' atmosphere, on the other hand, contains 96 per cent carbon dioxide, which is a potent greenhouse gas.

The difference is life. Over millions of years the carbon that was once in Earth's atmosphere has been removed and stored. Today it exists in mostly stable forms like fossil fuel deposits such as coal and oil and in the limestone left behind by organisms. But, that life is fragile. And we are reversing the process that gave us the environment in which we now live with relative comfort. Humankind's overuse of its planetary oasis means that species of life on earth are becoming extinct at anywhere between 1,500 and 40,000 times the natural background rate. At the same time our economic dependence on fossil fuels means that we are returning the powerful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere around one million times faster than natural processes removed it.

Now, a confession. Hopefully this chapter's title – A short walk to Venus – caught your attention. It intends to summarise and focus the planetary predicament in which we find ourselves. A situation is always more clearly visible when seen in contrast. But there is both less, and more, to the invocation of Venus than an informative comparison of different planets' atmospheric gaseous composition. Calling up Venus, or her Greek synonym Aphrodite, also has a metaphorical purpose. In mythology the goddess has many incarnations. She is not merely the standard-bearer for simple love or beauty. The reference books say she was a fertility goddess whose domain embraced all nature, plants, humans and other animals. Only later did she become, 'the goddess of love in its noblest aspect as well as in its most degraded'. Inadvertently, Venus-Aphrodite steps forward from her giant sea shell as an emblem for our age. She symbolises, on one hand, a world of natural resources, inescapably the wellspring of our economic wealth. And, on the other hand, she represents the desires that drive both our necessary and our more profligate, destructive behaviour patterns.

There is an amount of consumption of natural resources that is necessary to meet basic human needs. For centuries it has included the burning of ancient bottled sunshine in the form of coal, oil and gas, to produce energy and also, unfortunately, the guilty greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. This pollution could be called 'survival emissions'. But there is also conspicuous consumption, a term first coined more than a century ago by Thorstein Veblen in a critical and dryly satirical account of the social...