If there were life on Venus, then it would have to survive in the tough Venusian environment.
Venus is completely uninhabitable for us humans, for a few reasons.
- Days on Venus last 243 days, meaning nights would be worse than winters in Alaska
- There's no magnetic field on Venus, so your compass wouldn't work, plus you'd get radiated to death by solar flares a few times a month
- The atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide and about 0% oxygen, so you couldn't breathe
- The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is 90 times more than earth (90 atms), so you'd be crushed to death just by the air
- Oh, and it's over 400 degrees there. So your egg would fry before you could crack it, which means you could only get hard-boiled eggs on Venus. Plus you would melt like a marshmallow in a microwave.
March 2015: Scientists discover a ginormous asteroid about as far away from the Earth as Jupiter is, but it's headed directly toward Venus. It will pass by far from earth, but it appears that it's headed on a direct collision course with Venus. Most news stories focus on whether or not the resulting Venusian dust cloud from the Venus impact will affect Earth, even though the projected path of the asteroid is far from Earth. Some enviro-friendly people suggest that we do something to alter the course of the asteroid, but the President of the US announces that we won't do anything about it, because it won't impact earth and it would be too expensive to do something. (This shows that we humans are insensitive to stuff that doesn't affect us.)
November, 2015: (six months later) A few weeks before impact with Venus, the asteroid starts reacting to what seems to be an anti-gravitational or magnetic force emanating from the Venus. The planet Venus appears to be magnetically affecting the asteroid. This is somewhat ironic, since Venus doesn't have magnetic poles, like Earth. The asteroid barely clears Venus, skimming its atmosphere, and unexpectedly hurls back, directly toward earth.
This time, we do everything possible to stop the asteroid. Scientists project it will land on Los Angeles, and this will be a dinosaur-extinction-level asteroid disaster.
January, 2016: (two months later) Everything we shoot at the asteroid gets deflected around it. We try a bunch of stuff, like in that movie, but we're thwarted at every turn, by what seems to be an invisible force emanating from the asteroid. The asteroid starts gradually changing its course, so that the new projected impact point is anywhere between LA and Japan, and this is hotly debated by different scientists and astronomers. We start preparing the coastal cities for the worst tidal waves ever.
March, 2016: (two months later) Right before the asteroid impacted Earth, it did some really weird stuff with its impact angle, and started spinning really, really quickly. Scientists were able to develop mathematical models for how the asteroid strangely behaved, so everyone still thinks the asteroid is a natural phenomenon. When it impacted, it hit Hawaii, but because of its spin, it had a ricocheting effect, so it actually hit and re-hit the earth, causing what felt like earthquake after earthquake, felt worldwide, for about two days. During the two days of earthquakes, everyone is pressed up against a wall, if they're inside. Stuff outside that wasn't nailed down moves dozens and sometimes hundreds of miles away.
Three days later: Very surprisingly, most buildings are still standing, almost everyone is still alive. The tidal waves ended up not being all that bad, either. New Orleans got the worst of it, since they never put great levies in there. True, it's the worst natural disaster since probably when the dinosaurs got destroyed, so things are pretty bad, but almost everyone is thankful they're still alive.
The weird thing is that the sun never sets. (At least for us Americans.)
May, 2016: (two months later) After we get the power back on, we realize that the only real impact of the asteroid was Earth's rotation has been slowed to a crawl. Well, that and a huge volcano close to the north pole that's now even taller than Mount Everest, due to shifting of the tectonic plates, scientists say. The equator, which used to rotate at over a thousand miles per hour, now only rotates at about 6 miles an hour. This means a new day will last about a year.
Needless to say, GPS devices no longer work.
May, 2018: (two years later)
The new volcano, which we called Mount Vesuvius, put a bunch of stuff into the atmosphere, so that scientists say that's why the days don't boil us and the nights don't freeze us. Plus as a weird aftereffect, the winds in the upper atmosphere blow almost a thousand miles an hour, even though winds on the surface have slowed down considerably.
Life is pretty much the same except days last 130 days. And nights last 130 days also. So most of the technological development of the last two years was focused on how we can grow food on the bright side of the world and transport it to the dark side of the world.
This is also the same month we discover another asteroid headed on a collision course with Venus.
May 2019: (one year later)
The same thing happens with this asteroid as with the first one. It barely misses Venus, skimming its surface, and turns back on a collision course for Earth. The only difference is this one misses the Earth and becomes a secondary satellite to our planet. The effect of this satellite is that 95% of the time, the Earth’s magnetic field is neutralized.
Solar flares severely affect Earth now. People don’t want to go outside, because skin gets fried pretty easily now, and electrical stuff only works about half the time.
June 2019: (one month later)
It’s pretty obvious now that these two asteroids weren’t accidents, and something in Venus is trying to transform Earth into a Venus-like environment. We react to this in just about every way possible. The people who have been saying this since the first asteroid hit instantly become celebrities. We start sending peace messages to Venus. India launches a nuke at Venus, but before it hits, some force pushes it so the bomb goes around Venus and heads toward the dead of space. People start praying to the gods and goddesses of Venus.
June 2025: (six years later)
Life has been pretty much the same for years. Lots of people died, because of the problems of transporting food around the globe, but we fixed enough of them so most of the Earth’s population is still alive.
In this month, where Hawaii once was, this massive bubbling, or boiling comes up out of the water. We find that it’s ice-cold carbon dioxide vapor, and that something or someone is turning the oceans and the biomass in the oceans into carbon dioxide and this kind of salt-like substance.
September 2025: (three months later)
The carbon dioxide vapor has kept coming, so much that it’s very hard to breath, so almost everyone who can afford it is wearing supplemental oxygen devices. The atmospheric pressure is rising rapidly, and so are the carbon dioxide levels, but surprisingly because the vapor steaming out of the ocean is super cold, it stabilizes the Earth's temperature. So the temperature has basically been the same as it always has. So much for all of the greenhouse effect warnings we heard over the years. We’d stopped trying to make contact with Venus the last few years, but with the carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, everyone starts trying to make contact with Venus again.
December 2025: (three months later)
The temperature starts to rapidly rise, because of a massive greenhouse effect. We try to stop the oceans from boiling, but find that it’s being done by this kind of indestructible nanotechnology that will turn pretty much anything into carbon dioxide. Most people think that the Venusians just can’t see us, and so we focus most efforts on experimental technologies and communication methods, trying to tell the Venusians that we’re alive and we want to keep living.
January 2026: (one month later)
We start to die, some from heat, some from lack of oxygen, some from being pressurized to death, and some from starvation. We did shoot a few pods off into space with cryogenically frozen humans in hopes of preserving humanity, and also so this story isn’t ultimately depressing.
January 2126: (ten years later)
Venusforming of Earth is complete.
January 2226: (one hundred years later)
Venus explodes.
January 4226: (two thousand years later)
Beneficent and advanced aliens find the pods and construct a new Earth for us. Or at least for the ten humans they saved from the pods.
The End.
This is a plot outline of a movie I think would be cool. Hopefully someone takes it and turns it into a book or a movie. If you need a moral, it’s that maybe we should be thinking now about how life might exist in forms that are much different than us. Almost all of us believe we have souls that are alive, yet those souls are as strange and elusive as the aliens in my story who couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them.
Links:
- Article on how to terraform Mars
- Wikipedia page on terraforming Mars
- Article on terraforming Venus
- Wikipedia page on terraforming Venus
Photo purchased from istockphoto.
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