Alternate history: How would a habitable Mars and Venus have changed the space race?

[RacerX]

Had Mars and Venus been habitable (I am assuming by humans) then that would mean life would had evolved there also just like it did here. Question is how fast or slow did they evolve compared to us?. I think it would be a whole different space race then what the US and Russia had in mind. More and likely if we had found them first before they found us it would have been a more cooperative venture. If they found us first well I dont think there would of been a "space race" at all

 

[Unstung]

Why not just send people to Venus (because it has similar gravity) with the necessary equipment to survive, given the atmosphere and environment is not hostile to humans? Ignoring contamination, a vehicle does not need to be provided to return to Earth and the crew can start colonizing immediately.

 

[T.Neo]

I suppose you could run into trouble if all the local life contains some chemical that kills yeast: then you'd have to look for a local microorganism to do the fermentation with.

Perhaps [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion"]anaerobic digestion[/ame] could be an alternative?

Had Mars and Venus been habitable (I am assuming by humans) then that would mean life would had evolved there also just like it did here. Question is how fast or slow did they evolve compared to us?.

It is important to remember that strictly, evolution has no 'end goal', such as intelligent life. For most of the 500 million years or so that Earth has had complex life on its surface, there have been no sapient species present. Modern humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years; less than a tenth of a percent of that time. The liklihood of intelligent life being present on Venus or Mars is therefore fairly low.

Even if intelligent life did exist on, say, Venus, there is no assurance that it would be technological (humanity was, again, at the level of hunter-gatherers for most of its history).

Ignoring contamination, a vehicle does not need to be provided to return to Earth and the crew can start colonizing immediately.

Immediate colonisation may not be an objective, though.

 

[RacerX]

Perhaps anaerobic digestion could be an alternative?



It is important to remember that strictly, evolution has no 'end goal', such as intelligent life. For most of the 500 million years or so that Earth has had complex life on its surface, there have been no sapient species present. Modern humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years; less than a tenth of a percent of that time. The liklihood of intelligent life being present on Venus or Mars is therefore fairly low.

Even if intelligent life did exist on, say, Venus, there is no assurance that it would be technological (humanity was, again, at the level of hunter-gatherers for most of its history).



Immediate colonisation may not be an objective, though.

Modern humans have only been around a few hundred thousand years? Ok fine this cant happen on other planets? If Venus and Mars was habitable why couldn't intelligent life evolve on those planets as well as it did here? If they were habitable wouldn't they have the same building blocks life had here on earth? only differences being slightly? By what you are saying leaves a gap in the evolutionary timeline. Why? Are you suggesting humans possibly evolved with outside help or that intelligent life can only exist here on earth and that life might or could evolve elsewhere but just not sapient? Who is to say the "spark" of being sapient could not happen on those planets as well. Who is to say the "spark" of sapient life could of happened sooner then here on earth. My point being is the universe is some would call infinite. Some would differ this opinion. But point being is I just can not believe for a second out of all the planets,stars,goldielocks zones, and such that we are the ONLY intelligent life out there. Sooner or later there has to be a first contact.(unless we destroy ourselves first) I just can not believe that somewhere out there in the vast universe/multiverse there is no other sapient life out there. There has to be, how can it not be? If the "spark" of sapient life can happen here why not anywhere else in the infinite universe? Or Mars or Venus hypothetically speaking of course.

 

[T.Neo]

I never said that intelligent life couldn't evolve on a habitable Venus or Mars, that there's a special 'spark' of sapience or that human evolution would have required outside help. All I'm saying is that intelligent life doesn't have to evolve on Venus or Mars. It isn't a necessity of evolution.

The probability of finding intelligent life in a set group of planets (or in the universe as a whole) is one thing, but not exactly what I was discussing. I was talking about the probability of intelligent life being present on a particular planet, and based on Earth's history, that seems fairly low. If you landed on Earth at any random point in the last 500 million years, you'd most likely land in period when intelligent life was absent.

And of course, there are numerous events in Earth's history that were fundamental to the development of life. Remove or alter the K-Pg extinction, or change the Permian-Triassic extinction, or alter something about the positioning of continents or the nature of Earth's tectonic history, and things would differ considerably. Considering that Venus is an entirely different planet, it is obvious that life would be different there than it would on Earth.

That said, there's nothing actively preventing the evolution of intelligent life (unless you've got a severely limited environment or repeated mass extinctions going on). There could be intelligent life on Mars or Venus, it's just that the overall liklihood of humanity being overrun by a Venusian Space Race is fairly low.

 

[Tychonaut]

The original thread question brings up a variety of other questions for me.

If crewed missions to Mars or Venus had been attempted early on, such as the 1960s or 1970s, what would have been the impact on the crews? How would they have handled exposure to the interplanetary radiation environment and possible multi-year flyby missions in zero-g? Remember that decades ago, some of the hazards we now know have to be planned for in planetary missions would instead have come as ugly surprises.

Would the prospect of habitable, colonizable, exploitable nearby planets have been enough to overcome the political and economic currents against space exploration? Apollo was a huge expense for Earth's wealthiest economy as it struggled to pay for increased social spending and the war in Vietnam. Using the same technology to support regular missions to Mars and Venus would have been fantastically expensive. Also, in the absence of some sort of "unobtainium" you're not going to be sending back space galleons loaded with gold from the colonies that will pay for the whole venture.

Perhaps the technical problems would create a willingness to consider the otherwise unacceptable, such as Project Orion. Nuclear pulse propulsion was, and is, a technology in search of a justification for building it. Would life on Mars and Venus have been that justification?

Even if the United States had gone for it, would the Soviet Union have followed suit, or looked at the price tag and balked? Following the Americans in a big push would have risked bankruptcy and social upheaval.
If they do succeed in building Syrtisgrad, what sort of place would it be? Do they fill it with scientists and run the risk of them deciding the Soviet system is best left on Earth, or accept the expense of shuttling herds of KGB minders around the solar system?

Although the US and USSR would clearly be the frontrunners, what about the smaller powers? Would European nations try to offset the loss of their Earthly colonies by getting in on the interplanetary action? It starts to look a bit like Space:1889, a century later.

On a different note, if making Mars habitable requires increasing its mass substantially, what impact would that have on Earth? Either directly, through increased perturbations in our orbit, or indirectly, through possibly perturbing more asteroids into our path? If a bulked-up Mars led to even a slight change in the rate of large impacts on Earth, there might not be a humanity to have a space race.

 

[Linguofreak]

The original thread question brings up a variety of other questions for me.

If crewed missions to Mars or Venus had been attempted early on, such as the 1960s or 1970s, what would have been the impact on the crews? How would they have handled exposure to the interplanetary radiation environment and possible multi-year flyby missions in zero-g? Remember that decades ago, some of the hazards we now know have to be planned for in planetary missions would instead have come as ugly surprises.

The biggest hazard would probably have been solar activity en-route, but I think that that hazard was known and planned for in the interplanetary missions proposed in that era.

Also, they *were* looking for surprises. One part of the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_Flyby"]Manned Venus Flyby[/ame] project was to be a ~year long mission in high-earth orbit (above the van Allen belts) to test the feasibility of such a long duration mission while staying within a few hours of Earth.

It's getting late here, so I'll cover the rest of your post later.

 

[IDNeon]

I think the problems are far more ...astronomical... than just planets are not habitable.

It takes the effort of the entire planet to put space craft in low orbits.

Now you want to colonize other planets? Where is the money in that?

Bottom line....space has everything the elite owners of earth want.

But there's no profit in it. And kings or ceos are driven by profit. There is no great tournament in space (an economic argument made "comparative advantage in violence"...look it up. It makes a strong argument why the unprofitable warfare of Europe was driven by the psychological idea of a tournament).

So what incentive do we have to be there? Colonizing planets won't be profitable. The resources actually there aren't profitable.

Etc.

And the problems are far more vast than what the moonshot made it appear like.

Imagine living in the chernobyl sarcophagus your entire life. That's space in a nutshell.