The Mourning Star

Venus is shining brightly in the morning sky these days. If you look to the East just before sunrise you can't miss it. Venus has long been refered to as the mourning star, but of course its not really a star. People long mistook the visible planets for stars, but now-a-days we know better.

At some times Venus has also been the Evening Star, it would be visible right after sunset. It always appears close to the Sun from our point of view, and of course it is closer in it's orbit.

Venus as a planet is a very unfriendly place, the conditions at the surface resemble some of the imagined conditions of Hell. You wouldn't want to go there.

Mars has problems of its own, and its not much more friendly to our kind of life. Just getting there is a tremendous problem of course; but even if we could, why would we want to go? Of course the answer is simple, everyone is desperate to know if life was possible anywhere else. Its more or less obvious that if life is possible on Planet Earth, then it must be a possibility elsewhere in the Universe as well. Of course this logic has never been good enough for us, we want definitive proof. Personally I believe that we will find the evidence with a telescope sooner or later, we don't really need to send people looking at Mars.

The existence of life has altered Planet Earth in a way that would be detectable from a great distance. If we can observe similar planets around distant Suns, we should be able to determine the existance of our kind of life conclusively. But of course the Earth will not be hospitable forever, eventually life will run out of opportunities here. It could be a great long while before our world becomes uninhabitable, on the order of billions of years. But our world today is at considerable risk in a way that we are powerless to do anything about. It could easily be far less than a billion years before something changes here, and our home becomes unfriendly. Of course it's well within the realm of possibilities today that we ourselves will damage the viability of the Planet. In truth we don't really have the power to extinguish life completely, but we can make it much harder for humanity to survive here. The species may become extinct long before natural events render the world inhospitable. The very life of our species is at risk here, and its proven a very difficult problem to manage all those risks away.