Venus as the Moon

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
You are assuming that the Venus in this scenario was put there by nature. You are also assuming that Venus orbited the Earth for about 5 billion years or so, but what if it didn't?

You've never implied otherwise. In fact, you've implied that it's always been there. To quote your first post:

This is an idea I’ve had, what if the Solar System formed differently with the result of the planet Venus taking the place of our Moon in orbit around Earth and our Moon taking its position in Venus’s orbit?

Perhaps if you'd said that you'd assumed the whole scenario was artificial in the first bloody place instead of giving me this unapologetic bullshit about how science is wrong and how I'm "deliberately setting out to wreck things" I would have been more inclined to investigate that scenario for you.

That means its still possible to have a Venus orbiting the Earth at 1.3 million km, having it exert the tidal force that it does, slowing down the Earth's rotation and further receding from the Earth.

Then you have to answer the question of how it got in orbit around the Earth at such a late stage in solar system history. Not to mention that capture into orbit around Earth would cause a lot of havoc on both worlds as they suddenly had to cope with new tidal forces, and would be more likely to fling one or the other out of the solar system than to have them end up in orbit around eachother.

Plus, without a moon there for much of its history, Earth's rotation would be much quicker and it would have retained its early unbreathable atmosphere because it wouldn't have been blown off in a giant impact to form the moon.

But if Venus was put there later, then yes, there'd be less tidal force and it wouldn't be tidelocked - but then you'd have lots of other problems.

Perhaps a natural explaination is insufficient to explain the presence of Venus and the fact that neigther body is tidal locked by now. What would the scientists of this imaginary Earth be doing now, if their equations seemed to preclude a natural explaination for Venus's orbit around Earth? I believe they would begin looking for an unnatural explaination. That means that something put Venus in its present location, perhaps something intelligent. If you could spin up the Moon, I'm sure it would keep spinning for a time. Why would aliens do this? Well that's the stuff that science fiction stories are made out of.

As it is, Venus could be placed initially at 1,297,174 km from Earth 1 billion years ago and end up today at 1,300,832. Even though it doesn't move out from Earth much at all, if you put it there any earlier than 1.78 billion years ago it still tidelocks to Earth.

Assuming Earth starts with a rotation period of 8 hours, then even if you put Venus there at 1.78 billion years ago (not further than that), then today Venus' rotation period would be 122 24hour days long, and Earth's would be 16 hours long. But they'd be freely rotating relative to eachother.

But you'd still have the problem of the venus-like dense primordial atmosphere on Earth remaining. And on Venus too, probably.

You may as well just stop pretending that this is Venus and Earth and use totally different worlds.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
I don't know, it just seems implausible to me that tidal forces could be so great that they extend all the way to the edge of the gravity well.

Considering that tidal forces ARE gravitational forces, it shouldn't be surprising that they "extend all the way to the edge of the gravity well" (and beyond the obvious extent of it at that - gravity acts over a huge distance and even if something isn't directly orbiting something else it is still affected by the gravitational fields of everything around it).

I know Venus tracks the Earth, but it seems implausible that tidal forces could be the explaination for this. Venus is in a separate orbit around the Sun.

So? Jupiter and Saturn are in a 5:2 orbital resonance. Venus and Earth are in this weird 5:1 spin-orbit resonace. Maybe J&S is down to gravity and dust drag interactions between them while they were still forming in the protostellar disk. With Venus and Earth it's possible that the same applies there too.

Again, just because YOU don't understand how it happens or how to explain it, doesn't mean it can't happen or nobody can explain it.

But consider this as well, the Sun also exerts tidal forces on the planets, and they aren't tidally locked.

That's because to be tidally locked to the Sun you need to be closer than we are to it. Mercury isn't because it's in this 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, probably caused by a combination of relativistic effects and interactions with Venus and Earth. Venus isn't because its super-rotating dense atmosphere totally screws up the tidal dissipation (in fact, the rotation period of its solid body is is longer than its orbital period around the sun, which is VERY weird, and and it's rotating upsidedown because of that too).

 

[TKalbfus]

Malenfant said,

As it is, Venus could be placed initially at 1,297,174 km from Earth 1 billion years ago and end up today at 1,300,832. Even though it doesn't move out from Earth much at all, if you put it there any earlier than 1.78 billion years ago it still tidelocks to Earth.

I have no problem with a 1 billion year old Earth-Venus system. You see, the Earth may be 5 billion years old, but the Earth we know is only about 500 million years old, that is the Earth with the complex multicellular life forms.

Sorry If I accused you of something I should not have.

For much of Earth's history, its landscape was barren, then the Cambian "explosion" happened and life blossomed into its many multicullular and complex forms.

Lets say that up to this point the Earth and the Solar System are what we know it to be, then sometime between 1 billion BCE and 500 million BCE, an alien spaceship appeared in the Solar System. For reasons that are lost to the mists of time this alien spaceship started manufacturing billions of robots and spaceships, and these moved the Moon out of Earth Orbit and Venus into Earth orbit via gravitational manipulation, say by hulting large asteroids at the Moon and Venus, the gravitational fields of the Moon and Venus deflect these asteroids, the deflected asteroids are then captured by the robotic spaceships and then accelerated back toward Venus and the Moon for another pass. Venus spirals outward in its orbit and the Earth loses the Moon, the Moon the spirals inward to take up residence in Venus's former orbit. Venus approaches Earth from just inside its orbit and when it enters the fringe of Earth's gravitational influence, a series of asteroids slow down Venus just enough to capture it. More asteroids shrink its orbit to 1,297,174 km and if necessary some asteroids are made to impact with Venus at a glancing blow to spin it up.

The most important question to ask is why the Alien Spaceship did this.

One possible answer might be this, the Aliens were trying to terraform the Earth and Venus to their liking, but then never followed up with colonization for whatever reason. it takes a very powerful civilization to move planets around, if such power were turned to destructive ends, well you get the picture. The alien ship was acting at the behest of its home civilization and evidently the political situation at home changed, the aliens never completed their project and both planets evolved from there. The effect of the aborted terraforming project was to accelerate evolution on both planets and produce the Cambion explosion. As you know the surfaces of Earth and Venus are very changable over time, little remains in the fossil records of both planets to indicate this tampering. Much that proceeded afterwards was fairly natural and Earth History proceeded along familiar lines, and the inhabitants of this timeline don't know any different. Having a blue moon in the sky that rotates and reveals different surfaces is perfectly natural to them. Various mythologies were affected by this as well. For instance the Greek Goddess Aphrodite was the goddess of love, beauty, nature, and hunting. There is no Diana, the Moon in the second orbit around the Sun is referred to as the planet Vulcan, it is a dim morning star.

The planet Venus is most often referred to as "The Moon" although it is represented by Venus in the Roman Mythology and Aphrodite by the Greeks, in most everyday parlance its simply called "the Moon" There is a lunar year, which is the period of time between one full moon and the next, I believe this is about 340 days long. The Jewish calendar is based on this year and it lags considerably and all the holidays must be constantly reset. There is a period of time called the zodiac, which for all intents and purposes is the came as a calendar month. These zodiacs are named for the constellations the sun passes through, but their lengths have been changed and have very little to do with what constellation the Sun is seen to pass through. Mostly the Zodiacs have 30 or 31 days with the exception of the second zodiac of the year which normally has 28 days, but on leap years has 29. Some people receive their paychecks on a zodiac basis or on the 1st and the 15th of each zodiac, so its important that each zodiac be roughly equal in length, other than that history proceeds according to our history books.
The main difference occurs with the space race. On July 20, 1969 the first humans make a landing on Venus, and there are 6 of them, 3 men and 3 women, none of those people are Neil Armstrong. As you might imagine, getting people to spend the rest of their lives on another planet and leave all their families and relatives behind forever is a very difficult thing to do.

The Mercury and Gemini Programs proceeded apace with trained test pilots to maneuver the spaceships in low Earth Orbit. When the first Apollo Capsule was delivered, finding volunteers who were qualified was hard. I figure that it would take a week for a Saturn V rocket to hurl an Apollo spacecraft to Venus. The Command module contains mostly life support to keep the crew alive during the Journey. There is no LEM as the Apollo Capsule is the Lem, its designed to hold 6 people, with supplies waiting for them on Venus, launched their on prior unmanned Saturn V rockets. I figure about 120 tons there launched by 6 Saturn Vs ought to be enough.
The capsule enters the atmosphere and when it slows down enough parachutes are deployed. Unlike historic Apollo missions, the object in this case is to land on dry land rather than a splash down. Pehaps jets or landing rockets are used after parachute separation. The ships land in a clearing near a forest that was perhaps cleared by a recent forest fire caused by lightning. The astronauts get out and stretch their legs, they don't wear spacesuits of course, it the environment is going to kill them, its going to kill them as there is no going back to Earth. Assuming the astronauts don't die of germs or toxic life forms they gather their stuff from the other 6 capsules. Each astronaut is aloted a mass budget of 20 tons for their initial mission. They can order additional stuff from Earth, but due to NASA's budgetary requirements this is limited to only 3 1/3 tones every 6 months per person or the contents of 1 Apollo space capsule every 6 months.
The price of the individual equipment is not object, they can order expensive solar cells, diamonds or even gold if they want, the major cost item is the mass of whatever is to be ordered that arrives on Venus.

One open question is how do they fuel their vehicles? Their are no oil refineries here. Some astronauts are going to have to engage in agriculture, and some of the prioduce can be turned into alcohol to fuel vehicles with. Were talking 1969 technology here initially at least. Shipping fuel from Earth is very expensive and comes at the expense of importing other things. NASA will want some return on its investment and will want its astronauts to do things other than to grow their own food and fend off the wild life, so they'll send technology to reduce the number of man-hours spent growing food so that at least some astronauts can be freed up to explore. The astronauts will probably be fairly young, basically men and women in the second half of their 20s, they will likely have children. So the division of labor will go something like this. Two astronauts to grow the food, two astronauts to take care of the children and 2 astronauts to explore. Probably the first few zodiacs will be spent building a walled fort to keep the wild life out and from eating them or their children. The trees of the forest will provide much of the material to do this, meanwhile the astronauts will live in capsules.

So how does this sound?

 

[mike wightman]

The aliens may have been attempting to build a rosette - the next step could have been to shift Mars inward to join the Earth/Venus pairing, which itself was meant as a temporary holding pattern. But something stopped them before they completed their project.

And if they could do all this then why not make another planet by crashing the Earth's moon into a relocated Mercury?

 

[Piper]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
One open question is how do they fuel their vehicles? Their are no oil refineries here. Some astronauts are going to have to engage in agriculture, and some of the prioduce can be turned into alcohol to fuel vehicles with.

See this link for the history of fuel cells. Good enough even in '69 for the initial power source for light vehicles.

Alchohol might be distilled from local vegetation rather than having to grow a Terran crop just for fuel.

Solar is an option but as with all of these, vehicle power is going to be fairly low so you're looking at lunar rovers rather than Range Rovers.

If you position the landing site near an ocean and/or river, sailing becomes an option for some of your transport needs.

I like the incomplete rosette idea. Venus might even contain remnants of the technology used.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
I have no problem with a 1 billion year old Earth-Venus system. You see, the Earth may be 5 billion years old, but the Earth we know is only about 500 million years old, that is the Earth with the complex multicellular life forms.

But keep in mind that life existed prior to that in microbial form for a couple of billion years at least. And at least in the late pre-cambrian (650-1 billion years ago) there was a lot of complex soft-shelled life in the oceans that was VERY bizarre by modern standards, such as those found in the Burgess shale.

Sorry If I accused you of something I should not have.

I'm sorry, I just fell off my chair. Tom actually APOLOGISING for something? Is that an admission that you were actually WRONG, Tom? I think the world must be coming to an end.

Apology accepted, in this case at least.

For reasons that are lost to the mists of time this alien spaceship started manufacturing billions of robots and spaceships, and these moved the Moon out of Earth Orbit and Venus into Earth orbit via gravitational manipulation

Skip this whole section. Just say they did a switch and that was that, don't even think about explaining it because you'll just make more complications for your scenario. The end result is the moon is closer to the sun and Venus is orbiting Earth. They did it using Incredible Tech That Humanity Won't Know For Billions Of Years (TM).

The most important question to ask is why the Alien Spaceship did this.

Quite. On one hand, you have a reasonably habitable planet. On the other, well, by then presumably Venus was well on the way to being a hothouse world. We don't really have a timescale for that though, since the whole planet was resurfaced piecemeal around 500 million years ago. All we know is that it had oceans at one point in its history because of the Hydrogen: Deuterium ratio in its atmosphere. It's likely that it would have been the same sort of corrosive hellhole a billion years ago as it is today though, just with different surface features at the time - the change from habitable to steam hothouse to acid greenhouse probably took place a long time before that.

Either way, Venus would be a lot more effort to terraform than Earth. And if you can make a double planet, why not go the whole hog and make a ringworld or something else like that if it's living space you're after?

The effect of the aborted terraforming project was to accelerate evolution on both planets and produce the Cambion explosion. As you know the surfaces of Earth and Venus are very changable over time, little remains in the fossil records of both planets to indicate this tampering.

Well, we do have fossils from billions of years ago. And there are indications that the Cambrian explosion was fuelled by the atmosphere of Earth switching from an anaerobic one to one with oxygen in it. And also that the earth's axis stabilised from something like 70 degrees to 23 degrees over a very short time in that period (something to do with precession of the rotating core, which tipped the rest of the planet to a new axis too, IIRC?).

Having a blue moon in the sky that rotates and reveals different surfaces is perfectly natural to them.

That moon, by the way, would be REALLY bright in the night sky. Being reasonably conservative and having lots of ocean and bright clouds and saying it has an albedo of 0.35 (same as earth), a Full Venus would be considerably brighter than a full moon (by a couple of magnitudes, probably). However, it'd be about half the size of the full moon in our sky because it's so much further away - so it'd be brighter, but smaller in the sky.


[quotre]For instance the Greek Goddess Aphrodite was the goddess of love, beauty, nature, and hunting. There is no Diana, the Moon in the second orbit around the Sun is referred to as the planet Vulcan, it is a dim morning star.[/quote]

Of course, Diana could still end up being the goddess of the moon - she'd just be the goddess of love and beauty too. Or it could all be totally different.

There is a lunar year, which is the period of time between one full moon and the next, I believe this is about 340 days long.

It'd be 170 days - full moon to next full moon is one orbit of the moon, not two.

The Jewish calendar is based on this year and it lags considerably and all the holidays must be constantly reset.

Chances are they'd find something shorter to base it on. Like the 'zodiac'. Or just not use a lunar calendar at all.

 

[Vargr Breath]

Hi
This whole Venus as the Moon discussion is interesting, but in reality it would be hard if not impossible to make it work. But, what if you moved Venus out to where Mars is? With oceans and an atmosphere and the mass to hold onto them, what would this world be like? And if there was a chance for life, or that humans could actually live there, don't you think we'd be trying just as hard to get there?
VB

 

[TKalbfus]

Actually, I chose the distance so that Venus would have the same apparent diameter in our sky as our Moon or the Sun.
Also the reason I set Venus and Earth to orbit each other, was so that it could be reached using Apollo technology, manely the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo Command Module. Getting back is a much greater problem as you would need another Saturn V, so once the astronauts arrive their career as astronauts is over, they become colonists from that point onward. Since the astronauts can breath the air drink the water and eat the food, supporting them is not that difficult. What the astronauts do need is technological items that would make their lives easier in order to devote more time to exploration rather than simply survival. One item that might be useful would be a wood burning steam turbine which generates electricity. Photovoltaics would cost as much as to ship it from Earth plus the relatively small change that would be involved in actually manufactuing the Solar Cells from silicon crystals. Nuclear reactors are probably a bad idea as the astronauts are going to have to live on the world for the rest of their lives and disposal of nuclear waste is an issue. Perhaps a car could be built that runs on wood, requires that wood be fed into the furnace, but its better than nothing. Live stock would probably be chickens as they are easy to transport in a space capsule. Maybe the local wildlife can be hunted and eaten, but no guarantees. Also what the astronauts will need are guns, take them from D20 Modern, and the Arms locker, plenty of variety there. Traveller T20 rules can be applied to them as well as the more futuristic stuff. Traveller classes, Scout immediately comes to mind. There are no profits to be made herem so Merchant is probably out. There's always the military of course, probably an Army guy or a Marine. I don't know about Barbarians, probably not, although if the colonist are not resupplied with high tech, they may all be forced to become Barbarians. The Russian colonists will be in severe trouble when the Soviet Union collapses, perhaps they'll revert to barbarism in order to survive.

As for the Lunar cycle, for the Moon to make a complete orbit takes 170 days, but if it starts as a full Moon, it doesn't end as a full Moon because the Venus-Moon System is on the other side of the Sun By the time it completes its cycle, so it would be almost a new moon, so even though Venus makes a complete circle, an observer on Earth would only see half the phases. To finish the cycle, Venus would have to make another complete circle in its orbit, this comes to about twice 170 days or 340 days, not quite an Earth Year.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Tom Kalbfus:
Actually, I chose the distance so that Venus would have the same apparent diameter in our sky as our Moon or the Sun.

Doh, you're right, sorry - I put in the radius of venus instead of the diameter. Yeah, it'll be the same size (I wondered why you'd picked that specific distance). But it'll still be considerably brighter. I guess this is a good excuse for me to finish how to figure out apparent magnitudes of planets...

EDIT: It would seem that the magnitude of a full Venus seen from earth would be about -14 (compared to a full moon of -12.7). When it's at half-full, it'd be about -12.2 (more like what a gibbous moon is to us now).

As for the Lunar cycle, for the Moon to make a complete orbit takes 170 days, but if it starts as a full Moon, it doesn't end as a full Moon because the Venus-Moon System is on the other side of the Sun By the time it completes its cycle, so it would be almost a new moon, so even though Venus makes a complete circle, an observer on Earth would only see half the phases. To finish the cycle, Venus would have to make another complete circle in its orbit, this comes to about twice 170 days or 340 days, not quite an Earth Year.

Hm. Yeah, I see your point... I wasn't considering the movement of the pair around the sun. I'll see if I can set this up in Celestia and see what happens. Can't help but think some kind of odd spinrbit resonance would be going on here.

EDIT: Not sure if I've got this set up right, but it looks like the time between full Venuses is about 320-325 24hour days.

 

[TKalbfus]

Yeah, 170 days isn't exactly half a year, so I didn't expect a full cycle of phases to be exactly twice that.

I going to try to come up with some creatures for this planet.

 

[Whipsnade]

Tom,

Okay, the fact that Venus was placed at the location you need it in at some relatively recent time in the geological past neatly sidesteps all the orbital mechanics problems with your idea.

However, having Venus there for an amount of time greater than the current age of human civilization does not neatly sidestep the all the problems your setting has with its effects on human history.

[A side note here: While your idea is fun and interesting as a game setting, it cannot be reconciled with reality no matter how many time travel and nanotech rabbits you pull out of your hat. The points I'll be raising have to do with making the history of your Venus as Earth's Moon setting more plausible. Because this is a game setting, you are free to ignore them.]


Having a body like Venus as close to Earth as you suggest will drastically effect human history. The effects on religion alone are incaculable. You've posted a lot of bumf regarding Greek and Roman Aprhodite cults, but can you even imagine what sort of cults and beliefs a Venus as close as you suggest and as bright as Constantine calculate would generate? Do you have the intellectual honesty to even consider them?

Your first post had an Apollo mission being launched by the USA from Florida in July of 1969. I am wholly certain that the effects of your Venus on the development of human civilization means that when your Venus mission is launched:

- It won't be called 'Apollo'
- The penninsular it launches from won't be called 'Florida'
- It won't be launched by a polity called the 'USA'
- It won't occur in a month named 'July'
- And it won't be during the year '1969' of the calendar then in use.

I posted a link to an alternate history site. Check it out. History is chaotic. The further back in time you make a change, the more 'butterflies' appear and the more time they have to work. Placing Venus where you want it in 1 Billion BCE means human history will be utterly different. Hell, to be intellectually honest with the POD you suggest, placing Venus where you want it in 1 Billion BCE means that there won't be any humans at all!

Now compare that to the only changes you've made to the historical Apollo mission; there will be 6 people aboard and none are Neil Armstrong.

Please go ahead with this idea. I've enjoyed reading it. Just be honest with your ideas and don't have President Nixon of the USA calling the Apollo astronauts to congratulate them after they land.

And for Pete's sake, this time save everything, write it down in a coherent, concise format, and give it to Hunter to post in the FLibrary. Last time you failed to do that and we lost all your ringworld ideas.


Have fun,
Bill

 

[mike wightman]

Bill,
you can still find the original threads:

http://www.travellerrpg.com/cgi-bin/Trav/CotI/Discuss/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=000245;p=1#000000

http://www.travellerrpg.com/cgi-bin/Trav/CotI/Discuss/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=000069;p=1#000000

 

[Whipsnade]

Sigg,

Thanx! I'm stuffing them into my hard drive as I write!


Tom - please, please, please, PLEASE, PLEASE do not let this thread fall away. Do the work, write it up, and give it to Hunter. PLEASE.

 

[Malenfant]

The further back in time you make a change, the more 'butterflies' appear and the more time they have to work. Placing Venus where you want it in 1 Billion BCE means human history will be utterly different. Hell, to be intellectually honest with the POD you suggest, placing Venus where you want it in 1 Billion BCE means that there won't be any humans at all!

In fact, one could argue that the much more massive Venus-moon would be more effective at deflecting incoming asteroids heading for Earth. Bullets with the dinosaurs' name (and earlier mass extinctions) on it might end
up missing completely, or hitting Venus instead.

Or, the longer orbital period may mean that there is LESS chance of it intercepting incoming rocks (because it's less likely to be in the right spot and might instead be on the other side of Earth), which means more get through and many more mass extinctions occur as a result.

A billion years of higher tides on a longer cycle would also change the coastlines drastically through increased erosion.

 

[TheDS]

Crap, I didn't get to join in the argument and call you both a bunch of idiots, whether you deserved it or not!

Anyway, are figure 8 orbits at all naturally plausible? (Check out the 3rd animation for figure 8's orbiting stars!) Considering the wackiness that is the Saturn system, I wouldn't put it beyond belief.

Next up, the smei-well known horseshoe orbit of Cruithne. IIRC, this is technically not stable, and probably requires the third body to be a lot smaller. Plus, the cycle of 770 years might be daunting.

Here is SUPPOSEDLY an alternate view of Cruithne's orbit. While Cruithne is supposed to be inclined, the horseshoe doesn't show this wonderful ballet of near-misses with the 4 inner planets... or what looks like it, anyway. But I have difficulty believing this is our "second moon" because it doesn't look like the object could ever shift to the other side of Earth's orbit.

A comment I hate to scrap: The tidal lock thing should be thought of as compound interest. It adds up!!! And we're not talking a period of a couple years, but a couple BILLION years. I believe tidal lock is going to happen.

But anyway... now that the orbital mechanics question is settled, on to the more important questions: biology and the Earthmen's actions.

I agree with Bill that a launch would take place a lot sooner, even assuming that everything else played up to basically the same thing. I would say that as soon as rockets were discovered, they would be researched heavily and put to use to boost a colony mission as soon as possible. Maybe that would take 20-30 years, but I think it would be a lot sooner before some attempts were made.

It makes sense to send only married couples, since these people are, at the very least, going to be away from home for YEARS. At first, they would be given birth control, and if it looked like the chances of coming home were too small, or the astronauts decided they wanted to stay, they would probably be allowed to breed.

As to the claiming of territory... well, I am pretty sure that whoever has the biggest guns will, at the end of the day, be the owner of whatever they want. International pressure will force all competitors to give a somewhat fair share of the land to those first few who are capable of getting someone there. That means the top 20 or so world powers would get a stake, but little countries like Andorra would have to forgo a share, or combine their share with that of a host nation. If the people are REALLY smart, they'll insist that only "internationalized" people can leave the Earth... the children who can't work together and still believe nationalism trumps specism (or whatever) will not be allowed to spread their defective world-view and poison this new world like the other one was.

The primary jobs of the colonists would have to be to FIND SOMETHING USEFUL to justify their presence. Earth ain't gonna start a mass-exodus, it's just too expensive, so they're going to spend most of their time finding resources to rape^Wdevelop, and figure out a way to get them off planet and back to Earth.

Vehicles can be powered by batteries, either conventional or nuclear-decay. Eventually, the colonists will be able to build some sort of power generator, either with a water wheel or tidal generators, or burning grain alcohol. Of prime importance is making the colony self-sufficient and of almost equal importance is making money off it. Once the colonists are mostly self-sufficient (or can at least get by without their weekly gear shipment from Earth), they turn to finding wealth to exploit.

Back on Earth, the need to get those resources off the moon and back here means they develop a giant railgun launching system, or maybe a beanstalk (or would a beanstalk be impossible in this case?) and start using that to send their supplies to the colonists.

Assuming there's something valuable there, more and more people will be sent, like maybe 10-20 a year, to help with the bigger projects, particularly the cannon.

Biology should be similar enough to ours that it can almost be considered Earthlike. I would wager that - assuming this place was seeded from the same material that made Earth - you would see a very similar evolutionary line. There are only so many possible ways to do something efficiently, afterall. Yes, there's lots of room for weirdness, but you're not likely to see psionically invisible mobile tree groves that prey on birds and have no such thing as an 'individual'. Any true strangeness (like angler and luminescent fish are strange) will be the result of odd niches being filled.

It is just within possibility to have hoards of insects or worms or something like that which can communicate via assorted chemical/pheromone cues (not unlike many insect colonies) which attains a sort of sentience when found in colonies. Well, assuming something like that is even possible.

Of course, if the world was moved there, then it will have whatever the movers seeded it with, and that will theoretically have evolved some. There's no predicting that: anything goes. Anything at all.

 

[TheDS]

Re: asteroid deflection

I think that the combined Earth-Venus mass would be more like to attract asteroids than the Earth-Moon mass does. As the moon is only 1% of Earth's mass, you could probably double the number of attracted asteroids by replacing it with Venus (or ADDING Venus to get a figure-8 orbit I mentioned earlier).

Balance that with both worlds getting about half of those asteroids, and it just might balance out in the end.

But if Jupiter is responsible for allowing Earth to have fewer impacts, I can't imagine adding more mass to the Earth area would be a good thing. Taking a look at the moon, we can see an awful lot of impacts as it is...

 

[TKalbfus]

Bill Cameron said,

Your first post had an Apollo mission being launched by the USA from Florida in July of 1969. I am wholly certain that the effects of your Venus on the development of human civilization means that when your Venus mission is launched:

- It won't be called 'Apollo'
- The penninsular it launches from won't be called 'Florida'
- It won't be launched by a polity called the 'USA'
- It won't occur in a month named 'July'
- And it won't be during the year '1969' of the calendar then in use.

Realistically such a change in the timeline would preclude the evolution of humans as well, basically its rerolling the "dice" of evolution way back in the past. But there is a reason, I'm doing it this way.
For one, I avoid writing several books worth of background notes explaining to the PCs what type of creatures they are, and summarizing all of history from the beginning of civilization to the present.
I'd also have to redo the Entire Earth's ecology, and I feel that one planet is enough.
In addition, its easier to players to relate to their PCs if they are human and come from familiar backgrounds.
Also consider the existance of Venus doesn't preclude the evolution of humans and the Entire Earth's biota, it doesn't forbid the development of history along familiar lines. I simply make the minimum changes to accomodate the different astronomical situation. Besides thare are no 'sliders' who come from our world and complain that this one isn't different enough. The people of this imaginary Earth don't know that they're supposed to be different if someone doesn't come over and tell em so. To them history makes perfect sense, people don't spend all their time gazing at the Moon as they have other Earthly matters to attend to. The probability of history following roughly the same course is very very small, but not zero so therefore possible. Another book you should read is "A World of Difference" by Harry Turtledove, in that book Mars is alot bigger, and its called Minerva. Otherwise history is the same except the Soviet Union doesn't collapse. Probably HT did this on purpose to extend the Cold War and have some competition with the Ruskies, who bring AK47s. Minerva is a very cold world barely able to support artic adapted life and all but its equatorial region is covered with ice sheets. I desired something more Earthlike, so I put Venus in orbit around Earth.

 

[TKalbfus]

The DS said,

I agree with Bill that a launch would take place a lot sooner, even assuming that everything else played up to basically the same thing. I would say that as soon as rockets were discovered, they would be researched heavily and put to use to boost a colony mission as soon as possible. Maybe that would take 20-30 years, but I think it would be a lot sooner before some attempts were made.

There are other things involved besides just rockets. Pushing hard on research before the basic technologies are ready would waste alot of money Also a rocket launched in the 1950s or 1940s would have difficulty comminicating with Earth, there is no carrying a Univac or an Eniac computer in a small space capsule, and a computer would be needed to that Venus wouldn't be missed entirely as small course corrections had to be made.

It makes sense to send only married couples, since these people are, at the very least, going to be away from home for YEARS. At first, they would be given birth control, and if it looked like the chances of coming home were too small, or the astronauts decided they wanted to stay, they would probably be allowed to breed.

There's an argument for that, but on the otherhand, it might be a better idea to have single astronauts who are not married and have no attachments, as married couples are package deals, one partner may have expertise that's very useful to the mission while the other only marginally so, such as being a housewife or a secretary. It would be more useful if the spouse was something like a doctor, a biologist, or an engineer or something and the husband likewise. Each member of the colonization team has to carry their own weight, so NASA unfortunately has to play the role of Match maker. Each of the 3 men have 3 women to choose from, and then there are the Russians, they land another 3 men and 3 women on Venus a few years later. I think there will be cooperation between the two teams, but to keep all the goodies comming from Earth, they need to maintain the facade of Cold War competition. The Ground controllers in the USSR don't mind so much as long as word doesn't get out to the general public. Americans and Russians turn off the TV cameras when they meet. Besides its very much them against an entire planet.
Since there are only 12 of them, they have to put on this frontier based hostile wilderness attitude in order to survive. There are alot of dangerous things here. Simply chopping down one of the giant trees can be very dangerous, as they have to shimmy up the tree and cut the top off and hopefully it doesn't land on someone. Their are no hospitals here so people have to be very careful. Also the woods are crawling with predators who will kill and eat humans who aren't properly defended. Guns will be a necessity of life, there is just no getting around that. They can clear cut ancient old growth trees all they want, but as they are only 12, their is a limit to how much they themselves can reshape the planet. The US and Russia are spending billions simply to maintain the current population that's up there, they have made commitments to support the children as well and reduce the cost of space transportation, they do this by building rockets that are larger that the Saturn V. The Nova Rocket is an example, which is like a Saturn with solid rocket boosters strapped on the side, they can also add a nuclear upper stage that can boost the final payload which reaches Venus, so this can support the nexte generation. My guess is the population will reach 72 including both Americans and Russians by 1990. When the USSR collapses. the US is left with the burden of supporting them, this means hard times for the colonist over the next decade.

 

[Malenfant]

You could say that Venus doesn't affect humanity's physical evolution, sure. But it would definitely affect our social/scientific evolution (and those tides would definitely shape the coastlines, which means that countries would look slightly different).

For example, Venus would definitely be a blue/white jewel in the sky. Ancient cultures could probably figure that the blue stuff is water. Right away you'd have people assuming that the moon was a habitable body like Earth (heck, they might even assume there's a huge mirror in the heavens, reflecting the Earth - i.e. that it's a mirror image of the Earth, not a separate body). If Venus is rapidly rotating, they'd probably be able to figure out that it's spherical, and therefore (using the aforementioned 'mirror principle') that Earth is too.

Any life on Venus' surface would be obvious to see once telescopes are invented too.

And who knows what judeo-christian religion would make of it. Maybe they'd claim its inhabited by angels or devils. Maybe they'd go with the "mirror of Earth" explanation. Maybe they'd say that was the garden of eden that we were cast out of (heck, maybe they'd *name it* Eden) and there'd still be big problems even in the late 20th century in sending people there because the religious lot would complain so much.

 

[TKalbfus]

Besides, why be different just for the sake of being different. No history I make up could match in depth and detail real history.