Professor Cox - The Planets

Understanding why Mars and Venus diverged so significantly from Earth over the last 4 billion years will provide great insight into the fragility of worlds and perhaps suggest whether our own good fortune is near-impossible to comprehend or merely outrageous. Planets change. Ours could change at any moment. A stray comet from the frozen Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune could put an end to our story. We could also put an end to ourselves. The study of Venus might help us avoid one of the ways by which we could destroy our civilisation, because it shows us what greenhouse gases can do to a world. I think one of the reasons why anthropogenic climate change is so difficult for a certain type of person to accept is that atmospheres seem ethereal and tenuous and incapable of trapping enough heat to modify the temperatures on a planet significantly. For such people I suggest a trip to Venus, where they will be squashed and boiled and dissolved on the surface of Earth’s twin.

The exploration of the planets, then, is not an indulgence. If we want to know how we came to be here we need to understand the histories of the planet that gave birth to us and the system that gave birth to it. We are children of Earth and also children of the Solar System. Understanding our history is important because it places our existence in context. The more we learn about the events that led to the emergence of humans on this planet only a few hundred thousand years ago, the more we are forced to marvel at the sheer unlikeliness of it all. We needed Jupiter and the comets and asteroids and countless collisions and mergers and near-catastrophes stretching back 4.6 billion years. There are valid objections to this way of thinking; it is an objective fact that we are here, and our future should be our primary concern. That may be so, but I argue that a deeper understanding of the evolution of the planets is essential for our continued prosperity and existence on this one. The threat of catastrophic climate change is an obvious example, but there are many other reasons why knowledge is important. There is feedback in human affairs; our collective state of mind affects the decisions we make. To confine our imaginations to the surface of the Earth is to ignore both our immense good fortune and the fragility of our position. A wider knowledge of both will, I believe, help secure a safer and more prosperous future.

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