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Comment by personjerry | Hacker News Reader

Could it be that rather than being stuck "four billion years ago", Venus is actually ahead of Earth in its timeline? Perhaps what we are seeing on Venus is the eventual result of climate change on Venus, not unlike what we are experiencing now?

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My understanding is that we know from rocks that conditions on Earth up to four billion years ago were very like those on Venus now. So, we know that the arrow of time runs from Venus-like to Earth-like, at least on Earth. Which doesn't, of course, rule out the possibility that it also runs from Earth-like to Venus-like here as well.

Sadly, I don't think even that would get us to change our ways to prevent it this time around.

This could make for an incredible movie plot. Humans spend all this time studying climate change and debating about it, only to find out that we were staring the result of it right in the face the whole time: Venus. We discover that the origin of man is not Earth. Rather, we were colonized here by our great ancestors, forgotten in time. Ancestors that came from Venus. They left after destroying the planet. And now, here we are on Earth, repeating history.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

- Six, Battlestar Galactica

That's actually one of the real reasons we study Venus - because it's an existing case of runaway global warming, and we want to learn something about our future from it.

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