(Congratulations to all today as the daybreak of space business follows the dawn of space travel.)

Seven years is what they say it will take the errant Japanese space craft Akatsuki to return anywhere close to our sister planet. As best we know that is, since communications with the promising probe have not been successfully re-established. It seems Venus regards the curse of Mars and serves a surprise (or was it?) or two of her own. Bad luck it seems. Buddha gazed at the morning star to break through personal struggle realizing the nature of self and the cause of suffering. Well not quite but that's within pull-in range. Mistaking a planet for a star is not so ignorant a sin that it can't be forgiven by better informed if not more enlightened seekers.

Last week we examined the idea that human culture went into “Apollo Shock” sometime after 1972, a profound realignment of perspective as the moon literally came into our grasp. What now? We're gone through extremes of political corruption and public hypocrisy, we've about run out the cash drawer on senseless wars, and our wells of inspiration have nigh run dry. We even tried new Star Trek series, several of them well, awful, and I believe that's because we lost grip that we are supposed to be exploring, It seems the one might have been sufficient. Live and learn.

So I believe it's time we stop just celebrating the third rock's fecundity and actually administer it elsewhere in the solar system, as if we really believed that life is a good thing. The race is on to discover some “out there, that-away” but that shouldn't stop us from thinking big right here and now. There needs to be more planets with life on them! Provided they don't already have living beings in their own matrix as Dr. McCoy warns, which sorta rules out Mars. So let's look at Venus. Good heavens, the place is ninety atmospheres of sulfuric soup at liquid lead temperatures. Only at the very fringe of her cloak – the place where the biosphere on Terra stops – do conditions approach something humans might reasonably colonize someday. But until then? Time we give panspermia a hand and start dumping microbial life into Venus, and boost the mathematical chances of life on another world. Earth might do without a few of its cults, though her fertility cults aren't among them. Time we step up the game and try a little space seeding ourselves.