Sorry sci-fi fans, the answers aren't out there

In a classic sci-fi plot twist, they spent years looking for life on Mars and Zontar snuck up on them instead. How exciting. I mean dull.

I'm sorry. I know a lot of people think space is the final frontier, if we don't explore space we've turned into cowards, we must colonize other planets to ensure the survival of the human race after we trash the Earth and are personally dead etc. But there's nothing out there except some phosphine. Which you never heard of until two days ago and neither did I.

Now we know, at least if we once had plastic Apollo 11 moon lander models, that phosphine is … no. I forgot. Where's that story again?

Oh right. It's “a gas … that on Earth … is produced by bacteria thriving in oxygen-starved environments,” its chemical formula seems to be PH3 and it is “highly toxic to people.” Though not compared to the rest of Venus.

In mythology Venus is Aphrodite, described in the Percy Jackson series as … no, we can't print it. Whereas the Venus described in Tuesday's National Post comes close to being unprintable for the opposite reason. It starts with “harshly acidic clouds” and quickly spirals down to a surface “hot enough to melt lead … covered with craters, volcanoes, mountains and large-scale lava plains.”

In short, hell. Or at least a colony of same. It's so awful even phosphine dies out quickly, so maybe something is making more. But not something you'd want to meet.

No, not because of batwings and mind-control “injecto-pods.” (If you haven't seen Zontar, the Thing from Venus, which Wikipedia calls “arguably (Larry) Buchanan's best known film,” I urge you not to check it out at once.) Because the real “life” on Venus would be dull. Dull dull dull.

Oh, I know, the scientists say otherwise. Sort of. The story quoted one who said “life, as an explanation for our discovery, should be, as always, the last resort” but “if it is phosphine, and if it is life, it means that we are not alone. It also means that life itself must be very common, and there must be many other inhabited planets throughout our galaxy.”

Right. And if we go there we will finally be given the marvellous technology and

Zen-like philosophy that make life worthwhile. As in the Star Trek pilot The Menagerie, it is a science fiction staple that the aliens are way smarter than us, meaning not only their technology far surpasses our own but also their wisdom. Which makes sense since as our gadgets improve we become calmer, nicer and … No wait. We don't. We make uglier war and play uglier video games wearing uglier clothing in uglier cities.

Hence the urge to find something out there to save us from ourselves. Remember Monty Python's “pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's *** down here on Earth!” But what they're seeking on Mars or Venus isn't “intelligent” like, say, humans or our pet dog who tries to move his bed while standing on it. Or complicated in any interesting way.

It's “life” on the wrong side of the photosynthesis threshold. Photosynthesis appeared on Earth somewhere between 3.5 and 2.5 billion years ago, nearly a billion years before multicellular life and two billion years before the “Cambrian explosion” of things with disgusting tentacles like Hallucigenia or big scary mouth parts like Opabinia.

Now that stuff is interesting. Some extraterrestrial submicrobe? Not so much. Because even if it can cling to existence in the “cooler” Venusian clouds once the planet is sublet to Satan, the question whether there's so much as a slime mould out there depends on how often things leap the photosynthesis barrier. And based on Fermi's famous “Where is everybody?” calculation about radio silence, it's very rarely and nowhere we can ever get.

I mean, keep looking. I admire the perseverance. But space isn't going to solve any of our problems. If we trash Earth, we can trash Mars. And if there's some great philosophy out there, it's down here too if we're willing to find it. And not with a telescope or microscope.

I suspect the urge to explore “space” is linked to reluctance to believe we are unique and our unbelievably beautiful planet is as special as it seems. And frankly science fiction often has more depth than materialist science (or made-for-TV movies).

Sometimes it shows us the aliens we wish we were, or fear we are as for instance in Forbidden Planet, or as dolts. C.S. Lewis's Perelandra trilogy serves up theology with a helping of fried materialism on a hauntingly beautiful Venus. But in reality?

A whiff of phosphine and, if we're lucky, a ticket home to where our real problems are, and our real solutions if any.

NASA / AIA / SOLAR DYNAMICS OBSERVATORY / REUTERS That's Venus, where things don't seem to be going much better than they are here, John Robson writes.