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  The Electric New Paper 24 Apr 06
Venus? I'd rather explore Sungei Buloh
By Siva Choy

LAST week, a $300 million satellite started circling the planet Venus. The satellite looks like a front-loading washing machine with a cooking wok on top and two oversized food-can rings glued on its sides.

(For that kind of money I would have expected a more dignified design. What will the Venusians think of us if this junk landed in their midst?)

Our space experts don't think there'll be any Venusians around because surface temperatures on this warm, welcoming planet are about 470 deg C; afternoon breezes waft by at about 360kmph; the picturesque clouds are not made up of water but sulphuric acid; the carbon dioxide atmosphere would suffocate us immediately, and air pressure 90 times that of earth would crush us as effectively as an NS boot descending on a cockroach.

No, I wouldn't invest in Venusian property, tourism or any business venture there. That crazy planet spins backwards, the sun rises in the west and each day is longer than a hundred earth days. That sort of thing plays havoc with making phone calls, fixing appointments and remembering birthdays.

So why do people spend billions exploring such unfriendly, uninhabitable places when there's so much unexplored user-friendly terrain here on Earth - like the Sahara, the Amazon and the bottom of the oceans?

How come nobody gets excited about life in the arctic Tundra, where Eskimos still live in igloos made of ice, wishing they could light a fire to keep warm, but knowing that if they did, they'd end up with no igloo and become a polar bear's breakfast by dawn.

Maybe it's human to admire things that are far away and overlook equally wonderful things on your own doorstep.

I know people who rushed to Yellowstone National Park or Grand Canyon in the US. But they totally ignored Bukit Timah Nature Reserve just because it's a bus ride away, and visiting it doesn't impress the neighbours as much as going to the US.

There are more exciting creatures to be found in Pulau Ubin, MacRitchie Reservoir and the Sungei Buloh wetlands than scientists have discovered so far on the moon, Mars and Venus.

World-renowned science educator David Bellamy remarked a few years ago that there was more eco-diversity in one square mile of Bukit Timah forest than in North America (Yellowstone, Niagara and the Rockies included), and he wondered why Changi Airport didn't announce that fact loudly to all visitors.

Okay, it's hard to get people excited about new species of crab unless the crab makes good curry, and it's easier to interest them in insect repellants than in long-legged flies and midges.

But what if we genetically modify that crab into a 20m-tall creature and let it run around Sentosa? Now that might change people's perceptions about what's exotic.

After all, that's the kind of stuff we hope to encounter on other planets, don't we?
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