Kunseiki Kaiketsu to Seisou Jikin

The Venus terraforming and colonization crisis is the Fifth Men’s attempt to make Venus habitable before the approaching danger to Earth, and the encounter that turns this project into a struggle with the planet’s intelligent ocean life. A plan conceived as scientific adaptation becomes an ethical emergency: the changes required for human survival poison the Venerians’ world, while their resistance threatens the human settlement. The crisis exposes the cost of treating another inhabited planet as a refuge available for human use.

The need for another world

The project arose from a long history of dependence on finite energy and from the recognition that Earth could not remain humanity’s home indefinitely. Earlier civilizations had repeatedly organized themselves around fuels that seemed abundant until their supplies dwindled. Oil had run out within three centuries of the founding of the World State, leaving coal to power aircraft and other activities. Even Antarctica’s unexpectedly rich coalfields were not inexhaustible; the later failure of those supplies helped bring that civilization down. These earlier collapses made the management of resources a recurring problem in human history, although they did not settle the question of how humanity should treat another world.

By the era of the Fifth Men, material power had reached a scale earlier societies could scarcely imagine. The artificial disintegration of atoms and the annihilation of matter supplied energy for a world community in which routine transport, mining, manufacture, and agriculture could be performed by machinery. This abundance did not remove the need to plan for a future beyond Earth. Observations of the Moon’s orbit indicated that the planet’s habitability might end sooner than the earlier estimate of ten million years, and the Fifth Men judged that they had to prepare another home.

Changing human nature to suit the existing conditions of Mars or Venus seemed unacceptable to them: it would require refashioning the human organism and might sacrifice the existing species’ constitution. Mars, moreover, could not be made habitable without supplying air and water. Venus offered a different possibility. Its polar regions beneath deep clouds were not unbearably hot, and later generations might be adapted to its colder climates. But the planet had no vegetation to replenish free oxygen, which was bound in chemical compounds. Human settlement therefore depended on creating an atmosphere and a biosphere compatible with human life.

Engineering a habitable planet

The Fifth Men began extensive chemical and physical research from Ether ships and with gas helmets, since people could not survive in Venus’s natural atmosphere. They planned to split some of the planet’s ocean into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. The oxygen would be released into the atmosphere; the hydrogen would be expelled beyond the atmosphere at a speed that would prevent it from returning. Once enough free oxygen existed, specially designed vegetation could help replenish the atmospheric supply as it was consumed. Biological research eventually produced a range of specialized plant types intended to cover the land.

Automatic Venus electrolysing stations were established on several islands, and the terraforming work proceeded alongside the biological program. The projected timetable was immense but, against the approaching danger to Earth, finite: the Fifth Men hoped that in less than a million years Venus would be ready to receive humanity and humanity ready to live there. The scheme thus depended on two linked transformations, of the planet and of future human generations.

Surveying revealed a world that was far from an empty or passive landscape. Venus’s land consisted of a scattered archipelago, barely more than a thousandth of Earth’s land area, with mountainous islands and a deeply corrugated surface. Its slow rotation produced a sharp contrast between the cold hemisphere of night and the hot hemisphere of day, driving violent storms and currents. Dense cloud, recurring thunderstorms, torrential evening rain, and ice-fragmented waves made the proposed home harsh even before the effects of human engineering were considered. The Fifth Men looked toward Venus with aversion, while their attachment to Earth grew more intense as the prospect of leaving it became unavoidable.

Discovery and resistance

The conflict became unmistakable when several electrolysis stations were wrecked and Ether ships surveying the ocean exploded. A damaged vessel returned with a metal object attached to its sounding equipment by a hook. The artificial object exploded after it struck the ship’s hull. The incident showed that the destruction of equipment was not simply a natural hazard: intelligent inhabitants of Venus were resisting the alteration of their environment.

The Fifth Men had assumed that water without dissolved free oxygen could not sustain life. Their observations overturned that assumption. Venus’s ocean contained many organisms, from microscopic and stationary forms to large free-swimming species. Their life processes depended not on photosynthesis but on the controlled disintegration of radioactive atoms. Venus contained radioactive elements that had long since disappeared from Earth, and oceanic organisms drew on this resource within their tissues.

Among these species, one intelligent and versatile kind had achieved dominance and built a civilization using radioactive power. The Venerians were about the size and shape of swordfish, with three manipulatory organs normally concealed within a long sword-like structure. They moved through the water with screw-like motion and possessed several means of sensing their surroundings. Their reproductive and social practices remained difficult for human observers to interpret; the available observations did not establish what some of their unusual collective behavior meant. Their unfamiliarity to human understanding did not erase the evidence of intelligence, technological ability, or organized life.

As the human project expanded, the Venerians tried to stop it. Because they were deep-sea organisms and could not survive outside the ocean’s pressure, they could not confront people directly on the islands. Instead, they used explosives against the settlements and undermined them through tunnels. These attacks seriously impeded electrolysis. Attempts to communicate or reach an agreement failed, leaving the Fifth Men without a negotiated compromise and the terraforming effort under continuing threat.

The choice and its consequences

The Fifth Men recognized that their decision involved more than a technical obstacle. They had once been invaded by Martians, who may likewise have regarded humanity as a lesser form of life. Now the human colonists faced a comparable possibility: their judgment that the Venerians were inferior could be mistaken, particularly because the Venerian mental world remained incomprehensible to them. The Fifth Men nevertheless reasoned from the evidence they believed they had, rather than accepting that the natives might be superior in ways humans could not perceive.

They also took account of the Venerians’ dependence on radioactive matter. Those atoms decayed and would grow rarer; research suggested that the Venerian fauna had once been more extensive and that the diminishing supply already limited their civilization. The Fifth Men concluded that the Venerians were doomed in any case and that human settlement would only hasten their decline. That claim became part of the moral case for proceeding, although it could not make the costs of colonization disappear.

The hoped-for accommodation proved impossible. The Venerians continued their attacks even when these also caused heavy losses among their own population. Meanwhile, the oxygen released by electrolysis dissolved into the ocean and began to damage organisms whose tissues could not tolerate it. The Fifth Men could not stop the process without jeopardizing their plan to make Venus’s atmosphere suitable for human life. As oxygen levels approached the requirement for a human atmosphere, they concluded that the Venerians would be exterminated within at most a few thousand years. Rather than allow this protracted outcome, they decided to destroy the native fauna more quickly. With people able to walk on the islands and the first settlements already established, they built powerful submarines to search the ocean and eliminate its inhabitants.

The destruction of Venus’s native life left the Fifth Men with opposing responses. It produced guilt and disgust at humanity’s having killed in order to survive, compounded by their loss of confidence after science failed to explain the Moon’s approach and by a separate sense of responsibility toward the suffering of the past. Together, these pressures contributed to racial neurosis. Yet the same crisis could also be understood as a challenge: the failure of scientific explanation opened new problems to investigate, and some came to regard the destruction of the Venerians as terrible but justified. Their account emphasizes that human beings had learned about and admired the natives even as they killed them. The crisis therefore ends not with a clean moral resolution, but with survival purchased through a planetary transformation that makes human settlement possible by destroying another civilization.