Oh come on, Matthew, don’t be such a wet blanket. Josh’s cartoons were inspired.
I especially liked “Trust me, I’ve been doing this for 4.5 billion years,” which put me in mind of my wish to see the unexpurgated version of my life flash before my eyes. My two fears are that it will be released early, and that I’ll blink during the scenes edited from the PG-13 edition.
The opportunity to ignite 200 million years accumulation of fossil fuel in a mere 200 years only happens once in the lifetime of a planet. It’s like a magnesium-powered flashbulb going off. The opportunity to do it again on Venus has passed, assuming that’s even what happened there. At surface temperatures hot enough to eliminate all seismic activity by making the surface plastic there is no fracking way to tell (or any other way).
Unless, that is, the third rock from the Sun shields the second rock therefrom with a parasol in the 25th century and then waits a few million years for it to cool down. Maybe in this way Venus and Earth can pass the baton of life back and forth until the fruitcakes on the extreme left or right on whichever planet has the upper hand gets the upper hand. (Democracy is not compatible with picosecond online trading.)
The curious thing is that it’s not the heat from the flashbulb, which is hardly anything. It’s the Sun, stupid, whose incoming heat is trapped by the burnt flashbulb and is millions if not billions of times the heat from the original flashbulb itself. That’s what’s happening on Venus today. There but for the grace of common sense goes Earth.
But hey, we’ll all be long dead and gone before anything like that happens on Earth. What, me worry? I’m just the messenger, my only worry is being shot at by extremists for pointing out the obvious. 
Fortunately I’m as good at dodging electrons as Neo and Trinity are at dodging real (?) bullets.
Lucretius
