[mturmon]

What happened to Venus is a pretty good motivator for sustainability and limiting global warming, no?

How about the Earth-observing satellites that are monitoring key environmental variables (http://oco2.jpl.nasa.gov), or the exoplanet spectroscopy studies that will see how common different atmospheres are (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/habex/) ?

[zbyte64]

Those pesky observations are why planetary science funding got cut.