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A Habitable Fourth Planet - An Alternate Space Exploration TL
An alternate spaceflight and alternate space exploration timeline with an ASB POD, created by Winner. You can read the timeline here.
Premise and POD
The timeline was inspired by the idea suggested in this thread.
To quote the author : “The premise is simple - what if the fourth planet from the sun wasn't a frigid desert world like Mars, but a lush, thoroughly habitable world? In this timeline, a Venus-sized planet occupies the orbit of OTL Mars and vice versa. How exactly that happened is open to debate. Either the two planets formed in their respective neighbourhoods, or they were moved there during the violent early phases of the Solar System's formation. The details are not that important. How ASB is this ? Depends on how you look at it. I think that the recent discoveries of some pretty exotic planet configurations around other stars show that practically anything is possible. For example, NASA's Kepler telescope has recently discovered a star system in which there are 5 (!!!) planets orbiting inside what in our Solar system would be Earth's orbit. If something as insane and contradictory to our existing models of star systems' formation can exist, I think it is conceivable that the configuration I propose is also possible.”
TL-related trivia and media
The alternate names for the planets Venus and Mars are “Vulcan” and “Aphrodite”, respectively.
Illustration of what the mildly alternate inner Solar System looks like
