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New Scientist: Venus' Atmosphere Implies Life
WolfWithoutAClause writes "This New Scientist article says that the atmosphere of Venus has features that may only be explaineable by the existence of life in its upper atmosphere. In particular it has cartain chemicals which are extremely difficult to make inorganically. At the altitude where life is suspected the temperature is about 70C and about 1 atmosphere. There are gases there which are not naturally found together. The article suggests something is actively producing them, quite possibly, life."
There are more than a few explanations for that, I hate New Scientist, they jump to conclusions too often in an effort to drum up interest in their articles.
Gotta be female. After all, Men are from Mars, etc.
Giant bugs .. That soon will atack earth with giant meteors filled with bug spores .. ;)
One day your head will be your box, your brain will be your client, and all energetic problems will be solved...
Besides the typical "oooogle first post bork bork", I do have some sort of serious question to ask: Why are we focusing so much on mars instead of venus? Venus seems to be very earthlike in some ways, and if we could only find a way to cool it down some... :) Not to mention just plain having a better name and no nasty stigma of war..
Oh yeah, and speaking of space, why has /. been up and down the last 20 minutes?!
"I regret that I have but one life to give for my country. I'd feel safer if I had two or three."
I remember seeing a documentary a long time ago about Venus. The Russians sent a lander probe down to the planet. The atmosphere was so acidic that they only got a few seconds of video footage before it was eaten away by the acid. Apparently, though, the camera lens was made of diamond. We all know how tough diamond is, so it may still be out there.
Hold on, folks. I think a diamond rush is heating up!
OLPC Australia
New Scientist is not a peer-reviewed journal and often publishes speculative articles. This report is interesting, but I'd like to see the scientific article. There are alternative explanations, I'm sure, and I'm interested in seeing whether they've been adequately ruled out. In any case, how would you test this theory?
From the article:
I think this would be amazing. Whenever there has been a possibility of life before, it has always been microscopic bacteria frozen in rock or ice. Nearly undetectable, and certainly nothing that would visually incite people. But this? Huge swarms that discolor the atmosphere under ultraviolet light? If true, I'd bet that these images become more popular than Cindy Margolis.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
All this time we have been wasting our time looking for little green men on mars.
Wonder how many movies about vixens from Venus we 'll get if this turns out to be true.
Meanwhile the Swedish Space Agency is looking for international partners to develop their idea for a mission to return a sample of the atmosphere from Venus around 2010.
So how'd you do it?
A couple of thoughts occurred...
1. Isn't the adjective pertaining to Venus 'venereal'?
2. If true, life must truly be ubiquitous. In the solar system alone, we've got Earth, Mars, Europa, Titan and now Venus. Of course, there's only evidence so far of life on one, but the very fact that scientists are even considering it is a testament to life's tenacity.
3. Can someone who knows more than I tell us all how easy it'd be for UV light to penetrate to the required depth? I wouldn't have thought it possible.
Remember that astronomers once said Mars was covered with a complex network of irrigation ditches, which implied the presence of life. Take this with a grain of salt - we know so little about our own solar system that we must treat all discoveries as hypotheses - nothing more, nothing less.
Maybe numerous earth probes infected venus' atmosphere with life.
Slashdot really sucks nowadays. There are better alternatives. I'm quitting /. now. You should, too. Check out
The Quit Slashdot Movement for some better quality "new for nerds" sites.
In other news, further research has found that the atmospheric gasses on Venus are actually made up of insect farts... farts, and burps. Oddly enough however it is believe that the smell produced would actually be a pleasant one to humans.
Shopkeeper: "... I must warn you they've found life on venus."
Homer: "That's bad."
Shopkeeper: "But it was only some bugs!"
Homer: "That's good!"
Shopkeeper: "The news was reported on New Scientist."
Homer: "That's bad."
Shopkeeper: "But they don't require you to register!"
Homer: "That's good!"
Shopkeeper: "They log your IP address and keep logs of all the pages you go to."
[Silence; Homer looks puzzled]
Shopkeeper: "That's bad."
Homer: "Can I go now?"
If we did find life right next door to us on Venus, it would be quite ironic that we've been thinking that we know everything there is to know about our own solar system and a long way beyond.
:-) ), small amount of the sky, at a very limited range. We are nowhere near even having begun searching for extra terrestrial life properly.
Also, SETI searches have covered an astronomically, (pun intended
Even the WOW! signal could be chirping away at us at the same point in the sky, but using a modulation we cannot recognise, or a signal too weak to detect, and we already know where to look for that, (OK, technically we don't, because of errors in the data processing, but we more or less do know where it originated), and yet we've found nothing.
I can say with a fair amount of (entirely baseless) confidence that the chemical anomalies observed on venus are simply the result of processes seperate from life and these claims will one day be put on the same shelf as ether and the four elements along with all the other anomalies inexplicable by current-day science that were explained fully in later years with the discovery of new concepts and theories. (now that was a long sentence)
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
Let's terraform the bastards before they evolve into ten foot tall insection beasts with razor sharp teeth, glistening with demonic slobber.
Terraform Venus Now!
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Side-note to my upper-case writing friend. Why do you feel dirty?
actually find some microbes or virii from Venus, Mars, hell even from Ganymede. That'd finally put a full stop to all those religious morons that are so full of "we're the centre of the universe". Just by showing that there's _a_ life form outside earth would remove a huge barrier from all those debates and we could concentrate on more interesting topics.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Everyone knows that the Good Lord made life and He made it here on Earth only, your Bible tells you that!. You blasphemers are wasting your time on SETI and looking at other planets. Just like the dinosaurs and radio-carbon dating, it's just the devil playing tricks on your blasphemous souls. I know for sure there's no life but here where He intended and saw that it was Good, not on some hell-hole like Venus, or a frigid wasteland like Mars. You people, sheesh, you only need look around you to see you're wasting your time, and you ain't going to Heaven with me.
New York Times August 10th, 2010
:)
KILLER VENUS MICROBE BROUGHT BACK BY SWEDEN
"EATS EVERYTHING"
You must have an account to read full text of
story.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
"In particular it has cartain chemicals which are extremely difficult to make inorganically."In our perspective that is.. and... it says extremely difficult, and not impossible... put 20 IFs together and you have life.... yeah right... Come up with FACTS...
Personally I'm not that enthuiastic yet. Scientists were considering life on Mars, the Moon and life on Venus and life outside of Earth generally 100 years ago, too. Respected scientists throughout history were involved in a lot of these theories, which unfortunately were often hyped out of proportionby media and others. It doesn't mean that the basis for the considerations were correct or meaningful or led to anything except for hype.
There's definitely a lot of anecdotal evidence so far supporting the idea that life might exist in other places, and it's interesting. I'm going to wait for life somewhere else to actually be proven before I get too excited, though.
The speculation is on the basis of finding two chemicals which don't typically persist for long in each others presence, Hydrogen Sulphide and Sulphur Dioxide. BBC news has a summary.
--
"Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."- JBS Haldane.
To quote the article, "To look for possible signs of life, Schulze-Makuch and his colleague Louis Irwin looked at existing data..."
/. headline I thought they had something tangible. Oh well.
Of course if they were looking for signs of life, they would find some anomalous results that they could present as "amazing."
And from the
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
Is this the 21 Century equivalent?
Im happyhippy. Add the mod points of this post to my account!
It could be that life formation is extraordinarily unlikely and occurred on a single planet in our system [eg mars]. Once firmly established on that planet a glancing blow from a largish asteroid could release dust containing the basic compounds [DNA, or perhaps simpler stepping stone molecules] from the planets gravitational pull.
This is all conjecture anyway. We have no proof that life exists on these other planets. New Scientist these days is a tremendously speculative publication.
For a good discussion about life's probability's, read Not By Chance by Dr. Lee Spetner.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
At the altitude where life is suspected the temperature is about 70C and about 1 atmosphere.
I did not know that ET could fly without a bicycle ?
theefer
Is this scientific evidence that women consist mostly of gas?
...quit using such weak articles as an opportunity to attack religion. Did you ever think that there may be some belief systems out there that might actually accept this? If you did, you wouldn't have said what you did. Maybe you should have a look at Buddhism, for example. Remember, you're still the center of yourself, and we have nothing else to compare our own perceptions to.
Yes, we should treat them as hypotheses deserving of vigourous investigation. That's how you learn. Well, it's how I debug.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
echo "goatse.cx 127.0.0.1" >> /etc/hosts
No more Goatsex.
That explains all the e-mail I get from routers on Mars.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Haven't I heard this joke a couple times before?
In other news... Microsoft is planning a major campaign in the Venus atmosphere.
"If there is life, it must run Microsoft.net." says a spokesman for the company. "Plus, it allows us to get closer to Sun."
TO SURVIVE!
The evidence that life has fostered on the Earth's Sister Planet is a dire and grim proposition for the future of the human race. If we don't strike now, these phosphate-producing bacteria may, in billions of years evolve to a spacefaring race with religious viewpoints opposing The One True Way.
We must strike now, to wipe out these bacteria before it is too late! I beg of you, Mister President. Launch the nukes. It's the only chance that we have to eradicate these monsters before they can oppose Earth and America and Christianity! LAUNCH THE MISSILES! NOW!
God I'm drunk (on love, Pokey?) Yes Little Girl, drunk on love. And whisky. But mainly whisky.
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
I mean, it always feel impressive to say "our CPU runs at a tenth of the room temperature", doesn't it? :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
So, if the theories hold true and there's actually things livin' up/out there, then there would, theoretically, be organisms, parasites if you will, living on those life forms.
Now, theoretically, if we can get these parasites back to earth and they infect everybody, that is, theoretically, the most pure venereal disease ever.
Screw Iraq, the Venetian threat is much greater...
sorry, couldn't resist.
-mo
Strange gases on Venus caused by..?
1) Complex atmospheric-solar interactions
2) Mysterious unknown life-forms
3) Cowboyneal
Marvin probably could have told us about this a while back if WE weren't obscuring his view!
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
Life on Venus? Could a Mekon-led Treen invasion of Earth be imminent?
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
Slashdot is from Uranus
"...God could show up in person..."
That's us!
Actually, I find it more interesting to think about the universe, existance, to be life itself. After all, a body is nothing solid. Within a year, nearly all our cells are replenished. The food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe become our body when it enters. On the other hand, without the touch of God, natural laws, whatever you want to call it, life is null and void.
Since a body, any existing object, is nothing by itself (all matter is 99,99999...% empty), life must therefore be existance itself, a glorious play of patterns and experiences.
You can't even say stone is devoid of life. By watching earth's crust for millenias, stone and sand become just as lively and complex as any other organism.
What is life anyways? All the labels we stick to it, are nothing without our logical way of thinking. When our thinking defines reality, our thinking becomes reality! Thus if we're stuck with logic alone, that limits our reality.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Damn funny!
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
We may have found Lando's Cloud City. We must inform the Emperor. The Imeprial have already been dispatched. The rebel resistance will be crushed.
Regards,
D.V.
Two Towers-Two Worlds.One seeks triumphs and freedom for man.The other deems man unworthy and wrecks them.
Just /. them out of existence!
Life on another planet could be anything. It could be more bizarre and terrible than anything ever created by Hollywood (yes even Alien or Predator). It could be invisible. It could be super-intelligent single celled organisms or molds. It could be waiting. It could be hungry.
The Venera 13 & 14 landers arrived on the surface of Venus on March 1st and 5th, 1982, respectively. This is more then 20 yrs ago. Is it possible that small lifeforms from earth hitchhiked along and found the conditions favorable to reproduce? Would 20 years be enough to get enough bacteria to color the clouds of a planet?
The Apollo 12 mission brought back some parts of the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe, which had been on the surface of the moon for 31 months. The Surveyor 3 had not been sterilized prior to its launch, and the researchers found a few small colonies of bacteria (Streptococcus mitis) inside some parts of the probe which had survived the 31 month exposure to the lunar environment.
Of course, the bacteria could have also been accidentally introduced during the trip home or during the research....
That joke is *SO* 4 minutes ago.
--- What
President Bush Gave Speech this Morning about the possibility of life on venus. In his speech he mentioned that they are harobring terrorist and weapons of mass destruction and that we must act now before they strike first. He spoke of a regime change as well.
I'd hate to think that we'd have to file an environmental impact statement before we terraform Venus.
Collect a sample. Run it through a chromatography column. Put a polarimeter on the end. If there's anything chiral, you have life. If everything is completely racemic, you almost certainly don't.
It's not a self-contradiction, clearly all life is unnatural. This would imply that all live on Earth should be destroyed to return it to it's early pristine, lifeless state :)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
This can be achieved without having to actively propel the probe back up to orbit. Change the eccentricity of the orbit to go into the atmosphere, but not enough to cause it to crash into the planet. After it makes it's pass through the atmosphere, change the eccentricity back into near-circular and prepare to return to earth. This would take some skill, as atmospheric effects would affect the velocity and direction of the probe, and corrections would have to be made when the probe emerges.
This was a very real concern during re-entry of the manned space missions. If the angle of re-entry was to steep, then the spacecraft would come in too fast and burn up. If the angle was too shallow, then the danger was the spacecraft would "bounce" off the atmosphere and get into an unpredictable orbit around the earth. In this case, we could use the bounce to our advantage.
Many thinks the meaning of life is to get laid and keep our species alive, but thats not true. To be able to play this game AND receive the message "Congratulations! You are the winner" instead of "GAME OVER!", you should stack a bung of bacteria inside a spaceshuffle and launch it to a planet that is like earth. After all, if earth is currently the only planet containing life, whouldn't spreading this life to another distant planet before we kill our own planet be to much to ask of an intelligent specie like the Human?
The parent post was talking about nuclear rockets -- which have already been developed but are not "politically correct". A nuclear rocket has an ISP of something like 60,000 -- it would have no problems going to Venus, landing, picking up several tons of crap, blasting off, and returning to Earth, all *without* needing to use a Hohmann transfer orbit.
This would seem to indicate that conditions were more conducive to life in the past. I wonder if it was the life that led to the current surface conditions...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
There does seem to be a scientific predisposition toward treating life as anomalous rather than widespread and perfectly normal, all of which goes back to the theological underpinnings of European thought, i.e., God created life on Earth, which is the center of the universe, and therefore life anywhere else in the cosmos is heresy. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for violating this dictum. The confusion has its origins in assuming that because a certain set of chemicals have not been observed by our severely geographically limited species to occur in places where life is not present, that therefore these chemicals imply the presence of life on Venus. They could just as easily indicate that our observations have been distorted by viewing these processes almost exclusively through the filter of a rather lively (life-bearing) planet.
Again, life is seen as unusual, in that its products are assumed to be different from those produced by inorganic processes rather than the results of parallel organic and inorganic processes. Keep in mind that Venus is basically a huge pressure cooker. One might also be reminded that the primary difference claimed by the alchemists between their art and that of the chemists was the practice of slow cooking.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
In case you are too lazy to check Google.
s /v enera13.jpg
3 .j pg
s /v enera14.jpg
s /v enera9-10.jpg
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/venu
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/pics/v1
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/venu
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/venu
Watch for spaces in the URLs.
A few years back an alien space ship picked me up and were taking me to their home planet. Well about the time we got to Venus I had to fart. I figured since these guys didn't have any noses they would'nt smell anything, so I cracked one off.
Was I wrong! those guys were really pissed that I polluted their spaceship. They immediately vented the stench in the Venetian atmosphere and took me back home. This "gas" that this scientist discovered actually eeked out my butt and is floating around venus. And if the scientist does further analysis, he will find that it was produced by two beef and bean burrito's from Taco Bell. So there you have it.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
But another sentence in the article implies that nevertheless the two gases can be found together. And certainly neither of them are produced by biological activity in this case.
As for carbonyl sulfide (also "carbon oxysulfide", or COS - essentially carbon dioxide with sulfur substituting for one of the oxygens), I don't know much about how it can be synthesized. I suspect that it is a product of careful hydrolysis of thiophosgene (CSCl2 - itself not an easy thing to make), but this would hardly be occurring naturally. I know that the gas is unstable, susceptible to hydrolysis into carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. This article discusses its presence in our own atmosphere; the bulk of it comes from natural sources.
Incidentally, why do these articles on Slashdot of genuine scientific interest attract more stupid posts than usual? Everyone's trying to crack lame sci-fi jokes, and few are addressing the matter seriously.
"I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!"
What are you on? I want some.
... not sure about yourself :) that a brick wall is hard.
[...] all matter is 99,99999...% empty [...]
Yes - that's why the simile "a hole in a hole within a hole" is sometimes used to describe matter. That doesn't, however, change our perception (well, mine
[...] stone and sand become just as lively and complex as any other organism [...]
Lively and complex: yes. Exhibiting something which might be recognised as "intent" or "will" or "emotion" or what-have-you by us wormbabies: no.
[...] if we're stuck with logic alone, that limits our reality [...]
Yeeees. What alternatives have you to offer? Anything you can communicate? Anything structured? "Things are things", "Time is time" et cetera ad absurdum (which wouldn't take a whole lot of time), I agree. But unless somebody decides to come back down from the smokey mount and give us logicians a hand, I for one will stick with attempting to build a better satellite or whatever.
Human perception is indeed fantastically narrow - but recognising the fact that this is so does not change the fact.
</superfluous reply to what I have come to the conclusion is a happyTroll[TM]>
yes, we have no bananas
Hello? I am searching for the clue that this thread lost?
The reason the gases are "un-natural" is because they react with each other!
Just like finding a fresh, half-eaten bagel at your desk, you know someone or something was there. You know it was recent, otherwise you would already have finished off the bagel, (or else it would have gone to waste, or green, you understand..)
If the fresh bagels keep appearing, you know that *something* is making them. Otherwise, all the bagels would soon be stale.
That is why the presence of things that react together quickly shows that something is re-supplying the process, which means life. Unless you know something we don't?
Maybe numerous Earth probes infected Venus' atmosphere with life.
It was the other way around; the Earth was contaminated with life from other planets.
Everybody knows, that women are from Venus.
Dr. John Gray proved that long time ago: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
do you mean "viruses?"
Anything you say will be held against you.
If you can't bring the sample to the lab, just bring the lab to the sample...what's wrong with a Venus lander similar to the Martian one (ok, the environment is much harsher) that will collect a sample, pick it apart and send all data back via radio before the Venusian "air" eats the lander. Radio waves are lighter than payload after all. One would probably still have to speculate if radio waves could penetrate.
Conspiracy theories and all notwithstanding, I get the creeps when I think about what would happen if there really WAS bacteria there and the government (any gov't) got there hands on it. You could probably FORGET heat disinfection for this particular strain...
Hm. The word "strain" make me think of a certain novel/film...
maybe, but how do we explain the "fact" that women don't fart?
I think this might be a more precise answer:
User Friendly, July 29, 2000
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
is *so* loving life today. :)
l t. htm
http://www.curtharmon.com/bova/tour/venus/defau
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
1) Detect a new compound in inhospitable place.
2) ???
3) Life!
**keep your eyes on my buh buh-buh-buh bump**
God, do I really have to read the silly article? ;-)
"That is why the presence of things that react together quickly shows that something is re-supplying the process, which means life. Unless you know something we don't?"
That's not exactly what it says:
"Solar radiation and lightning should produce large quantities of carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere, but instead it is scarce, as if something is removing it. They also found hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide. These two gases react with each other, and so are never normally found together unless something is producing them."
The operant word is "should." They are postulating life on the basis of the absence of something they think "should" be there, or rather, even less convincingly, on the basis of their inability to detect something they think "should" be there.
As for the presence of gases that "normally" react together, one is tempted to ask, how are we defining normal? There is nothing particularly "normal" about Venus except to the extent that I have already suggested, that anything not subject to human intervention can be thought of as "natural." Venus is certainly not "normal" when compared to the Earth, and any suppositions regarding what SHOULD be happening there are premature at best.
The contradiction referred to in the subject line results from the supposition that the presence of life is somehow unnatural. I would remind you that what is normally thought of as a dichotomy, inorganic-organic, is actually part of a continuum: inorganic, organic, cybernetic,...,n. One could just as easily postulate the presence of any one of these terms in the vicinity of Venus if it is assumed that some chemical process or lack thereof indicates an unnatural (read not inorganic) condition. Despite the reference in the article to a "theory," this is in fact just a hypothesis. Any other hypothesis would have equal standing until subjected to some kind of experimentation. Appealing to William of Occam, one might more productively suggest that there is some chemical process going on in the atmosphere of Venus that we do not completely understand. Perhaps resulting from the presence of a chemical poison (the opposite of a catalyst) that we have not yet detected.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
http://www.benbova.net/venus_benbova.htm
:)
Go and read about life on Venus in the book, it's a very good story
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Robert L. Forward (sadly, died this week) wrote a book called Saturn Ruhk with a similar basic concept. Life evolved and exists in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. All of Forward's books have great plausible lifeforms and fascinating technology. He was a long time researcher with a PHD in physics.
Liberty in your lifetime
Several astronomers have written articles about the contamination (or colonization) of the rest of the planets by Earthly bacteria. They've known for some decades that bacterial spores are found throughout the Earth's atmosphere, including at very high altitudes. The Earth has a "dust tail" produced by the solar wind that very slowly strips off the outer atmosphere and blows it outward. This tail is something that interferes with some kinds of astronomy, so they must take it into account.
The dust tail includes gases and fine dust particles, including things the size of bacterial spores. We've also known for decades that many such spores can survive indefinitely in space.
The conclusion is obvious. Bacterial spores from Earth have been contaminating the outer solar system, probably for several billion years. Some of them will get picked up by meteoroids and comets and carried back to the inner solar system, so Mercury and Venus have also been colonized by these bacteria.
Probably not many survive. But it's likely that some do. And, of course, their descendants will have re-colonized the Earth.
The solar system is a pretty messy place, when you look at it on a microscopic scale.
One article I read back in the 70's did a rough calculation on a larger scale. The Earth circles the galaxy in about 250,000 years. We've made more than a dozen orbits since bacterial life arose here, spraying spores most of that time. The author calculated that by now the entire galaxy has been contaminated several times over by Earthly spores. Of course, we don't know how many could survive interstellar space for the required millions of years.
But it's fun to think about.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
One article I read back in the 70's did a rough calculation on a larger scale. The Earth circles the galaxy in about 250,000 years. We've made more than a dozen orbits since bacterial life arose here, spraying spores most of that time. The author calculated that by now the entire galaxy has been contaminated several times over by Earthly spores. Of course, we don't know how many could survive interstellar space for the required millions of years.
:-)
Or perhaps the reverse: that galactic dust/comets have seeded the Earth with microbes rather than life being "native" to Earth.
IOW, life here may be something like 10 billion years old instead of 5.
Some alien in Orion may even hold a patent on all of us who came from it
Table-ized A.I.
How is it that the original post is 0, Flamebait and the reply below it by the same author is 2, Interesting?
Looks like the only Flame being drawn is from the moderators.
Slashdot's content implies Jon Katz !!
You rock!
.
They must float about clinging to the clouds.
I think they should be called Baloonicles!
.
My pills, where are they?
.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Is there life on Uranus?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Let's terraform the bastards before they evolve into ten foot tall insection beasts with razor sharp teeth, glistening with demonic slobber.
Terraform Iraq Now!
> Or perhaps the reverse: that galactic dust/comets have seeded the Earth with microbes ...
...
Yup; that's the "panspermia" hypothesis that some astronomers (and some biologists) have discussed. In essence, all the places where life arose are busy contaminating the rest of the universe with spores.
Now to collect some evidence
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This same observation was mentioned on Paul Harvey News and Comment at least two years ago (I actually think it was longer than that).
Gee, this sounds familiar.
Temperature of 70C... check.
Earth-normal air pressure... check.
My God! Venus' atmosphere is just like the inside of a tricked-out 4.7GHz tower with neon and Nixie tubes.
NASA can save their money looking for life in an atmosphere like that. I've been to LAN parties -- you're not going to find a life anywhere near a box like that.
Couldn't you just send up a big superball, bounce off of the planet's surface, and back up into orbit?
Now here comes Japans revenge for all the lame things slashdot, they'll convert venus to slashdot hating hoes and kill us all by staying perminantly on the rag
I like how he thinks in in bad, accented English.
Play Command HQ online
They talk...and talk...and talk...
Not 250,000 Years, it's 250,000,000 Years for each rotation around the galaxy !!
Wait a minute: for the microbes to seed the galaxy, how fast would they have had to be moving, and in which direction? They'd still have whatever momentum our solar system hadc(there isn't a lot of friction in space), and they'd only go outwards as fast as the solar wind could push them. Even with several shots of 250,000 years, I'm not sure they could get far enough to reach other solar systems with planets, much less the galaxy.
Of course, Venus is CLOSER to the sun than Earth so a "dust tail" extending towards the outer planets would not be a strong hypothesis of the source for bacteria on Venus.
this article brought up the question which i often ask myself - why is there so much attention paid to mars and so little to venus?
surely venus is a much better long-term proposition for colonisation than mars? yes i know about it's crushing and extremely hot atmosphere, but this is something that can potentially be adapted to or ameliorated - perhaps even comprehensively changed by some atmosphere engineering
what can not be changed about a planet is it's gravity - this is obviously a fundamental characteristic of a planet inextricably linked to it's mass - and mars' low gravity seems to me to be an intractable problem for colonists - ie maybe they could adapt to living there but they would never be able to return to earth
finally, from a poetic viewpoint it would be nice if the human race made it's first step out into the solar system towards the planet of love and not the planet of war
i welcome comments
Are they chemicals that come in waxed paper boxes?
You are not correct.
Launching from Venus' upper atmosphere is almost exactly as difficult as launching from Earth's surface.
Even a couple of hundred miles up, the force of gravity is almost the same as on the surface. (Remember, it drops off as the inverse square of the distance between you and the center of the planet. Since r is roughly 4000 miles, a couple hundred mile change doesn't matter much.)
The atmospheric pressure & hence drag are almost the same as on Earth.
So, to launch a sample from Venus back to Low-Venus Orbit, you'd need something comparable to a Pegasus booster. (Pegasus rockets are drop-launched from under the wing of an L-1011 aircraft. They look like an over-sized cruise missle.) A Pegasus XL could launch about 300-400 kg into Low-Venus Orbit. A Pegasus XL weighs 24,000 kg.
The Pegasus is complete overkill for sending a few kg of Venus' atmosphere plus 10-50 kg container spacecraft into orbit. That's good, because its mass is far too high to send there currently. But, it gives you some sense of what you might need. (A Pegasus might be able to launch a sample return canister directely from Venus' atmosphere to Earth, but I'm not positive about that.)
Don't underestimate the difficulty. It's almost exactly as difficult to get away from Venus as it is to get away from Earth.
With hope that it will happen someday,
A friendly neighborhood astrophysicist
> Not 250,000 Years, it's 250,000,000 Years ...
Yeah; you're right. But what's a few zeroes among friends? The significant part of the astronomical calculation was the dozen or more orbits we've made since bacterial life arose on this rock.
As I recall, the current estimate is more like 260 million years, but of course it depends a lot on what large masses we pass near during the orbit. And they don't have that good an estimate of the detailed mass concentration where we're headed even over the next 10 million years.
Stick around and find out, I say.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
> ... for the microbes to seed the galaxy, how fast would they have had to be moving, and in which direction?
It's been a few decades since I read that article, but as I recall, the author went into quite a lot of detail about the force of the solar wind and the velocities that it imparts to the Earth's dust tail.
The effect isn't trivial. The solar wind varies over a wide range, but the speed of particles as they pass the Earth are comparable to the Earth's orbital speed. Most of the time, the solar wind is above escape velocity. The Earth's dust tail rapidly accelerates to solar-wind velocity. This was the crux of his calculations.
The direction is easy: The dust tail starts off pointing away from the sun. The Earth is in a nearly circular orbit, so the dust tail is a spreading spiral. So the junk is heading out in all directions (though it's mostly close to the plane of the ecliptic).
At the time in the Earth's orbit when it's leading the sun (in our galactic orbit), the dust tail is blowing ahead at more than escape velocity, so that part will spread outward ahead of us at speeds comparable to our speed around the galaxy,
plus solar escape velocity. This is higher than galactical orbital speed in our neighborhood.
In 4 billion years, some of those dust particles will have left the galaxy entirely. Most, however, will end up in assorted galactic orbits, until something bigger stops them.
At the time in the Earth's orbit when it's following the sun, the dust tail will be escaping the solar system with a galactic speed below local orbital velocity. That part of the tail will tend to drop toward galactic center. Its speed will be low, so it might not have got there yet. Some will be soaked up by passing nebulae.
At other times in the Earth's orbit, the dust tail will leave the solar system with intermediate galactic speeds. On average, the speed will be comparable to the solar system's speed, but in different directions. In 4 billion years, the particles will have easily crossed the entire galaxy, unless something stops them.
Remember that in a billion years, the solar system circles the galaxy roughly 4 times. The Earth's dust tail spews out in all directions in the plane of the ecliptic. It has a speed comparable to our galactic orbital velocity, but in different directions. Dust particles and spores will also orbit the galaxy roughly 4 times per billion years, but in assorted directions.
Find a friendly local astronomer or a few good books and do your own calculations. Then start thinking up your own SF plots. But remember that it can take a long time for a bacterial spore to evolve into a Klingon, even on a hospitable planet.
The main unanswered question is how long bacterial spores can really survive in interstellar space. If they're only viable for a million years or so, they could only reach a few nearby stars. The basis of this topic is that bacterial spores do seem to be inert and unchanging, and potentially viable indefinitely.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The conditions in the Venusian atmosphere are much more favorable to life as we know it than the surface. Contrary to popular belief the article was speaking of the upper atmosphere, not the surface.
Bit of a headscratcher for you: http://www.kronia.com/library/journals/venair.txt
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
---Remember that in a billion years--- Wait: didn't you say we go around once every 250,000 years? That woud be a lot more than 4 times around.
and these life forms may not exist, but already you just know someone somewere has begun worshiping them :(
What, deliberately kill another planet's biosphere to pre-empt a dangerous civilisation developing there?
Then when a ship of the law drops into Earth orbit, I think I'll want to be tried separately.
Note to moderators: don't bother, I know...
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
I'm out, the noise level has increased to the point where it's no longer worth the time spent.
Dreadful editing and questionable moderating combined with endlessly repeated articles wich little or no basis in technology.
You know what? You're right. How that escaped (-1, Flamebait) I will never know. What I'm objecting to is the (often heard, though not in the comment I replied to) assertion that not believing in a god is a belief in itself, which it isn't. Atheism, as a positive belief that there is no god, is of course as much a matter of faith as the belief in a god.
Is that what they mean by a dictionary attack?
The Soviets sent that virus in their probe to teraform Venus because there's oil there too. The viruses, I believe, took the USSR flag as well.
A novice asked the master: "I perceive that one computer company is
much larger than all others. It towers above its competition like a giant
among dwarfs. Any one of its divisions could comprise an entire business.
Why is this so?"
The master replied, "Why do you ask such foolish questions? That
company is large because it is so large. If it only made hardware, nobody
would buy it. If it only maintained systems, people would treat it like a
servant. But because it combines all of these things, people think it one
of the gods! By not seeking to strive, it conquers without effort."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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