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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."
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."
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 &
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.
Maybe numerous earth probes infected venus' atmosphere with life.
- Put a vehicle in orbit.
- Insert a probe into the atmosphere (either from the orbiter or as a separate vehicle). This probe could use one or more of several techniques (parachute, winged design (no retro-thrusters at this stage as this may contaminate the samples)) to perform a fairly slow and controlled descent.
- The probe fills a small canister with gas (possibly several compartments from different altitudes) and propels it back up into orbit before the pressure and gravity gets too high
- Dock the canister with the orbiter and send it back to earth.
Difficult? Damn right. Impossible? Nope. Just keep those pesky imperial units away from the project and you should be set. The probe could continue to send back data to the orbiter as it goes down, but it's probably too much to ask for a soft landing.Money for nothing, pix for free
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.
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"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!
But the heat just gives us even more reasons to not (at least not as a first step) land first and try to launch back up. It's much easier to propel the canister(s) from a decent altitude than if you wait until you're in deep. Gravity, pressure and heat all combine to make it unnecessary difficult (and expensive, since all propellants and other resources has to be brought along for the ride) to do launches from the surface.
Or, just get the orbiter there and launch disposable probes into the atmosphere that can analyze the gases as they tumble down through the soup and relay back the results via the orbiter. This could be done as a cheaper and faster precursor to the "bring 'em back alive" mission, to help develop the technology, methodology and focus of the mission.
Money for nothing, pix for free
"...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/
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....
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.
But you have to bring the sample back if you want to actually gather some microbes and bring them back for deeper studies. If they really are microbes, we would want to know what they use for genetic information, and if it is DNA, then we want to sequence it to see where it comes from.
I wonder if you could have a probe dip into the atmosphere, maybe without even slowing (much) from the Earth to Venus trip, and still have enough momentum to get back out. Ok, so it is a bit hard to collect samples at mach 2+ (probably plus a lot), and even if you could they might be destroyed in the process.
You definitely don't want to land, then launch. All this activity is in the upper atmosphere anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even a literalist biblical interpretation of the creation section of genesis does not preclude the existence of life on other planets. "God Created the heavens and the earth..." and then he goes on to tell us about the part that matters to us, the earth. Depends on whether you believe that everything that exists must be mentioned specifically in the bible, which is absurd, since no one ever mentions platypuses in the bible, or even or dozens of other animals. So there is no biblical reason for any religious nutball to believe there is or is not life on other planets.
Kintanon
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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
Bit of a headscratcher for you: http://www.kronia.com/library/journals/venair.txt
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