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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.
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."
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 &
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.
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?"
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!
New York Times August 10th, 2010
:)
KILLER VENUS MICROBE BROUGHT BACK BY SWEDEN
"EATS EVERYTHING"
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story.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Sorry to correct you, but you are a bit off.
They landed several Venera landers, two of which took B&W photos and two of which took color ones...
They did fail relatively quickly, but not in only seconds. And they failed due to the crushing atmospheric pressure, not acidity.
This space available.
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!
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/
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
"...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/
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.
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.
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.
>it could be a native form (at 70C?? I doubt it)
Why? We have identified thermophiles that can survive in temperatures over 100C here on earth.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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.
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 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.
**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.
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.
You rock!
The post that I responded to was talking about 'native forms' of life on venus, not transplanted ones.
Besides, many of those bacteria are extremely hardy. They can withstand both hard vacuum and cosmic rays and still remain viable. We sent some up on a satellite a few years ago and bacteria were able to survive fine with just a little soil for protection.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Umm, how does that work? Is it the specific belief that there are no gods, or is it no opinion either way? A lack of opinion would make you an Agnostic. A firm belief that there are no gods would make you equally as faith based as any other religion as there is no proof one way or the other that there are gods of any kind.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
> 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.
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.
You're missing the point. What I'm saying is that maybe the life evolved, and did not successfully establish an equilibrium with the environment, and caused the runaway greenhouse effect.
Actually, I guess the current state would be the equilibrium.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
---Umm, how does that work?---
It's not that hard, but confusing to people that are used to positive definitions only. To say that I am an atheist is akin to saying that I am not a racecar driver.
---Is it the specific belief that there are no gods, or is it no opinion either way?---
You've got it wrong. "There is a god" is a belief. "I don't believe in god" is a description of a person (and an atheist). "No belief" is not the same thing as "I believe no."
---A lack of opinion would make you an Agnostic.---
Some agnostics believe in god: on faith. Agnostic means "without knowledge" i.e.: I don't have any knowledge of god. Atheism/theism concerns _belief_, not knowledge. Agnosticism is not a midpoint between having a belief or not having it. A person who says that they are agnostic can always still be asked "yes yes, but do you believe IN a god?" If yes, then they are a theist. If no, then they are an atheist.
--- firm belief that there are no gods would make you equally as faith based as any other religion as there is no proof one way or the other that there are gods of any kind.---
I agree. However, not all atheists believe THAT there are no gods. Most just do not believe IN any gods, usually because they don't have any reason to believe (like me). Are there gods? Who knows: but I don't BELIEVE in them anymore than I BELIEVE in the existence of life on Venus.
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 intoxicated by life ;-)
;*)
Why, the intent of stone is of course to reach the centre of the earth!
It's plainly obvious for those who use their eyes to observe!!
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Maybe it's just a function of the specific Atheists I've spoken with in the past, but they have all stated there beliefs in the format of "I believe there is no God", as opposed to "I do not believe there is a God". Would being an Atheist more accurately be defined as not Worshipping any God? Regardless of your belief in their existence? So that perhaps one could say, "Yes, I believe in the existence of Allah, but I do not worship him." And be an Atheist or am I missing the point?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
It can be a confusing issue, because "belief" can have more than one meaning: and one of them is "trust in" or "have (personal) faith in." Consider the Greek gods: many people believed in most of the them, but only worshiped a subset of them.
However, in modern usage, "theist" and "atheist" refer to the existence question only. Someone who believes in Allah, but doesn't like Allah, would still be a theist for the purposes of philosophical discussion.
To understand why this is so you have to think about the needs of a philosophical discussion: to establish what _objective_ truths can be considered givens between _subjective_ parties. That I don't like Allah isn't particular relevant to any philosophical discussion of objective facts. However, whether or not I believe Allah objectively exists IS very important: if I don't, then a participant in the discussion cannot simply assume the truth of Allah's existence: I can't gratn that premise unless its proven. That's why the terms 'theist" and "atheist" are actually useful: they tell us what a given person's ultimate position is on whether or not they think the proposition "god exists" can be taken as being true, without additional proof.
---Maybe it's just a function of the specific Atheists I've spoken with in the past, but they have all stated there beliefs in the format of "I believe there is no God", as opposed to "I do not believe there is a God".---
Perhaps. "I don't believe in gods." is easily confused with "I believe no gods," even by atheists themselves. To make matters worse, people who believe there are no gods are ALSO atheists (because if you believe there are no gods, you also fall under the superset of "I don't believe in god").
The best way to think about it is this: when you call someone a theist, you don't necessarily have to know their REASONS for believing in god. They could be rational reasons, faith reasons, habit, whatever. All you have to know is that they do in fact believe in god (and not even WHICH god, at this point!). On the atheist side, a belief that there is definately no god is one possible REASON why one might be an atheist (not believe IN gods): it is a sufficient, but not necessary, condition. Other reasons might be: no reasons TO believe, never even heard the claim (god exists) and so never even considered the possibility of belief, or don't even think the claim (god exists) is linguistically meaningful (which is known as non-cognitivism).