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Possible Signs of Life Detected On Venus
MoThugz writes "This article from the The Houston Chronicle discusses the discovery of mysterious swirling patches on the surface of the planet which may be communities of bacteria. These bacteria might be a genetically-enhanced version of the thermophiles which are known to survive in extreme temperatures. The article suggested the bacteria could be using ultraviolet light from the sun as an energy source, which would explain the presence of strange dark patches on ultraviolet images of the planet."
See also slashdot.
But wait, must grab some karma!
Any life on venus must be female, afterall, men are from mars....
Also
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.
yadda yadda
I guess fp is too much to hope for
These guys are GOOD!
...to this.
Not on the surface of Venus, 50 km up in the atmosphere, where the temperature is not too extreme. Their being lifeforms is inferred from the presence of gases that should recombine over time (like oxygen on Earth, which wouldn't stay in the air if life wasn't there to produce it).
This article from the The Houston Chronicle
Ah, well it must be true!
Well, they _are_ from Venus.
and how do we plan talking to them? :-)
I'd say that there are lots of other, more plaussible, explanations to 'mysterious swirling patches' on a planet surface.
But, hey, the sientisist will get a headline or two, and perhaps even a few dollars to spend. I'm just saying that there are reasons to stretch the reality just a bit sometimes. Often these reasons are political or economical. In this case I'd have to go for the latter.
FAR more compelling EVIDENCE = CO levels being suspicious.... too low.
All the free carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide gasses are too low in concentrations expected.
SOMETHING is getting rig of them... a likely suspect is a biological activity from a microbial lifefrom.
The patches are just a MINOR piece of the puzzle, this header to this article should not have been written without revealing the alarming absence of expected carbon gasses.
.... those "dark patches" are just acne I'd bet. Our solar system is pretty young on the scale as things go in the universe, so Venus prolly just needs to wash up a bit better.
There's a lot of might's in that story :) - Why,
after so many "ooh, we were wrong's" are scientists still so trigger happy on announcing "possible life on x"?
This sounds like a case of a bunch of scientists forgetting to properly apply Occam's Razor!!
Life (even microbial life) is so extremely complex, that is seems implausable to jump to the conclusion that life must be present, simply because of a chemical marker which we find hard to make without the help of microbes!
These guys should be concentrating on eliminating other possibilities, rather than just jumping onto the News Bandwagon to get their latest 'discovery of life' publicised.
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
If there is life on Venus, it's going to be very difficult to get any future plans to terraform the planet past the environmentalists.
Look what you did!
:-)
Now you made Google News post old news as well and we get this chain of Google News from Slashdot News from Earlier Slashdot News (which I'm sure got covered on Google News as well).
Hm... On the other hand... Let's just blame it all on Houston Chronicle which posted the old story first.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Do we really have to go through this again? We'd already done swirling mists on Venus - then Pluto's frozen oceans.. now we're back on the swirling mists of Venus - I don't think anything has changed:
.it's a far cry from 'life'... in any interesting sense.. and it's also only a =maybe= 'bacteria'....
Some swirling anamolies 'could be life'... yeah right!?
I don't care - bacteria, it's not relevant..
Give us a digital watch (secondhand or so)... or a sock or a hat... a machine that goes 'ping' or 'beep'..
but weird swirls - there's more than one of those in the universe... even more than one in the solar system - no doubt.
---- *dog sitting next to a computer, with his beady eyes shifting left to right*
I think we need a new category on Slashdot; "Wild speculation about extraterrestrial life based on insubstantial evidence".
Nasa could do metric>>imperial conversions we could send an orbital probe to go pick some up... with out it buringing up (-:
Seriously thou, would it be possible to send a scope to go pick some up. Obviously it would be expensive.. and the money could be spent better else where, but we know they won't so lets go with the flow and think about it... Not knowing much about venus, would the atmospheric pressure and gravitational forces be to high to send some sort of probe to enter the atmosphere and blast back out? (far off wacky idea I know, but I am bored)
-- powered by a beowulf cluster of chimpanzees - a 1000 monkeys at a 1000 keyboards strapped together with duct-tape.
"All your Venus are belong to us."
"For life, you need a volume of water, not just tiny droplets."
Yeah, he's right. There is no such thing as airborn viruses....not
This is the comment of an entrenched and threatened scientist.
Plenty of extremephiles can live at 158 degrees. Plenty of viruses can live in the air. I've always thought venus has been too often overlooked. I belive it was because the russians made it there first.
Seems to me the ideal place to send a solar glider made of glass. Better solar power production than Earth. Thicker atmosphere than Mars. Easier to get to than mars. Least explored of our neighbors.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
- Help in prooving that life may exist on other more distant planets
- Perhaps some insight into lifes origins on Earth
- Good curiosity value
Either way this wont change my life in any meaningful way except my paycheck will be needed to send up a few more space shuttles.----
bling bling i love to ping
Why do most people asume that the living conditions on earth are the best model to compare other planets with? For all we know, the conditions here on Earth might be downright horrible for life to develop and we simply just got lucky. (Especially plausible if you think about the conditions we live in; instable tectonic plates, atmospheric disturbances, electro-atmospheric disturbances, oceanic disturbances, etcetera) But that'd going off-topic... There are simply so many things yet unknown and researchers are simply too eager to disregard a complicated subjects for various reasons I'm unfamiliar with...
Hate me!
I did read the article... I just don't take "return samples of the atmospher" to mean the same thing... I mean physically aim for them and scoop them or something (-: I am sure the ESA probes will not be going that deep which is why I asked my question about the plausability.
-- powered by a beowulf cluster of chimpanzees - a 1000 monkeys at a 1000 keyboards strapped together with duct-tape.
I'm getting tired of all this 'possible' stuff. I wanna see pictures of little green men on CNN !!
I mean these aliens are really losing credibility here.
beauty is only a light switch away
Someone on Venus was flushing is toilet.
eTrade SUCKS
Because otherwise the 99% of the human population who know little to nothing about modern science and don't even watch the news would never get "hooked" by anything. "Life on X" is popular at the mo' there have been many others "The Might Atom" for example.
I think the theory is that you have a coupla "whizz bang" announcments a year and hope that enough people get into the sciencey thing and become inventors, engineers, fizzysists etc...
Otherwise most people would go back to watching "Big Brother" or "Pop Idol" or some equally vacuous "entertainment"... after many years of this the TV system would eventually fall into disrepair and the ensuing social chaos would cause untold destruction.
probly.
"None of this shit works" -W.Shatner
The phrase "genetically enhanced" has become an abbreviation of "genes altered through chemical manipulation". All evolution is natural genetic enhancement...even if done selectively by plant breeders who, for example, create large juicy ears of corn from a plant which produced small ears just a short time earlier (and I have no idea how much corn had been altered by pre-Columbus breeders).
The original paper in question here was called "Reassessing the Possibility of Life on Venus: Proposal for an Astrobiology Mission" and published in a journal called "Astrobiology."
Please note that the title of the damn paper is not "Merchants of Venus Discovered, Are Selling Us Meat," but, it appears to me to be an optimistic proposal for another venusian probe.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
Maybe this means they can do something about the strange lifeforms infesting uranus!
Have scientists detected a way to stop duplicate Slashdot posts?
...mysterious swirling patches on the surface of the planet which may be communities of bacteria...
Wow! There IS intelligent life in the universe.
I am a meat popsicle.
"Could a Mekon-led Treen invasion of Earth be imminent?"
Imagine a beowolf cluster of THOSE!
what a crock! should read: for my dachsund, you need a volume of water, and that's all i can get my mind around right now."
There is no life elsewhere in the universe! Give it up.
These bacteria might be a genetically-enhanced version of the thermophiles which are known to survive in extreme temperatures
Does this only sound silly to me? They can't be genetically enhanced. If they exist, they're just the way our lord Venus Christ created them!
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
The Houston Chronicle discusses the discovery of mysterious swirling patches on the surface of the planet which may be communities of bacteria
So either the RIAA have set up shop on a new planet, or evolution is starting on Venus, with lawyers...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
One of the best indicators of life is a system existing far from equilibrium. Without the presence of life, all systems tend towards the point of minimum order (towards chemical and energetic equilibrium). But life uses an energy source to direct the system around it away from chemical equilibrium, producing ordered structures. These structures contain the energy in a way such that life can later return to extract the energy source to perform work. See Stuart Kauffman's "Investigations" for a very interesting read on it.
These guys come to exactly the same conclusion as I would have given the evidence, and I think the theory is quite sound.
There is no life elsewhere in the universe! Give it up.
This statement makes me very sad. My reply to you is a quotation:
"The dream alone is of interest. What is life without dreams?" - Edmond Rostand
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
These patches must be mighty large if they can be seen swirling from a satelite (I imagine) in space. Seems unlikely to me...
When can we communicate with them, and how ? At least the RTT timeouts for TCP seems way to low.
We should be looking to send a manned mission to Venus before sending a manned mission to Mars. Venus is 10 million miles closer to Earth than Mars is. A Venus mission wouldn't have a landing so it would be much cheaper. And then there's the possibility of finding life in the atmosphere. I know, I know, people want to have the excitement of astronauts walking around on the surface of another planet. They also want to be able to see the surface of the planet from orbit. But think about it, for considerably less cost we can have humans exploring (from orbit) another world with an atmosphere and possible life. We can have probes enter the atmosphere and return samples to the orbitting spacecraft, which could then be brought back to Earth. A manned mission would have the flexibility and resources to make an exhaustive examination of the atmosphere. It makes more sense to have this be our first manned interplanetary expadition than the more expensive and difficult mission to Mars.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Ok from an economic/15 min of fame perspective which do you thnk would attract more $/pretigue saying the you found some rare funky gas on Venus or that you found some rare funky gas on Venus that was CREATED OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS BY BILLIONS OF EXTRATERRISTIAL BACTERIA LIVING AT 50KM. hmmmm... tuff one
IIRC Stephen Baxter explores a related theory in his book "Deep Future" availble from Gollancz. I found it an excellent read and if you find this kind of thing interesting I recommend it.
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
There's likely to be a wait for any firm answers. NASA lists a Venus mission as only a "medium priority," causing Schulze-Makuch to say, "Forget about the chances, if we go to war with Iraq."
...
The European Space Agency is planning a 2005 launch of its Venus Expression mission
heh. why don't we get funding from GWB to send weapons inspectors to venus, so we can add those "evil bacteria" to the "axis of evil".... it's not as if our military budget isn't fucking enormous as it is, a little probe to venus wouldn't be anything particularly costly to the military...
moox. for a new generation.
Yeah... and maybe 1000 monk... err... alien bacteria will fly out of my butt!!!
What's the use of this kind of hypothesizing? There are 1 billion+ possibilities (some of which have already been mentioned).
My hypothesis is that it's a top-secret project funded by Micro$oft/China/RIAA and run by the CIA/Commies/DoJ. They hope to create a death-to-Linux/Capitalists/Fileswappers ray!
This Article - Score:0 Redundant
If my memory is correct, Carl Sagan et al already proposed to seed bacteria or algae into the upper atmosphere of Venus. Their proposal was to use photosynthesizing organisms that reproduce so rapidly thay enough of them stay in the friendlier upper layers of Venus' atmosphere to survive. They would break down the carbon dioxide, reducing the greenhouse effect. As aeons pass, the habitable layer of the atmosphere would become thicker and thicker, so the process would accelerate. Another source of acceleration would be simple evolution. After a number of aeons, terraforming could begin. Perhaps the Russian Venera's carried the seeds...
the probability of finding life in our own solar system is pretty good, but just because we find i doesn't mean its native, the probability of life evolving on another planet in our own system is pretty small, its probably safe to assume that any bacteria we find have terrestrial origins, we sent a probe to venus 20 years(?) ago, might some bacteria have hitched a ride on our probe and possibly thrived on venus?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
That would be the real discovery :-)
Seems like the thing to do lately.
Need research funds? Imply there might be life out there to the media.
Sensationalism at its best.
I for one am getting more cynical about claims of ET life. I think it'll get to the point where most people would have to shake hands with an alien to believe a "researcher" now.
This space intentionally left blank.
...and then again, it may NOT be life...
I believe the appropriate karma to follow should be tagged "Funny". :-) Community moderation at work!
And now, to make my post important enough for it to avoid the dreaded zero...
Regarding life anywhere; Steve Grand makes a very interesting point about life in his book "Creation"; it's not tied to the matter that makes life up but rather the patterns in how things connect. The analogy he drew was how clouds are not static bodies of steam but rather areas inside which the water carried by air becomes visible. Like ripples in the water, we only borrow the atoms in our own bodies for a while, binding them to the patterns of interaction that make us unquestionably alive.
While it's far fetched to imagine even bugs on Venusian surface, it is not impossible to envision bacteria evolving from the complex interactions of heat and gases in the atmosphere. All evolution needs to kick off is a fertile playground, a pattern that can replicate itself with a degree of variation, and a lucky roll of dice.
If there indeed *is* bacteria discovered on Venus it would suggest the dice of the universe are heavily loaded with a bias towards generating life. It's that bias which would determine not just whether we are alone but just how crowded it can this universe get after a while. On the other hand, the Venusians have quite a few hundred million years to catch up with their Terran cousins.
Although, with the moderation above points, one has to wonder. :-)
Jouni
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
SOME moderator needs to get a sense of HUMOR!
Shuttle a bunch of antibiotics to Venus. If the dark patches go away, then we know bacterial life existed on Venus.
Science is fun.
But that dosent make news and increase project funding.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why does life require circumstances like our planet to start?
We aren't looking for life on other planets, we're looking for life that we understand. Realistically life should occur just about anywhere given enough time (perhaps for actual voids in space, not necessarily what we think of them as, since "black matter" could be negate a "void" in certain areas of space).
I think "life" is merely a self propogating chemical reaction. Evolutionarily wise it makes sense that "chaos" would force mutations. We can easily assume the propogation under all circumstances won't necessarily be the same.
This means that organization of chemicals so that a reaction produces other reactions of the same type would likely be found anywhere that chemicals and or energies can react (remember, we're not just looking for life like our own).
More interestingly it would be interesting to try to create reactions that re-create themselves, and allow them to evolve.
Then again, I don't think we'd get approval for any experiments that wouldn't yield results for possibly billions of years . . . imagine the electric bill.
-Sean
We haven't done enough exploring in this universe to really know the simplest explanation. If life, in fact, arises with some regularity (at least microbial life) throughout the universe, then life may in fact be the simplest explanation. Until we have actually thoroughly investigates enough regions of various planets and moons to determine that even life that functions the way we expect (with chemistries we can see and study here on Earth) does or does not exist with any specific regularity, then you guessing it isn't life is just as meaningless as them guessing it is. In fact, it may be worse odds, since we know for a fact that there are thermophile microbes on Earth that can exist in conditions found on Venus, and would produce those sort of emissions. I would probably argue that Occam's Razor should fall on the assumption that its life, not the assumption its not, since we have specific statistics for the extistance of life that could work that way, and no statistics , and no statistics to suggest it couldn't be.
no body cares about those incompetent 'scientists'. Bacteria!?!?!?! Who gives a flying shit about that.
Either they provide the real stuff - super intelligent aliens - or they should shut up.
I hope they don't bring it back to earth! Afterall, we've already seen what microbes from Venus can do in Night Of The Living Dead. Do we really want the dead rising from their graves again and devouring the living?
Aren't those the bacteria that started growing on my 1.4 GHz Athlon after I installed it during my lunch hour?
This useless space for sale, inquire at front desk.
Do you have a link to more information on that?
Google came up empty for me...
Actually, that would be Uranus.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Now I feel stupid. Thanks for the rectification. It was meant as a joke however, but that's no excuse for historical inaccuracy. (And next time I Google, before I write something down that I don't know for sure)
Volcanic activity liberates CO2 from sediments.
The decline in tectonic activity and hence in vulcanism is the reason why Gaia had to develop intelligent species that would liberate carbon by burning coal & oil.
Life on Venus? Well maybe but don't you think we should take the planets in order as far as distance goes? I think Uranus is closer to us than Venus. Or maybe that is Ouranus...I never was very good at astronomy.
> > There is a common house cat killing penguins in antarctica.
> Bill Gates left Fluffums out to roam again?
Not Rome, Antarctica. Jeez, people, learn your geography.
Virg
If you throw up some, say, volcanic ash into the atmosphere every once in a while (it stays up for years), it'll substantially reduce the amount of sunlight coming in.
Nobody's said that terraforming is easy. Too much sunlight, however, is one of the easier problems to solve. It's downright trivial compared to making the atmosphere breathable, or figuring out how to deal with the length of the Venusian day.
If you wanted to block _all_ the sunlight falling
on Venus, which is more than you need to do to get
Earth-like conditions, the numbers go like this:
The area of mirrors required is approximately
equivalent to a 10,000 x 10,000 km square. If
formed of rolled sheet steel 1 micron thick, you
will need 0.1 cubic kilometers of steel. A small
iron-nickel asteroid will do nicely. To heat the
material for rolling, concentrated sunlight can
be used, focussed by some of the mirrors you made.
Thus what you need to start with is a seed
factory that can produce the parts for a rolling
mill.
Once you have the mirrors made, they can operate
as solar sails to deliver themselves to Venus
and maintain position once there.
Daniel
Cash is so primitive. And so are people who like it.
Well, suppose there is, in fact, life on Venus. That doesn't mean that given enough time, intelligent life will emerge. Maybe suitable conditions for basic life cover a very broad range, but that doesn't mean intelligent life can survive in such heat.
[Ob.Disclaimer: IANA Smarty Man] Technically, we really have no idea what conditions are necessary to "kick off" evolution. We've deduced that evolution is in effect, based on observable phenomena, but that's about as far as we've gotten. We're still not sure exactly what conditions got it started on Earth, where we actually have the thing to work with. Making statements about how likely Venus is to meet these conditions is laughably premature. We don't know enough about evolution or Venus to do more than gather data and look for patterns.
If there indeed *is* bacteria discovered on Venus it would suggest the dice of the universe are heavily loaded with a bias towards generating life.
Another alternative is that the "dice of the universe" are biased against life, and the presence of life in our solar system is a statistical anomaly produced by some other effect. Certainly the universe in general is extremely hostile to life as we know it.
There could be life in half the star systems in our galaxy, and the dice would still be heavily biased against life in general. If there were life in half the star systems in the universe, that would still only suggest--to me, anyway--that the dice have no particular bias one way or the other, everything else being equal. But I admit that these things are nowhere near my area of expertise.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Possible life on Venus! Possible life on Europa! Possible life on Mars! Possible life on extra-solar planets! There's even possible life hitching a ride on comets. They can find possible life everywhere!
So then why can't we find anything to watch on TV?
There has been some talk about the stats involved on life being created on Earth and then being created on Venus. What if there was a planet that had large oceans and it was teaming with life. Then an asteroid hit the planet and sent fragments of it in all directions. One of those pieces of ice and dirt (which now has frozen microbes in it) happened to find our solar system. As it approached the sun, it started evaporating and pieces started falling off. All it would take is one microbe to seed life.
After all the extremophiles discovered all over the Earth, it is not too hard to imagine a layer in the atmosphere of Venus where life could thrive.
We know there are microbes that can survive being frozen, and there are some that can survive extreme temperatures and large amounts of radiation too. We've even found a several billion year old microbe captured in a salt crystal in Carlsbad Caverns, and when it was rehydrated, it was alive.
If an even like the one I described could happen, then there are billions and billions of microbes floating around space just waiting to land on some planet that can support life.
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
Back in the 1960s, when the U.S. was planning the first Mars lander to look for signs of life, NASA scientists were proposing instruments such as traps for sand fleas. NASA gave Lovelock some money to look into whether they were going about this appropriately.
Lovelock did not believe that there was life on Mars and proposed that anomalous gases in the atmosphere was the best test for ruling out the presence of life on a planet. As described in Nature:
This hypothesis has the advantage of strongly satisfying Popper's falsifiability requirement: If life must create a chemical balance in the atmosphere that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium, then it's easy to rule out life on a planet by demonstrating that its atmosphere is close to equilibrium.Of course, a non-equilibrium atmosphere is a necessary, not a sufficient condition, so further work must, of course, be carried out before reaching the conclusion that life must be present, but it's so rare to see such strong non-equilibrium conditions that this is indeed exciting news.
Time for a Homer Simpson quote... "Gahh *drool* Venus... precious Venus!"
You have it completely backwards. Oxygen breathers like you are freaks. The sort of organisms that like the sorts of conditions you find in hotsprings are normal.
The conditiions for sustaining life may not always be sufficient to create life.
Origin of life is a very rare event...under special circumstances...presence of water doesn't gaurantee anything.
Life may survive extrememe conditions but it has to evolve to get there!
Jesus, though, didn't all of you read about the planets in the 6th grade? Who's moderating here?
If somebody figures out a non-biological process by which that gas is produced, the scales tip in the favor of that explanation. The fact nobody has figured out how this would happen, despite the fact we have tried, is some evidence that it is not happening, and that instead, life is producing the gas.
This is junk science: Where the hell are you going to get the ocean to put the hulls of these sails in so that you get a path of least resistance that is anywhere but directly away from the sun?
Countervailing expirement for you: Get a totally flat bottomed raft. Tack with it.
Here is the current link.
If they find life next door, what will I do with all those spare CPU cycles after I remove my SETI@home screensaver?
This is junk science:
Well, at least you got that part right. Your whole post is nothing but junk. The parent post correctly explained how you use a solar sail to head towards the sun.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Hey, I've looked in the Kitchen Sink, when the water is going down the drain, and there are what could be called "mysterious swirling patches" (I'm not going to mention the toilet, etc.)
AND, speaking of "going down the drain", your paycheck goes there every payday!
I would love a genuine discovery of venusian life.... Unfortunately, Venus has a different, more violent form of tectonic resurfacing than the slow plate tectonics on Earth. Judging by the number of craters on the surface, the entire surface of Venus melted ca. 600 million years ago, as the build-up of internal heat made the crust crack up and hot magma totally covered the surface.
Even if life was present high up in the atmosphere, the heat of the ground was much higher than today, and would have been carried upwards, frying any airborne microbes.
Adiabatic cooling makes air cool with altitude, but to escape the heat of a molten-lava surface, any airborne life would have had to migrate up to altitudes with very thin air, much higher than the layer where the interesting molecules are found today.
While thick air might carry microbes, I do not see how life could survive and thrive in a stratospheric near-vacuum. Yours Birger J.
what do you do?
have oxygen injected into your blood?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Honestly, in my humble opinion, who cares if there are bacteria on Venus? What will this do? Can we cure diseases with these bacteria? Who's going to go get it?
Really though, every place I read "possible life found on [insert planet name]" in which there *may* be evidence of *possible* life on another planet in the form of bacteria just makes me hope even more that the bacteria comes over here and proves more advanced than we.
Devon
It is OK if the plants are flammable -- they'll emit oxygen and if they catch fire they'll fall where they ultimately are wanted. I don't know if they could evolve to remain floating in an Earth-like atmosphere, as it would be awkward to live with flammable things floating through the neighborhood. And if a stable ecosystem arose which did not conclude in a human-inhabitable planet then we would be no worse off than now, with all our eggs still in the Earth basket.
There already are many water-floating plants with bladders. There are plants which extract nutrients from air. There are bacteria and other life which create hydrogen-based gases. Combining these starting points is undoubtedly not simple...if it can be done. But if an environmental impact statement is required, that would surely be the hardest part.
Looks like good old George Adamski was right after all...(wink!)
Tough not exactly as he intended it to be.
--Vuzz.
...who forgot to wash his petri dishes. that was fleming - he left a dish uncovered, it started growing some Penicillum mold, and the rest is history.
pasteur took sterilized bottles of agar broth and kept them sealed, exposed to sterile air, or exposed to open air. only the one exposed to open air grew anything, conclusively disproving abiogenesis (life arising spontaneously).
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Yes, I suspected you didn't read the other comment. You didn't come over as a dick, since I really was wrong. Glad someone corrected it, and at least you gave some extra information for those that were too lazy to google themselves.
>If there indeed *is* bacteria discovered on Venus it would suggest the dice of the universe are heavily loaded with a bias towards generating life. It's that bias which would determine not just whether we are alone but just how crowded it can this universe get after a while. On the other hand, the Venusians have quite a few hundred million years to catch up with their Terran cousins.
The problem here is the loose (read ``lousy'') definition of the term bacterium. It means so much that it means almost nothing. It is usually said of anything small, kinda cellular and simple, with no nucleus. Even on Terra there are 2 very different kind of organisms (out of 3 kinds total!) that are called ``bacteria'' but that are of very different types and are not related (one kind is more related to humans than to the other, and this other is more related to mitochrondria than to the first kind). The 2 groups (Domains) are now considered distinct and currently named Bacteria (eubacteria) and Archæa (archeobacteria), but they were previously taken as the same thing, i.e. ``bacteria'', and still are often called that.
So, be careful with that term; it can be terribly misleading.
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Just a few questions that crossed my mind while reading this thread:
*If there are bacteria on Venus that hitched a ride on our probes, would 20 years be sufficent time for them to breed up the numbers to produce the observed effect?
*Forgive my ignorance, but what are the criteria as to what qualifies as life? I recall watching a TV Doco about an Australian scientist discovering what could be the smallest form of life currently known. These 'Nanobes'(if I remember correctly) are roughly 20 times smaller than the accepted size barrier, share some properties with inert minerals, yet contain basic RNA (they also love to eat plastic). Interestingly, they bear a resembalence to the fossilized 'evidence' of Martian microbes.
Anyway, just some food for thought...