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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
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).
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!
Ummm, Viruses aren't generally considered alive untill they infect something. When the virus isn't infecting a cell it's just a protein coat with some nucleic acid inside. It doesn't need to "do" anything, so is it alive in the air? As far as the scientist's comments, I'm not sure that we can apply our terrestial bound understanding of biology to other worlds: Sure on earth the creation of life probably involved large amounts of liquid water, but that's not to say all life will be like earth life. Perhaps life on venus started as self replicating clouds of gas, or any number of other things
That was Fleming.
Don't play lawyerball, son. If they found viruses in Venus' atmosphere, that would still be big news, whether or not you consider them "alive".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Even so, most textbooks will say it's a gray area, but generally come down on the side that viruses aren't technically alive because they don't have metabolic systems.
(* 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. *)
:-)
Nah. Just slip a few spores of generically-altered atmospheric transfering bacteria, and it nobody will know who "fixed" Venus. They can complain all they want, but there is nobody to complain to
The biggest problem IMO is its slow rotation. A day is about 240 days. Perhaps a thick enough atmosphere will transfer heat evenly to the dark side.
Table-ized A.I.
The biggest problem IMO is its slow rotation. A day is about 240 days.
Which is longer than the Venusian year which is 225 Earth days. Weird, huh?
Perhaps a thick enough atmosphere will transfer heat evenly to the dark side
Given that Earth's atmosphere isn't all that thick, and we're warm enough at night, I reckon a planet closer to the Sun would have reasonably (if not ridiculously) warm nights...
IMHO, Venus needs several things to be habitable:
My solution? Grab that Quaoar object everyone's in love with at the moment and smack it into Venus. Hit it right and all three criteria will be met :)
Insert witty sig about inserting witty sig here, here.
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
It could be possible that carbonyl suphide might be made by non-biological processes, but it is highly improbable given the time scale of such a reaction. A lot of organic compounds (like carbonyl suphide) can be made without biological processes, but the energy and time requirements are too extremely high to be produced in the AMOUNT that was found on Venus. However, if you add biological catalysts (protiens), you can get these compounds extremely quickly. So, when someone sees a large amount of one of these compounds, he can safely say that some sort of catalyst is causing this reaction. Since carbonyl suphide is a common compound produced by life on Earth, it isn't a giant leap to say that it might be produced by life on Venus.
[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.
You are correct in stating that the levels of CO are 'low'. But, there is nothing 'suspicious' about this.
This is known as the CO2 stability problem of Venus. In other words, given the large atmospheric abundance of CO2 (96.5% by volume), there should be much more CO present via photolysis of carbon dioxide.
However, the 'stability problem' has been solved by invoking catalysts that convert CO back into CO2. In fact, the chlorine catalysts involved in this process were discovered in the atmosphere of Venus before their recognition in ozone depletion here on Earth!
Also, regarding the presence of H2S mentioned in the article... There is a process by which pyrite (FeS2) on the surface of Venus can generate hydrogen sulfide. That is,
FeS2 + CO + 2 H2O => FeO + CO2 + 2 H2S
However, the problem with this mechanism involves the process of transporting pyrite to high altitudes!
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.
Also, recall that they sometimes pick up rocks from Mars on the Earth. Stuff gets spread among the planets due to comet hits, etc.. If there is life in the atmosphere of Venus, it could have come from Earth before Mankind was around.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.