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."

Comments

Not Likely

[e8johan]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:FAR more compelling EVIDENCE = CO levels

[mikerich]

My own problem with the life hypothesis is that we are pretty clueless about the chemistry that goes on in the Venusian atmosphere. It is quite possible that some chemical process that we haven't considered is influencing the balance of the atmosphere.

Whilst on Earth carbonyl sulphide might be made by biological processes, it is quite possible that the high temperature and pressure of the lower Venusian atmosphere is generating the chemicals without biological intervention.

It's interesting, but I'm quite literally not holding my breath.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Might?

[pmasters]

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"?

Not good news for terraformers

[rpjs]

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.

Re:Occam's Razor

[Dynedain]

Actually, I would say that in this case, applying Occam's Razor could justifiably let you pick either life-based or purely chemical processes.

However, these scientists didn't choose. They said it might be life, or it might be an unknown chemical process.

They lean to the life option because in this case microbes are much more efficient than inorganic processes (a valid Occam's Razor conclusion)

Trash talking scientist.

[Perdo]

"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.

Re:Trash talking scientist.

[Perdo]

Sorry, I read this article too long ago to remember it's subject:

"Almost no earthly environment is out of bounds for bacteria, including the atmosphere. And while the clouds aren't exactly teeming with life, air-sampling instruments have trapped bacteria more than 11 kilometers above sea level. Carried aloft by rising currents, some microbes can also drift thousands of kilometers before landing. But scientists thought that, like many long-distance travelers, the bugs were inert during their time in the air.

To test whether atmospheric bacteria were inactive, limnologist Birgit Sattler of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and colleagues collected cloud water from a site 3100 meters up in the Austrian Alps. They kept the samples frozen and analyzed them back in the lab. Once thawed, the cloud bacteria released carbon and slurped up radioactively labeled amino acids and thymidine, an ingredient of DNA, showing that they were metabolizing and reproducing even when on the verge of freezing. That bacteria straight from clouds were active suggests that cloudborne bacteria are as well, the researchers conclude in the 15 January issue of Geophysical Research Letters."

Terrible error on my part. I hope this clears up the gist of my argument, that air itself carries life.

At least here on earth, life will fill any ecosystem it can. Non-native life will adapt to and fill any ecosystem, even ecosystems hostile to life. There is a common house cat killing penguins in antarctica. Bacteria were found outside the mir space station, eating the glass. Sea lampreys will thrive in a fresh water lake 50 degrees warmer than their normal ocean habitat.

We may have already infected Mars, Venus, the Moon and Jupiter with bacteria. How many bacteria must survive to create a viable breeding population? Just One.

Re:Trash talking scientist.

[fearboy]

> Bacteria were found outside the mir space station, eating the glass

Actually, they were found inside. They weren't eating the glass (although the by-products of their existence did damage the glass and some other components), they were eating human epithelial cells and sweat. Not to mention you're begging the question of how the mysterious bacteria would be found in the first place...

While we're at it, let's all think for a minute about the housecat/penguin thing. Just for a second. How cold do you think a housecat would need to get before s/he was no longer interested in delicious penguin meat? It's like...Hoth cold in Antarctica, and until I see a cat capable of weilding a Light Saber, cutting open a...penguin, I guess, and wearing it as a coat until a Snow Speeder comes to the rescue, I don't think I'll be buying the Mysterious Feline Penguin Murder theory.

Habitablity

[Dark Lord Seth]

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...

Re:Habitablity

[Anonymous Coward]

The lack of 'unstable tectonic plates' on Mars and Venus is why these planets are the way they are (taking their gravity and solar energy input into account). Plate tectonics is a vital part of the carbon cycle without which Earth's atmosphere would be drastically different.

I like the reasoning...

[vandan]

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.

Manned mission to Venus

[invid]

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.

Re:Manned mission to Venus

[chainsaw1]

There are other reasons why I totally agree with this plan

Venus provides positive pressure and a positive heat source to work with. The pressure outside and the temperature outside is _greater_ than our standard for living. We know more about dealing with increased pressure (deep-sea research, scuba) environments than reduced pressure ones. We also know how to cool hot temperatures to cool ones with the Carnot cycle. Venus contains complex chemicalls naturally that would be profitable to industry. Best example is sulfuric acid, the #1 most produced industrial chemical in the world. It is generally too complex to be found in significant amounts on the surface of other worlds.

I also believe it may be easy to set up a power station by taking advanage of the high temperatures of the planet to produce energy somehow, but I'm still formulating how to do this.

Re:Slashdot is ruining everything!

[mbourgon]

Does this mean we could use Google News as a "Slashdot repeat story" filter?

Interesting read

[Fnagaton]

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.

Re:Wont effect me

[esarjeant]

I think the curiosity value is the most significant aspect of this finding. We need to get something orbiting Venus to find out what's really going on, and then monitor for the next 20-30 years to see what happens.

We should also try to understand if this is a new phenomina. It sounds like NASA is basically giving up on this discovery already, while activities like the space station are significant I don't honestly see how a few unmanned probes are going to break the bank.

Re:Occam's Razor

[scaryjohn]

To ask which is more likely, that life forms are instigating these reactions, or undiscovered caches of inorganic catylists are... the answer fundamentally hinges on how high you think the lowest hurdle for life's emergence is, and how prevalent you think life is in the universe. (And I'm not talking "greys").

There are a good number of people looking for more basic life in the universe that are of the opinion that life can begin in places much more hostile than blue planet Earth. They're looking to test the idea that basic, basic life is going to crop up wherever possible and then evolutionarily "dare" planetary conditions to kill it off. Just think about it, when life first emerged here the rocks had just barely solidified and the only thing we really had going for us was liquid water. Most of this planet's geologic history has been the three billion years between the emergence of prokaryotes, and the evolution of cells with proper nucleii.

Carl Sagan planned this

[Rotaluclac]

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...

Why?

[seangw]

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

Comets seeding life

[i8a4re]

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.

Re:Occam's Razor

[trotski]

I may be modded to troll for this, but I think it's a sad reality for the scientific community:

They lean to the life option because in this case microbes are much more efficient than inorganic processes (a valid Occam's Razor conclusion)

Not to mention that theres a lot more grant money involved if you further investigate the life option.