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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).
Well, they _are_ from Venus.
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!
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.
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!
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!
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
That was Mars (Percival Lowell mapped and counted the canals). Sure, it's confusing, what with them having a capital letter in common, not to mention the same number of letters! Still, they're different. The moon was believed to be made out of cheese and Mars had lots little green men with shovels.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Dear God, please stop trolling.
thanks.
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!
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
Ah, yes. Obviously, the government should never involve itself in basic research, since so many companies are willing to fund baseline development that has no immediate, obvious return. Instead, the government should restrict itself to funding work that has fast and sure commercial potential -- private industry never cares about that stuff.
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.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
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."
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
Shuttle a bunch of antibiotics to Venus. If the dark patches go away, then we know bacterial life existed on Venus.
Science is fun.
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.
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.
There is no life elsewhere in the universe! Give it up.
You might very well be proven wrong within your life time. Within the next decades, probes will check out Mars, Venus and Europa. New telescopes will be able to detect planets similar to Earth in distant systems, and even reveal if tell-tale life signs (e.g., atmospheric oxygen) are present.
Tor
Do you have a link to more information on that?
Google came up empty for me...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
> > 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
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa...ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE."
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
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.
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.
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.
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
...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