Venus and Life

An anonymous reader writes "Venus-- thought in the 1950's by British astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle, to be covered in oil-- is discussed today by NASA's Principal Investigator for Planetary Atmospheres and Venus Data Analysis Program as having water in its atmosphere, and strange ultraviolet absorbers that swirl in the upper clouds. He speculates on the four ways that Venus might harbor life. Today's Cessna 182 crash led to the tragic death of the spacecraft manager for the highly successful Venus Magellan radar mapping mission, Gary Parker. The next scheduled Venus fly-by will be in 2004 and 2006 by the Johns Hopkins/Goddard Messenger spacecraft on its four-year mission to study Mercury."

Comments

Duh

[pmz]

Everyone already knows that Earth is the mating grounds for the Venusians and the Martians. Why speculate about life with which we are already intimately familiar?

Re:Hoyle, covered in oil

[GigsVT]

wouldn't a 'mozillion' be a cool number?

Mozillion - The number of seconds it takes for Mozilla to start up.

Call Bush

[AndrewRUK]

Quick!
Call Bush to tell him that Venus has oil. That should get more funding for space exploration :-)
Unless he's heard of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," in which case he'll probably start a war against women^W^W^W^W^W take action to liberate the women of Venus from an evil opressive dictator...

uh...

[eglamkowski]

David Grinspoon says: First let me say that I am a big fan of carbon-based life. Some of my best friends are carbon-based.

I'd sure hope so...