Venus and Life

Posted by michael on Wednesday March 26, 2003 @06:17AM from the half-shell dept.

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."

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What is life? by clambake · 2003-03-26 19:13 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think the reason why Venus sounds like such an incredibly bad place to find life is that a lot of us consider "life" to be humans and ducks and such. What is the core of life? Life is just a very complex machine for converting stuff to energy and then using that energy to do stuff. Venus has tons and tons of energy just hanging around. Life on Venus wouldn't need to eat, it could just sit there and absorb all the 800 degree goodness in little bio-capacitors. If it did eat, it wouldn't have to spend any time creating digestive juices, it could just open it's mouth when it rained. For us, Venus would suck, but for life adapted to Venus, it would be paradise.