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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."
"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."
Will a spacecraft even last 4 years that close to the sun? Does it plan on staying on the "dark side" of Mercury?
I mean, the article says that "The frame for Messenger's signature sunshade - which will protect the craft and its instruments from the intense heat at Mercury - is due to arrive this week from GenCorp Aerojet. Layers of ceramic fabric will be added to the frame at APL over the next two months." but will that be enough? I mean it is the sun after all. I'd be surprised if it didn't fry as soon as it got within Mercury's gravitational field.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
1. Strongly acidic media (diluted sulfuric acid) is not a big deal: there are microbs on Earth that thrive in diluted sulfuric acid (like pH=0) 2. Strong UV is bigger problem: enegetic UV is enormously destructive to carbon-based life 3. Some moisture is probably needed, and there is not much of it in the clouds in liquid form 4. The strongly UV-absorbing material in clouds can very easily be a mixture of sulfurous compounds: The products formed in system H2S + SO2 + S (irradiated by UV) are qute complex and very, very UV absorbing. They form and decompose easily. So we may have the photochemical processes high up in the clouds (which produce or destroys the compounds) and pyrolitic processes by the surface (which does a different chemistry). So we would have these various bands of cloud material with different levels of UV absorbing sulfur compounds - depending whether they were iradiated by strong UV or exposed to the hot interior of the atmosphere. You do not need a life to explain this - a simple thermal convection will do the same. And, I found the idea of life (single cell -like?) in atmosphere causing its super-rotation on planetary level (because it gives these microbs an evolutionary advantage) just preposterous. No living organism can produce energy enough to move around atmosphere of entire planet at speeds 200+mph. Only the sun energy can do that.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Anything can exist anywhere. As long as they have adapted to there living environment. It is possible that a chunk on rock with small traces of life on it could have been projected off earth and landed on Venus; the life form evolves and adapts to the radiation and heat allowing it to live in that what we think of harsh conditions. Then, as for the resources it would need to survive, it is possible that it could adapt to live off the heat or to live off even oil.
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