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Russian Scientist Claims Signs of Life Spotted On Venus
flergum writes "Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer based at the Space Research Institute of Russia's Academy of Sciences, analyzed photographs taken by a Russian landing probe during 1982 and claims to have found signs of life. Ksanfomaliti says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a 'disk,' a 'black flap' and a 'scorpion.'"
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -The Sagan Standard
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
that's why I sold a piece of toast for $50 bucks... it looked like Jesus.
FTFA:
"Ksanfomaliti cautioned that the objects he wrote about seem to “emerge, fluctuate and disappear” in different photographs taken from a variety of vantage points."
So it could be a problem with the equipment, an optical illusion, or both. Merits further investigation, but not conclusive evidence of life on Venus.
Signs of life eh?
Or easily explained by the distortion of a lens by heat in desert conditions - this one a scathing 1k F.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
That was me, the Martian alien. Forgot my toys the last time I've spent my holidays there :(
No pictures were included, so how can we form our own, uneducated, opinions???
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
“Let’s boldly suggest"
Let's not.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
And no pictures highlighting your claim? Damn you!
Leonid Ksanfomaliti, ...claims to have found signs of life...objects resembling ... a scorpion
I haven't heard the Scorpions since the 80s. They were pretty good in their niche. Is this a reunion tour?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
See this site for the best processed pictures from the Venera missions. Absolutely fascinating stuff those Russians did then.
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm
Ydco co
and saw objects resembling a “disk,” a “black flap” and a “scorpion.”
From this distance? Some telescope.
What is this site? Science or gossip?
*clicks on article* ...Hmm, ok, no pictures here.
*googles it* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2090556/Life-Venus-Russian-scientist-claims-seen-scorpion-probe-photographs.html?ito=feeds-newsxml.
Yea... I'm no astrocryptozoologist, but that doesn't look like life to me.
Welcome our new big breasted overlords.... or is it overladies??
Who in their right mind would write an article like that without including the photographs?
And seriously... why do we even see this story here?
Digging back to the original source gets "Solar System Research". Seems like a legit journal:
http://www.maik.ru/cgi-perl/journal.pl?name=solsys&page=main
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
but on earth. We do pattern matching, even when there is none, we see shapes of gods in cluods, of the future in tea leaves, even faces in the moon and mars. This could have been totally random shapes. But of course, if it was life, specially one that are totally different from what we are used to see, could be a step forward for us, still too much people see earth as the center of the universe.
It has to be Zontar. He is the last surviving member of his species. Leonid Ksanfomaliti has been in communication with him using a plutonium laser. You'll find you can't kill Zontar with a gun because something causes the gun not to be pointing at Zontar when pulling the trigger.
Sigh... I don't know if anything from Yahoo is even worthy of /. idle. The site is really a testament to what happens when a company stands still. Frequent users are almost exclusively people who landed there after AOL ceased to be a premiere destination (in popular culture). Just like Yahoo, they didn't upgrade and adapt. And that's why their user base is on the left side of the curve and their user-generated content is terrifyingly ignorant.
Come, stare into the abyss of people just smart enough to use a computer: Exhibit A: http://answers.yahoo.com/
Ask me about my sig!
I was looking up today and say a bunny, a turtle and and man's face! That's WAY better evidence of life than " 'disk,' a 'black flap' and a 'scorpion'".
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Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yeah and there are canals and a giant face sculpture on Mars too. The guy is either suffering from pareidolia or drinking too much vodka.
http://www.transparency.org
Translation: They're tricks of the light or other optical illustions.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is the only reasonable picture I could find.
Life? At 400+ deg C? Well, I suppose it's possible in science fiction stories, but the evidence would have to be pretty extraordinary.
(Looks at 1982 Venera 13 pictures again, especially the reprocessed ones by Don Mitchell.)
Uh, no. What is in the pictures isn't much different from a lava plain that you might see in places like Craters of the Moon or maybe Hawaii. Look around hard enough there and you'll find plenty of rocks that superficially resemble all sorts of things. The human visual system is great for imagining familiar shapes in ordinary objects. For example, I have rocks from the beach that look like human faces. That doesn't mean I think they really are fossilized heads of former humans. And motion doesn't mean living. There are plenty of non-biological processes that can induce motion, assuming that whatever this guy is seeing isn't some kind of imaging artifact.
our new disk, black flap, and scorpion overlords.
The flash of light you saw on Venus was not an alien life form. It was simply swamp gas from a weather balloon trapped in a thermal pocket reflecting the light.
The comments on these photo's sound very much like the pictures of the monster at Lock Ness.
perhaps the same phenomena underlies the 'realty' of both sets of creatures.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
. . . he's right. What if there is life on Venus, but unlike ours? What if there is a lot of it? Would we, perhaps, be better off ignoring it? Seriously, are we ready for such a discovery? It may sound silly, but I think there is a large segment of the human population who couldn't deal with it.
Seriously, this is a non story without pics.
hmm.
So, this Russian astronomer has gone to the bottle once too much?
Here are some other fine examples of Slavic star gazers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ8TjY5WebY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03OPcn80Uzs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR9YMEt6Xok
Venus life? Based on an old photograph? Hmmm... No.
No pictures were included, so how can we form our own, uneducated, opinions???
This article from Ria Novosti has one picture with attributions to the scientist and journal. I'm not sure what you're looking at but I am guessing that the object outside of the pod is not a device of theirs -- which leads to a lot of speculation and conjecture. I guess I don't know enough about their sensors/cameras that they were using in 1982 to say whether or not this was some sort of aberration or malfunction of the camera due to extreme temperatures. But that's about the best uneducated opinion I can offer you.
My work here is dung.
I suppose there are some chances that some alien life would superficially resemble life on earth. But not likely. Any significant similarity would be more easily explained by a common ancestor. If there is no common ancestor, all bets are off, and since the mutation and selection pressures on another world would be completely different, the resulting life forms would be completely different. Sure, it's more likely than not that they'd be made of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc., and it's likely (because it's such a huge advantage) that they'd use something LIKE DNA to encode information, but it's not necessarily the case that they would use the same chemicals.
Come on guys, I have seen clouds shapped like a lion, like a baby etc. The ancient astronomers have seen a hunter, a scorpion, a bull, a big bear, a small bear, a girl, a lion etc etc for a long time in the skys with nothing more than a few pin pricks of light. When you have the imagination, you can see anything.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This morning I saw signs of a dolphin, a T-Rex on a moped, and Abraham Lincoln.
Ksanfomaliti cautioned that the objects he wrote about seem to “emerge, fluctuate and disappear” in different photographs taken from a variety of vantage points.
they're geological formations. duh!
Scientists simultaneously confirm that intelligence no longer exists in Russia.
Ksanfomaliti says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a 'disk,' a 'black flap' and a 'scorpion.'"
Yeah, and NASA took photos of what appeared to be a stature of a human head on Mars, which was actually just a trick of shadow and light.
Free Martian Whores!
I wish people would stop saying "greenhouse effect" caused the heating. It's simply not true. It is the atmospheric density and proximity to the sun which makes it so hot.
Venus: 93 bar surface pressure, 96.5% CO2, 460C surface temp
Mars 0.00636 bar surface pressure, 95.3% CO2, -63C surface temp
What's responsible for the heating?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I always wondered how long you could keep a baloon aloft on Venus. I would think you would be able to use thermal electric effect (peltier/stirling engine) of altitude vs surface heat to create energy and use the acidic clouds to maintain a lighter than CO2 gas for the baloon -- like a CO2 to SO2 converter or something.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Exciting news for Russia, but I hope it doesn't encourage them to launch a probe to investigate the Planet. If so, stay indoors or wear a hard hat!
Look here
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
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You lost me at "Russian scientist claims ... "
...that someone found and interesting chemical compound is the atmosphere or some other evidence of microscopic life on Venus, instead this guy claims he sees a "black flap" in pictures from the 80's. The article itself doesn't even have pictures with red circles around these flying magic aliens for me to gawk at and laugh about. I'm not only questioning Slashdot, but the original story, why would anyone care?
With bad vodka, you can see lots of things.......
I can tell by the pixels.
“What if we forget about the current theories about Kristin Cavallari's pregnancy and her upcoming marriage to Jay Cutler?” he wrote. “Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living, but not necessarily intelligent.”
one of the picture looks as if its is a broken piece of some equipment, other looks like some liquid or super heated gas or camera articraft.
was predicting this a whole lot difficult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
FTA:
“What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus?”
Then you're not doing science.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
OLD NEWS!
Of course there is life on Venus. I remember from my University days that this research was done a long time ago and one scientist discovered that Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
This guy is totally right. And there's the Virgin Mary.
I bet what they see are really just ink blots left from the aliens...indirect proof but proof nontheless.
Stuff like this is more like National Enquirer, Fox news and pravda, than /.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Here are the pictures. Now, they are an extraordinary accomplishment, but I sure don't see any signs of life (except for the bits ejected from the spacecraft, like the camera covers). You can look (and judge) for yourself.
Call me again when I can find these critters on the menu at Black Angus and Denny's. With ET's the video-or-it-hasn't-happened test isn't sufficient... it's gotta be on a menu somewhere. If I can't eat it, it doesn't exist! /sarcasm
If someone can provide a link to the paper itself, I would appreciate it. (I can read Russian.)
"What in god's name does a "black flap" look like?"
A black flapper?
How about:
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqu6s0pNp31qeq7tpo1_500.jpg
I'd hit it. ;)
L. Ron Hubbard on Venus.
Did it happen to look like this? http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs17/f/2007/138/7/a/Brotherhood_of_NOD_wallpaper_by_NeoApocalypse.jpg
I am John Hurt.
Found a picture and yeah that looks like an alien, or some kind of new phenomenon for certain:
http://cdn.static.ovimg.com/episode/1155981.jpg
http://andrzej.dabrowka.com/Gamma1.jpg
I hope there are more on Mercury, Mars, Jupiter's moons, Saturn's moons, and Pluto. ;-)
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
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I by no means see terrestrial type life on Venus as being impossible or ruled out by existing data. In the regions between 40 and 60 km above the surface, the conditions are roughly Earth like, and a biosphere could presumably be present (as there is a biosphere in the clouds here on Earth. We know that there are aerosols at those levels (i.e., microbe sized droplets), although we don't really know much about them, and finally we know that the atmosphere is out of chemical equilibrium, which is generally regarded as a sign of biological activity.
There have been proposals to send spacecraft to study this further, but they have gotten nowhere, at least at NASA.
I bet the objects observed were "video artifacts" generated by extreme heat exposure to the camera. Venus surface is damn hot! 895 degrees F! I really the the camera was baking in the heat. You need more data points than just visual to make a claim like that.
If you have a medium sized telescope, aim it to the northern pole. Do it now. Before they realize that we're spying on them and they close the blinds.
Different from life on your anus how?
Is it a big deal because it is further to reach?
The first photos and videos from Venus, as well as the first TV picture from another planet in the history of mankind are quite extraordinary.
The facts of first video from another planet in the history of mankind usually induce immense butthurt in "patriotic" Americans, not even mentioning that publishing something like that can lead to serious problems with federal censorship watchdogs. Sing the "Starts and stripes" 11 times and eat two pairs of US-flag-colored underpants to cleanse yourself of your sins!
Somewhere on Venus they're wringing their hands, convinced that their planet will be destroyed 100 years from now when the temperature goes from 464 to 465.
Not to worry, Howard the Duck will save us from any would-be scorpion overlords.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
Giant babies? Deceased wives?
I would love to know how fast any of these objects were supposedly moving, but I know from experience it's difficult to get Russians to reveal that information. "HOW FAST?!"
Just like the face on mars I bet.
The mind plays tricks. When you stare at the texture on the ceiling in bed and start seeing countries or dinosaures. Seeing a bunny in a cloud, a movie in television static, it's just your brain trying to fit things together. To call some shapes seen in a picture of venus possible signs of life is like saying there might be giant flying bunnies in the sky amongst the clouds.