New Scientist: Venus' Atmosphere Implies Life 281
WolfWithoutAClause writes "This New Scientist article says that the atmosphere of Venus has features that may only be explaineable by the existence of life in its upper atmosphere. In particular it has cartain chemicals which are extremely difficult to make inorganically. At the altitude where life is suspected the temperature is about 70C and about 1 atmosphere. There are gases there which are not naturally found together. The article suggests something is actively producing them, quite possibly, life."
I may not know too much, but.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Now that's sci-fi appeal! (Score:4, Interesting)
From the article:
I think this would be amazing. Whenever there has been a possibility of life before, it has always been microscopic bacteria frozen in rock or ice. Nearly undetectable, and certainly nothing that would visually incite people. But this? Huge swarms that discolor the atmosphere under ultraviolet light? If true, I'd bet that these images become more popular than Cindy Margolis.
Cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Isn't the adjective pertaining to Venus 'venereal'?
2. If true, life must truly be ubiquitous. In the solar system alone, we've got Earth, Mars, Europa, Titan and now Venus. Of course, there's only evidence so far of life on one, but the very fact that scientists are even considering it is a testament to life's tenacity.
3. Can someone who knows more than I tell us all how easy it'd be for UV light to penetrate to the required depth? I wouldn't have thought it possible.
Humm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Developing ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Contamination? (Score:4, Interesting)
They probably didn't decontaminate the probes very well, and if the veneran atmosphere is ideal for some atmospheric bacteria, it could spread like a...disease.
Don't fuck with Venus. Not without a condom at least.
If it's life, Jim, then it's not as we know it. (Score:5, Interesting)
The speculation is on the basis of finding two chemicals which don't typically persist for long in each others presence, Hydrogen Sulphide and Sulphur Dioxide. BBC news has a summary [bbc.co.uk].
--
"Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."- JBS Haldane.
Let's all take a trip to self-delusion-land (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course if they were looking for signs of life, they would find some anomalous results that they could present as "amazing."
And from the
Re:Developing ideas (Score:4, Interesting)
But the heat just gives us even more reasons to not (at least not as a first step) land first and try to launch back up. It's much easier to propel the canister(s) from a decent altitude than if you wait until you're in deep. Gravity, pressure and heat all combine to make it unnecessary difficult (and expensive, since all propellants and other resources has to be brought along for the ride) to do launches from the surface.
Or, just get the orbiter there and launch disposable probes into the atmosphere that can analyze the gases as they tumble down through the soup and relay back the results via the orbiter. This could be done as a cheaper and faster precursor to the "bring 'em back alive" mission, to help develop the technology, methodology and focus of the mission.
God is here (Score:3, Interesting)
That's us!
Actually, I find it more interesting to think about the universe, existance, to be life itself. After all, a body is nothing solid. Within a year, nearly all our cells are replenished. The food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe become our body when it enters. On the other hand, without the touch of God, natural laws, whatever you want to call it, life is null and void.
Since a body, any existing object, is nothing by itself (all matter is 99,99999...% empty), life must therefore be existance itself, a glorious play of patterns and experiences.
You can't even say stone is devoid of life. By watching earth's crust for millenias, stone and sand become just as lively and complex as any other organism.
What is life anyways? All the labels we stick to it, are nothing without our logical way of thinking. When our thinking defines reality, our thinking becomes reality! Thus if we're stuck with logic alone, that limits our reality.
Re:Life?, did we bring it ourselves? (Score:2, Interesting)
The Apollo 12 mission brought back some parts of the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe, which had been on the surface of the moon for 31 months. The Surveyor 3 had not been sterilized prior to its launch, and the researchers found a few small colonies of bacteria (Streptococcus mitis) inside some parts of the probe which had survived the 31 month exposure to the lunar environment.
Of course, the bacteria could have also been accidentally introduced during the trip home or during the research....
A simple experiment... (Score:3, Interesting)
Collect a sample. Run it through a chromatography column. Put a polarimeter on the end. If there's anything chiral, you have life. If everything is completely racemic, you almost certainly don't.
Re:Developing ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
But you have to bring the sample back if you want to actually gather some microbes and bring them back for deeper studies. If they really are microbes, we would want to know what they use for genetic information, and if it is DNA, then we want to sequence it to see where it comes from.
I wonder if you could have a probe dip into the atmosphere, maybe without even slowing (much) from the Earth to Venus trip, and still have enough momentum to get back out. Ok, so it is a bit hard to collect samples at mach 2+ (probably plus a lot), and even if you could they might be destroyed in the process.
You definitely don't want to land, then launch. All this activity is in the upper atmosphere anyway.
Re:Contamination? (Score:4, Interesting)
Spread that mass over Venus and you'll have
Since all of that mass would be from atmospheric gasses, you would have chemically transformed 16 tonnes of atmosphere per square meter. That's about 1,5 atmospheric pressures on Earth. Therefore, you would have transformed the entire atmosphere into bacteria.
Of course, this assumes that the Venus atmosphere could supply just the right chemicals in just the right proportion. This is, of course, a critically false assumption.
In any case, this illustrates that exponential growth can be remarkable. Remember that the observations were only about a certain area in the Venus atmosphere (70C etc), which might have the optimal conditions.
But of course, if it really is contamination, and goes on unrestricted, it might actually...wheee...terraform Venus!
Re:Self-contradiction in action (Score:2, Interesting)
Again, life is seen as unusual, in that its products are assumed to be different from those produced by inorganic processes rather than the results of parallel organic and inorganic processes. Keep in mind that Venus is basically a huge pressure cooker. One might also be reminded that the primary difference claimed by the alchemists between their art and that of the chemists was the practice of slow cooking.
Ben Bove (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.curtharmon.com/bova/tour/venus/defau
Re:Self-contradiction in action (Score:2, Interesting)
"That is why the presence of things that react together quickly shows that something is re-supplying the process, which means life. Unless you know something we don't?"
That's not exactly what it says:
"Solar radiation and lightning should produce large quantities of carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere, but instead it is scarce, as if something is removing it. They also found hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide. These two gases react with each other, and so are never normally found together unless something is producing them."
The operant word is "should." They are postulating life on the basis of the absence of something they think "should" be there, or rather, even less convincingly, on the basis of their inability to detect something they think "should" be there.
As for the presence of gases that "normally" react together, one is tempted to ask, how are we defining normal? There is nothing particularly "normal" about Venus except to the extent that I have already suggested, that anything not subject to human intervention can be thought of as "natural." Venus is certainly not "normal" when compared to the Earth, and any suppositions regarding what SHOULD be happening there are premature at best.
The contradiction referred to in the subject line results from the supposition that the presence of life is somehow unnatural. I would remind you that what is normally thought of as a dichotomy, inorganic-organic, is actually part of a continuum: inorganic, organic, cybernetic,...,n. One could just as easily postulate the presence of any one of these terms in the vicinity of Venus if it is assumed that some chemical process or lack thereof indicates an unnatural (read not inorganic) condition. Despite the reference in the article to a "theory," this is in fact just a hypothesis. Any other hypothesis would have equal standing until subjected to some kind of experimentation. Appealing to William of Occam, one might more productively suggest that there is some chemical process going on in the atmosphere of Venus that we do not completely understand. Perhaps resulting from the presence of a chemical poison (the opposite of a catalyst) that we have not yet detected.
Re:Contamination from Earth (Score:5, Interesting)
The dust tail includes gases and fine dust particles, including things the size of bacterial spores. We've also known for decades that many such spores can survive indefinitely in space.
The conclusion is obvious. Bacterial spores from Earth have been contaminating the outer solar system, probably for several billion years. Some of them will get picked up by meteoroids and comets and carried back to the inner solar system, so Mercury and Venus have also been colonized by these bacteria.
Probably not many survive. But it's likely that some do. And, of course, their descendants will have re-colonized the Earth.
The solar system is a pretty messy place, when you look at it on a microscopic scale.
One article I read back in the 70's did a rough calculation on a larger scale. The Earth circles the galaxy in about 250,000 years. We've made more than a dozen orbits since bacterial life arose here, spraying spores most of that time. The author calculated that by now the entire galaxy has been contaminated several times over by Earthly spores. Of course, we don't know how many could survive interstellar space for the required millions of years.
But it's fun to think about.
Re:I just hope they would... (Score:3, Interesting)
Kintanon
why venus second to mars? (Score:3, Interesting)
surely venus is a much better long-term proposition for colonisation than mars? yes i know about it's crushing and extremely hot atmosphere, but this is something that can potentially be adapted to or ameliorated - perhaps even comprehensively changed by some atmosphere engineering
what can not be changed about a planet is it's gravity - this is obviously a fundamental characteristic of a planet inextricably linked to it's mass - and mars' low gravity seems to me to be an intractable problem for colonists - ie maybe they could adapt to living there but they would never be able to return to earth
finally, from a poetic viewpoint it would be nice if the human race made it's first step out into the solar system towards the planet of love and not the planet of war
i welcome comments
Here's one! (Score:3, Interesting)