5 ms·

Bold Mission to Hunt for Aliens on Venus Is Happening

70 points by Bluestein 1y ago

webdevver 1y ago
forget the cubesat nonsense. the aim should be to get a dudebro to quadbike on the surface. redbull & gopro will be the sponsors, plus polymarket for people to bet on the outcome of the mission. actually i dont understand why this hasn't already happened! what is more extreme sports, that doing it on other planets? its hard to get people to care about the sciencey stuff. I've even got the tagline "Yeah, we found life on mars." and its a picture of the dude looking like a pirate in a spacesuit. people would (could?) love that i think.
- voidUpdate 1y ago
  I mean the soviets had a good go at landing big metal probes on there and they melted and failed pretty quickly. I'm not sure we have the technology to make a space suit or a quad bike that can function on the surface of venus. You'd also need to transport over 100 days of water and snacks so your dudebro doesn't starve on the way there
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I remember reading a short story that featured settlements on Venus, and it mentioned the difficulty of running any sort of engine - rocket or combustion - on the surface. After all, your engine and its exhaust must be hotter than the atmosphere surrounding it, otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refridgerator.
    - the_gipsy 1y ago
      I don't doubt it's extremely challenging. But the initial engine temperature would still match the environment temperature, and it would not get somehow colder. That's not how any of this works.
    - voidUpdate 1y ago
      I don't know if a rocket exhaust must absolutely be hotter than the environment, just at a higher pressure. If you open a gas bottle, the jet is going to be very cold, but it will produce thrust. With some quick googling, the surface pressure on venus is 90 bar, and a spacex falcon produces 350 bar in the chamber, so I think a falcon 9 could quite easily take off from the surface (ignoring the fact it would melt and the tanks might crush etc)
      - IAmBroom 1y ago
        pV=NRT Pressure and temperature are not independent. "Hotter than the environment" is shorthand for "contains more energy than the output region does".
    - kleiba 1y ago
      Run your engine inside said refridgerator?
  - webdevver 1y ago
    damn i thought venus was like the moon but red. still i feel like its hard to get excited about stuff without humans intimately involved. ultimately its all about the meatbag, he needs to be there somehow. maybe in orbit controlling the sat via FPV goggles?
    - theoreticalmal 1y ago
      Oh boy this is all mixed up. Mars is red, are you thinking of Mars. Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars
      - voidUpdate 1y ago
        Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. It's still cold and you'd need a specialised quadbike (electric?), but seeing as martian travel is on the cards for some point in the future, you might see martian quadbike racing in your lifetime. However there are still the same food/water/oxygen issues, since it's a 9 month trip each way
        hermitcrab 1y ago
        >Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. Indeed. The very low pressure on Mars (0.006 Bar) would be much easier to deal with than the absolutely crushing pressure on Venus (92 Bar) - not to mention the 470C surface temperature. Hanggliding or ballooning in the cloud tops of Venus would be more practical than going to the surface.
        Sanzig 1y ago
        Humans have already survived simulated dives in hyperbaric chambers to around 70 bar with no long term effects, so in theory you may be able to have Venusian astronauts live in a habitat at ambient pressure if 90 bar is similarly tolerable (obviously would still need heroic measures for cooling, an approx. 200 K temperature differential is no joke). Getting enough gas there to pressurize the hab could be difficult, the deep dive experiments used a hydrogen/helium/oxygen mixture and I doubt you can recover helium through in situ resource extraction. And you would need some sort of acclimatization system to get the astronauts from their half-bar or so transit environment down to the surface - maybe a balloon that slowly descends over the period of a few days. So yeah, pretty much science fiction for now!
- Zigurd 1y ago
  Thank you for capturing the zeitgeist way too accurately. Now I'm once again in a mood to watch it all burn.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    As kids, my friend and I had an idea of getting Microsoft to fund us buying used Buran and building a launchpad for it in Poland, in exchange for painting the shuttle all blue and slapping big Microsoft Windows logos on it. I still think this wasn't that bad of an idea. Maybe if we followed through with it, Poland would've had a proper space program now.
- slightwinder 1y ago
  That's not economical. A human mission to another planet is far too expensive and risky for the little advertising it would deliver. They could do that already on earth, send people to the north/south-poles, or even send them to the moon.. This would all be cheaper and still have similar effects. But the mindset is probably not wrong. Maybe Jeff Bezos can rent his dick-rocket to Red Bull, so people can spacediving the atmosphere. The necessary security-tech they have to build, will probably very beneficial for actual astronauts later.
  - upghost 1y ago
    I can guarantee you that if someone were to discover that the "Ark of the Covenant" dataset that would unlock AGI was on Venus and it could only be accessed by a meatbag, we'd be sending fleets. Given the current hype it probably doesn't even matter if the claim is true as long as it keeps the capital flowing.
    - slightwinder 1y ago
      The difference is, that the prospective win from AGI is far bigger than any investment. But an advertisement more expensive than a whole decade's revenue from the company, has hardly any chance to reach the profitable zone.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      There are many worse ways of spending capital. Even if a false claim of this nature successfully bullshitted some companies or countries into a manned mission to Venus, that would be a net win to humanity compared to what that capital will be allocated otherwise.
- i_love_retros 1y ago
  A picture of dudebro's quad wheel squashing that actual life that we found on mars, with a redbull logo on the tire
pavel_lishin 1y ago
I'd love to see a Venus sample-return mission - a probe that descends into the atmosphere and inflates a balloon to hover there for awhile, collecting samples - before firing a rocket to return to orbit and either directly return to Earth, or rendezvous with something in orbit, similar to the planned Mars sample return missions.
- perihelions 1y ago
  China is planning to attempt that one in the next few years, following their (NET) 2028 Mars sample return, https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-venus-mission https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-venus-mission ("News China Plans to Bring Back Samples of Venusian Clouds / A gauntlet of engineering challenges await a search for evidence of alien life") https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jvl3hb5wle4igkd4qgzk2wrt/post/3llggireu6c2i https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jvl3hb5wle4igkd4qgzk2wrt/po...
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  Venus sample return faces extreme challenges beyond Mars missions - the 90x Earth's atmospheric pressure and 450°C surface conditions make rocket launches nearly impossible, while sulfuric acid clouds would rapidly degrade balloon materials. The energy requirements for escape velocity from Venus are also substantially higher than Mars.
  - mattashii 1y ago
    Wouldn't it be possible to float teflon balloons (without ever descending to the surface), and use those to carry a launch platform? Samples do not need to be surface samples, the atmosphere itself seems quite interesting already. And note that you may be able to "fish" for samples from an atmospheric floating platform; there is no specific need to get all the way down to the rocks with your rocket.
    - IgorPartola 1y ago
      I thought the atmospheric conditions there were also quite violent.
samuel 1y ago
I had never expected that I would witness in my lifetime such advanced AI, and now (may be) extraterrestrial life. If confirmed, the only remaining big mystery would beto know if there is intelligent life in any other part of the universe, which I understand is orders of magnitude more unlikely to confirm, but one can dream...
- dmead 1y ago
  Neither of those things have actually happened. This is pure, what's the word. Cope?
  - samuel 1y ago
    One of these obviously hasn't happened, but it might be, hence my excitement. I don't know how likely the experts think it is (~1%, ~10%,etc...) but I guess the odds aren't high. With regards to the other one (AI), I did not claim anything else than a subjective assesment. I did not expect to see an AI capable of mantaining a conversation aloud, for example. May be I'm easy to impress.
- i_love_retros 1y ago
  I think we are more likely to find extraterrestrial life than create proper AI and not just text summarizers/predictors
- booleandilemma 1y ago
  I think the other big mystery is why does the universe exist at all.
munchler 1y ago
This article makes it sound like phosphine is definitely present in the atmosphere of Venus, but has this been confirmed? There was a lot of controversy over the claim when it was first published several years ago.
- goodcanadian 1y ago
  That is addressed in the article: But a subsequent project, JCMT–Venus, designed to study the molecular composition of Venus’s atmosphere using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, offered a possible explanation for these disparate findings. Researchers tracked the phosphine signature over time and found it could only be detected at night, as it was destroyed by sunlight. They also discovered that the amount of gas in Venus’s atmosphere varied over time.
  - MarkusQ 1y ago
    At some point I expect they'll discover that it can't be detected in the presence of skeptics. At least, that's the usual trajectory. I'm all for any sort of planetary science missions, but this seems more faith than logic driven. For example: “There are no known chemical processes for the production of either ammonia or phosphine, so the only way to know for sure what is responsible for them is to go there.” This is untrue on multiple levels. There certainly are known chemical processes for producing both, ammonia is fairly common (e.g. huge clouds of it on the gas giants). Plus it still seems likely that what they detected was SO₂[1] which is also quite common and expected; if the problem with your discovery is in the interpretation of the measurement, confirming the measurement doesn't change that. In any case, I'd lay long odds that "going there" doesn't resolve the issue any more than debating it here has. [1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/01/27/phosphine-venus-so2/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/01/27/phosphine-venus-s...
blinkbat 1y ago
What a horrible ad experience on this site
- imglorp 1y ago
  Ublock origin on FF. I don't see a thing!
  - parpfish 1y ago
    Is there a good way to Adblock on mobile?
    - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
      [dead]
    - Xiol32 1y ago
      Same: uBlock on Firefox.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - imzadi 1y ago
      Depends on if you are on android or iphone. If iphone, not really. All browsers on iphone are required to be built on webkit, which has limited ad blocking. If on android, you can use Firefox and install the ublock origin extension.
    - l3x4ur1n 1y ago
      Brave browser. Native ad blocking. Also blocks YouTube ads. No need for any other extension.
      - Kuyawa 1y ago
        100% this. I really don't understand how the whole world doesn't use Brave. Lack of marketing?
acjohnson55 1y ago
If there is microbial life in the clouds of Venus, I wonder if there's a pretty good chance of its origin being from Earth. I can imagine one of the major impact events sending a tiny bit of debris into the solar system, and a tiny bit of that getting captured by Venus. Just maybe, microbes being able to survive the journey and resuming metabolism and reproducing in Venus's atmosphere.
- daveslash 1y ago
  Agreed. Although alternative to a chunk of Earth as a result of a natural impact, I wonder if it could have been a poorly sanitized space probe from the 60s or 70s?
- jerf 1y ago
  This has been hypothesized for a while. Same for Mars too, FWIW. Life on another planet of any sort is an exciting scientific development regardless of how it happened. However, even if definitely proof of life is found in the Solar System, one should resist leaping to the conclusion that it is a separate "branch" of life because it's reasonable to think that it could still be from the same abiogenesis event. I use "the same source" carefully, because it could be independent events of galaxy-level "panspermia" spreading. It can also be the case that Earth provided the source of panspermia... or, if you want to get a lot more exotic, that life started on Mars and spread to Earth through hitchhiking. We'd need to get it into a lab to see if it is truly from a separate abiogenesis event. Fortunately, it wouldn't necessarily take long. Earth life seems to have many, many, many highly-conserved characteristics to it that show that it is all comes from a single source here, but that there is no reason to believe those are the only valid choices that life could have made. The odds of another abiogenesis event being able to pass itself off as the some one we came from is negligible. It is most likely that the life would be so immediately and completely different in many ways that it would be completely clear.
BSOhealth 1y ago
Is there some probabilistic named theory for thinking there is greater chance for life to exist the closer to the center of a solar system? almost like sluice box or coin sorter, where as outer planets develop life, get blasted by asteroids, and the remains drift further inwards? At least up to some distance where carbon vaporizes by whatever heat source exists. In other words, what’s the mathematical principle for Goldilocks zones
- clarionbell 1y ago
  Water, not carbon. Carbon itself isn't enough, in order for the fine machinery of life to work you need solvent. On Earth it's water. Limits of Earth bound life are determined in great part by properties of water, when it boils and when it freezes. The Goldilocks zone itself is a bit of an outdated concept now. Largely because we now know that liquid water exists way beyond the orbit of Mars, in oceans of Europa and Enceladus at very least. Something similar is the case with Venus. Surface is too hot for liquid water, but high atmosphere is pretty much fine.
waltbosz 1y ago
I see the plot of a sci-fi story where scientists bring home some of the Venusian microbes for study and accidentally wipe out all life on Earth after it escapes the lab, multiplies rapidly, and Earth has no defense. Or the microbes could be all that is left of a doomed Venus society that genetically engineered these microbes to lay in wait in their atmosphere for the day that a curious space traveling society comes to investigate only to be parasitically taken over as a host. Come to think of it, I think Asimov already wrote that same story in "Green Patches".
- daymanstep 1y ago
  Seems unlikely that a microbe that is adapted to the Venusian environment would outcompete microbes that are adapted to the Terran environment
  - momento 1y ago
    Famous last words.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > the Venusian environment Everyone uses "Jovian" for Jupiter, and yet nobody uses "Venerean" for Venus... [The planets take adjectives in -an because, I assume, people didn't want to reuse "Martial", "Jovial", and "Venereal". In science fiction you also see "Terran" replacing "Terrestrial". Interestingly, while martial and venereal are named after the gods, jovial and mercurial are named after the planets.]
    - perihelions 1y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean
      - thaumasiotes 1y ago
        It's a little odd to complain that "venereal" is strongly associated with sex when you don't mind the planet being called "Venus".
ilamont 1y ago
“There are no known chemical processes for the production of either ammonia or phosphine ..." After reading this, I was curious how ammonia can be produced in industrial quantities on Earth. The process does appear to be a chemical process: One famous example is the Haber-Bosch nitrogen-fixation reaction, which uses a simple iron catalyst to make ammonia and other nitrogen-containing compounds from nitrogen and hydrogen https://cen.acs.org/articles/86/i33/Haber-Bosch-Reaction-Early-Chemical.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/86/i33/Haber-Bosch-Reaction-Ear...

70 points by Bluestein 1y ago

forget the cubesat nonsense. the aim should be to get a dudebro to quadbike on the surface. redbull & gopro will be the sponsors, plus polymarket for people to bet on the outcome of the mission. actually i dont understand why this hasn't already happened! what is more extreme sports, that doing it on other planets? its hard to get people to care about the sciencey stuff. I've even got the tagline "Yeah, we found life on mars." and its a picture of the dude looking like a pirate in a spacesuit. people would (could?) love that i think.

voidUpdate 1y ago
I mean the soviets had a good go at landing big metal probes on there and they melted and failed pretty quickly. I'm not sure we have the technology to make a space suit or a quad bike that can function on the surface of venus. You'd also need to transport over 100 days of water and snacks so your dudebro doesn't starve on the way there
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  I remember reading a short story that featured settlements on Venus, and it mentioned the difficulty of running any sort of engine - rocket or combustion - on the surface. After all, your engine and its exhaust must be hotter than the atmosphere surrounding it, otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refridgerator.
  - the_gipsy 1y ago
    I don't doubt it's extremely challenging. But the initial engine temperature would still match the environment temperature, and it would not get somehow colder. That's not how any of this works.
  - voidUpdate 1y ago
    I don't know if a rocket exhaust must absolutely be hotter than the environment, just at a higher pressure. If you open a gas bottle, the jet is going to be very cold, but it will produce thrust. With some quick googling, the surface pressure on venus is 90 bar, and a spacex falcon produces 350 bar in the chamber, so I think a falcon 9 could quite easily take off from the surface (ignoring the fact it would melt and the tanks might crush etc)
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      pV=NRT Pressure and temperature are not independent. "Hotter than the environment" is shorthand for "contains more energy than the output region does".
  - kleiba 1y ago
    Run your engine inside said refridgerator?
- webdevver 1y ago
  damn i thought venus was like the moon but red. still i feel like its hard to get excited about stuff without humans intimately involved. ultimately its all about the meatbag, he needs to be there somehow. maybe in orbit controlling the sat via FPV goggles?
  - theoreticalmal 1y ago
    Oh boy this is all mixed up. Mars is red, are you thinking of Mars. Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars
    - voidUpdate 1y ago
      Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. It's still cold and you'd need a specialised quadbike (electric?), but seeing as martian travel is on the cards for some point in the future, you might see martian quadbike racing in your lifetime. However there are still the same food/water/oxygen issues, since it's a 9 month trip each way
      - hermitcrab 1y ago
        >Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. Indeed. The very low pressure on Mars (0.006 Bar) would be much easier to deal with than the absolutely crushing pressure on Venus (92 Bar) - not to mention the 470C surface temperature. Hanggliding or ballooning in the cloud tops of Venus would be more practical than going to the surface.
        Sanzig 1y ago
        Humans have already survived simulated dives in hyperbaric chambers to around 70 bar with no long term effects, so in theory you may be able to have Venusian astronauts live in a habitat at ambient pressure if 90 bar is similarly tolerable (obviously would still need heroic measures for cooling, an approx. 200 K temperature differential is no joke). Getting enough gas there to pressurize the hab could be difficult, the deep dive experiments used a hydrogen/helium/oxygen mixture and I doubt you can recover helium through in situ resource extraction. And you would need some sort of acclimatization system to get the astronauts from their half-bar or so transit environment down to the surface - maybe a balloon that slowly descends over the period of a few days. So yeah, pretty much science fiction for now!
Zigurd 1y ago
Thank you for capturing the zeitgeist way too accurately. Now I'm once again in a mood to watch it all burn.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  As kids, my friend and I had an idea of getting Microsoft to fund us buying used Buran and building a launchpad for it in Poland, in exchange for painting the shuttle all blue and slapping big Microsoft Windows logos on it. I still think this wasn't that bad of an idea. Maybe if we followed through with it, Poland would've had a proper space program now.
slightwinder 1y ago
That's not economical. A human mission to another planet is far too expensive and risky for the little advertising it would deliver. They could do that already on earth, send people to the north/south-poles, or even send them to the moon.. This would all be cheaper and still have similar effects. But the mindset is probably not wrong. Maybe Jeff Bezos can rent his dick-rocket to Red Bull, so people can spacediving the atmosphere. The necessary security-tech they have to build, will probably very beneficial for actual astronauts later.
- upghost 1y ago
  I can guarantee you that if someone were to discover that the "Ark of the Covenant" dataset that would unlock AGI was on Venus and it could only be accessed by a meatbag, we'd be sending fleets. Given the current hype it probably doesn't even matter if the claim is true as long as it keeps the capital flowing.
  - slightwinder 1y ago
    The difference is, that the prospective win from AGI is far bigger than any investment. But an advertisement more expensive than a whole decade's revenue from the company, has hardly any chance to reach the profitable zone.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    There are many worse ways of spending capital. Even if a false claim of this nature successfully bullshitted some companies or countries into a manned mission to Venus, that would be a net win to humanity compared to what that capital will be allocated otherwise.
i_love_retros 1y ago
A picture of dudebro's quad wheel squashing that actual life that we found on mars, with a redbull logo on the tire

pavel_lishin 1y ago

I'd love to see a Venus sample-return mission - a probe that descends into the atmosphere and inflates a balloon to hover there for awhile, collecting samples - before firing a rocket to return to orbit and either directly return to Earth, or rendezvous with something in orbit, similar to the planned Mars sample return missions.

perihelions 1y ago
China is planning to attempt that one in the next few years, following their (NET) 2028 Mars sample return, https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-venus-mission https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-venus-mission ("News China Plans to Bring Back Samples of Venusian Clouds / A gauntlet of engineering challenges await a search for evidence of alien life") https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jvl3hb5wle4igkd4qgzk2wrt/post/3llggireu6c2i https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jvl3hb5wle4igkd4qgzk2wrt/po...
ethan_smith 1y ago
Venus sample return faces extreme challenges beyond Mars missions - the 90x Earth's atmospheric pressure and 450°C surface conditions make rocket launches nearly impossible, while sulfuric acid clouds would rapidly degrade balloon materials. The energy requirements for escape velocity from Venus are also substantially higher than Mars.
- mattashii 1y ago
  Wouldn't it be possible to float teflon balloons (without ever descending to the surface), and use those to carry a launch platform? Samples do not need to be surface samples, the atmosphere itself seems quite interesting already. And note that you may be able to "fish" for samples from an atmospheric floating platform; there is no specific need to get all the way down to the rocks with your rocket.
  - IgorPartola 1y ago
    I thought the atmospheric conditions there were also quite violent.

samuel 1y ago

I had never expected that I would witness in my lifetime such advanced AI, and now (may be) extraterrestrial life. If confirmed, the only remaining big mystery would beto know if there is intelligent life in any other part of the universe, which I understand is orders of magnitude more unlikely to confirm, but one can dream...

dmead 1y ago
Neither of those things have actually happened. This is pure, what's the word. Cope?
- samuel 1y ago
  One of these obviously hasn't happened, but it might be, hence my excitement. I don't know how likely the experts think it is (~1%, ~10%,etc...) but I guess the odds aren't high. With regards to the other one (AI), I did not claim anything else than a subjective assesment. I did not expect to see an AI capable of mantaining a conversation aloud, for example. May be I'm easy to impress.
i_love_retros 1y ago
I think we are more likely to find extraterrestrial life than create proper AI and not just text summarizers/predictors
booleandilemma 1y ago
I think the other big mystery is why does the universe exist at all.

munchler 1y ago

This article makes it sound like phosphine is definitely present in the atmosphere of Venus, but has this been confirmed? There was a lot of controversy over the claim when it was first published several years ago.

goodcanadian 1y ago
That is addressed in the article: But a subsequent project, JCMT–Venus, designed to study the molecular composition of Venus’s atmosphere using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, offered a possible explanation for these disparate findings. Researchers tracked the phosphine signature over time and found it could only be detected at night, as it was destroyed by sunlight. They also discovered that the amount of gas in Venus’s atmosphere varied over time.
- MarkusQ 1y ago
  At some point I expect they'll discover that it can't be detected in the presence of skeptics. At least, that's the usual trajectory. I'm all for any sort of planetary science missions, but this seems more faith than logic driven. For example: “There are no known chemical processes for the production of either ammonia or phosphine, so the only way to know for sure what is responsible for them is to go there.” This is untrue on multiple levels. There certainly are known chemical processes for producing both, ammonia is fairly common (e.g. huge clouds of it on the gas giants). Plus it still seems likely that what they detected was SO₂[1] which is also quite common and expected; if the problem with your discovery is in the interpretation of the measurement, confirming the measurement doesn't change that. In any case, I'd lay long odds that "going there" doesn't resolve the issue any more than debating it here has. [1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/01/27/phosphine-venus-so2/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/01/27/phosphine-venus-s...

blinkbat 1y ago

What a horrible ad experience on this site

imglorp 1y ago
Ublock origin on FF. I don't see a thing!
- parpfish 1y ago
  Is there a good way to Adblock on mobile?
  - inquirerGeneral 1y ago
    [dead]
  - Xiol32 1y ago
    Same: uBlock on Firefox.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - imzadi 1y ago
    Depends on if you are on android or iphone. If iphone, not really. All browsers on iphone are required to be built on webkit, which has limited ad blocking. If on android, you can use Firefox and install the ublock origin extension.
  - l3x4ur1n 1y ago
    Brave browser. Native ad blocking. Also blocks YouTube ads. No need for any other extension.
    - Kuyawa 1y ago
      100% this. I really don't understand how the whole world doesn't use Brave. Lack of marketing?

acjohnson55 1y ago

If there is microbial life in the clouds of Venus, I wonder if there's a pretty good chance of its origin being from Earth. I can imagine one of the major impact events sending a tiny bit of debris into the solar system, and a tiny bit of that getting captured by Venus. Just maybe, microbes being able to survive the journey and resuming metabolism and reproducing in Venus's atmosphere.

daveslash 1y ago
Agreed. Although alternative to a chunk of Earth as a result of a natural impact, I wonder if it could have been a poorly sanitized space probe from the 60s or 70s?
jerf 1y ago
This has been hypothesized for a while. Same for Mars too, FWIW. Life on another planet of any sort is an exciting scientific development regardless of how it happened. However, even if definitely proof of life is found in the Solar System, one should resist leaping to the conclusion that it is a separate "branch" of life because it's reasonable to think that it could still be from the same abiogenesis event. I use "the same source" carefully, because it could be independent events of galaxy-level "panspermia" spreading. It can also be the case that Earth provided the source of panspermia... or, if you want to get a lot more exotic, that life started on Mars and spread to Earth through hitchhiking. We'd need to get it into a lab to see if it is truly from a separate abiogenesis event. Fortunately, it wouldn't necessarily take long. Earth life seems to have many, many, many highly-conserved characteristics to it that show that it is all comes from a single source here, but that there is no reason to believe those are the only valid choices that life could have made. The odds of another abiogenesis event being able to pass itself off as the some one we came from is negligible. It is most likely that the life would be so immediately and completely different in many ways that it would be completely clear.

BSOhealth 1y ago

Is there some probabilistic named theory for thinking there is greater chance for life to exist the closer to the center of a solar system? almost like sluice box or coin sorter, where as outer planets develop life, get blasted by asteroids, and the remains drift further inwards? At least up to some distance where carbon vaporizes by whatever heat source exists. In other words, what’s the mathematical principle for Goldilocks zones

clarionbell 1y ago
Water, not carbon. Carbon itself isn't enough, in order for the fine machinery of life to work you need solvent. On Earth it's water. Limits of Earth bound life are determined in great part by properties of water, when it boils and when it freezes. The Goldilocks zone itself is a bit of an outdated concept now. Largely because we now know that liquid water exists way beyond the orbit of Mars, in oceans of Europa and Enceladus at very least. Something similar is the case with Venus. Surface is too hot for liquid water, but high atmosphere is pretty much fine.

waltbosz 1y ago

I see the plot of a sci-fi story where scientists bring home some of the Venusian microbes for study and accidentally wipe out all life on Earth after it escapes the lab, multiplies rapidly, and Earth has no defense. Or the microbes could be all that is left of a doomed Venus society that genetically engineered these microbes to lay in wait in their atmosphere for the day that a curious space traveling society comes to investigate only to be parasitically taken over as a host. Come to think of it, I think Asimov already wrote that same story in "Green Patches".

daymanstep 1y ago
Seems unlikely that a microbe that is adapted to the Venusian environment would outcompete microbes that are adapted to the Terran environment
- momento 1y ago
  Famous last words.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > the Venusian environment Everyone uses "Jovian" for Jupiter, and yet nobody uses "Venerean" for Venus... [The planets take adjectives in -an because, I assume, people didn't want to reuse "Martial", "Jovial", and "Venereal". In science fiction you also see "Terran" replacing "Terrestrial". Interestingly, while martial and venereal are named after the gods, jovial and mercurial are named after the planets.]
  - perihelions 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      It's a little odd to complain that "venereal" is strongly associated with sex when you don't mind the planet being called "Venus".

ilamont 1y ago

“There are no known chemical processes for the production of either ammonia or phosphine ..." After reading this, I was curious how ammonia can be produced in industrial quantities on Earth. The process does appear to be a chemical process: One famous example is the Haber-Bosch nitrogen-fixation reaction, which uses a simple iron catalyst to make ammonia and other nitrogen-containing compounds from nitrogen and hydrogen https://cen.acs.org/articles/86/i33/Haber-Bosch-Reaction-Early-Chemical.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/86/i33/Haber-Bosch-Reaction-Ear...