Rocket Lab to search for signs of life in the clouds of Venus Rocket Lab's Peter Beck is sending a Photon spacecraft carrying a small probe to Venus, marking the culmination of a childhood ambition for the CEO. The private mission is due to launch next May, with an Electron rocket carrying the Photon spacecraft and probe into Earth orbit. The plan is to carry out a Trans Venus Injection …
Any organisms evolved for earth conditions will need to evolve quickly to survive being irradiated, starved of oxygen and extremes of temperature on the journey there. When it arrives it will need to fend off clouds of sulphuric acid, 93 bar’s atmospheric pressure and 450 C heat.
There's a region in the atmosphere where the pressure and temperature are approximately the same as on the surface of the Earth. Up there the sulphuric acid is a minor problem, plenty of critters on earth thrive in absurdly acidic conditions.
Microbiomes in extremely acidic environments: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369527417302230
At some point somebody will send a balloon to lurk high in the atmosphere and do the science from there. Covering the probe with Teflon would be more than adequate to protect it from the sulphuric acid.
Slowing a probe down enough to prevent the balloon from being torn to shreds is rather tricky but not impossible.
Slowing a probe down enough to prevent the balloon from being torn to shreds is rather tricky but not impossible.
Wasn't that achieved by the Vega missions?
Darwin was not all that rich and the name of the ship "HMS Beagle" should give a clue that it was not a private mission.
Darwin then was a 22 year old student who happened to have the required qualifications for the mission and could cover his own minor expenses over the trip.
We're so used to seeing pictures of Darwin as an old man with his splendid beard we forget he did his formative work as a clean shaven youth.
1 - The public will expect photos of floating alien cities.
2 - The probe will find organics, the 'building blocks of life', and some chemicals that are indicative of life.
3 - The mainstream boffins will explain away the findings as they have since Gilbert Levin's Viking experiments.
Personally, I'm hoping for #1 but expecting #2 and #3.
Still, a pint of Becks for Peter Beck.
Here's the original paper announcing the possible detection of phosphine at Venus
Greaves et al. 2020 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.06593.pdf
Here's a later paper suggesting it was actually sulphur dioxide which has an absorption line at 1.123058mm which is not too distant from a phosphine absorption line at 1.123053mm.
Lincowski et al.2021 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.09837.pdf
How about Glycine?
Manna et al. 2020 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06211
That question was valid fifty years ago.
After the Hubble Deep Field experiment, the question has been answered.
If every single pixel of our sky is full of galaxies, then life is out there. The only question is : how far from us are they ?
Most of the 'new' galaxies dont contain any of the elements necessary for life. They may by now but I think its extremely likely that we are amongst the first places where life has lasted for 4 billion years (and only bloody just!!) and created something with a level of intelligence that will spend days arguing what intelligence is.
Places that made the ingredients for life earlier are more likely to have blown themselves up several times before they could go 'oh no not again'.
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