[meteorite-list] BIG VENUS NEWS

From: Jason Utas <meteoritekid_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:38:32 -0800
Message-ID: <93aaac890711291138g7c1df3f6gda694120666459e7_at_mail.gmail.com>

Larry, Sterling,
Even supposing that there had been some sort of life on Venus, the
odds that the development of life there would have even somewhat
paralleled evolution on Earth is so unlikely as to be, in my opinion,
nearly impossible. Should there have been any life on Venus, it is
logical to think that such life would have initially have developed to
utilize sunlight as a form of energy (as our plants do), but the
evolution of any forms of animal life would likely be a far cry from
anything that ever came to live on Earth.
That said, considering the substantial increase in the amount of solar
radiation that Venus gleans from sitting in a closer orbit, I think
it's safe to say that any sort of life would have a hell of a time of
trying to develop complex forms in such a biological oven.
- And that said, the odds that any life would form at all are quite minuscule.
It is possible, but is highly (very, very, very highly) unlikely.
Jason


On Nov 29, 2007 10:21 AM, <lebofsky at lpl.arizona.edu> wrote:
> Hello Sterling:
>
> I have not had a chance to read the articles in general, but if Venus is
> still losing its water, and we are talking about this happening with the
> last 1/2 billion years or so, is there any chance that it was realted to
> the global resurfacing of Venus? Maybe Venus did have swamps and dinosaurs
> a billion yers ago and then wham, along came golbal resurfacing which
> boiled off the water and decomposed the carbonates!
>
> Speculatively,
>
> Larry Lebofsky
>
>
> On Thu, November 29, 2007 1:10 am, Sterling K. Webb wrote:
> > Hi, List,
> >
> >
> > ESA had a big (press) conference to release the first
> > findings of the Venus Express spacecraft. There will be nine papers by
> > principal investigators in "Nature," next issue. So all the science
> > reporters were there, of course, to get the inside story.
> >
> > The spacecraft detected "whistlers." Whistlers are
> > sharp, short, frequency decreasing bursts of low frequency radio waves. You
> > can detect whistlers on Earth by connecting an old-fashioned quarter-mile
> > wire antenna to a stereo set, as the radio waves are in the audio
> > frequencies! They are caused by lightning. Earlier indications of
> > lightning on Venus have always been dismissed as "mistaken" but it appears
> > we were mistaken about being mistaken.
> >
> > The second big story is the confirmation of the old Pioneer
> > probe's detection of a high ratio of deuterium-to-hydrogen in the
> > atmosphere of Venus. Well, that's only the small end of the big news. The
> > big end of the big news is that the D-to-H ratio of the UPPER atmosphere
> > is 2.5 times greater than it is in the lower atmosphere.
> >
> > Well, you say, scratching your head, so what? It means that
> > water loss from Venus is going on right now, not a few billion years ago or
> > just one billion years ago. No, Venus is losing water right now. The
> > deuterium is heavier than hydrogen; when water is split and stripped from
> > the top of the atmosphere by the solar wind, more deuterium remains than
> > hydrogen. The fact that there is a higher D-to-H ratio up top means that
> > the water loss is both very active and on-going, that Venus is still
> > bleeding water, that the water loss did NOT begin anciently, but recently
> > (cosmically
> > speaking, say 400 or 500 million years, or even more recently).
> >
> > The reporters had heavy going trying to figure this out, quite
> > possibly because the Venus "specialists" are also having heavy going trying
> > to figure all this out, mostly because reality is doing such a poor job of
> > matching theory. They were disapproving of these unruly facts. Example:
> > whistlers, yes, but not from lightning. From what? It's a mystery.
> >
> > There isn't one press account I can paste in here to sum it
> > all up, since every press account varies according to which "expert" was
> > being interviewed. So, here's the major news stories, with a scorecard...
> >
> > Space.com believes the lightning but doubts the water:
> > http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/071128-venus-express.html
> >
> >
> > The NY Times doubts the lightning, believes the water,
> > but doesn't know what it's all about:
> > http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/science/space/29venus.html?ref=space
> >
> >
> > The Independent believes in more lightning, thinks the lack of
> > a magnetic field caused the loss of water, not global warming:
> > http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3204073.ece
> >
> >
> > The AFP says Venus was "doomed by global warming!"
> > http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gFOc6GAb7TDdajJhw-5xwwcfFZRA
> >
> >
> > The Houston Chronicle thinks Venus was "just too close to the Sun"
> > http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5337291.html
> > (The last time I was in Houston, I flew into Hobby at 7pm
> > and it was 107 F. in the shade, and there was no shade as all the leaves
> > had died and dropped off from the heat. This is a "natural" theory for a
> > Houston paper, I think.)
> >
> >
> >
> > Sterling K. Webb
> >
> >
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> >
> >
>
>
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Received on Thu 29 Nov 2007 02:38:32 PM PST