January 22, 2012 - 9:58 pm
A Russian scientist is suggesting that their landers may have actually observed life on Venus.
At temperatures higher than the melting point of lead, with sulfuric acid rain, we can be certain it wouldn’t be “life as we know it”. But then, what is “life” anyway?
I used to think that too, but they keep finding new forms of life deep in the Galapagos trenches where according to everything we know about life, it simply shouldn’t be possible to exist and yet it does. These life forms life under enormous pressure and very high temperatures and absolutely no sunlight. They also have an entire food chain that’s based on chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis like us surface dwelling types depend on.
You just never know.
Does it involve muscular women wearing fur bikinis? Because I’ve watched enough ’50s sci-fi films to know that’s what life on Venus is gonna look like.
“Life” means “biological life” and “biological life” means physical constructs able to process energy to perform work. In order for such constructs to exist, dozens of criteria must be met, and Venus doesn’t qualify. So it’s not a matter of whether there is “life as we know it” but whether there are physical beings capable of processing energy. Of course we could easily be mistaken about these physical conditions, but that’s not the same thing as claiming that we can only conceive of “life as we know it”. I wrote about this on my blog: http://agentintellect.blogspot.com/2009/01/anthropic-principle-for-misanthropes.html
I haven’t had coffee and today is a work day, so I won’t go through the whole thing, but your argument — reducing “life” to “carbon-based and constructed of proteins” — I find as unconvincing as your Ockham’s Razor argument from design. But other people should read that article and decide for themselves.
There are no plants or animals on Venus. There are no protozoa or fungi on Venus. There may, however, be some extremophile bacteria on Venus, just as there are in such extreme conditions on Earth as ocean vents (thermophiles), ice cores (cryophiles) and the Dead Sea (halophiles).
This is extremely old “news”, and bogus to boot. The pictures are part of the camera assembly that was blowing around.