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During its descent Venus Express measured a thousandfold increase in atmospheric density from 160 down to 130 km (100 to 80 miles) in altitude, as well as solar panel heating of over 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). Additional fluctuations in velocity were measured between the planet’s day and night side.
originally posted by: Luuke123
a reply to: Xcathdra
Barren.
originally posted by: Xcathdra
originally posted by: Luuke123
a reply to: Xcathdra
Barren.
From some of the orbital probes its been discovered Venus does have continents as well as "oceans", albeit not water. Barren or not is some place other than Earth. To me that merits attention and exploration.
who knows, maybe we will find elements on Venus / other solar system planets that does not occur on earth, unlocking the holy grail that would allow us to travel more efficiently in our solar system and hopefully beyond it.
originally posted by: Xcathdra
a reply to: stormbringer1701
I was under the impression the period table could exceed over 200 elements, with plateaus of stable elements around some of the higher elements.
3.3 Present Life
Could bacterial life exist in the atmosphere of Venus today? Although this is considered unlikely, the possibility of life in the clouds or the middle atmosphere of Venus has not been ruled out by any observations made to date. While the atmosphere is both dry and acidic, extremophilic life has adapted to far more harsh conditions on Earth.
There is some evidence that the trace-gas constituents of the Venus atmosphere are not in chemical equilibrium with each other. On Earth, the primary source of disequilibrium in the atmospheric chemistry is the activities of biological processing; could disequilibrium on Venus also be a sign of life? In 1997, David Grinspoon made the suggestion that microbes in the clouds and middle atmosphere could be the source of the disequilibrium. In 2002, Dirk Schulze-Makuch independently proposed that observations of the Venus atmosphere by space probes showed signatures of possible biological activity...
...Another interesting sign is the nature of the ultraviolet-absorbing aerosols that form the markings seen in UV images of the planet (figure 2). The nature of these aerosols, and whether they are biological in origin, is still unknown. On Earth, viable microorganisms are found in clouds. A research team from the University of Innsbruck examined bacteria from cloud samples by freezing onto Teflon plates water droplets collected in-situ from cloud samples from Mount Sonnblick. They then melted the samples in the laboratory and monitoring bacterial growth at the low temperatures found in clouds. On the average, the cloud droplets contained around 1500 bacteria per milliliter, including round, rod-shaped and filamentary shaped bacteria, actively metabolizing at the cloud temperatures.
Because the bacteria multiply over a time scale of several days, shorter than the typical lifetime of a cloud, they concluded that the bacteria collected almost certainly reproduced inside the cloud. Cloud temperatures on Venus are similar to the range of cloud temperatures on Earth, although the Venus clouds are strongly acidic in composition. Nevertheless, identification of cloud-dwelling bacteria on Earth is a strong supporting evidence for the plausibility of bacterial life in the atmosphere of Venus.