On Monday, millions of spacecraft reacted with joy to a study showing that the atmosphere in Venus contains spines, a chemical byproduct of biological life. In conclusion, no one would have been more thrilled or less surprised by this discovery than the great Carl Sagan – who said that this day could come more than 500 years earlier.
Now best remembered as the presenter of the most watched PBS series Cosmos, Author of the book behind the movie Contact, And the man who put the gold disc of Earth Music on NASA’s Voyager mission, Sagan actually began studying the two planets closest to us. Edgar Rice became an astronomer after being inspired as a child by space fantasies based on Mars and Venus.
But as Cosmos Fans know that the stellar-eyed scientific hope of teak can never beat its rigorous science. He created an early “proof” of life on Mars. He predicted that the surface of Venus would be very hot in 1962 before NASA’s first Venus probe, which he worked on, was confirmed. He was the first scientist to see the hellish crust of Venus as a result of the fugitive greenhouse effect – what he knew could show the way to a changing future in the Earth’s atmosphere.
So it was even more surprising when Sagan co-wrote a paper preface, when we might one day discover microbial life on our sister planet. “If a small amount of minerals are stimulated from the surface to the clouds, it is by no means difficult to imagine the indigenous biology in the clouds of Venus,” he wrote. Nature In 1967 – two years before NASA landed on the moon. “While Venus’s surface conditions make the hypothesis of life impractical, Venus’s clouds are a different story.”
As Sagan said, the high carbon-dioxide atmosphere was no barrier. At the top of the Venus clouds, 50 km. At the (31-mile) level, conditions are really hospitable and almost like Earth. Bacteria thrive in the same way that organisms can acne in the upper part, around the superheated, CO2 rich vents at Yellowstone. Add sunlight and water vapor to CO2, he said, and you have that recipe for life, that building block, the recipe for photosynthesis.
Darby Dyer, chairman of NASA’s Venus Exploration Advisory Group, said Sagan’s work on Venus was preliminary, although many today remember its impact. “His idea was ancient, and it is still understood today: there must be a temperate region between the position of the hell surface on the present Venus and the vacuum near outer space where life can live.”
Just 11 years after the teak made its prediction, another Venus probe found methane in the atmosphere – a predictor of the presence of organic matter. Scientists like Sagan were wary of discovery; No one could prove that methane meant life beyond reasonable doubt. (We also found it on Mars in 2018, and it remains to be seen). However, no one has ever given a reasonable alternative to why methane is hanging on Venus.
Sagan died in 1996, amid a long dry spell of NASA’s exploration of Venus. But his idea lived on. In 2013, we discovered a large amount of living germs in the clouds above the Earth. To the amazement of the scientists who collected them, more than 300 species – microbes really do exist. Less At low altitudes. In 2016, NASA’s M-models Dello showed that Venus once had oceans for at least 2 billion years. This planet supports the theory of expert David Greenspoon, who suggests that microbial life migrated into the clouds billions of years ago when conditions for life on the surface were very difficult.
Call them native climate refugees.
Science did not stop, even when we used only Earth-based telescopes to do that. We have found evidence for active volcanoes on the surface, which would “stimulate minerals” in the atmosphere indicated by teak. In 2018, a second study of the atmosphere of Venus turned up mysterious “dark stripes” that scientists speculated could be evidence of microbial life – a huge amount of it. How much We need more study to find out. Last year, co-author Sanjay Limaye told me, “I came to the paper out of frustration.” “We have not discovered the organism [on Venus]. why not?”
Really why not. As I wrote earlier this year, Venus was unfairly left to Mars in NASA’s budget priority. Despite being closer to Venus and more like Earth, Mars had a surface on which we could stand, which was easy to sell to our 20th century “space colonization” mentality.
But as much as we look at Venus, we should think more about what the research looks like.
Quietly, inside and outside NASA, a “Venus community” grew up wanting to explore its clouds and beg for budget scraps. Its most exciting moment so far came in 2015, when NASA unveiled a concept mission called HAVOC – a zeppelin, basically, you don’t need to fill with helium or hydrogen. Only regularly does the old Earth’s air float above Venus’s ga ense atmosphere. Tear off the fabric of the balloon, and the high pressure can actually escape from the air Weeks.
As you might expect, the Venus community phosphin discovery was obscured with excitement on Monday. Not that the NASA administrator just tweeted the magical words: Time to prioritize Venus.
Life on Venus? The discovery of phosphine, a byproduct of anaerobic biology, is still the most significant development in terms of life on Earth. About 10 years ago, NASA discovered microbial life at 120,000 feet in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This is the time to prefer Venus. https://t.co/hm8TOEQ9es
– Jim Bridenstein (Gimbredensine) September 14, 2020
There is, of course, caution in spades. Phosphin is also found in the giant, churning gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn. But to explain why it would be on a small rocky planet like Venus, if not because of life, scientists say, you have to propose some geological process that we don’t know yet.
“The exciting discovery of phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere only reinforces the growing body of evidence that Venus is probably, perhaps, another place in our solar system where life may or may not have existed in the past,” said NASA’s Dyer. “Venus has the key to our understanding of the evolution of rocky planets as houses of life.
“This could be the first discovery among many who have come up with the innovation of the Venus research program by NASA and other countries.”
Currently ESA, the Russian Space Agency and NASA all have plans to investigate Venus in the works that could come this decade; Phosphin ad can move launch dates well. If and when subsequent probes find further evidence of life above the most mysterious planet in the solar system, we will be one step closer to confirming Carl Sagan’s legacy as a visionary Ventuan genius.
