Mission May Look for Life in Venus' Clouds

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Could Dark Streaks in Venus’ Clouds Be Microbial Life?

Quote

The question of life on Venus, of all places, is intriguing enough that a team of U.S. and Russian scientists working on a proposal for a new mission to the second planet — named Venera-D — are considering including the search for life in its mission goals.

If all goes as planned, an unmanned aerial vehicle could one day be cruising the thick, sulfuric acid clouds of Venus to help determine whether dark streaks that appear to absorb ultraviolet radiation could be evidence of microbial life.

  Read More: NASA - Astrobiology Magazine

 

[Merc14]

Would be an exciting mission to watch, I hope the agencies fund it, or something similar, in the future. 

[Aftermath]

Wow quite fascinating.  I do hope they are able to move forward with this mission.

 

[FTWind]

While i like the idea of finding alien life what does finding it change. I feel space agencies should be perfecting space travel and the colonization of other planets . This just seems selfish to the evolution of the human race . Most if not all people with half a brain cell will tell you that it is an inevitable fact that there is alien life out there somewhere. So, why look? Eventually we will just stumble onto it anyways.

[Merc14]

10 minutes ago, FTWind said:

While i like the idea of finding alien life what does finding it change. I feel space agencies should be perfecting space travel and the colonization of other planets . This just seems selfish to the evolution of the human race . Most if not all people with half a brain cell will tell you that it is an inevitable fact that there is alien life out there somewhere. So, why look? Eventually we will just stumble onto it anyways.

You don't think having a thorough knowledge of how the universe works and how/where life may evolve is an important consideration when contemplating the colonization of other worlds?   Also, our fastest spacecraft launched, to date, is New Horizons which travels about a million miles per day (36,373 MPH).  At that speed it would take New Horizons 78,000 years to reach our nearest galactic neighbor, Alpha Centauri, so hardly a practical mission for an agency to plan for, no?   In order to increase the speed of a spacecraft you'd have to increase the power available to it which means nuclear or, more practically, fusion power which, despite years and billions of dollars spent researching it all over the world, is still decades away. 

So, given that we are decades away, barring some earth shattering, physics changing technology, from even contemplating building a starship don't you think NASA should be increasing our understanding of how the universe works?   Don't you think it practical to do what we can to prepare the human race for one day leaving our star by understanding what we are getting ourselves into out there?  Maybe answer the question of "Is life common or incredibly rare?" before we go and set up camp around another star?

 

[TaintlessMetals]

A sustainable controlled fusion reaction wouldn't be nearly as far off as all that if we were able to confirm life, especially on a planet as close as Venus. A find like this would garner enough attention and support to fast track any related technologies. Imagine the amount of funding just the D.O.D by itself would pour into ships capable of space flight if it knew the reality is most habitable world's are actually inhabited.

[Merc14]

10 minutes ago, TaintlessMetals said:

A sustainable controlled fusion reaction wouldn't be nearly as far off as all that if we were able to confirm life, especially on a planet as close as Venus. A find like this would garner enough attention and support to fast track any related technologies. Imagine the amount of funding just the D.O.D by itself would pour into ships capable of space flight if it knew the reality is most habitable world's are actually inhabited.

You may be right that more money spent on fusion research would yield better results but I can safely assume that billions have been spent to date and multiple methods have been built and researched and we still haven't produced a sustainable reaction, although I believe one reactor did, for a millisecond, produce more power than was put in.  My point was that we are, no matter how much is spent, many years (decades? centuries?) away from producing anything approaching a star ship and restricting all space research to that end would be exceedingly counterproductive IMHO.

[Nnicolette]

52 minutes ago, FTWind said:

While i like the idea of finding alien life what does finding it change. I feel space agencies should be perfecting space travel and the colonization of other planets . This just seems selfish to the evolution of the human race . Most if not all people with half a brain cell will tell you that it is an inevitable fact that there is alien life out there somewhere. So, why look? Eventually we will just stumble onto it anyways.

Thank you! I'm glad somebody feels the same way as i do about it.

[brlesq1]

Exciting! I hope they can pull it off. All knowledge is useful--it just might not have an application yet. 

[pallidin]

Outstanding! Good report, Waspie.

Looking forward to the future examinations.

[pallidin]

3 hours ago, brlesq1 said:

Exciting! I hope they can pull it off. All knowledge is useful--it just might not have an application yet. 

May I ask what you mean with regards to "it just might not have an application yet" ?

[FTWind]

4 hours ago, Merc14 said:

You don't think having a thorough knowledge of how the universe works and how/where life may evolve is an important consideration when contemplating the colonization of other worlds?   Also, our fastest spacecraft launched, to date, is New Horizons which travels about a million miles per day (36,373 MPH).  At that speed it would take New Horizons 78,000 years to reach our nearest galactic neighbor, Alpha Centauri, so hardly a practical mission for an agency to plan for, no?   In order to increase the speed of a spacecraft you'd have to increase the power available to it which means nuclear or, more practically, fusion power which, despite years and billions of dollars spent researching it all over the world, is still decades away. 

So, given that we are decades away, barring some earth shattering, physics changing technology, from even contemplating building a starship don't you think NASA should be increasing our understanding of how the universe works?   Don't you think it practical to do what we can to prepare the human race for one day leaving our star by understanding what we are getting ourselves into out there?  Maybe answer the question of "Is life common or incredibly rare?" before we go and set up camp around another star?

 

Very good points . But i still dont see the point of spending millions into sending a probe to venus to see if theres microscopic life when it wont advance us in the slightest. We should be putting that money to future asteroid missions and the technoligies for mining these objects. If money can be made advances will happen in all fields . Though if money is spent in the wrong direction it will slow the process of all space advances. Though this is just my opinion. 

[FTWind]

16 minutes ago, pallidin said:

17 minutes ago, pallidin said:

May I ask what you mean with regards to "it just might not have an application yet" ?

It ment that there really isnt a benifet to knowing if there is micro bugs in the sky on venus...

[pallidin]

1 minute ago, FTWind said:

 

Why not?

Wouldn't microbial findings apart from the environment of Earth be an absolutely outstanding discovery?

[FTWind]

Just now, pallidin said:

Why not?

Wouldn't microbial findings apart from the environment of Earth be an absolutely outstanding discovery?

Yes it would be truly one of the greatest discoveries known to man. Though ,when all is said and done what do we gain? At most is peace of mind. 

[pallidin]

Have the "basic medical science and discoveries" in the last 100-years benefited you, me and countless other's, is what I think, for example.

The same for all sciences.

[FTWind]

1 minute ago, pallidin said:

Have the "basic medical science and discoveries" in the last 100-years benefited you, me and countless other's, is what I think, for example.

The same for all sciences.

Im not sure i see your point because medical science and space science  are like apples and .....hand grenades idk there way different.

[FTWind]

Im just saying first give the capitalist machine incentive and it will thrive ....give the people with money reason to throw their money at outerspace and they will. They will give the money to the people who want to explore and boom  we have the space age....

Also to add, the em drive looks pretty promising.

[Merc14]

14 minutes ago, FTWind said:

Very good points . But i still dont see the point of spending millions into sending a probe to venus to see if theres microscopic life when it wont advance us in the slightest. We should be putting that money to future asteroid missions and the technoligies for mining these objects. If money can be made advances will happen in all fields . Though if money is spent in the wrong direction it will slow the process of all space advances. Though this is just my opinion. 

NASA is already planning an asteroid mission and I believe they are looking at two more as proof of concept but NASA is not or at least should not be about making a profit, they are, or should be, about science and increasing our knowledge of the universe.  If there is money to be made and NASA has proven that we can capture an asteroid, then isn't it much more preferable to turn that "business" over to commercial entities so they can exploit asteroids for profit and let NASA concentrate on furthering our knowledge?  

You could the same thing about any endeavor in space but if you did and then lived by that philosophy then we wouldn't have Hubble or any of the space observatories as they "don't advance us in the slightest".  See, I couldn't disagree more as we are now so much more knowledgeable about our universe and how it works than we were just 20 years ago.  Of course, some people find no value in that but others do and see it as a fundamental part of the human endeavor.   Discovering life in the clouds of Venus would change the way we see ourselves in the universe as we could postulate that life is more than likely everywhere.

 

 

[FTWind]

8 minutes ago, Merc14 said:

NASA is already planning an asteroid mission and I believe they are looking at two more as proof of concept but NASA is not or at least should not be about making a profit, they are, or should be, about science and increasing our knowledge of the universe.  If there is money to be made and NASA has proven that we can capture an asteroid, then isn't it much more preferable to turn that "business" over to commercial entities so they can exploit asteroids for profit and let NASA concentrate on furthering our knowledge?  

You could the same thing about any endeavor in space but if you did and then lived by that philosophy then we wouldn't have Hubble or any of the space observatories as they "don't advance us in the slightest".  See, I couldn't disagree more as we are now so much more knowledgeable about our universe and how it works than we were just 20 years ago.  Of course, some people find no value in that but others do and see it as a fundamental part of the human endeavor.   Discovering life in the clouds of Venus would change the way we see ourselves in the universe as we could postulate that life is more than likely everywhere.

 

 

But only if we got these huge commericial entities to put there money into space exploration can we truly can go to the stars . Nasa can always do there studies  on the other side of the rock.

[pallidin]

5 minutes ago, FTWind said:

But only if we got these huge commericial entities to put there money into space exploration can we truly can go to the stars . Nasa can always do there studies  on the other side of the rock.

"Always" ???

I know you do not mean it in that strict of a term.

Anyway, recall that NASA is funded institution. Thus, they have a yearly budget, which does change.

[pallidin]

Of course, NASA does have some outside revenue in commercial payloads and site-launch logistics.

 

 

[Merc14]

30 minutes ago, FTWind said:

But only if we got these huge commericial entities to put there money into space exploration can we truly can go to the stars . Nasa can always do there studies  on the other side of the rock.

You seem to think the two are mutually exclusive and they most definitely are not.  To date, NASA has been a willing partner to the fledgling commercial space enterprises and willingly passes their hard earned knowledge over to these companies whenever requested.  You want to land a probe on Mars then you'd best be asking NASA how to do it as no other country has their record of success in that endeavor.  Hard lessons learned with past crashes led to an incredible success like Curiosity and commercial enterprises will benefit greatly from the knowledge gained from those science missions. 

[pallidin]

True, so true.

Put something in orbit around another planet or onto it's surface?

Best to go with NASA/ESA on that.

[jpjoe]

Aliens.. a cheap way to get publicity and funding