Remember Venus is a Earth like planet and even relatively close to the habitable zone (depending on your definitions and error bars). Just because it's a planet like Earth, doesn't mean it would support life.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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I wouldn't be particularly surprised to find out Venus has life. Complex life, probably not, but something like the life we have around undersea volcanic vents seems more than possible.
I really don't see how. Yes there is life at undersea volcanic vents on Earth, but they don't live like in the vent itself. It's where the temperature gets lower there is life.
As far as I know nothing can survive boiling temperatures for long and Venus has been way above boiling for millions of years. There are extremophiles that survive a little above boiling, but 400+ degrees I really don't see how.
There is a chance in the atmosphere where there are parts with reasonable temperatures and pressures. But there is also a lot of acids floating around, which is sorta incompatible with life. If some photosynthetic life was present in the atmosphere, floating around and living on sunlight, we would have seen it by now. There would be seasonal blooms, similar to plankton in the oceans on Earth.
It's cool to think about and I remember reading old sci-fi with Venus as a forest planet, since it's so like Earth in a lot of ways. But in reality it's dead dead.
Same for Mars I feel like. We might find indications life once lived there, which would be a huge deal. But as far as actual current life, I think chances are slim to none.
The mean surface temperature of Venus is only 464C.
But, with 93x the atmospheric pressure of earth, water boils at around 300C.
So…what is it that makes it difficult to thrive beyond 100C? Is it strictly the temperature, or is it the properties of water at that temperature? If it’s the latter, I wouldn’t be so surprised.
Also keep in mind that photosynthesis was a genetic accident that just happened to work really, really well, and the ability to process sunlight directly into energy was what allowed microorganisms to move away from thermal vents.
That same genetic accident could play out in a different world. Or a different genetic accident that’s more suited to their environment. Or no genetic accident at all, and life never moves past small, very secluded regions.
It's the temperature, a lot of chemistry doesn't work at higher temperatures because everything is too unstable. There is simply too much energy messing things up. This is why having a surface temperature that allows for liquid water to be present is such a good indicator for life. A lot of chemistry for life as we know it works at liquid water temperatures and water does play a big part as well.
The pressure would be less of an issue, there is plenty of life on Earth that thrives at huge pressures.
I'm pretty sure life on Earth evolved at the surface (or even in the atmosphere, it is thought lightning plays a part) and only adapted to use the vents later on. I'm not sure life could get started at those volcanic vents.
Life finds a way...
As far as I know nothing can survive boiling temperatures for long
Pretty sure there are though
The article you post specifically states the observed lifeforms to be limited to 130 degrees C (and even then they don't live long) with a theoretical max of 150 degrees C. Life as we know it (in all its wonderous forms) cannot exist above that temperature. The processes needed simply can't work and the structures can't exist. Maybe there's some lifeform that uses a neat trick to remain alive trough a short stint of say 200 degrees, but that's a far cry from living at 400+ all the time. Extremophiles usually can't live at boiling temperatures for long, they can only tolerate it for short durations, living most of their lives in less than 100 degrees. Which is still really cool, since most lifeforms die at half that temperature.
Now there could be some form of exotic stuff that may be called life, but that's well into speculation and science fiction.
Personally I'm not convinced by extremophiles, yes they can exist in very harsh environments, but they are always specialized forms of life that evolved in simpler conditions. It's not clear whether life can make the jump from mild to extreme or even start out in an extreme environment. My bet is that's not possible. So that could mean stuff on Mars, since we know it was probably very mild in the past and extremophiles may have persisted that can live in the current environment since that time (unlikely, but possible). But probably not on places like Venus where as far as we know it's been super hot for ages now, too long for anything to survive if it was even habitable to start with.
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To me it feels that if the planet cannot support life, then it's not an Earth-like planet. So, the definition of Earth-like planet is broken
Show me the scientists who are surprised by the fact that we haven't found life on another planet yet. Where are those scientists? Are they even real?
I mean, isn't the entire concept of the Fermi paradox that given the universe is so large and old, it seems surprising that we see no signs of aliens anywhere, and therefore some explanation must exist for why we have not? That's more focused on intelligent life than extraterrestrial life of any sort I suppose, but given it's even named a paradox in the first place, someone must find it surprising
I guess people tend to look to astronomers for information about space, while the Fermi paradox probably borders more on philosophy than on astronomy. And in a lot of people minds philosophers are not real scientists, unlike astronomers.
Science and Philosophy might not be exactly the same thing, but there is a lot of overlap, and a lot of people who do both.
An overwhelming portion of what is hard science now was probably in the domain of philosophy once.
You don't even have to go very far back to hit a time when scientists were called "natural philosophers".
And "philosopher" is just Ancient Greek for "lover of wisdom".
Science is generally a superset of philosophy if you try hard enough...
Earth was like those planets at various points in time.
like when the whole world froze https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician
or thousands of years of lava pouring out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event
Thousands of years of lava? Try millions, shortly after the earth's formation and collision with Theia, forming the Moon.
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It could just be that they're just so far that we're looking at these planets millions/billion of years in the past, meaning there may may be life there but we can't see it yet.
Earth looked pretty icy when it was "snowball Earth" and early Earth's surface was full of molten rocks.
The Milky Way galaxy is "only" 100.000 light years across, so any planets we see around stars in our galaxy we would only see about at most 100.000 years in the past. So it would be very unlikely there would be detectable life now, where there wasn't 100.000 years ago. And even if there were, it wouldn't be complex life.
The most distant exoplanet we've found to date is 27.710 light years away, so we see that planet as it was 27.710 years ago. We've had humans running round for at least a 100.000 year on Earth, so if there are any aliens on that planet we would see them.
Almost forgot the mandatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/1342/
There's always a relevant xkcd!
Yeah I didn't know we were mostly looking at planets in the Milky Way, but it makes sense. Rocky planets are very tiny compared to other stuff in the universe so it's gotta be hard detecting them millions of light years out.
Yeah it's hard to even make out individual stars in other galaxies, let alone planets around them.
Only chance we have of seeing life in other galaxies is if they have built stuff like Dyson swarms.
Wake me up when they find a Class M planet.
Yo, is that second picture Mustafar?
It totally is, good eye