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Is there life on Venus?

Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
Good job it wasn’t THE Roger Moore, as the two careers would have been fundamentally incompatible. Most chemistry teachers I knew had no eyebrows...
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I’m surprised he didn’t change his name with all the grief he had from all of us. Once we hit the sixth form (just 10 of us in his form) we valued his quiet encouragement to explore the subject as long as we didn’t kill him (definitely) or us (preferably)! At least 4 science PhDs out of those 10....
 
hc25036 said:
I’m surprised he didn’t change his name with all the grief he had from all of us. Once we hit the sixth form (just 10 of us in his form) we valued his quiet encouragement to explore the subject as long as we didn’t kill him (definitely) or us (preferably)! At least 4 science PhDs out of those 10....
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Shows the effectiveness of small class size very well. Ours was much the same - I think there were just 6 in our class and two chemistry graduates.
 
My 'O' level Chem class 1972-3 was 8 of us. A timetable issue meant the other Chemistry class was about 30 of them. We had Grimmy - he was nuts and we spent a good deal of the year at the back of the room, whilst he 'lit' the experiment from a taper tied to a broomstick, so that he himself could be behind the first bench. I remember we distilled alcohol - he was the taste tester, of course.

Grimmy had a gammy leg and besides chemistry teaching was also the Cricket coach. A couple of years later he married my 'O' level French teacher, Miss Hibbert - who was only about 4'10 tall - their height disparity was the source of much mirth for us 6th Formers'. My claim to fame was that I was famously bad at French, so was in the bottom stream of 3 for that. I just about passed the O level with a 6 and Miss Hibbert was ecstatic - I was the only one of her class to get a 'pass'!

I bunked the idea of Chemistry 'A' level as going to be too hard. A grave mistake - some more Chemistry would be mighty useful in my current job (polymer scientist I guess would be a description). I scrape by.
 
My 'O' level Chem class 1957-9 was all of 1 of us - me! My teacher was also me! My Sec. Mod. only taught General Science at 'O' Level but I was given permission to study and take Chemistry. I left school at 15 and ended up with a Chemistry degree and went into teaching where I taught all the way to the 6th form 'A' Level and University entrance. I even taught in a school alongside teachers who taught me!

The Venus discovery is an interesting event that warrants further investigation and research. Life doesn't exist until we have actually seen and examined it. However we do know that life on Earth can exist in some very inhospitable places such as boiling acidic waters. For some scientists finding any form of life living or not in our own solar system is a holy grail for them as they can then extrapolate that the Universe as a whole is teaming with life. FWIW this may be true but the logistics involved means that we might never know - too far away. The Universe is mind bogglingly huge.

Cheers,

DV
 
Life should not exsist in the deepest oceans. It does in fact there are many places on Earth life should not exsist but it does. Bacteria growth in the atmosphere of Venus why not. Everything in the universe is made of energy including humans. Life will be teaming out in the vastness of space. Unless you think the Earth is flat.
 
Also true that timescales are mind bogglingly huge. So life elsewhere is in my view almost a certainty, but it may have existed earlier or will be existing in the future, but in 'our' time period we may never know!
 
JensenHealey said:
Also true that timescales are mind bogglingly huge. So life elsewhere is in my view almost a certainty, but it may have existed earlier or will be existing in the future, but in 'our' time period we may never know!
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Will probably get mocked for this. Something is here from out there the evidence is too strong now for it to be passed as wee green men or as some kind of unbalanced individual with outlandish views.
 
Maybe it was seeded by the Russian Venera probes or the following US craft?

I suspect they weren’t great at sterilisation then.

Stephen
 
I have no idea if the current situation around Venus could have been triggered by any craft from earth, but the tv camera from the Surveyor 3 probe which was retrieved and returned to earth by Conrad and Bean during Apollo 12 was found to have bacteria inside after nearly a year on the moon. It was later traced to someone with a cold sneezing while it was being assembled and tested on earth prior to launch.
 
Graham B said:
I have no idea if the current situation around Venus could have been triggered by any craft from earth, but the tv camera from the Surveyor 3 probe which was retrieved and returned to earth by Conrad and Bean during Apollo 12 was found to have bacteria inside after nearly a year on the moon. It was later traced to someone with a cold sneezing while it was being assembled and tested on earth prior to launch.
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From memory, colds aren't caused by bacteria.
 
No known Earth life could survive in that niche, which just does not have an equivalent here. That makes contamination very unlikely
 
David,

That’s what I was thinking. And if some atmospheric phosphine were the result of contamination of microbes from Earth, would we expect concentration this high just a few decades after the Venera missions? That would imply that the microbes not only survived but are thriving in Venus’s atmosphere.

Joe
 
Europa, Titan, Mars for a while...
People are so keen to find life elsewhere that they will see it where it doesn't exist.
What do I think ?
There's no life anywhere else in the Solar System, but there's certain to be life somewhere else in the Universe, though we'll probably never find it.
 
Graham B said:
I have no idea if the current situation around Venus could have been triggered by any craft from earth, but the tv camera from the Surveyor 3 probe which was retrieved and returned to earth by Conrad and Bean during Apollo 12 was found to have bacteria inside after nearly a year on the moon. It was later traced to someone with a cold sneezing while it was being assembled and tested on earth prior to launch.
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'Super bacteria' survive for three years outside space station

I'd like Fred Hoyle to be some kind of right. Hearing a scientists with a northern accents was pretty inspiring in the days of Oxbridge vowels.

Stephen
 
I.D.C. said:
Will probably get mocked for this. Something is here from out there the evidence is too strong now for it to be passed as wee green men or as some kind of unbalanced individual with outlandish views.
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What “Evidence”?
 
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