Bold Mission to Hunt for Aliens on Venus Is Happening | Hacker News Reader

Bold Mission to Hunt for Aliens on Venus Is Happening

gizmodo.com

70 pointsBluestein88 comments

If there is microbial life in the clouds of Venus, I wonder if there's a pretty good chance of its origin being from Earth. I can imagine one of the major impact events sending a tiny bit of debris into the solar system, and a tiny bit of that getting captured by Venus. Just maybe, microbes being able to survive the journey and resuming metabolism and reproducing in Venus's atmosphere.

Agreed. Although alternative to a chunk of Earth as a result of a natural impact, I wonder if it could have been a poorly sanitized space probe from the 60s or 70s?

This has been hypothesized for a while. Same for Mars too, FWIW.

Life on another planet of any sort is an exciting scientific development regardless of how it happened. However, even if definitely proof of life is found in the Solar System, one should resist leaping to the conclusion that it is a separate "branch" of life because it's reasonable to think that it could still be from the same abiogenesis event.

I use "the same source" carefully, because it could be independent events of galaxy-level "panspermia" spreading. It can also be the case that Earth provided the source of panspermia... or, if you want to get a lot more exotic, that life started on Mars and spread to Earth through hitchhiking. We'd need to get it into a lab to see if it is truly from a separate abiogenesis event.

Fortunately, it wouldn't necessarily take long. Earth life seems to have many, many, many highly-conserved characteristics to it that show that it is all comes from a single source here, but that there is no reason to believe those are the only valid choices that life could have made. The odds of another abiogenesis event being able to pass itself off as the some one we came from is negligible. It is most likely that the life would be so immediately and completely different in many ways that it would be completely clear.

I'd love to see a Venus sample-return mission - a probe that descends into the atmosphere and inflates a balloon to hover there for awhile, collecting samples - before firing a rocket to return to orbit and either directly return to Earth, or rendezvous with something in orbit, similar to the planned Mars sample return missions.

China is planning to attempt that one in the next few years, following their (NET) 2028 Mars sample return,

https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-venus-mission ("News China Plans to Bring Back Samples of Venusian Clouds / A gauntlet of engineering challenges await a search for evidence of alien life")

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jvl3hb5wle4igkd4qgzk2wrt/po...

Venus sample return faces extreme challenges beyond Mars missions - the 90x Earth's atmospheric pressure and 450°C surface conditions make rocket launches nearly impossible, while sulfuric acid clouds would rapidly degrade balloon materials. The energy requirements for escape velocity from Venus are also substantially higher than Mars.

Wouldn't it be possible to float teflon balloons (without ever descending to the surface), and use those to carry a launch platform? Samples do not need to be surface samples, the atmosphere itself seems quite interesting already.

And note that you may be able to "fish" for samples from an atmospheric floating platform; there is no specific need to get all the way down to the rocks with your rocket.

I thought the atmospheric conditions there were also quite violent.

That depends on the layer; there's apparently one that's quite nice, and there's been some work scoping a possible manned mission there - IIRC, there's even some ISRU possibility due to useful chemicals being in layers immediately below.

Venus Express did aero-breaking to go into orbit in 2005(?). I don't think it was configured to scan its surface for microbes afterwards, maybe we could add something like that for later missions.

IIRC, there's only a thin layer of atmosphere where we think the microbes live, and I'm not sure if VE (or future missions) descended to that layer during aero-breaking, but it's an idea.

> IIRC, there's only a thin layer of atmosphere where we think the microbes live,

COULD live

Point well taken, COULD live.

> And note that you may be able to "fish" for samples from an atmospheric floating platform; there is no specific need to get all the way down to the rocks with your rocket.

That never even occurred to me! That's a brilliant idea.

Lots of things are east to imagine in principle, but actually doing them is just so much harder. There are so many practicalities you run in to.

The first from the top of my head would be the required length and sheer weight of the cable attached to that Teflon balloon, to say nothing of the weight of the balloon itself or its contents. Speaking of which, actually keeping the contents in that balloon might also be surprisingly tricky.

You need to drag that all the way to Venus, then decelerate enough to stop all that mass, then accelerate that again to come back to Earth, before decelerating to land here. Even without any extra weight that's actually a huge challenge due to the amount of fuel required. There's a reason none of the Mars rovers have come back.

The balloon wouldn't contain anything except a gas that's more buoyant than the Venusian atmosphere at the desired height, and maybe we can use the atmosphere itself, just heated up - similar to how hot air balloons work, except presumably fully enclosed.

Not to say it'd be easy, but certainly easier than landing & returning.

Atmospheric sample retrieval—not from the surface—seems doable.

> "90x Earth's atmospheric pressure and 450°C" — becomes Earth-like conditions at higher altitude

> "while sulfuric acid clouds would rapidly degrade balloon materials" — Teflon coatings are a solved problem; JPL did coupon tests[0]

> "The energy requirements for escape velocity from Venus are also substantially higher than Mars" — True, but you'd only need to launch a tiny, dumb payload into orbit, to rendezvous with the return craft. Like Apollo, sample returns aren't one monolithic spacecraft that does the full round-trip; think the Apollo Lunar Ascent Module, but, for ants

[0] https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.asr.2007.03.017 ("Prototype design and testing of a Venus long duration, high altitude balloon")

> "Although the expected sulfuric acid concentration at Venus is expected to be in the range of 75–85%, tests were conducted up to 96% to understand our design margin. The material itself was found to be unaffected by prolonged exposure to all concentrations of sulfuric acid up to a temperature of 70 °C. Adhesively taped seam samples did show some discoloration at the tape edges, but there was no evidence of acid penetration into the joint using blotter paper on the inside surface. This test confirmed that the cover tape adhesive was indeed resistant to sulfuric acid as predicted and can support a long duration balloon mission at Venus."

edit: I totally forgot—the Soviets already demonstrated that, in the 70's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_program#Balloon

Also, we could use this as an excuse to have a moon base: when we get sample returns, it's better to have them land on the moon and studied there instead of risking the sci-fi scenario of interplanetary bacterial overlords infecting earth. (Yes, I know the chances of that are low, but I really want a moon base since watching space:1999 as a kid, so I'm just using this as a justification for spending other people's taxes.)

Which is why I specified atmospheric sample returns.

What if we pushed an asteroid into the planet and collected material from the explosion from orbit?

Easier to start with an atmosphere-less moon - you need a smaller rock.

Also been done. Also, in a way, we've been doing it since before space travel, because such material occasionally reaches Earth's surface in form of meteorites. But that's of course using naturally occurring impactors.

Have you looked into the conditions in Venus?

It's the closest thing to Hell in the Solar System apart from the Sun.

There is a habitable zone in the atmosphere.

The word "habitable" in that sentence should be surrounded by very, very large quotes.

There is a zone with Earth-like temperature and pressure, but the atmosphere is still poisonous & corrosive, I think. It's someplace we could probably put a human settlement, but it wouldn't be easy and would probably be as fun to maintain as the ISS.

Way less fun than the ISS, which is like stepping outside on a cold day in comparison. We will have colonies on the moon, Mars, and all the major moons of Jupiter before people are living in the clouds on Venus.

You won't even have colonies underwater, let alone there.

OTOH, one man's poison is another man's ISRU opportunity...

This is one of the reasons it's fascinating to me. We often talk about Mars but Venus is truly our sister planet. But it turns out she's a raging hellhole, the sulfurous evil twin of our lovely planet. Crazy stuff.

The fact that - as the other comment mentions - life could potentially survive in the atmosphere is incredible too.

This article makes it sound like phosphine is definitely present in the atmosphere of Venus, but has this been confirmed? There was a lot of controversy over the claim when it was first published several years ago.

That is addressed in the article:

But a subsequent project, JCMT–Venus, designed to study the molecular composition of Venus’s atmosphere using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, offered a possible explanation for these disparate findings. Researchers tracked the phosphine signature over time and found it could only be detected at night, as it was destroyed by sunlight. They also discovered that the amount of gas in Venus’s atmosphere varied over time.

At some point I expect they'll discover that it can't be detected in the presence of skeptics. At least, that's the usual trajectory. I'm all for any sort of planetary science missions, but this seems more faith than logic driven. For example:

“There are no known chemical processes for the production of either ammonia or phosphine, so the only way to know for sure what is responsible for them is to go there.”

This is untrue on multiple levels. There certainly are known chemical processes for producing both, ammonia is fairly common (e.g. huge clouds of it on the gas giants). Plus it still seems likely that what they detected was SO₂[1] which is also quite common and expected; if the problem with your discovery is in the interpretation of the measurement, confirming the measurement doesn't change that.

In any case, I'd lay long odds that "going there" doesn't resolve the issue any more than debating it here has.

[1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/01/27/phosphine-venus-s...

I see the plot of a sci-fi story where scientists bring home some of the Venusian microbes for study and accidentally wipe out all life on Earth after it escapes the lab, multiplies rapidly, and Earth has no defense. Or the microbes could be all that is left of a doomed Venus society that genetically engineered these microbes to lay in wait in their atmosphere for the day that a curious space traveling society comes to investigate only to be parasitically taken over as a host.

Come to think of it, I think Asimov already wrote that same story in "Green Patches".

Seems unlikely that a microbe that is adapted to the Venusian environment would outcompete microbes that are adapted to the Terran environment

Famous last words.

> the Venusian environment

Everyone uses "Jovian" for Jupiter, and yet nobody uses "Venerean" for Venus...

[The planets take adjectives in -an because, I assume, people didn't want to reuse "Martial", "Jovial", and "Venereal". In science fiction you also see "Terran" replacing "Terrestrial".

Interestingly, while martial and venereal are named after the gods, jovial and mercurial are named after the planets.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean

It's a little odd to complain that "venereal" is strongly associated with sex when you don't mind the planet being called "Venus".

When wood-like structures first evolved there were no bacteria that could penetrate the tough cellulose. The trees would just fall over and ... stay there, as rotting wood is just wood being eaten by bacteria. This is where coal comes from.

I suppose something along those lines could happen: Venusian microbes are sufficiently alien that Earth-based life can't really interact with them, while the Venusian can interact with Earth-based life, or something like that. They can eat you but you can't eat them.

In lots of sci-fi like Star Trek all aliens have DNA and you can create Vulcan-Human hybrids and whatnot, and while e.g. Star Trek does offer an explanation for this[1] in reality alien life would be foundationally different. It will have some sort of DNA-like encoding structure, which isn't DNA.

I agree it's somewhat unlikely, but it's also completely uncharted all-bets-are-off territory. It's not so much about competing, but more about how it will interact (or not).

[1]: https://i.redd.it/16xmtid83sbf1.jpeg

“There are no known chemical processes for the production of either ammonia or phosphine ..."

After reading this, I was curious how ammonia can be produced in industrial quantities on Earth. The process does appear to be a chemical process:

One famous example is the Haber-Bosch nitrogen-fixation reaction, which uses a simple iron catalyst to make ammonia and other nitrogen-containing compounds from nitrogen and hydrogen

https://cen.acs.org/articles/86/i33/Haber-Bosch-Reaction-Ear...

Is there some probabilistic named theory for thinking there is greater chance for life to exist the closer to the center of a solar system? almost like sluice box or coin sorter, where as outer planets develop life, get blasted by asteroids, and the remains drift further inwards?

At least up to some distance where carbon vaporizes by whatever heat source exists.

In other words, what’s the mathematical principle for Goldilocks zones

Water, not carbon. Carbon itself isn't enough, in order for the fine machinery of life to work you need solvent. On Earth it's water. Limits of Earth bound life are determined in great part by properties of water, when it boils and when it freezes.

The Goldilocks zone itself is a bit of an outdated concept now. Largely because we now know that liquid water exists way beyond the orbit of Mars, in oceans of Europa and Enceladus at very least. Something similar is the case with Venus. Surface is too hot for liquid water, but high atmosphere is pretty much fine.

I had never expected that I would witness in my lifetime such advanced AI, and now (may be) extraterrestrial life.

If confirmed, the only remaining big mystery would beto know if there is intelligent life in any other part of the universe, which I understand is orders of magnitude more unlikely to confirm, but one can dream...

Neither of those things have actually happened. This is pure, what's the word. Cope?

One of these obviously hasn't happened, but it might be, hence my excitement. I don't know how likely the experts think it is (~1%, ~10%,etc...) but I guess the odds aren't high.

With regards to the other one (AI), I did not claim anything else than a subjective assesment. I did not expect to see an AI capable of mantaining a conversation aloud, for example. May be I'm easy to impress.

I think we are more likely to find extraterrestrial life than create proper AI and not just text summarizers/predictors

I think the other big mystery is why does the universe exist at all.

What a horrible ad experience on this site

Ublock origin on FF. I don't see a thing!

Is there a good way to Adblock on mobile?

Same: uBlock on Firefox.

Depends on if you are on android or iphone. If iphone, not really. All browsers on iphone are required to be built on webkit, which has limited ad blocking. If on android, you can use Firefox and install the ublock origin extension.

Brave browser. Native ad blocking. Also blocks YouTube ads. No need for any other extension.

100% this. I really don't understand how the whole world doesn't use Brave. Lack of marketing?

Can you send me the link for the iPhone Brave app with ad blocking? Thanks!

Use VPN that also blocks ads, or configure private DNS and use a service like nextdns that also blocks ads.

A bonus with either of those is your mobile provider won't see every website you visit.

Curious why you don't use an adblocker? it's so easy to do

I don't use one on mobile because I don't do a whole lot of work on mobile. I generally just avoid bad mobile experiences.

forget the cubesat nonsense.

the aim should be to get a dudebro to quadbike on the surface. redbull & gopro will be the sponsors, plus polymarket for people to bet on the outcome of the mission.

actually i dont understand why this hasn't already happened! what is more extreme sports, that doing it on other planets?

its hard to get people to care about the sciencey stuff.

I've even got the tagline "Yeah, we found life on mars." and its a picture of the dude looking like a pirate in a spacesuit. people would (could?) love that i think.

I mean the soviets had a good go at landing big metal probes on there and they melted and failed pretty quickly. I'm not sure we have the technology to make a space suit or a quad bike that can function on the surface of venus. You'd also need to transport over 100 days of water and snacks so your dudebro doesn't starve on the way there

I remember reading a short story that featured settlements on Venus, and it mentioned the difficulty of running any sort of engine - rocket or combustion - on the surface. After all, your engine and its exhaust must be hotter than the atmosphere surrounding it, otherwise you're not running an engine, you're running a refridgerator.

I don't doubt it's extremely challenging. But the initial engine temperature would still match the environment temperature, and it would not get somehow colder. That's not how any of this works.

I don't know if a rocket exhaust must absolutely be hotter than the environment, just at a higher pressure. If you open a gas bottle, the jet is going to be very cold, but it will produce thrust. With some quick googling, the surface pressure on venus is 90 bar, and a spacex falcon produces 350 bar in the chamber, so I think a falcon 9 could quite easily take off from the surface (ignoring the fact it would melt and the tanks might crush etc)

pV=NRT

Pressure and temperature are not independent.

"Hotter than the environment" is shorthand for "contains more energy than the output region does".

Run your engine inside said refridgerator?

damn i thought venus was like the moon but red. still i feel like its hard to get excited about stuff without humans intimately involved. ultimately its all about the meatbag, he needs to be there somehow. maybe in orbit controlling the sat via FPV goggles?

Oh boy this is all mixed up. Mars is red, are you thinking of Mars. Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars

Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think. It's still cold and you'd need a specialised quadbike (electric?), but seeing as martian travel is on the cards for some point in the future, you might see martian quadbike racing in your lifetime. However there are still the same food/water/oxygen issues, since it's a 9 month trip each way

>Sending a dudebro to mars would be much easier I think.

Indeed. The very low pressure on Mars (0.006 Bar) would be much easier to deal with than the absolutely crushing pressure on Venus (92 Bar) - not to mention the 470C surface temperature.

Hanggliding or ballooning in the cloud tops of Venus would be more practical than going to the surface.

Humans have already survived simulated dives in hyperbaric chambers to around 70 bar with no long term effects, so in theory you may be able to have Venusian astronauts live in a habitat at ambient pressure if 90 bar is similarly tolerable (obviously would still need heroic measures for cooling, an approx. 200 K temperature differential is no joke). Getting enough gas there to pressurize the hab could be difficult, the deep dive experiments used a hydrogen/helium/oxygen mixture and I doubt you can recover helium through in situ resource extraction. And you would need some sort of acclimatization system to get the astronauts from their half-bar or so transit environment down to the surface - maybe a balloon that slowly descends over the period of a few days.

So yeah, pretty much science fiction for now!

>200 K temperature differential is no joke

It would be more like +450K/C difference (470C, not 470K).

Also it is one thing to get a person to 70 Bar in experimental conditions. It is another to actually stay at that pressure for prolonged periods and do anything useful.

Ah, whoops, you're right! Somehow my brain defaulted to Kelvin. So 740 K down to 290 K. Carnot COP alone is only around 65%, you'll be lucky to do half that, you need the stuff outside to survive heat and sulfuric acid, and you'll need to power it somehow. You could run it off a nuclear reactor, but your reactor will not be very efficient since it has to sink heat at over 700 K.

> Also it is one thing to get a person to 70 Bar in experimental conditions. It is another to actually stay at that pressure for prolonged periods and do anything useful.

Fully agreed - you'd have to test this long term in a hyperbaric habitat on Earth. You may end up needing some sort of medical or pharmaceutical intervention to make it possible. Very risky.

Even firmer in the realm of science fiction. It'd be a good hard sci-fi novel though.

It might be possible to make a hard suit where the inside is around 35 bar, which should be easier to work in (if maybe still uncomfortable), and reduce the stress on the suit of a 70 bar difference

Newtsuits have apparently been tested to 90 Bar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtsuit

I believe they maintain ~1 Bar inside. Not sure if something like that could be built to protect a fragile human from the temperature differential, though. Better to send a robot?

That's exactly what I was thinking of, I just didn't know the name. If they can do 90 bar, that's fine too, I didn't know what pressures they were rated to

The article says they are rated to 30 bar, but have been tested to 90 bar. Presumably with no human inside for 90 bar!

>It'd be a good hard sci-fi novel though.

Must have been done already. Surely?

'Hail Mary' by Andy Weir has some interesting stuff about the (spoiler!) alien 'rocky' who is adapted to a high pressure/temperature environment.

I can't imagine anything would justify the cost and hellish conditions of living on Venus's surface. Except, perhaps, as an example what not to do to our own planet.

I really need to re-read Project Hail Mary, especially with the film in development. I really hope the film lives up to the book. I think they did a reasonably good job with The Martian, even though they cut out the entire dust storm section (and my favourite joke in the book!)

>I think they did a reasonably good job with The Martian

Within the time and marketing constraints of a Hollywood film, I thought they did a good job on 'The Martian'. Let's hope Hollywood doesn't ruin 'Hail Mary'.

I mean yeah, what can we do about that surface temperature? That is extremely high.

Refrigeration is hard but I don't think impossible at high ambient temperatures. What immediately comes to mind is compressing gas (which will increase its temperature), letting it equalise with the ambient temperature, then decompressing it, which will lower the temperature (from Charles' Law). No doubt there are many other systems that could be used though.

I'm not an expert on refrigeration at all, but if you're interested, it might be worth checking out the youtube channel Hyperspace Pirate, who does a lot of diy refrigeration systems, and I believe has managed to make liquid nitrogen in his garage using a home made refrigeration system. He also goes very in-depth into the technical details

Interesting, thank you!

>Venus is the opposite direction to us from Mars

Depends where they are in their orbits.

Thank you for capturing the zeitgeist way too accurately. Now I'm once again in a mood to watch it all burn.

As kids, my friend and I had an idea of getting Microsoft to fund us buying used Buran and building a launchpad for it in Poland, in exchange for painting the shuttle all blue and slapping big Microsoft Windows logos on it.

I still think this wasn't that bad of an idea. Maybe if we followed through with it, Poland would've had a proper space program now.

That's not economical. A human mission to another planet is far too expensive and risky for the little advertising it would deliver. They could do that already on earth, send people to the north/south-poles, or even send them to the moon.. This would all be cheaper and still have similar effects.

But the mindset is probably not wrong. Maybe Jeff Bezos can rent his dick-rocket to Red Bull, so people can spacediving the atmosphere. The necessary security-tech they have to build, will probably very beneficial for actual astronauts later.

I can guarantee you that if someone were to discover that the "Ark of the Covenant" dataset that would unlock AGI was on Venus and it could only be accessed by a meatbag, we'd be sending fleets.

Given the current hype it probably doesn't even matter if the claim is true as long as it keeps the capital flowing.

The difference is, that the prospective win from AGI is far bigger than any investment. But an advertisement more expensive than a whole decade's revenue from the company, has hardly any chance to reach the profitable zone.

There are many worse ways of spending capital. Even if a false claim of this nature successfully bullshitted some companies or countries into a manned mission to Venus, that would be a net win to humanity compared to what that capital will be allocated otherwise.

A picture of dudebro's quad wheel squashing that actual life that we found on mars, with a redbull logo on the tire

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