Venus Could Harbour Non-Water Based Life
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 มิ.ย. 2024
- Whenever we search for life, we're searching for 'life as we know it". But are there alternative options? Non-carbon based life? Or life that doesn't use water as a solvent? It turns out, things like that can be as close as on Venus. Figuring it out with Dr William Bains.
📜 Venus' Atmospheric Chemistry and Cloud Characteristics Are Compatible with Venusian Life
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
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00:00 Intro
01:26 Life as we don't know it
03:27 Defining life
11:44 Evolution
14:02 The role of solvents
18:22 Other fluids
23:33 Venus
29:55 How to look for life on Venus
48:01 Obsessions
56:30 Final thoughts and more interviews
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If you found this interesting. Read the sci-fi novel Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Very good book! It's actually Project Hail Mary.
"This is the Worst it will ever be" was such a beautifully optimistic statement for this high tech era we get to live in.
soon there will be a micro nova from the sun, all tech will stop working.
shortly later the magnetic polls will flip , causing crustal slippage . the oceans will rush across the continents a thousand feet high.
killing 90% of all land dwelling life .
erasing civilization...an actual great reset .
I’m so ready for either funding or a breakthrough. Love the interviews, but it’s just always: could be life, we need missions, James Webb good, red dwarfs suck, we’ll see.
This was a really really interesting interview!
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.
very cool discussion salute from Toronto :).
whether there is life (what ever we mean by that word) on Venus or not. I think it is pretty clear, that we have big gaps in our understanding of the chemistry of Venus atmosphere. So it is time to send an atmospheric probe, a balloon or perhaps even a blimp there to begin giving us answers. or at least leads us to ask the right question.
Probes have been sent to Venus, due to the inhospitable environment, they tend not to last very long in the lower atmosphere or on the surface. Consider the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere of Venus for why ballons and such aren't usable.
"or at least leads us to ask the right question." The right questions is the secret ingredient to super genius thinking -- and any meaningful enlightenment,
Mr Cain, I have a question. If an alien civilization was broadcasting radio signals into space like we do, how far away could we detect them with our current technology? Assuming the signal was made long enough ago to actually reach us?
If it was a repeating and identifiable signal it would depend on the strength of broadcast the length of the repetition and the amount of scattering betwixt source and cypher. Of course they'll probably use neutrino transmitters as they go through stars just fine :).
About 37 feet
I googled and found this:
National radio astrometry observatory ~ How Far Away Could We See An Alien Civilization Transmitting a Powerful Radio Signal in Our Direction?
Apparently the most powerful transmitters we have could be detected 10pc away by current radio telescopes and 100pc away by ones currently under construction.
I think it depends on the technology. Narrow-band signals -- probably, but good luck if they're transmitting with some modern technology such as UWB (ultra wide band) signals.
lol, and also recievers lol...in other words, you can't use them because you can't catch enough to get a discrimination between signal and noise...
Super interesting interview!
Great interview again Fraser, you really are the master in this class of journalism.
When I was young I was told fire pretty much can qualify as alive it eats fuel, breaths oxygen, poops ash, grows, dies and is literally symbiotic with a lot of plants.
(For the internet: that points out how difficult it is to provide a workable definition for life.)
It’s hard to find the difference between a complex self propagating chemical reaction and life because there really isn’t one (depending on your definition of course)
Right, fire meets the metabolism requirement (struggle against entropy...). So a better definition of life needs to also include something about processing and replicating information about how to do life. Fire doesn't process information (recipes) about how to build a good campfire.
Excellent interview.
My experience from astrobiology meetings is that physicists want to look at abundances of chemicals (expressed as a Chi square over a background) and biologists want to understand the ecosystem - the "Is it a Vegetarian?" question of Dr. Bains. Just finding chemicals associated with life will not (from my discussions) convince most biologists.
Nothing could live in the gaseous clouds around Uranus
There are Klingons around Uranus
"We're science fiction friendly" :) It was a great interview, but I have my doubts about a return sample from Venus. That's VERY hard. But I definitely love Venus and I find it very stupid that we haven't sent more missions there, especially since it's cheaper to send them there in terms of delta v. I don't know how space agencies has resisted the temptation to go there for so long.But I really appreciated Dr. Bains explanation about why water is needed for life and how it could be replaced by other solvents. Super interesting.
Great interview, thank you Fraser!
Thank you very much. The content is on all levels interesting. Life, as we don't know it, could be extended to the system dynamic viewpoint. (Extremely slow metabolism that is unrecognizable to us) OR from the perspective of boundary layers (aerosols with complex organics as we know it, but only active niches of turbulent flows within atmospheres. OR upside down oriented lifeforms at the bottom of the ice sheets, etc )❤
Definition of life: fight against entropy.
Just like White Wolf's *Mage: the Ascension* back in the 90s! Don't forget to take a few pips of Prime, tho
I’ve always thought this too. They look for life as we know it but life could be made of totally different than us
how do you know that? you have to demnonstrate that it´s at least possible in principle. as long as you don´t, that assumption is not only not warranted but also possibly gigantic waste of time and money. also they don´t only look at life as we know it hence this video.
COULD IT BE?
Red dwarfs when young blow all the water and atmosphere out farther into the system then later when they become docile those elements which may have accumulated in and on space debris, Kuiper belt objects, comets and asteroids could conceivable fall back onto the planets now that they are in the habitable zone? I mean, after a long time - billions of years.
I was one of those asking about life as we don't know it. Thanks! Great interview!!
When I think of life as we don’t recognize it, I think of fire and things more sophisticated than fire;
A water cycle, transforming limestone into chert and minerals producing complex jaspers from chert;
Vulcanism, cryovulcanism, mineral segregation and tectonics
There’s silicon life if we look at it that way but it doesn’t make dna
Great interview guys, thank you
Organic chemistry in water seems so eager while everything else seems so terminal
Finding ice world tube worms are common would be nice but I expect life as we know it is the way it is, Cyanobacteria and mitochondria begetting trees, grass, insects and whatnot
I’m all for unlimited research, but I expect Mars and Venus are now and have always been utterly dead;
Still, I hope my cell service returns so I can hear the end of the interview
That was an awesomely entertaining interview!
IN the mid Atlantic ridge at the volcanic vents
The creatures get their energy from sulfuric acid
Bye the way the pressure and the temperature is about the same as the surface of Venus.
No they don't, they get it from hydrogen sulfide.., they react it with iron and other metals, eventually the sulphur compounds get turned into sulfuric acid.
On a different video of his I suggested maybe there was life converting HS into HSO4 but unfortunately nothing evolved to photosynthesize turning the CO2 into O2 etc. hence it killed itself.(On Venus)
If something could live on or photosynthesize SO3 , it would be a great candidate for terraforming!
If you engineered life,
What could you use that can live in 800° supercritical CO2?
Can you make a cell with an ionic membranes and hydrophobic non polar insides?
Can sulphur and phosphorus form polymers under those conditions?
Why does it have to be at high altitude?
Great as always, just wish it was a bit longer!
Absolutely excellent. I really enjoyed the discussion regarding What is Life?. After having to teach the MRS GREN definition it's so refreshing to here a much more nuanced and encompassing version that is so much more in line with what I would like to talk about.
I'm not really interested in what weird alien life may or may not look like but it makes us all realise how wondrous life here on earth really is.
It has been 3 minutes watching this video and already have this ear worm of Shocking Blue „I‘am your Venus, I‘m your fire…“. That would be one of the major reasons, that I am no scientist working on celestial bodies… I am happy to be an artist, working on celestial bodies… sometimes… 😅
I was gettin "star trekn"
"It's life Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it Jim
Klingons on the starboard side starboard side,
Wipe them off Jim "
Fraser, how irradiated is the James Webb Telescope by now?
It's a robot, it loves it.
Why does bender and an irradiation machine come to mind lol.
@@frasercain
Great interview thank you
I'd define life as having three properties: 0: Maintain low entropy within the system through interactions with the environment (i.e. metabolism), 1. Replicate, 2: Process information about how to do 0 and 1.
Something like that. My point being that the definition doesn't need to be overly biased by "as we know it".
That being said, it is possible to argue the hypothesis that life is gonna be carbon and water based, without that argument being unimaginative or thinking inside the box.
A simple definition in terms of entropy allows for a pretty broad range. I mean, who knows what's going on in stellar plasma, etc. But if you constrain the search to chemistry, you've got a very finite set of ingredients, of which carbon happens to be the only viable candidate for both structure and flexibility necessary for life. We can enumerate the short list of alternatives, and it's fairly trivial to rule those alternatives out. There could be some debate about alternative solvents, but that's a finite list too, and water is hard to beat.
Why do many space nerds push for colonizing Venus (in upper atmosphere) when there's no way to acquire resources locally (other than what you can extract from atmosphere), so you'd have to ferry all supplies from Earth and basically this colony wouldn't be more practical than any random space station? Do they just not consider logistics, or am I missing something?
I think a lot of them think the idea of giant aerostats because of their size makes them a good place to be. But smaller ones with ultra light study packages in bladders sure.
AT THAT POINT, WE MAY AS WELL JUST LIVE IN EARTHS UPPER ATMOSPHERE VERSUS GOING TO A PLACE WHERE WE ESSENTIALLY KNOW NOTHING COMPARED TO EARTH. EVEN IF OUR PLANET GETS SCREWED UP, ITLL PROBABLY STILL BE MORE SURVIVABLE THAN VENUS.
Because it seems more easily doable -- and the important thing is to Get Out There!!! We are confident once we are Out There compelling reasons, obvious even to a politician, will become obvious we need more Out There exploration and human involvement.
One major advantage of living in the upper atmosphere of Venus, versus a space station, would be gravity. A vessel supported by balloons and sitting above the thick atmosphere would have gravity, which is difficult to make artificially. Gravity is important for humans and any life they might bring along. Venus being about the same size as Earth should be even better than Mars or our moon.
It's the relative density of the Venetian atmosphere that makes it good. Airships don't get the requisite buoyancy in earths puny atmosphere to do us any favours. @@beaches2mountains230
Sweet! I’ve been making this argument forever. We keep looking for life as we know it (water-based). What if life exists in different forms. Genius!! 🖖🏼
Vialant Thor!
The very remote odds of a cloud of glass becoming alive are exactly the same extreme remote odds of our own basic componets becoming alive, yet THEY DID, and no one knows exactly how it started at zero day
I would say that glass is pretty inert, but a cloud of gas might get dispersed, but then a fart can hang around for a long time.
That’s where the formless 5D jellyfish people live 🪼👽
3D, sure. The 5D ones occasionally interact.
Could harbor life? It’s my belief, based on scientific observation that life exists on all planets, moons and in the vacuum of space itself. The information to make this claim is out there. All one has to do is keep an open mind and look. Long fan of you Fraser. Keep up the great work.
Darn. Please share the data from your private probes, sir 🙏
@@archmage_of_the_aether It's all a matter of interpretation of known DATA. Some of Carl Sagan's writings came to the same conclusion.
Hi Fraser! Question: we can measure our velocity relative to earth, the moon, the Sun the Milky Way etc. What is the biggest 'thing' we can measure our velocity relative to and do we know what velocity we are at if sitting in a chair on Earth?
The alien in Ridley Scott’s movie “Alien” had some sort of super acid as blood.
The dude's called xenomorph
@@JurisKankalis Sure was a mean SOB
10:21. Every time I’m dropping a deuce I’ll remember that it’s proof that I am alive.
They're a magnificent example of life. Poop on, my friend, 💩
@@frasercain I promise that I will continue to do so!
yes a planet worth study :)
Living creatures use free energy to reduce local entropy.
Life as we don't know it is probably the life that's out there...if any 🤷
I think of life as an entropy pump. A living thing is a minimally-open physical system that keeps its internal entropy from increasing by pumping entropy into its environment. Life obtains the energy needed to do so from energy gradients in its environment.
Heje is a sea monky life :) Interesting question
.
Did they try passing electric charges or something analogous to lightning through the sulfuric acid with base pairs dissolved in the sulfuric acid?
3.22 - is dr bains really using a 3:4 monitor?
Great interview. I love the image of life going shopping for aminoacids.
Would silicon-based life be more stable at high temperatures? Energy might not be such a problem if there's plenty of it around.
Is life present everywhere where we find water? I think I've read that water is found 100s of km below the earth's surface, & life only 10s of km.
silicon based chemistries do not lend themselves to life due to silicon's double bonds being asymmetrical
When would life on Earth first have been detectable to hypothetical extraterrestrials? And how big is the sphere representing the places extraterrestrial visitors could have traveled here from if they left as soon as they detected life?
Remember those videos of blimps going around in Venus’ clouds? I was trying to imagine how you could deploy those. Could a blimp fill up and deploy as it’s falling into Venus’ atmosphere?
My bet is on europa
❤"All these worlds are yours
Except Europa.
Attempt no landing there."❤
Thanks.
Life that we would not recognise when we see it ..... life on a massively smaller or larger scale, life on a very dofferent perception of time, life that manifests within a frequency of vibration outside of what our senses and technology can perceive.
i was surprised to learn how inconclusive the idea of living organisms in EARTH'S atmosphere is
The altitude anyway.
All good
I don't know why we don't have balloons in the upper atmosphere of Venus, the pressure is similar to earth, temperatures are around 80f the gravity is similar to earth. The only thing needed is insulation from acidic clouds. In other words this environment seems much more permissive opposed to mars.
What is life?
Baby, don't hurt me.
😎
For me, life is a very long chemical reaction that withstood the injuries of time.
Complexity has nothing to do with life, complexity can rise in non-living things. That said, life became more and more complex over time.
Qualities which are offered by water for life are best than those in waiting.
Also learn Etc(electron transport chain).
Other element based lives will struggle huge while associating with non perfect element.
Depends on the pressure & temperature
This was good.
Shame that Titan fish are probably not likely, but nevermind.
"we call ourselves 'physche'."
I poop, therefore I am alive.
The entire planet could be a lifeform LIFE FORM
Water is necessary for life. The geometry of the water molecule is the only euclidean geometry that forms self similar fractal formation. This is why life is capable of forming endless shapes & function & Its the only thing that joins spirit & matter together. All life will use water
Please find someone to explore the liquid methane further. Seems like he /one can eliminate things (gas) /(silicon or we would have it here?). Return missions to Venus atmosphere are within our ability! Methane is Carbon based. What can we imagine or eliminate about it?
Dr. Angela Collier (acollierastro) has an in-depth video why aliens will not be silicon based.
Looking forward to the mission to send an airtight bubble containing the University of Cambridge on a grand tour of the solar system!
Should be easy enough.
48:55 ... sounds like a great candidate for a distributed computing network project using citizen scientists' computers. See also Prof. Venkata Mandala at MIT: Tiny Molecules, Big Impacts working with Folding@home. Also see A DISCUSSION OF RECENT FOLDING@HOME WORK ON AB INITIO NANOREACTOR where they used simulations to run Urey Miller experiments.
The assumption that a brick is not alive doesn't take into account that the brick could be hibernating. How would we recognize that any rocks or materials that we return to earth don't contain some unknown life form in a dormant state that perhaps becomes active only on the time scale of decades?
A Fluid more Acidic than Water, would require Elements which could survive the Fluid...
before i watch this. i cant imagine where it is going. water to me seems so 'goldilocks' the way it so handily has it's triple point near temps we like, the bonkers way its volume changes with temp, it's polarity; so all the chemical process we take for granted happen, the way it loves to stick to itself, 'till it doesn't. maybe, on account of me living in a water based world i think overly of water. but i kinda doubt it.
Based on how hard it is for us to replicate the life thing, I could jus imagine all the failed attempts that took off and never reproduced. These failures must outnumber success and be in record
"Life" - As in matter interacting complexly?
("Things that have membranes" ~biologists)
Life is a self-replicating process of keeping low entropy compared to its surrounding. In this sense even viruses are alive in the sense, that they temporary acquire ability to replicate using host cell's genetic machinery to create copies that keep entropy of the virus low.
Every process that has those characteristics of keeping its own entropy low and being able to replicate in time is an actual living thing.
Could, could, could. Santa could live on Venus and could be drinking tea with the flying spaghetti monster right now.
I'd like to see a debate about cheeses, between God and The Flyng Spaghetti Monster.
he looks like every Star Trek character at once
Of course life could exist in wildly different conditions but I think scientists have come to the conclusion that, most likely, it will look similar. Due to the physics that control the development as ALL LIFE.
Yeah, so star trek isn't a documentary lol
Yea, Galaxy Quest! Best "Star Trek" movie made.
Russia had quite the powerful interest with all of the probes sent in the past. Hats off for the good work the scientists performed
what about super critical CO2 on the surface of Venus?
Reflective cloud density more important.
If it’s so easy to use carbon why we don’t use it for our chips and not silicone?
Statistics. There are so many different ways to carbon could be put together and so hard to control, silicone puts itself together in much more limited number of ways so it's predictable and easier to engineer.
But there are fantasies of using carbon to make things like Moray patterns between layers of graphene , just changing the angles between the sheets slightly, make everything from an insulator to a superconductor with all kinds of metamaterial photonic crystals inbetween, and that's just from sheets of graphene,
Think of organic light-emitting diodes and transistors that operate on the molecular scale like the molecule for the dye perylene green!
Carbon does have so much more potential but because it could be put together in so many different ways but it's not like we can just use our hands to put the carbon atoms where we want , it's so much harder to engineer.
I think you mean *silcon* and not silicone.
@@douglaswilkinson5700 ha! Both of us, I shoulda cought that...
Unless you're doing a microfluidic chip🤷
@@petevenuti7355When I see little errors like that I usually don't comment. This time it seemed appropriate.
@@douglaswilkinson5700 no it's fine it's really, it's one that's too commonly made to not be noticed at this point... But you know if you keep hearing it, and you can correct 100 people and you keep hearing it, eventually you start saying it yourself.. you get so used to it you don't even notice...
Humans now have the ability to check for "errors" in the DNA of their offspring. If a group elect to correct any mutation from the parents' DNA (and can do so infallibly through rigorous methodology) do they cease to be alive?
Let's say we are on another planet out of the solar system looking back at earth, when would we be able to detect life? My guess would be after the industrial revolution
🌘🌟🌒
3:25 “Two arms, two eye, two legs”
Life on earth muddled along as slime for a couple of billion years until bilateral symmetry appeared. Looks to be some advantages for life to be as we do know it.
Was life better as slime, or is it better since then (bilateral symmetry genesis?) -in your opinion, which? May your opinion change in the event of, oh, let's say an impending doomsday asteroid collision approaches?
@@Bluebloods7 I would turn to Jesus and ask his forgiveness of course. On second thoughts I would find out the exact impact point on Earth and get there in time with a deck chair, box of cold beer and bag of weed. This way you get to enjoy the spectacle for a second before being vaporised
@@mitseraffej5812 lol
Lets just imagine that we found some kind of Lichens stuck to the side of rocks on Mars or Venus; it would be a big deal right? I mean we spent enormous time and money looking. So what happens then?
We can all see what humanity hoped to find by watching or reading any number of science fiction stories and yet reality is so far removed from that. Are we over reacting to the disappointment of not having a war with martians or friends like Mork?
2 eyes should be expected. When you are talking about evolution metabolism is one of the most important factors. What is the minimum needed to get the job done? For stereoscopic vision that is 2 photoreceptor organs separated by a distance. It is physics. 2 eyes is almost certainly common in the universe.
It is the most reasonable reason why our brains have been shrinking since the advent of cities. You simply don't need to spend that much energy on thinking in order to reproduce.
I would define "life" as anything that is animated (capable of moving, growing, stretching out it leaves, etc. over time): in other words, it "utilizes energy" for grown or motion. And 2.) it's capable of reproducing (transferring information to a new generation), even if it fails to adapt, evolve, and subsequently becomes extinct when the conditions of it's environment change.
Mules are alive.
Life = area of anti-entropy seems more useful.
Fire?
It's life Jim but not as we know it.... 😆
I guess we already know what he's "obsessed about" for now 😅
yep, even us ecologists hope we'll discover a weird life form in a sealed cave somewhere that's crystaline or something... a glass moss...tar-amoebas... sulphur-newts.. lol.
Life needs just the right amount of friction.
The viewers who ate an apple just before watching this: 🤔🤮🍎🙂 here ya go
Sulfuric acid as a solvent. Is this where xenomorphs come from?
Energy is life, the Sun is alive
Plank life.....virus bacteria cells atoms rocks its all life if it has a process whats plank life then the first things that could b a starting point and things defined as fundamentals
the obsession with not being able to cope with the absence of life in the solar system is taking on ridicolous shape
If Earth was around a red dwarf star, it might have had it's atmosphere blown off early on, but Earth still has volcanoes emitting various gases that would accumulate once the red dwarf star has settled down. So why would an earth-sized planet around an older red dwarf not form a new atmosphere at some point?
Atmospheres weigh a lot. It's not a small amount of material. We'd have to assume the magneticfield lasts that long to
@@rayparent1 Also the Earth's mantle may be recycling water, so if the atmosphere was lost early, there wouldn't be as much water being released by volcanoes today.
I believe in life predicated on
the sour cream donut.
"What are you obsessed about lately?" seems extreme to ask. How about, "What else are you excited about lately?"
Interesting people are obsessed by ideas. I want to know what's consuming their brain right now because it gives me a glimpse into what's coming next.
@@frasercainSpot-on!
aye! @@frasercain
Known Unknowns vs Unknown Unknowns anyone!?