Search for Life
STUDIES & DOC
The Search For Life
By your servant, Dan L Baxley
Life on Venus? Wow! Oh, wait, how do we know this? We don't. Just because someone says so, does not mean it is so. Hey, people have been looking for life on other planets and now are searching for other Worlds for planets with the possibility of having life, and now, all of a sudden, it is announce that life has been found on Venus? What happened to Mars? Isn't Mars the planet of choice? Isn't it Mars that the NASA people are lusting to travel to? Let's all just calm down. I have provided a couple of quotes from more reasonable sources explaining what is really up with this latest announcement on today's news (?), this September 14, 2020 -- see below.
There was a very interesting Netflix series, called, Away, about a crew of 5 taking off from the Moon for a trip to Mars. The series has a lot of drama about things going wrong and how they fixed each life threating event. They covered a lot of things that would have to be solved, like water, food, clean air, and time -- time is against all of us, and a trip to Mars is just too far away, by today's technology -- 7 months, one way travel. For a one way trip, this crew of 5 would need nearly a 1,000 gallons of water to survive. The space station has a semi water system, where the waste product from the humans on board drink their own fluids -- after being processed, of course. But in reality, on a non-stop trip to either Mars (7 months) or Venus (5 months), with no supplies coming from earth, just how much or often do you suppose the body waste recycle could be used? You body does not produce liquid, it expells excess liquid, and that excess liquid, like pee, and sweat, comes from the water you drink. Sooner or later you dry up, if you do not have any resource other than your own body fluids. This means you would have to take water with you.
Reality Check
A trip t Mars would take nearly a 1,000 gallons of water, and that is only a one way trip. That would be around 4 tons in atted weight, and for a return trip, another 4 tons and we are not talking about the food requirements yet. But we are being told that Venus has signs of life.
By Mike Wall -- www.Space.comThe detection of a possible sign of life in Venus' clouds is just the beginning.On Monday (Sept. 14), researchers announced that they'd spotted the fingerprint of phosphine in Venus' atmosphere, at an altitude where temperatures and pressures are similar to those here on Earth at sea level.On our planet, phosphine is produced only by microbes and by human industrial activity, as far as we can tell. So, finding the gas on another world, in an environment that astrobiologists had already flagged as potentially habitable, is exciting news indeed. https://www.space.com/venus-phosphine-alien-life-breakthrough-initiatives-study.html
By Shannon Stirone, Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye
High in the toxic atmosphere of the planet Venus, astronomers on Earth have discovered signs of what might be life.If the discovery is confirmed by additional telescope observations and future space missions, it could turn the gaze of scientists toward one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Venus, named after the Roman goddess of beauty, roasts at temperatures of hundreds of degrees and is cloaked by clouds that contain droplets of corrosive sulfuric acid. Few have focused on the rocky planet as a habitat for something living.Instead, for decades, scientists have sought signs of life elsewhere, usually peering outward to Mars and more recently at Europa, Enceladus and other icy moons of the giant planets.The astronomers, who reported the finding on Monday in a pair of papers, have not collected specimens of Venusian microbes, nor have they snapped any pictures of them. But with powerful telescopes, they have detected a chemical — phosphine — in the thick Venus atmosphere. After much analysis, the scientists assert that something now alive is the only explanation for the chemical’s source.Some researchers question this hypothesis, and they suggest instead that the gas could result from unexplained atmospheric or geologic processes on a planet that remains mysterious. But the finding will also encourage some planetary scientists to ask whether humanity has overlooked a planet that may have once been more Earthlike than any other world in our solar system.“This is an astonishing and ‘out of the blue’ finding,” said Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the papers (one published in Nature Astronomy and another submitted to the journal Astrobiology). “It will definitely fuel more research into the possibilities for life in Venus’s atmosphere.”
There you have it. Common sense reality, not some day dream. I remember the Moon trip. I watched it on TV. Yes, I am that old, and I have witnessed the demise of the dial phone, to the pushbutton phone, both attached to a wall or sitting on a table connected by a wire, and now, mobile cell phones, and the advent of personal computers all brought about by miniaturization. There were those who said God would not ever let man set foot on the Moon. I remember that discussion and do not have to go to the history books to read about it. There was a real argument going on among many religious groups about going to the Moon. Personal belief is a strange things sometimes. A few of those scoffers, after the fact, you know, after Neal Armstrong stepped off onto the surface of the Moon, and continued to disbelieve, saying it was all faked. Even some decades later a documentry came out attempting to prove it was all fake, a Hollywood production, some said. To this very day there are some who still believe it never happened, after all, God would not allow it. And where does it say that in the Bible? It does not. Here is an interesting word, from the Word, though --