Flying in sulfuric acid. Is life on Venus - and yes, then yak?
Just the other day, news feeds were almost a sensation - phosphine gas was discovered on Venus, which may indicate the presence of living organisms! For a person far from astrobiology, this news may cause confusion, because at first glance Venus does not seem to be a promising candidate for the role of an inhabited planet. Surface temperatures approaching 500 degrees, pressures 90 times that of Earth, and an almost complete absence of water make life anything like Earth's impossible. However, the ideas of scientists about Venusian life have long been reminiscent of a swing: Venus was sometimes called a world capable of supporting the global biosphere, or a living hell. The same thing happened with Mars, only Venus moved along this path more slowly: it was much more difficult to explore it. It is possible that the recent discovery is just the tip of the iceberg, and ahead is the most extraordinary mission in history to search for extraterrestrial life.
From heaven to hell in 10 years
One of the most important methodological principles in astronomy is the Copernican Principle. It can be most fully formulated as follows: the Earth is an ordinary, unremarkable planet of the solar system, the sun is a typical star of the Milky Way, etc. Now we imagine how complex and individual celestial bodies really are, but before the development of modern astronomy and cosmonautics the application of the Principle to the interpretation of observations has been fairly consistent. Working, "zero" hypothesis of astronomers of the XVIII-XIX centuries. was that life and, most likely, the mind is on all the planets of the solar system. The uniqueness of Venus lies in the fact that its perception as a truly earth-like world lasted longer than all other planets. As you know, our neighbor is covered with a continuous cloudy layer that prevents us from seeing the surface, and therefore refuting the null hypothesis of the existence of life.
This continued until the first observations of Venus's own radio emission began in 1956. Radiation came from the planet, indicating a high temperature. But where exactly? A short-lived but bitter struggle began between optimists, who believed it to be the source of the ionosphere, and pessimists, who believed that the surface was hot. The latter hypothesis was most elaborated by the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan, who based his theory on an atmosphere consisting almost entirely of carbon dioxide with a minimum admixture of water and subject to the supergreenhouse effect. But the initial optimism did not give up. Only after the first successful flight of the AMS to the Morning Star - it turned out to be Venera 4 in 1967.
It would seem that the question of the Venusian life was closed. Already in our time, the Soviet-Russian planetary scientist L.V. Ksanfomality, one of the architects of the Venus series missions, re-viewed the surface panoramas taken by the Venera-9, -10, -13, -14 stations. On them, he saw objects, in his opinion, similar to plants and animals, some of them allegedly even moved around the area. The international community of astrobiologists reacted very coolly to the "revitalization" of the details of the images, which was expected - in the case of Mars, the purely morphological approach failed too many times, and even in the era of Mars rovers, all kinds of "lizards" and "insects" on Martian images were not found only by the lazy. Alas (and this is a sincere "alas!"), They all turned out to be either geology or pareidolia.
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