Is there life on Maaaaaaars! (er, Venus)

[Morrus]

That makes them pretty damned successful.

Not at Scrabble.

 

[Umbran]

The point being that "last man standing" isn't necessarily a measure of how successful a species is, either.

Sure. But then, I'm questioning the idea measuring how "successful" a species is. There's a value judgement in that. But their existence is really just the result/part of a natural process, right? So's a tropical storm. I suppose that means we should have discussions on which hurricane is more successful?

If you want to compare two species on some metric, that's fine. But just name the metric, rather than obfuscate it as "success". "Success" is a concept devised for humans to sort out their ridiculous social hierarchies.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I both hope there is life on Venus, and hope there isn't. If there is, that's cool. We get more things to study, like how they program their genes, how they're different from us, learn how they survive the heat. But, we definitely should be careful if we ever decide to bring back that stuff to Earth.

It would be kind of crazy if we discovered that Venus and Mars had life. That would suggest that some of the Earth-like exoplanets should have life on them.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

Phosphine, eh?

BAH - Ziggy Stardog

 

[Umbran]

It would be kind of crazy if we discovered that Venus and Mars had life. That would suggest that some of the Earth-like exoplanets should have life on them.

If they all have similar chemical bases, then no - trading rocks among out own planets is probably a simpler explanation, and does not imply it happened elsewhere.

 

[Moon_Goddess]

On the subject of successful species, if we're talking evolution it's clearly a binary value, All extant species are equally successful, all extinct species are equally unsuccessful. But then we get into to drawing fine lines between where does one species end and another start, (like Modern Man/Neanderthal)

Lets say we do find microbes in the clouds of Venus. (that's really not even that hard to design a probe to test) How different does this life need to be in order to rule out trading rocks.

 

[Lylandra]

Question is... does that level of phosphine require the microbes to be still existent today? Maybe they existed back in the days and Venus was a more habitable planet for microbial life in these times?

I mean, life on earth neraly extinguished itself when these cyano-algae started exhaling oxygen en masse...

 

[Janx]

Not at Scrabble.

There's the Turing Test for AI and now, we have the Morrus Test for assessing if a lifeform is capable of playing a decent game of Scrabble. Any lifeform that fails has been wasting its time.

 

[trappedslider]

There's the Turing Test for AI and now, we have the Morrus Test for assessing if a lifeform is capable of playing a decent game of Scrabble. Any lifeform that fails has been wasting its time.

I prefer the Calvin test:

Spoiler

 

[Umbran]

Question is... does that level of phosphine require the microbes to be still existent today? Maybe they existed back in the days and Venus was a more habitable planet for microbial life in these times?

I mean, life on earth neraly extinguished itself when these cyano-algae started exhaling oxygen en masse...

Phosphine burns/oxidizes really easily, so it won't stick around in the atmosphere for geologic timescales unless it is constantly produced somehow.

The same is true of oxygen, btw. Having an oxygen atmosphere is a sign of active chemical processes, because the gas will combine with other elements when they burn, and not get replaced.