Holy shit, life on Venus? well, in the atmosphere ..
Here's a few links to the interested
BBC, Sky news, Ananaova, Google News
There has been talk on Slashdot about the theory that it (Venus) might have been contaminated by bacterium from our planet. Yea, yea that almost sounds plausable until you think about the conditions that the probe travelled through to get there.
Remember, it's not like it was in a hermetically sealed environment and then a couple of guys in those scary suits from ET opened up the container, dumped the container out and then got in their Econoline van and drove back to Earth. This probe was shot on the top of a rocket through however many miles of space and radiation, and THEN into the atmosphere where it was heated up mightly by friction braking until it got the altitude for the scientists experiments.
I know that many of you are going to protest 'But what about those microbes they found on the meteorites in Antarctica?'. And in your question lies the answer INSIDE A ROCK , not inside a flimsy tin can made by a couple of $10/hr graduate students.
I think anything that might have been on the probe when it took off, and anything that might have survived the travel probably hasnt had enough time to create the amount of gasses that they are talking about. Unless of course it created those gasses inside the intestinal tract of some other microbe that had it for lunch.
Dave ...
