lajoswinkler

Most transition metals are like that. The fact is that vanadium is not an abundant element, and carbon is everywhere. Even if we count in the possibility of some kind of life around vanadium as its base (just for the sake of argument; vanadium can't form structures like carbon), the fact is that carbon will do it sooner just because it's vastly more abundant. In simple terms, the chances of life happening with carbon are enormous because of its atomic structure and abundance. Transition metals have their share in life. Their atoms are often complexed inside huge carbon molecules and act as crucial components for electron transfer. Maybe there's an alien civilization that has turned completely to synthetic mechanisms, or maybe they exist as software in some mainframe. Maybe their existence is carried by electrons, photons or some other particle. However, life itself will not emerge in the form of naturally occuring digital life because that's not how chemistry works. That would violate the most basic laws of particle behaviour. This is not a problem of life. It has an issue with physics and physical chemistry. Life requires metabolism with an open thermodynamical system, meaning it needs a border between its interior and environment. The border ensures that the interior can be different from the environment in the means of entropy and energy. All that billions of galaxies could do is to fly around in clusters, passing one through another, and by the time few "stirrs" happen, their stars are exhausted. That's chaos comparable with stirring soup with oil blobs on its surface. But you're thinking, and that's a good thing. Most people never even thought about these things.

ISS does not blink. It looks like a steady, strong point of light, moving quite slow.

Chinese lanterns are becoming increasingly popular. They don't have to be ornamented. The name just denotes a type of aircraft. People launch them all the time even without any particular reason. Yes, they can be really big. The bigger they are, the more hot air they can hold.

Hydrochloric acid is an aqueous solution of hydrogen chloride, so, yes. It is a solvent. At standard conditions of temperature and pressure, you can make it around 40%. At higher pressures and lower temperatures the percentage can go higher.

I'm almost 100% sure it was a Chinese lantern. They look exactly like that, and the color depends on the paper it's made of.

No. "Versatility" isn't what you're describing, and the bonds silicon forms are weaker than carbon's, so on fried Mercury surface it would not be possible. Also, you need a solvent for life. There are no solvents on Mercury surface. Additionally, it's bathed in intense solar wind and hard UV. There might be something beneath the surface near the poles, but chances are there isn't anything. Yeah... that has about the same amount of reality in it as the inner workings of a tooth fairy, so I don't feel there's the need to bust every single detail of it.

There are planes with only one blinking light. It might've been a jet fighter, who knows. Is that sarcasm?

Exactly. Total body in first degree burns. Beta rays are the most responsible rays for those burns, and they penetrate into our skin. We are to gamma rays more like ghosts, they shoot right through us and don't deliver as much energy as one would think. The pain would be severe, as it was with first responders. Few minutes more and the burns reach second degree, with necrosis, oedema, all leading to the detachment of it from deeper tissues. The skin gets darker and peels away. Epithelium lining of various cavities inside our bodies sheds, so you vomit your stomach lining (and the acid eats your stomach - painful!), and you poop your colon lining. Bloody tissue in your poop. Basically, it's a horrible mess that gets worse as your immune system starts failing. Beta is weird. It's best to stop soft beta rays with plastic or glass. Hard beta goes through it and is stopped by something like 1 cm of aluminium plate or a lead foil, but when it hits the metallic surface, it produces brehmstrahlung. Those electrons slow down and release x-rays, so you get bathed in that. The best thing is a dense, thick layer of plastic doped with heavy metals, and a lead foil beneath it, and that's exactly the stuff being worn by liquidators. (note the white fog on the film coming from the ground and leaving a shadow where film perforations are) You can't avoid gamma, but for the reasons mentioned in my reply to Seret, the danger can be avoided by limiting exposure and increasing the distance.

And why is that? What can possibly happen to titanium and stainless steel in hot carbon dioxide? You people do understand that there is no sulfuric acid on the surface, no water, only supercritical CO2 with a hint of nitrogen and traces of hydrogen halogenides? There are worse conditions in chemical reactors that produce sulfuric and nitric acid, and nothing happens to them.

No. Reactivity of chlorine is much more intensive than of oxygen when it's exposed to planetary rock and ices. It will quickly react with water and it will attack silicates, oxides, metals, just about anything that makes up planets. Oxygen would linger around probably for thousands of years or even more, before the crust absorbs it. Chlorine would probably be gone in less than a year, and I'm being generous here. Any lifeform capable of oxidizing chlorine could not be based on aqueous medium, and that extremely narrows the whole thing down to few ideas. Water is everywhere and if something is going to evolve from simple chemicals, it basically can not avoid it.

I don't see why it should deteriorate. The polymers inside are probably all carbonized by now. Structural alloys are fine.

Blink is a sharp on-off behaviour. Like a flashlight. On... off... That never happens with satellites because the Sun is not a point, but a disc, so the reflections on Earth aren't sharp. They just change their magnitude, faster or slower.

That's simply not true. The bottom atmosphere of Venus is not highly corrosive. It's supercritical CO2 with only traces of the nasty stuff. Surface passivization of alloys is the worst thing you could expect. And no, it's not true that you can't take photos there. Roskosmos is planning on Venera-D. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera-D

Ok, short term exposure scale. 300 Sv/h means you'll get 5 sieverts in one minute. Let's say you wander around that roof for one minute and then you're suddenly somewhere far away from it. Your acute dose - 5 Sv. That's approximately a LD50 dose and will lead to death of approx. 50% of subjects (medically taken care of) in the following month, so you have 50% chance of dying in the next 30 days. Acute effects? Yes, it will make you sick in the following minutes. You will vomit and get diarrhea, and your skin will get mild burns. Such dosage is not "useless against your body". It would incapacitate you quickly. It will kill most of your immune system, rendering you vulnerable to fungi, viruses and bacteria. Your total blood count would become severely disrupted later that day.

If it: - blinks with a regular period - the blinks are sharp, on-off - doesn't abruptly show up or dim in the sky then it's an airplane of some kind. Satellites do not blink on and off. They change their magnitude.

I don't want to sound bad (because you've made some great statements that have cleared things a lot; thank you for putting a cork into the mouths of people who like to troll on threads like this), but as someone supposedly with a biochemistry degree, you don't seem to understand the basics of geology which are heavily immersed into inorganic chemistry, and you should. You need to know these things. Chlorine can not form atmospheres. Period.

Roskosmos is planning a mission to the surface of Venus.

Given the frequent transfer windows and enough safety, yes, absolutely. Right away.

This one is very convenient. http://postimage.org/

The taste was due to the actual chemical substances being released. Small amounts of elemental iodine, salts of caesium, iodine, organoiodine compounds, etc. The aerosol would have a weird taste. Pins and needles, that was probably a combination of facial nerve dying and severe stress. It's not like their clothes were stopping the rays hitting them, so that only their faces were exposed.

I don't think you have a grasp of exponential function... Yes, 5 Sv/h is insanely high. It will make you sick very, very fast. Normal values at my place are around 0.2 μSv/h, meaning that 5 Sv/h is 25 million. Hundreds of Sv/h, specifically the quoted 300 Sv/h value, which was present on the roof near the crater, is only 60 times higher than that. The doses would be a higher right above the wreckage or if you sticked the detector in it, obviously.

I don't know how true are these readings, but here's a start. http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-levels It' is a known fact that today, the levels around the power plant are only several times above background levels, with exception of some spots and some organisms like fungi and moss which accumulate certain elements. "Inside #4 reactor" - what does that mean? The reactor is blown apart, it does not exist anymore. I suspect that the levels while standing on the UBS would be few Sv/h, and near the solidified lava in the basement they're probably tens of Sv/h or more. My counter goes to 5 Sv/h, which is insanely high and expected to occur near the blast zone of an atomic attack.

You should count it in. Whole life cycle is extremely important, otherwise we could be fooling ourselves with actually detrimental sources... like most of the PV industry is.

I wouldn't be upset if this didn't take the places on Greenlight for other developers of actual games and simulators that do something. I get it, it's funny, ha-ha, but after half a minute of chuckle, it fades away.

No, there will never be a clean energy source. Ever.