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| Sunday, 13 June 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Is Venus hell? Notes from the universe by Gamini Dissanayake in Toronto On June 7/8 (depending where you were looking from) was the rare astronomical phenomenon, the transit of Venus. [For astrologers any planet is in transit when it moves from one sign to another or, a planet's passage through the zodiac]. The Transit of Venus occurs when the orbits of Venus, Earth and the Sun put them into alignment along the same plane. A Retrograde [the apparent backward motion of planet] Venus's subtle crossing of the Sun has occurred for thousands of years but it was first reported in the West in 1639. Since that year it was visible again in 1761, 1769, 1874 and 1882. The next one would be around June 6, 2012. After that more than a century will pass before the next transits in 2117 and 2125. We see a predictable pattern of two occurring in an eight-year period, followed by 105 1/2 years later and another eight years after that. After an additional 121 1/2 years, the pattern repeats. The paired eight-year sightings occur because a Venusian year equals 224.7 Earth days, making 13 Venusian years equal to eight Earth years. The 1882 transit inspired an international effort to use the event to answer the most pressing scientific question of the day: What is the exact distance between the Sun and Earth? By bouncing radar signals off the Sun and Venus and using spacecraft measurements, scientists in the 1960s calculated that the average Sun-to-Earth distance is 92,955,859 miles or 149,597,954 kilometres- a measure called the astronomical unit. For centuries, scientists had realized that if they could determine that number, they could use the formulas of the 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler to calculate the size of the solar system and the exact distances between the planets. And using the transits of Venus to calculate the astronomical unit was the best way to do it. The surface temperature of Venus is 400 Celsius and most of the landscape is covered with lava. Never rains, but eternally overcast and the clouds are made of sulphuric acid. Recently, the Washington Post reported U.S. planetary scientist David Grinspoon saying "Fire and brimstone: Venus is hell" Hollow Apology Dr. Grinspoon is a leading advocate for the thesis that Venus' battery-acid clouds might very well support microbial life -like the 'extremophile' earth micro-organisms that thrive near volcano outflows. Scientists generally accept that Venus had large, warm liquid water oceans for at least several hundred million years. At some point, however, the oceans heated up and eventually boiled away. Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, geobiologist of University of Texas at El Paso says if micro-organisms were present they would have begun migrating to the clouds at this stage. Grinspoon's view is that probably the clouds were not so acidic at first. It would have been a gradual transition, the kind life handles best. But astrobiologist Chris McKay of NASA argues that both Grinspoon and Schulze-Makuch have made the mistake of "basing their speculations on the properties of individual organisms." Instead, he says "you need a community of organisms-because individual organisms cannot live in isolation." "Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge" That was a line from the New York Times' editorial of May 26 when the paper publicly acknowledged errors in its reporting on Iraq. The confession looked less an apology and more an attempt to cover journalistic humiliation. Commenting on it Dr Megan Boler, an associate professor in Theory and Policy Studies at University of Toronto, to the Toronto Star recently, "While one wants to celebrate the historically momentous occasion of the "newspaper of record" admitting its lack of rigour and careful scrutiny of sources, for many this 'apology' feels empty and hollow. Too little. Too late. Too many people dead. Too many hungry. "Too many orphans and too many mass graves. Too much ink wasted and airtime purchased to ensure the Bush administration's horrific and never justified invasion of Iraq... "For those of us who have questioned the coverage all along, who are part of that unpatriotic 'minority' who questioned the invasion of Iraq and even Afghanistan, who read international and independent news, we are left with the haunting sense of living in a twilight zone..." "The New York Times and dozens of other media under-reported the millions of anti-war protesters in the U.S. and internationally who took to the streets month after month to oppose this invasion. In fact NPR (National Public Radio ) and NY Times corrected their numbers on the count of war protesters in 2002. Meanwhile, they did correctly report President George Bush stating that he doesn't attend to these protesters because that would be like basing "public policy on a focus group". "Where is the wool coming from, and exactly whose eyes is it being pulled over? To blame reporters for poor reporting is misleading. More important is to identify the less visible editorial and production-and even stockholders'-influence on when, how and what gets reported. "What really tipped the balance, and will we ever know? How can one not suspect that the prison abuse scandal, the call for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired, and Bush's plummeting public favour aren't reason for the Times to jockey into a new political liaison? "What goes on behind the media's closed doors, where the media is embed with the highest military officials, which newspapers are in whose pockets-these stories apparently not 'sensational' enough for our public eyes to see. |
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