by ne0357 » Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:28 am
After years of studying chemistry, the first time I read of sulfuric acid’s volatility was from a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”:
Place in a platina crucible over a spirit lamp, and keep it a red heat; pour in some sulphuric acid, which though the most volatile of bodies at a common temperature, will be found to become completely fixed in a hot crucible, and not a drop evaporates—being surrounded by an atmosphere of its own, and does not, in fact, touch the side. A few drops of water are now introduced, when the acid, immediately coming in contact with the heated sides of the crucible, flies off in sulphurous acid vapor, and so rapid is its progress, that the caloric of the water passes off with it, which falls a lump of ice to the bottom; by taking advantage of the moment before it is allowed to re-melt, it may be turned out a lump of ice from a red-hot vessel.
All of this got me thinking. Have astrobiologists considered the possibility of sulfur-based or sulfuric acid based life on Venus? There are obviously rich complex energy cycles involving SO2, SO3, water and sulfuric acid. The idea of an organism ingesting water and expiring sulfuric acid might be a direct analogy to us inhaling O2 and exhaling CO2. Complex sulfur chemistry is not particularly well studied on this planet, and sulfur compounds as we understand them can’t hold ‘chemical information’ the same way carbon compounds can, so it’s really hard to dream up what it might look like. Hard to even guess what you’d look for…
After years of studying chemistry, the first time I read of sulfuric acid’s volatility was from a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”:
[size=75]Place in a platina crucible over a spirit lamp, and keep it a red heat; pour in some sulphuric acid, which though the most volatile of bodies at a common temperature, will be found to become completely fixed in a hot crucible, and not a drop evaporates—being surrounded by an atmosphere of its own, and does not, in fact, touch the side. A few drops of water are now introduced, when the acid, immediately coming in contact with the heated sides of the crucible, flies off in sulphurous acid vapor, and so rapid is its progress, that the caloric of the water passes off with it, which falls a lump of ice to the bottom; by taking advantage of the moment before it is allowed to re-melt, it may be turned out a lump of ice from a red-hot vessel.[/size]
All of this got me thinking. Have astrobiologists considered the possibility of sulfur-based or sulfuric acid based life on Venus? There are obviously rich complex energy cycles involving SO2, SO3, water and sulfuric acid. The idea of an organism ingesting water and expiring sulfuric acid might be a direct analogy to us inhaling O2 and exhaling CO2. Complex sulfur chemistry is not particularly well studied on this planet, and sulfur compounds as we understand them can’t hold ‘chemical information’ the same way carbon compounds can, so it’s really hard to dream up what it might look like. Hard to even guess what you’d look for…