Что на самом деле увидели на Венере советские аппараты? Feat. Евгений Щербаков

Summary

The video examines Leonid Ksanfomaliti’s claim that Soviet Venera landers photographed macroscopic life on Venus. It reviews Venus’s surface conditions, considers whether life could theoretically function there, and evaluates the images and processing methods behind the claim.

Venus and its surface

• Venus’s surface is extremely hostile: temperatures exceed about 307°C across the planet and reach roughly 460°C at some landing sites. Surface pressure is at least about 45 Earth atmospheres. There is virtually no precipitation or meaningful daily or seasonal variation.
• One hypothesis for Venus’s transformation is catastrophic resurfacing: extensive volcanic eruptions buried much of the earlier terrain and released greenhouse gases. Climate models suggest this may have happened hundreds of millions of years ago—geologically recent enough to matter when considering the history of hypothetical life.
• The surface atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. Because Venus’s surface temperature and pressure exceed CO₂’s critical point, it exists there as a supercritical fluid, with properties between those of a liquid and a gas.

Ksanfomaliti’s claim and the Venera images

In 2012, astrophysicist Leonid Ksanfomaliti argued that Soviet Venera spacecraft had photographed Venusian plants and animals. He identified objects he called, among others, the “disc,” “black patch,” “owl,” “stalk,” “lizard,” and “scorpion.” In a later paper, he and colleagues catalogued more suspected organisms and suggested that new missions should test the hypothesis.

The video explains how the landers made their panoramas:

• Venera’s cameras did not use film or a conventional array of pixels. A moving mirror scanned the scene and directed light onto a single photodetector, building the image line by line.
• The resulting panoramas were low-resolution. The original data used 10-bit encoding, but early public images were reduced in quality; the original recordings were later digitized again.
• The video argues that access to the higher-quality images does not establish that the suspected shapes are organisms. It also criticizes Ksanfomaliti’s image-processing descriptions as insufficient for others to reproduce his results.

Could life use Venus’s supercritical CO₂?

The video considers whether life need not use water as its solvent.

• Supercritical CO₂ is used in industrial chemistry, including processes involving enzymes. It can dissolve some substances that do not dissolve well in water, and its properties can be adjusted by changing temperature and pressure.
• However, industrial enzyme activity in CO₂ does not show that a living cell could use it as its main solvent. Earth enzymes still require small amounts of water, and many biological processes depend on non-covalent interactions such as hydrogen bonds.
• Earth microbes have been found in a natural liquid-CO₂ lake in the Okinawa Trough. The community was relatively sparse in the lake itself, and CO₂ appeared to be an extreme environment for those organisms—not evidence of life using CO₂ as its internal solvent.
• Earth-like biology is also challenged by Venusian heat. High temperatures destabilize biomolecules and promote hydrolysis. The video gives examples of heat-resistant proteins and organisms, but notes that the survival limits of whole organisms are lower than the maximum temperatures at which some isolated molecules remain stable.
• Carbon-based life using a different, heat-resistant biochemistry is not ruled out in principle, but the proposed polymers would need to perform the complex roles of proteins and genetic material. The video says these possibilities remain speculative.

Other proposed forms of biochemistry

• Silicon-based life: Silicon can form polymers, but its chemistry is less versatile than carbon’s in important ways. Many organosilicon compounds are vulnerable to oxygen and high temperatures, and reactions with oxygen tend to produce silica. The video presents silicon life as highly implausible, particularly on Venus.
• Boron- and sulfur-based life: The video describes major chemical limitations for these alternatives, including boron’s scarcity and heat sensitivity, and the limited range of polymers formed by sulfur.
• Nitrogen–hydrogen compounds: High-pressure research has predicted a wide variety of such compounds, but the pressures needed are far greater than those found at Venus’s surface. Their potential relevance to biochemistry is unknown.

The video’s overall assessment is that the proposed Venusian organisms would require a plausible solvent, chemistry, origin, and evolutionary history—not simply a resemblance to familiar life forms. The authors find the hypothesis of plants and animals on the present-day surface extremely implausible.

How the claimed organisms are assessed

The video compares the suspicious shapes with the original panoramas and offers non-biological explanations:

• The “owl” resembles a grouping of rocks, including volcanic breccia and fragments of basalt.
• The “stalk” appears to consist of separate cracks or features on rocks, rather than a plant.
• The apparent changes in the “lizard” occur alongside changes in other terrain details and may reflect transmission, digitization, or differences between filters.
• The “black patch” around a soil-measuring device may be an image or transmission artifact.
• The “scorpion” appears in a noisy frame. Similar noise occurs around bright edges, stones, and in images from Venera 14, which the video argues explains its appearance better than a living animal.

A key problem is pareidolia: the brain’s tendency to perceive familiar forms in ambiguous patterns. The video also warns that sharpening, contrast enhancement, and other image processing can make noise and artifacts look like fine detail. It compares this risk with disputed interpretations of telescopic images of Mercury and with earlier claims of “nanobacteria” in a Martian meteorite: structures that looked biological were later understood as non-living mineral formations.

The video concludes that the Venera images do not provide convincing evidence of life. It argues that extraordinary claims require strong evidence and that new missions are still important for understanding Venus’s geology, climate history, and evolution.

Researchers and sources mentioned

Researchers and scientific contributors

• Leonid Vasilyevich Ksanfomaliti — proposed that Venera images showed Venusian life.
• Evgeny Shcherbakov — co-presenter and science commentator.
• Lev Zeleny, Valentin Parmon, and Valery Snytnikov — co-authors with Ksanfomaliti on a later paper discussing the suspected objects.
• Alexander Tikhonovich Basilevsky — geologist who criticized the interpretation of the “owl” object.
• Jan Špetkovski — co-author of a review on silicon-based chemistry; consulted about silicon chemistry in supercritical CO₂.
• Artem Oganov — led the group cited for theoretical work on nitrogen–hydrogen compounds.
• Charles Cockell — cited in a discussion of standards for astrobiological claims.
• Dmitry, from the DS Astro channel — discussed astronomical image processing and the interpretation of processed images.
• Valery Chudinov — referenced as an example of interpreting artifacts in highly processed images.

Publications and other sources mentioned

• Astronomical Bulletin — published Ksanfomaliti’s 2012 article and a critique of his interpretation.
• Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk (Physics–Uspekhi) — published a later paper by Ksanfomaliti and colleagues.
• Space Research — cited regarding the sequence of Venera panoramas.
• Astrobiology — cited for an article by Charles Cockell and colleagues.
• Live Science — cited for a review of silicon-based chemistry.
• The DS Astro and Joe Cheez channels — referenced in discussions of image processing and Valery Chudinov.