On Sat, 4 Aug 2018 21:37:11 -0700 (PDT), RichA
wrote:

On Friday, 3 August 2018 02:57:23 UTC-4, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 21:06:17 -0700 (PDT), RichA
wrote:

On Wednesday, 1 August 2018 19:59:37 UTC-4, Quadibloc wrote:
On Wednesday, August 1, 2018 at 5:19:31 PM UTC-6, RichA wrote:
Really, Venus may be 800 degrees on the surface, but Mars is just as dead.

If there's liquid water underground on Mars, we can't quite completely rule out
life on Mars any more. Of course, Mars has always been considered as a possible
home of life due to its superficial similarity to Earth - the gas giants, or
some of their satellites, _may_ be much better bets.

Venus is rather more certainly dead, thanks to being 800 degrees hot - and not
only is it less likely to already have life, it's also less useful to Earthly
life, specifically human beings. It might be possible to use Mars as a place to
live.

But is it possible Venus at some point was more hospitable to life than Mars ever was?

It is certainly possible. But that's not something we're likely to
determine from a surface probe.

I just want better pictures. Mars has been imaged to death.

And yet, new images continue to produce new discoveries. Not to
mention all the other instrumentation that doesn't get reported on so
much in the popular press, but which produce a steady stream of
papers.