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A comment on Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019). Parent comment

Re:Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019) by benlumen on Wednesday March 24, 2021 @05:53AM (#26565261)
Very good point. I'm in my 30s and it's even come a long way since I was a kid.

We didn't know until recently that there were planets orbiting other stars. We suspected that there might be, but we didn't know. The idea that there could be other "earth-like planets" was a hopeful guess.

When the headlines started coming in from Kepler, that was huge. Very exciting and huge.

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Re:Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019) by XorNot on Wednesday March 24, 2021 @10:00AM (#26567271)
The big news we're looking for from James Webb is the possibility of grabbing evidence of chlorophyll fringes in the IR spectra of other planets.

That is going to be huge news if we find it (I suspect we'll get a lot of other results first though and a ton of new interesting work looking for alternative photosynthetic chemistries).

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Re:Venus could have been habitable for billions of years (2019) by NortySpock on Wednesday March 24, 2021 @10:29AM (#26567680)
Wow, chlorophyll-equivalent detection? I though JWST was just going to be able to prove diatomic oxygen or other gas chemistries in atmospheres.

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/forScientists/faqScientist...

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