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篇章阅读20：太空探索 If our solar system has a Hell. its Venus. The air is choked with foul and corrosive sulfur. heaved from ancient volcanoes and feeding acid clouds above. Although the second planet is a step farther from the sun than Mercury, a runaway greenhouse effect makes it hotter indeed. Its the hottest of the nine plants, a toasty 900 degrees Fahrenheit of baking rocky flats from equator to poles. All this under a crushing atmospheric pressure 90 times that of where youre sitting now. From the earthly perspective, a dead end. It must be lifeless. Venus has nothing, is the blunt word from planetologist Kevin Zahnle of NASA Ames Research Center in Californias Silicon Valley. Weve written it off. Yet a small group of advanced life-forms on Earth begs to differ. and theorizes that bizarre microbial ecosystems might have once populated Venus and. in fact. may be there still. Members of this loose band of researchers suggest that their colleagues have water too much on the brain, and are, in a sense, H2O chauvinists(盲目的爱国者). Astrobiologists are neglecting Venus due more io narrow thinking than actual knowledge of the environment, or environments. where life can thrive. says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a geobiologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who recently co-authored a Venus-boosting paper in Astrobiology wich colleague Louis Irwin. | 
