Life on Venus?

See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2090556/Life-Venus-Russian-scientist-claims-seen-scorpion-probe-photographs.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

I hesitate to believe the “It’s OK, it’s just a lens-cap” story just like I hesitate when “experts” are wheeled out to tell me about “weather balloons”, “blokes with planks” and “flying truckloads of manure”. However if life has evolved on Venus then it can damn well evolve anywhere! Living on Venus is the equivalent of being in a bath of acid, 3000 feet beneath the sea, in a furnace. Planets cannot come much more hostile than Venus. If life can emerge there it can emerge anywhere! It makes one rethink the various new planets that scientists have discovered recently known as “hot Jupiters”, like HD-209458-b, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_209458_b ; could there be life on them even? Amazingly there are organisms on Earth that can live in extreme conditions quite similar to Venus, extremeophiles. These can anything from bacteria to crabs and fish that like hot underwater volcanoes.

Nevertheless I have taken precautions: I have downloaded every photo of the surface of Venus ever taken by the Venera probes, just in case somebody tries to “remaster” them so that these anomalies disappear.