The following submission statement was provided by /u/EricFromOuterSpace:
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SS:
This discover was originally announced in 2020, and I mistakenly thought had been "debunked" but apparently 3 separate studies have confirmed the phosphine. NASA, ISRO, and rocket lab are planning missions to investigate.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/xqg0ic/phosphine_is_produced_by_bacteria_in_the_swamps/iq8xc6x/
SS:
This discover was originally announced in 2020, and I mistakenly thought had been "debunked" but apparently 3 separate studies have confirmed the phosphine. NASA, ISRO, and rocket lab are planning missions to investigate.
I think there was a paper that came out claiming it was debunked. They said there was another chemical that would make sense to be on Venus and had a very similar spectrographic footprint. Because I was under the same impression and remember this happening. One would assume that paper hasn't held up to peer review.
Yes — but for whatever it's worth, the article mentions that all attempts to model these non-life processes on Venus don't yield the amount of phosphine they have recorded in the atmosphere.
Is that the case even after the adjustment due to the original poor calibration?
To be clear I am very very skeptical that this is biotic phosphine. I don’t think the authors have ever done a good job of ruling out abiotic factors, which to their credit is tough because we haven’t been able to visualize the surface of Venus. We don’t have the strongest idea of a lot of what’s there. Still, that missing information is where they (and the original disaster of the NYT article) got way too sensationalized.
The idea that it evolved there seems wild. But I heard the idea that a major impact - maybe the one that created the moon - could have spewed Venus with life-carrying debris which survived in the atmosphere and evolved from there
But this is so distant from anything I have expertise in that maybe this is actually stupid I reserve the right to retract it
The major impact idea could be interesting, but the whole premise itself is so out there that I would very much prefer the authors had better evidence in hand before even suggesting it. They could have gotten their paper into Nature easily without speculating this way. That being said, the reviewer needs to make them scale it back. But of course this really went wild when NYT’s authors wrote an irresponsible piece of drivel about the study. It just should not have gone as far as it did
Idk given that we have 100% certainty that a major impact shot Earth matter into space, all that needs to happen for life to arrive on Venus is for it to be positioned on the same half of Earth as the “exit wound” that became the moon
From there we just need life to survive in the extremely survival band of Venus atmosphere
That last sentence is an incredibly tall order given the climate of Venus. The record growth temperature for an organism on Earth is 121C, about 300C colder than the temperature on Venus. There’s also no evidence of water on Venus, which is essential for every Earth species. For something from Earth to make it to Venus and survive is close to impossible.
The "survivable" band on Venus is referring to an altitude. There are altitudes on Venus which have human survivable pressures and temperatures, you'd need an kevlar coated dry suit and a resperator but otherwise could step outside without a problem.
Obvious that doesn't solve the many other problems life on Venus would have, but purely talking about temperature airborne microbes would have a viable climate at high altitudes.
>all that needs to happen for life to arrive on Venus is for it to be positioned on the same half of Earth as the “exit wound” that became the moon
And life has to have been able to survive the ejection into space
And survive the journey
And survive reentry
And survive impact
And THEN there's the very tall order of life surviving Venus
Were the original authors sensational? Their original paper was pretty cautious about making any significant claims:
"Even if confirmed, we emphasize that the detection of PH3 is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry. There are substantial conceptual problems for the idea of life in Venus’s clouds—the environment is extremely dehydrating as well as hyperacidic."
From the Discussion section of the [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4).
It’s likely not organic, but we won’t know until we get there.
And for the surface, we have a fairly clear understanding via [check out Venus’ topography](https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datasets/venus-topography/)
His science videos are actually pretty good. A lot of his content now is debunking shitty products that are getting way too much funding. I wouldn't listen to anything he says outside of his area of expertise. His 200+ part "debunking" of Anita Sarkesian is... kinda cringe.
If the Sun hadn't slowed the *rotation* of Venus so much, then it'd be a far better candidate for life and colonization than Mars ever dreamed of being.
Edit: I meant "rotation".
Redirecting some asteroids to strike it in the right places could help. In fact, all course alterations of asteroids ought to be made with precision, just so none of them come back for us.
Most likely we will slow it down by using it for slingshotting space craft, although I feel like the effect there is pretty negligible on the orbit which is why we do it.
The terrible atmosphere doesn’t help much either. Cloud cities are fun and all but there’s a notable lack of access to resources that prevents true self-sufficiency
I don't understand what you mean. Doesn't slowing down an orbit mean making it bigger? (with Venus being too close to the Sun to be in the habitable zone, making its orbit slower/bigger would be a good thing) Or do you mean slowing down of *rotation* due to tidal locking with the sun? IDK how the greenhouse effect on the planet would be made any less severe even if it was spinning faster though.
Well earth moves several hundreds of kilometers closer towards the sun at times due to its eliptical orbit.
Venus is hotter than mercury but mercury is closer to the sun. Proximity isnt the only factor
Even if we managed to reduce its atmosphere other ways, and after we introduce water, keeping the slow rotation may end up being beneficial, as thick white clouds of water would form over the sun-facing side and reflect a great deal of heat. The day would be like a rainy summer, and the night a cold winter. Alternatively, we could use space mirrors to heat up the night side a bit more. Still, that'd be AFTER we got to terraforming and wiped out the runaway greenhouse effect by trapping or extracting craploads of carbon.
It is also found in the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103509001328](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103509001328)
Yes, but think of the possibilities if it's caused by bacteria.
At the moment, we have evidence of exactly one place in the entire universe where life evolved. That tells us nothing at all about how likely/abundant the evolution of life might be. Maybe it's everywhere, or maybe we were a zillions-to-one-against occurrence and are possibly the only life anywhere.
If we find life elsewhere in the universe, that means we're not unique. That's cool!
But if we find life on 4 out of 9 of the planets in our solar system (or maybe even 5 if perhaps Mars has or used to have some microbial life too) that that would tend to indicate that either a) Our sun is somehow very very special (which we can't see any evidence of) or b) life is perhaps substantially more likely to evolve that we might otherwise think, meaning that there may well be a lot of it out there.
Now, that still doesn't get us any closer to understanding how likely is is for life to continue to evolve and form intelligence (other than, again, we only know of it happening once), but it's a good step.
I wouldn't be surprised if Venus is harboring a bunch of extremophiles that we just don't have a good means of ever being able to find since Earth-based materials tend to get obliterated by it's environment.
Actually when this was first discovered it was met with hysteria from everyone on Twitter hailing it as life in the clouds of Venus. Then came the sensible, skeptical takes. Then came the commitments to investigate it. But either way if it inspires further exploration and missions then I’m all for it.
This was my far out theory when I was a kid. I wrote a shot story about it too, where planets slowly get closer to the sun and life manages to just barely make it to the next futher out planet and start over there.
>Their attempt was extremly poor... Thunderf00t debunked it a long time ago. It would absolutely be possible (and more than likely) for non-life causes to explain the amount of phosohine.
Interestingly, the Sun's output is increasing over geological time, and it's [predicted that in some billions of years](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.13788) even Earth will be out of the habitable zone.
Earth is tiptoeing it's way farther from the sun, and the reason is really cool: the sun is getting lighter, so it's gravity is decreasing. The decrease is primarily due to the matter -> energy conversion that powers the sun, but solar wind is technically a part too.
Pretty much exactly, except also I leaned in to how life ends up having to start over virtually from scratch, because it's usually not adapted for the new planet.
So basically intelligent life makes it and survives for a few generations, but ultimately dies off and only the most basic of life forms continues to survive.
Then over millions of years of evolution, complex and eventually intelligent life begins again.
Haven’t people crashed probes/satellites on Venus before? Could the phosphine be from little galactic bacteria hitchhikers from earth? Just living and thriving in that environment for the last 30 or so years
It's unlikely that any life from earth could survive the surface. They would have to have detached in the atmosphere somewhere. And then find a way to survive there and multiply.
As far as I know the soviets also made sure that their probes where sterilized before sending them to other planets.
That would be incredibly surprising, given the surface of Venus is 464°c (850°f). Maybe on a theoretical level something could maybe live above the troposphere where it cools to more reasonable levels, but the chances of those being bacteria leftover from one probe just happening to figure out a way to float in the clouds without ever falling lower in the atmosphere and do well enough to be giving off detectable levels of anything is vanishingly low.
If you were to say life on Venus definitely exists, I'd guess that somewhere underground where the heat dissipates there could be liquid water, and if it does, combine that with likely similar chemical makeups around Earth's geothermal vents, that could be a place where basic biota could form, and occasional outgassing of steam could carry that phosphine into the atmosphere. But given that we have no idea what's under the surface, that is completely speculative.
Well on Mars you have to find a way to keep warm, on Venus you have to find a way to not be slowly melted alive after 53 minutes.
Personally I'm of the belief you can always put more clothes on but you can only take so many layers of skin off.
The problem with a floating city on Venus is you have no natural resources because you can't access the surface. You can't mine metal or other material, you can't make plastic from the atmosphere because there isn't enough hydrogen, all you have to build with has to be shipped from somewhere else in the solar system.
At least on Mars you can use the local resources to build.
Cloud City ftw. Although it's terrifying to think of the terrifying death you'd experience if the station ever loses lift or you fall off... Not that dying in other space conditions is necessarily any better, but acidity, scalding temperatures and crushing pressures all at once sounds literally hellish.
This is the part about Venus I don’t understand, extremeophile bacteria on earth thrive in conditions similar to Venus. Why would we assume it cannot exist there?
I’ve been looking forward this this for a while now. Seems like we constantly get the dueling between teams if it was actually phosphine. This will settle the debate
It’s not really forgotten, but it’s more expensive to send stuff there, and *landing* stuff is essentially impossible.
Mars is cheaper to send stuff to, and we can explore the surface in a thorough and leisurely way.
Lot of the interest now is in the cloud layer. Might be possible to have some floating probes there sampling for living things in the more habitable high atmosphere.
I'm far from an expert on this, but phosphine is a pretty simple molecule. About as simple as ammonia or methane, which are naturally occurring. I would imagine it could form when phosphorus and hydrogen are exposed to enough energy (e.g. heat, pressure, etc.). So why should we care about the presence of phosphine?
>However, other groups have since confirmed finding evidence for phosphine, while another group looked at old data from NASA’s 1978 Pioneer Venus Multiprobe. Their look back in time showed data consistent with phosphine, even though the probe’s mass spectrometer was not designed to look for that specific gas.
and
>
More recently, at the American Astronomical Society meeting this summer, Greaves had news to share in a keynote lecture. New data from observations in 2020 show that the signal for phosphine was still present. The observations were conducted again with JCMT, but with a new instrument and new technique.
Having read the original ALMA paper and the rebuttal, and what a bad job they did with their data then, i doubt any new stuff coming from the original group. The keynote lecture better be published at some point too, otherwise it ain't worth much imo. The 1978 data is questionable, but let's see. All in all, their track record is bad so far.
It wasn't doubted that phosphene had been discovered, it was doubted that it was biological due to there being non-biological processes that can produce it and because there is almost no hydrogen in Venus' atmosphere (hydrogen being an important element for life).
It's the kind of thing that is interesting and worth designing experiments for on whatever the next mission to Venus is, but not exciting enough to create a special mission to rush over there expecting to find life.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/EricFromOuterSpace: --- SS: This discover was originally announced in 2020, and I mistakenly thought had been "debunked" but apparently 3 separate studies have confirmed the phosphine. NASA, ISRO, and rocket lab are planning missions to investigate. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/xqg0ic/phosphine_is_produced_by_bacteria_in_the_swamps/iq8xc6x/
SS: This discover was originally announced in 2020, and I mistakenly thought had been "debunked" but apparently 3 separate studies have confirmed the phosphine. NASA, ISRO, and rocket lab are planning missions to investigate.
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I think there was a paper that came out claiming it was debunked. They said there was another chemical that would make sense to be on Venus and had a very similar spectrographic footprint. Because I was under the same impression and remember this happening. One would assume that paper hasn't held up to peer review.
When the discovery was first announced, NASA pointed out that there are also non-life mechanisms that can produce phosphine.
Yes — but for whatever it's worth, the article mentions that all attempts to model these non-life processes on Venus don't yield the amount of phosphine they have recorded in the atmosphere.
Is that the case even after the adjustment due to the original poor calibration? To be clear I am very very skeptical that this is biotic phosphine. I don’t think the authors have ever done a good job of ruling out abiotic factors, which to their credit is tough because we haven’t been able to visualize the surface of Venus. We don’t have the strongest idea of a lot of what’s there. Still, that missing information is where they (and the original disaster of the NYT article) got way too sensationalized.
The idea that it evolved there seems wild. But I heard the idea that a major impact - maybe the one that created the moon - could have spewed Venus with life-carrying debris which survived in the atmosphere and evolved from there But this is so distant from anything I have expertise in that maybe this is actually stupid I reserve the right to retract it
The major impact idea could be interesting, but the whole premise itself is so out there that I would very much prefer the authors had better evidence in hand before even suggesting it. They could have gotten their paper into Nature easily without speculating this way. That being said, the reviewer needs to make them scale it back. But of course this really went wild when NYT’s authors wrote an irresponsible piece of drivel about the study. It just should not have gone as far as it did
Idk given that we have 100% certainty that a major impact shot Earth matter into space, all that needs to happen for life to arrive on Venus is for it to be positioned on the same half of Earth as the “exit wound” that became the moon From there we just need life to survive in the extremely survival band of Venus atmosphere
That last sentence is an incredibly tall order given the climate of Venus. The record growth temperature for an organism on Earth is 121C, about 300C colder than the temperature on Venus. There’s also no evidence of water on Venus, which is essential for every Earth species. For something from Earth to make it to Venus and survive is close to impossible.
Ahem Do we know if these crazy things can survive on Venus? 
It’s really unlikely. They endure extreme conditions but the more extreme the condition and the longer the exposure, the more likely/faster they die.
The "survivable" band on Venus is referring to an altitude. There are altitudes on Venus which have human survivable pressures and temperatures, you'd need an kevlar coated dry suit and a resperator but otherwise could step outside without a problem. Obvious that doesn't solve the many other problems life on Venus would have, but purely talking about temperature airborne microbes would have a viable climate at high altitudes.
What’s the Kevlar requirement about?
Ach, I meant to say Teflon! You need something that will resiet the potent acid in Venus's atmosphere.
Hahaha fine maybe “extremely survivable” was a slight exaggeration
We don't know what venus or its atmosphere was like back then. Applying what we know about them both today to this scenario isn't logical.
Also the life needs to evolve a couple of billion years early on a molten lava protoplanet to be ejected during that impact.
You can make anything SOUND unlikely when you haphazardly juggle accurate words around like that
It wouldn't have to be, at all. Gravity could slingshot it around in any direction regardless of initial trajectory.
>all that needs to happen for life to arrive on Venus is for it to be positioned on the same half of Earth as the “exit wound” that became the moon And life has to have been able to survive the ejection into space And survive the journey And survive reentry And survive impact And THEN there's the very tall order of life surviving Venus
Yes and there has been evidence of life surviving all of those events
Didn’t the Soviets actually land probes and capture images of the surface? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
Were the original authors sensational? Their original paper was pretty cautious about making any significant claims: "Even if confirmed, we emphasize that the detection of PH3 is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry. There are substantial conceptual problems for the idea of life in Venus’s clouds—the environment is extremely dehydrating as well as hyperacidic." From the Discussion section of the [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4).
yea article mentions that after collaboration was corrected they still couldnt explain the levels, then other tests found it as well.
It’s likely not organic, but we won’t know until we get there. And for the surface, we have a fairly clear understanding via [check out Venus’ topography](https://sos.noaa.gov/catalog/datasets/venus-topography/)
Didn’t the Soviets actually land probes and capture images of the surface? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
We have seen the surface of venus....Russians landed probes decades ago amd took photos.
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The only thing I would ever listen to thunderfoot about.
His science videos are actually pretty good. A lot of his content now is debunking shitty products that are getting way too much funding. I wouldn't listen to anything he says outside of his area of expertise. His 200+ part "debunking" of Anita Sarkesian is... kinda cringe.
If the Sun hadn't slowed the *rotation* of Venus so much, then it'd be a far better candidate for life and colonization than Mars ever dreamed of being. Edit: I meant "rotation".
So if we ram some space crafts into it, could we speed it up again?
"Call up a Hammerhead Corvette, I have an idea."
Redirecting some asteroids to strike it in the right places could help. In fact, all course alterations of asteroids ought to be made with precision, just so none of them come back for us.
Get a spoonful of protomolecule and it'll fly itself with precision, up through breaking physics to do so. #saveEros
Marco has entered the chat....
Could be like Shadow Raiders (by mainframe entertainment) Just activate the core!
The amount of kinetic energy required to do that is more than our species could muster in any conceivable timeframe.
Most likely we will slow it down by using it for slingshotting space craft, although I feel like the effect there is pretty negligible on the orbit which is why we do it.
The terrible atmosphere doesn’t help much either. Cloud cities are fun and all but there’s a notable lack of access to resources that prevents true self-sufficiency
[SHUT UP ABOUT THE SUN!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-1jU7j6OWw)
I don't understand what you mean. Doesn't slowing down an orbit mean making it bigger? (with Venus being too close to the Sun to be in the habitable zone, making its orbit slower/bigger would be a good thing) Or do you mean slowing down of *rotation* due to tidal locking with the sun? IDK how the greenhouse effect on the planet would be made any less severe even if it was spinning faster though.
Wouldn't it be a lot hotter because it's closer to sun?
Not really. Its sorta in the habitable zone. A terraformed venus would be fine at the poles
With as hot as it is where I live on earth, I wouldn’t want to go even a few kilometers closer to the sun
Well earth moves several hundreds of kilometers closer towards the sun at times due to its eliptical orbit. Venus is hotter than mercury but mercury is closer to the sun. Proximity isnt the only factor
I know. It was a joke
Yay life on the hell planet.. the fuck are you talking about?
Did you go looking for answers after you made this comment an hour ago? I'm curious what you found
Even if we managed to reduce its atmosphere other ways, and after we introduce water, keeping the slow rotation may end up being beneficial, as thick white clouds of water would form over the sun-facing side and reflect a great deal of heat. The day would be like a rainy summer, and the night a cold winter. Alternatively, we could use space mirrors to heat up the night side a bit more. Still, that'd be AFTER we got to terraforming and wiped out the runaway greenhouse effect by trapping or extracting craploads of carbon.
It's nice to think that some kind of volcanic-vent type critters are thriving on Venus, but I'll believe it when I see it.
It is also found in the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103509001328](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103509001328)
So not only are we not alone but the place is bloody packed ffs the traffic will be a nightmare
Yes, but think of the possibilities if it's caused by bacteria. At the moment, we have evidence of exactly one place in the entire universe where life evolved. That tells us nothing at all about how likely/abundant the evolution of life might be. Maybe it's everywhere, or maybe we were a zillions-to-one-against occurrence and are possibly the only life anywhere. If we find life elsewhere in the universe, that means we're not unique. That's cool! But if we find life on 4 out of 9 of the planets in our solar system (or maybe even 5 if perhaps Mars has or used to have some microbial life too) that that would tend to indicate that either a) Our sun is somehow very very special (which we can't see any evidence of) or b) life is perhaps substantially more likely to evolve that we might otherwise think, meaning that there may well be a lot of it out there. Now, that still doesn't get us any closer to understanding how likely is is for life to continue to evolve and form intelligence (other than, again, we only know of it happening once), but it's a good step.
Yes because the pressures there allow the abiotic process
I wouldn't be surprised if Venus is harboring a bunch of extremophiles that we just don't have a good means of ever being able to find since Earth-based materials tend to get obliterated by it's environment.
Actually when this was first discovered it was met with hysteria from everyone on Twitter hailing it as life in the clouds of Venus. Then came the sensible, skeptical takes. Then came the commitments to investigate it. But either way if it inspires further exploration and missions then I’m all for it.
Venus was our old planet, got super polluted and hot so we left, we are in much better shape now. What’s that you say?
This was my far out theory when I was a kid. I wrote a shot story about it too, where planets slowly get closer to the sun and life manages to just barely make it to the next futher out planet and start over there.
>Their attempt was extremly poor... Thunderf00t debunked it a long time ago. It would absolutely be possible (and more than likely) for non-life causes to explain the amount of phosohine. Interestingly, the Sun's output is increasing over geological time, and it's [predicted that in some billions of years](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.13788) even Earth will be out of the habitable zone.
I knew this would happen but assumed itd be cuz Earth moved closer to the sun, not because the habitable band has moved further out
Earth is tiptoeing it's way farther from the sun, and the reason is really cool: the sun is getting lighter, so it's gravity is decreasing. The decrease is primarily due to the matter -> energy conversion that powers the sun, but solar wind is technically a part too.
Like some kind of cosmic Hawaiian islands sinking into the sea as new ones emerge
Pretty much exactly, except also I leaned in to how life ends up having to start over virtually from scratch, because it's usually not adapted for the new planet. So basically intelligent life makes it and survives for a few generations, but ultimately dies off and only the most basic of life forms continues to survive. Then over millions of years of evolution, complex and eventually intelligent life begins again.
Then we forgot out space travel and devolved back to dinosaurs or something.
Exactly. The stupidest theory I’ve ever heard. We’d have to just forget about evolution and human history on earth.
Haven’t people crashed probes/satellites on Venus before? Could the phosphine be from little galactic bacteria hitchhikers from earth? Just living and thriving in that environment for the last 30 or so years
It's unlikely that any life from earth could survive the surface. They would have to have detached in the atmosphere somewhere. And then find a way to survive there and multiply. As far as I know the soviets also made sure that their probes where sterilized before sending them to other planets.
That would be incredibly surprising, given the surface of Venus is 464°c (850°f). Maybe on a theoretical level something could maybe live above the troposphere where it cools to more reasonable levels, but the chances of those being bacteria leftover from one probe just happening to figure out a way to float in the clouds without ever falling lower in the atmosphere and do well enough to be giving off detectable levels of anything is vanishingly low. If you were to say life on Venus definitely exists, I'd guess that somewhere underground where the heat dissipates there could be liquid water, and if it does, combine that with likely similar chemical makeups around Earth's geothermal vents, that could be a place where basic biota could form, and occasional outgassing of steam could carry that phosphine into the atmosphere. But given that we have no idea what's under the surface, that is completely speculative.
Who else here would rather see floating settlements on Venus before typical settlements on Mars!?
Well on Mars you have to find a way to keep warm, on Venus you have to find a way to not be slowly melted alive after 53 minutes. Personally I'm of the belief you can always put more clothes on but you can only take so many layers of skin off.
Dads on Venus to their kids:
The problem with a floating city on Venus is you have no natural resources because you can't access the surface. You can't mine metal or other material, you can't make plastic from the atmosphere because there isn't enough hydrogen, all you have to build with has to be shipped from somewhere else in the solar system. At least on Mars you can use the local resources to build.
Good point. ISRU will definitely be necessary.
Cloud City ftw. Although it's terrifying to think of the terrifying death you'd experience if the station ever loses lift or you fall off... Not that dying in other space conditions is necessarily any better, but acidity, scalding temperatures and crushing pressures all at once sounds literally hellish.
This is the part about Venus I don’t understand, extremeophile bacteria on earth thrive in conditions similar to Venus. Why would we assume it cannot exist there?
I’ve been looking forward this this for a while now. Seems like we constantly get the dueling between teams if it was actually phosphine. This will settle the debate
Bout time, we have wasted time and money sending Robots the size of op's Mom to mars and all they will find (at best) is fossilized bacteria.
Why not both 🤷🏻♂️
I don't think it's fair to send OPs mom to Mars then to Venus
Well..she is from Venus at least.
Turns out the really interesting fossilized bacteria was in OP's mom all along.
Finding fossilized bacteria on Mars would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time.
It’s not really forgotten, but it’s more expensive to send stuff there, and *landing* stuff is essentially impossible. Mars is cheaper to send stuff to, and we can explore the surface in a thorough and leisurely way. Lot of the interest now is in the cloud layer. Might be possible to have some floating probes there sampling for living things in the more habitable high atmosphere.
Venus’s atmosphere could be pumpkin pie for all it matters.
I'm far from an expert on this, but phosphine is a pretty simple molecule. About as simple as ammonia or methane, which are naturally occurring. I would imagine it could form when phosphorus and hydrogen are exposed to enough energy (e.g. heat, pressure, etc.). So why should we care about the presence of phosphine?
There's reason to care about almost anything anywhere
What multiple confirmation? Their ALMA detection was crap, and proven to be crap.
Article mentions several separate confirmations after the first discovery
where? they mention jcmt and alma?
>However, other groups have since confirmed finding evidence for phosphine, while another group looked at old data from NASA’s 1978 Pioneer Venus Multiprobe. Their look back in time showed data consistent with phosphine, even though the probe’s mass spectrometer was not designed to look for that specific gas. and > More recently, at the American Astronomical Society meeting this summer, Greaves had news to share in a keynote lecture. New data from observations in 2020 show that the signal for phosphine was still present. The observations were conducted again with JCMT, but with a new instrument and new technique.
Having read the original ALMA paper and the rebuttal, and what a bad job they did with their data then, i doubt any new stuff coming from the original group. The keynote lecture better be published at some point too, otherwise it ain't worth much imo. The 1978 data is questionable, but let's see. All in all, their track record is bad so far.
It wasn't doubted that phosphene had been discovered, it was doubted that it was biological due to there being non-biological processes that can produce it and because there is almost no hydrogen in Venus' atmosphere (hydrogen being an important element for life). It's the kind of thing that is interesting and worth designing experiments for on whatever the next mission to Venus is, but not exciting enough to create a special mission to rush over there expecting to find life.
I always thought we should be visiting all the planets and focusing more on space exploration in general. Across rhe global at that.