2020 has sucked so far, but we’re about to (at least in the sciences) get one very, very bright spot. In a few hours, we are going to learn that we are all but certainly not alone in the universe. An observatory in Hawaii, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, has discovered high concentrations of phosphine in the atmosphere in Venus at the level of clouds where the temperatures are in the habitable range. Phosphine is an explosive gas discovered in lab experiments 300 years ago by heating phosphorous in a potash solution.
No known naturally occurring inorganic process can produce this material: in nature, only the decay of living things - and ONLY the decay of living things can produce it, as natural environments otherwise don’t have reducing agents strong enough to convert phosphates to phosphine.
Venus probably has life. In this case, that is the Occam’s razor explanation for what has been found. The inorganic explanations are the far fetched ones, in this case.
We’ve known since 1978 that Venus likely once had oceans (the topography seems to suggest it) and computer modelling of the early solar system and Venus’ slow spin and cloud layers suggest it may once have been even cooler than Earth. At the boundary of the mesosphere and thermosphere, on the dayside, temperatures are typically in the life supporting range.
Monday, Sep 14, 2020 · 2:56:20 PM +00:00
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Bobs Telecaster
One of the humorous anecdotes of the history of “life on Venus”: In the 1970s, Russia sent landers to Venus, and one of them, Venera 13, actually took pictures. Leonid Ksanfomaliti, of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claimed that he saw “scorpions” in the photos that came back. The engineers retorted that was just the lens cap, popped off the camera.
Monday, Sep 14, 2020 · 3:43:38 PM +00:00
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Bobs Telecaster
Lead author Jane Greeves modelled every other known inorganic phenomena — atmospheric turbulence, delivery of materials by bolide strike, lightning — anything that could provide the energy boost needed to make Phosphine. “And we found that you were 10,000 times short of the phosphine you’d need if you made any new reasonable assumptions for these sources.”