CHEKOV: I suppose it could be a particle of preanimate matter caught in the matrix.
Howdy, er, neighbor – mind if we join you? Potential sign of life spotted in Venus's atmosphere
Alien life may exist in the thick clouds in Venus’ atmosphere, scientists speculated in research published in Nature Astronomy on Monday. The team of astronomers say they discovered phosphine, a molecule made up of phosphorus and hydrogen atoms (PH3), floating around Earth’s closest neighboring planet. Phosphine is a flammable …
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Monday 14th September 2020 22:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Life
First, before the detection on Venus, other boffins had proposed phosphine as one of several biomarkers for life on distant exoplanets.
Second, the phosphine is localized. With the Chilean ALMA array (which is more sensitive than the Hawaiian telescope that made the first observation) they could narrow down the molecule’s signal to equatorial latitudes and an altitude between 32 and 37 miles, where temperatures and pressures aren’t too harsh for life as we know it. Based on the signal’s strength, the team calculated that phosphine’s abundance is roughly 20 parts per billion, or at least a thousand times more than we find on Earth.
Third, theories as to how a microbe could metabolize sulfur as an energy source already exist.
Absent an error in the data, Ockham's Razor suggests that life is the easiest explanation.
Pints all around.
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 01:27 GMT USER100
Re: Life
This is totally momentous. It could mean the idea of panspermia is correct. There is no way life arose on Earth by chance. For years, boffins have tried to replicate the creation of life - they've failed.
Maybe there is something bigger than we know (NNG), which might have spermed life out into the Universe.
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 08:07 GMT Dave 126
Re: Life
> the idea of panspermia is correct. There is no way life arose on Earth by chance
That's just kicking the question down the line. The one thing that we do know is that life arose *somewhere*. Most scientists would be surprised if they were able to to replicate in a lab millions of years of chemical reactions across millions of square kilometres.
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 14:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Life
It could mean the idea of panspermia is correct. There is no way life arose on Earth by chance. For years, boffins have tried to replicate the creation of life - they've failed
Um, what? People have been trying to replicate the origins of life for, let's say, a century in a few isolated experiments with conditions which may or may not be similar to those when life actually originated. Given the earliest plausible date for life existing on Earth, which is 4.28 billion years ago, and assuming that life started in the oceans, which formed 4.41 billion years ago, life had 130 million years to get going, and the chemical and physical environments of the entire ocean to do it in.
Come back and say something meaningful when you've run the experiments on the scale of entire oceans for 130 million years.
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 09:26 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: Life
There is also this on arxiv:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06499
Phosphine on Venus Cannot be Explained by Conventional Processes
William Bains, Janusz J. Petkowski, Sara Seager, Sukrit Ranjan, Clara Sousa-Silva, Paul B. Rimmer, Zhuchang Zhan, Jane S. Greaves, Anita M. S. Richards
The recent candidate detection of 20 ppb of phosphine in the middle atmosphere of Venus is so unexpected that it requires an exhaustive search for explanations of its origin. Phosphorus-containing species have not been modelled for Venusian atmosphere before and our work represents the first attempt to model phosphorus species in Venusian atmosphere. We thoroughly explore the potential pathways of formation of phosphine in a Venusian environment, including in the planet's atmosphere, cloud and haze layers, surface, and subsurface. We investigate gas reactions, geochemical reactions, photochemistry, and other non-equilibrium processes. None of these potential phosphine production pathways are sufficient to explain the presence of ppb phosphine levels on Venus. The presence of PH3, therefore, must be the result of a process not previously considered plausible for Venusian conditions. The process could be unknown geochemistry, photochemistry, or even aerial microbial life, given that on Earth phosphine is exclusively associated with anthropogenic and biological sources. The detection of phosphine adds to the complexity of chemical processes in the Venusian environment and motivates in situ follow up sampling missions to Venus.
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 12:51 GMT Cuddles
Re: Life
"Absent an error in the data, Ockham's Razor suggests that life is the easiest explanation."
Not at all. Life is ultimately just a bunch of complex chemical reactions stuck together. So the alternatives presented here are either a simple unknown chemical reaction, or a big pile of more complicated unknown chemical reactions (the geological option just moves the simple reaction to a different location, so it doesn't form a third possibility). Occam's razor points very firmly at it not being life.
It's still worth popping over there to have a poke around, since that's the only way to find out for sure - Occam only suggests that the less convoluted explanation is more likely correct, it doesn't give an actual answer to any question. But jumping straight to assuming a complex living ecosystem when you find a single simple molecule in a place you didn't expect is rarely likely to be a bet that pays off.
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 04:30 GMT Timbo
errr...another possibility exists...
...and that is that both USA and Russia/USSR have sent probes to Venus, which have penetrated the Venusian atmosphere.
eg:
Venera program — USSR Venus orbiter and lander (1961–1984) - various probes entered Venus atmosphere
Pioneer Venus project — US Venus orbiter and entry probes(1978) - 4 probes entered Venus atmosphere
Vega program — USSR mission to Venus and Comet Halley (1984) - 2 probes entered Venus atmosphere
Magellan probe — US Venus orbiter (1989) - craft entered Venus atmosphere at end of mission
Venus Express — ESA probe sent for the observation of the Venus's weather (2005) - deorbited at end of mission
So, there is a possibility that one or more of these craft were not 100% "biomedically" clean, and that some organism(s) from Earth were carried on one (or more) of the probes and have now had time to acclimatise to the conditions on Venus and subsequently have multiplied to the point where they are now detectable?
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 05:03 GMT Conundrum1885
Re: errr...another possibility exists...
Nice try but this is *vanishingly* unlikely.
Though the cloud layers on Venus are indeed Earth like in some respects, on our own planet even the hardiest extremophiles can't tolerate the heat, pressure AND acidity at the same time.
Even the ones around black smokers have their limits.
I would suggest that its more likely that life started independently on Venus and adapted to the changing conditions, eventually going airborne as the oceans started to evaporate.
As a certain gentleman on a film once said, "Life WILL find a way"
I've also theorised that life might exist using heavy metals as DNA "bases" where normal DNA is merely a stepping stone and this though very unlikely isn't impossible in the complete absence of oxygen.
Some quirk of nuclear physics might permit isotopes to selectively leach out of the rocks so we just don't know what is really possible.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20906-life-like-cells-are-made-of-metal/
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 07:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Momentous
It's quite funny that so many efforts have been made to get to Mars and find something, anything, that indicates life might have been there, and all the while Venus has been sitting there closer to home, quietly saying "Er, Hello? I have something. That is, if anyone's interested at all..."
Congrats to the astronomers for making the discovery, and to the team overall for doing their damndest to disprove the conclusions before releasing the work.
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Tuesday 15th September 2020 14:35 GMT RLWatkins
I'm sorry, but what exactly does this mean?
"Bacteria on Earth capable of producing the gas would only have to work at 10 per cent of their maximum capacity to create the amount of phosphine seen on Venus...."
*How many bacteria* "would only have to work at 10 per cent of their maximum capacity to create the amount of phosphine seen on Venus"? One? Ten? Ten duotrigintillion? All of them?
Everyone who can type without thinking, raise your hands.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 08:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm sorry, but what exactly does this mean?
So I asked one of the people, and what it means is this: with a reasonable model of the atmosphere (which tells you the rate at which it is destroyed at various levels, the mixing time and so on) you can work out what the rate of emission from the surface would need to be to get the amounts that are observed in the upper atmosphere, which is 10^6 - 10^7 molecules / cm^2 / s. This about 10% of the surface flux you can get from terrestrial organisms.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
