Venus May Have Life!

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If you rank the most habitable places in our solar system Venus lands pretty low, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and sulphuric acid rain. And yet it may have just jumped to the front of the pack. In fact, we may have detected the signature of alien life - Venusian life -for the first time.

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Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Matt O'Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, & Pedro Osinski
Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber
Camera Operator: Setare Gholipour
Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber

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[TempraryName]

Don't forget that phosphine is also a side-effect of industrial processes. So this could simply be a sign of Venusian heavy industry. If so, our search for microbial life will just have to continue elsewhere.

[cade]

“Relatively young, perhaps only around 700, 000, 000 years old”

Queen Elizabeth: *ha*

[ulti-mantis]

Even if it's not aliens, who knows what kind of new abiotic chemical process this might reveal, and what else might be possible with it.

[wuuglyv]

It’s never aliens until it’s acid-cloud-dwelling photo-chemophile unicellular bacteriod aliens in Venus.

[mstalcup]

Imagine paleontology on Venus. Considering the timeline of life on Earth, hard-bodied life could have lived on Venus and fossilized.

[blacktimhoward]

me seeing 'aliens' headline on my homepage: sensationalist news, it's definitely not aliens

me seeing PBS ST considering the possibility:

[amaarquadri]

Chemists be like: "I hope it's unknown chemistry, not life"

[quillaja]

The phosphene was planted there by Martians to divert our attention.

[caveyful]

It's possible that these beings use farting as a means of locomotion.

[Psiberzerker]

Occam's Teacup: The simplest explanation is "Aliens."

Because it rests in a Saucer.

[ChukapiMagnetar]

Time for a new movie with Matt Damon: The Venusian

[AudieMurphy]

If this ends up being life, then in a twist of irony that would mean that the first alien life may have been discovered by detecting swamp gas in the light reflected (or technically emitted in this case) by Venus.

[Nuovoswiss]

There was a serious issue with their conclusion: the last "ruled out" claim on their list of abiogenic phosphine processes is unfounded and unsourced. Venus' lack of a magnetic field means it gets a massive amount of solar wind hitting its atmosphere, which is mostly relativistic hydrogen plasma. Their proposed pathway, whether *biogenic or abiogenic*, is based on the presence of (trace) phosphoric acid in the atmosphere of Venus. It makes sense for phosphoric acid to be present given that we expect Venus to have some phosphate minerals, and phosphate minerals react with sulfuric acid to produce phosphoric acid vapor at Venus' surface temperatures. Trace phosphoric acid would react with this hydrogen plasma to produce phosphine and water:
H3PO4(g) + 8∙H(p) <--> PH3(g) + 4∙H2O(g)
The only thing they show to rule that out is a single unpublished (not peer reviewed) manuscript. You can find that manuscript on a pre-print server, and it does nothing to rule out solar-wind produced phosphine, it just has a single sentence saying "we don't think so".

[jason_man]

3:20 seeing that random netch made me laugh so hard... hope that one nerd in the editor team is happy now

[newlife.oldlove]

Could you imagine the panic being on a cloud city on Venus? Honestly, It would not be fun to be on one when it malfunctions and plummets to the surface below.

[mtruo]

Matt, you guys have the highest quality pop cosmology channel by a mile. Even though you were weeks later discussing this breaking news, your video adds so much more to the discussion/information. Thanks for being so great !

[horseradish]

massive fires, killer hornets, global pandemic, race wars, more massive fires, ...Venusian aliens would be the cherry on top

[Attlanttizz]

I, for one, welcome our Venusian overlords

[war]

"A d4 shaped molecule."
That is the most nerd thing ever said.

[dreydantrovirr]

Matt: Phosphene is a tetrahedron

Me:

Matt: it's d4 shaped

Me: Gotcha