I am virtually certain that there will be an enormous push to send a probe to Venus that can scoop up a sample from the upper atmosphere and return it to earth. What biologist wouldn’t give his right arm to examine an alien biotica? Is it carbon and water based. Is the heredity based on some kind of DNA-like chain? Oh the questions they would ask. I can scarcely imagine them all.
Is a sample-return probe realistic? You’re talking about getting within 60 km of the surface. The acid in the atmosphere would be difficult, and the fuel needs to escape Venus and return to Earth seems like an insurmountable challenge.
xkcd, about showing the right level of caution for these kinds of things:
I, for one…
Even if that’s the origin of microbes on Venus (assuming that it is indeed microbes that are behind the phosphine), they would still need to be surviving and reproducing in the atmosphere of Venus for the phosphine to be there. Which would, in itself, be remarkable.
And we should still go in and grab them because in order to survive they probably will have evolved scientifically important mutations. If they are DNA or RNA based creatures we’d probably be able to tell the difference between a recent origin and an older origin but might not be able to tell the difference between one planet seeding another or both being seeded from elsewhere, although of course the holy grail would be carbon-based lifeforms that are not DNA or RNA based.
Kindly do not bring any of those phosphine-farting microbes back to Earth, until we learn to deal with the ones we got. The last thing we need are pathogenic alien microbes secreting corrosive gas multiplying with abandon on Earth’s surface.
True.
The earliest possible man-made contamination would have occurred in 1966 with Venera 3. For any Earth-based bacteria delivered then to have mutiplied up to the point of making enough phosphine for us to detect from Earth in only about 55 years would be remarkable indeed.
The contaminating bacteria would have to be very well-suited to the environment, finding plenty of whatever they eat and and plenty of ability for waste to be carted away by the environment as well. And we’d have to assume a very high reproduction rate. Although generally speaking, that’s something many bacteria specialize in. If we assume the planet is otherwise abiotic, about the only hardship they wouldn’t have to contend with is competition for their niche. Except by mutations of their own kind.
What we know about Earth-based phospine generating bacteria is they don’t do well in room temperature oxygen-heavy surroundings as would be found in a spacecraft factory. They require semi-exotic conditions by human standards.
Fascinating stuff.
Intermediate to “uses DNA and uses the same genetic ‘alphabet’ as Earth life” and “doesn’t use DNA at all” would be “uses DNA, but uses a different ‘alphabet’ from us”.
If extraterrestrial life exists and uses DNA, but uses different sequences of base pairs to code for different amino acids than we and E. coli do, that would be evidence that the life in question had evolved totally independently of life on Earth, rather than sharing a common origin (because of human-caused contamination a few decades ago; or due to cosmic impacts sending little bacterial spores flying from one planet to another millions or billions of years ago, or some other form of panspermia).
Relax! There will be a vaccine by Election Day, for sure!
More recent observations are now raising serious doubts as to whether there’s any phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere at all (without even getting into the question of whether hypothetical phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere might have some non-biological origin).
Ah, well.
Yeah. Given that the author wrote a paper recently about using phosphine to detect life, It looks like perhaps confirmation bias caused them to mistake noise for data because it caused what looked like a potential phosphine signal.
Science is hard, and people make mistakes even in the hardest of sciences. Lucky for us these things are testable in the hard sciences.
It makes you wonder how many of our beliefs in the ‘soft’ sciences are total nonsense.
It gives me more credence in our sciences.
Someone sees something, goes, “Huh, that’s weird.” They check to see if they did anything wrong to cause that odd observation, check with others to see if they did, and then if they cannot explain it, they turn it over to the rest of the science community to take a look.
The rest of the science community looks it over, and usually finds what the originally researcher missed, and only very rarely confirms their observation as valid.
It is only that the press is breathless in their need to get a scoop, and so they start the reporting process on a story as soon as it is first published in a review journal. If you had followed any of the serious science reporters on this subject, like Frasier Cain or Paul Sutter, even Scott Manley, then you would have seen what the evidence for and against the results were, and would have known to take the news with a good sized grain of salt.
If you just read the headlines on Yahoo News, then you should be prepared to meet our new Venusian neighbors.
If your beliefs in the “soft” sciences are based on headlines and popular reporting, then they are probably wrong. That does not mean that the science itself is at fault.
The signals that are believed to generate phosphine molecules in the atmosphere of Venus are in the same part of the spectrum as the lines associated with sulfur dioxide molecules. The concentration of this gas at an altitude of 56 km from the surface of Venus can be a thousand times higher than those used by scientists. Therefore, it may well be that this signal is completely generated by SO2 molecules, and there is no phosphine and life on Venus.
Now 2 years later here is some fresh research indicating the phosphine signal is much weaker than even the reduced upper bound of previous research. I think we can pretty well put the final nails in the coffin of the idea of phosphine on Venus.
So there could still be life, but not as much ?
There could be life, but we have found no evidence of it.
Phosphene was potential evidence suggesting life. There were reasons why it wasn’t a certainty of life, but it gave some reason to lean that way.
Now that we know that the detection was an error, and it wasn’t detected at all, we are back to not having any evidence for it at all.
Echoes of the CERN superluminal anomalous neutrinos…
In a lot of ways, there are similarities.
A team found something unexpected. They looked at their work, and didn’t find where they went wrong. They published their findings in a trade journal, where other interested parties could take a look and see if they did something wrong, or if they were on to something.
In the meantime, the media, looking for clickbait, found these articles, didn’t understand them, and published them as though they were as robust as something with a great deal of consensus behind it.
In both cases, when others looked over their work, they eventually found where the original researches went wrong.
There was nothing wrong at all with this process, it is how science works, except for the part about the clickbait. That’s what makes people who don’t pay much attention past the headlines think that science is vague and ambiguous.
Or worse, after these clickbait ‘findings’ fail to hold up, that science is guesswork or worthless. When in fact it’s the clickbait media that’s worthless.