Is there life on Venus?

The internet went crazy talking about phosphine on Venus! What does it mean?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Jorge, Hey, do you hear that the internet went
crazy over science news again? Did we discover another Higgs Boson?
Still just the one? Did the l C create a
black hole and destroy the world. No, We're still at
zero world destroying black holes so that the news go
crazy over or something that is not quite real a

(00:30):
little bit. I think the scientists are doing a good job,
but the coverage of it is a little bit out
of control. Well, you know what they say, Daniel. Scientists
are from Venus, cartoonists are from Mars, and all our
listeners are on Earth. I am handmade cartoonists and the

(01:01):
creator of PhD comment. I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist,
and I've never been to Mars or Venus. Or are
you omitting that information on purpose? I'm purposely not answering
that question. You are from Venus. I knew a Daniel,
But welcome to our show, Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe,
a production of I Heart Radio in which we take

(01:22):
you on a tour of everything crazy here on Earth,
from the tiniest little particles to the largest Earth swallowing
black holes, and all the way through the Solar System
on a tour of all the craziness that is or
might be out there, orbiting our star and finally zooming
out to the entire universe to ask the biggest questions
about the biggest thing in the universe. Yeah, and by

(01:45):
the way, if a black hole does swallow up to Earth,
you'll hear about it here first, or you can always
check the special website that we promised to keep up
to date called has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the
world yet? Dot com? As of this morning, the answer
is no. The physics forecast says no chance. That's right,
smoky skies, but no black holes. Yes. Welcome to our podcast,

(02:06):
in which we talk about the signs out there that is,
discovering all the amazing things about the universe and expanding
our understanding of everything there is and how it all works.
That's right, and pushing forward on the biggest questions of
the universe, the deepest questions, but also the most basic questions,
the ones we've been asking basically since we've been asking questions,

(02:27):
what does it all mean? How does it all work?
Why is it here at all? And maybe most importantly,
are we the only ones in it? And it's a
live event science is not something that happened in an
old textbook a long time ago. Science is happening right now,
and we are discovering things and trying to figure out
what they all mean. And it's kind of chaotic. We

(02:48):
see things, we don't know what they mean. Maybe they
mean this, Maybe they mean that. We're here to break
it down for you and tell you what actually happened,
what we know, what we don't know, and what we're
just totally wildly speculating. Yeah. So, if you've been paying
attention to the news this week, there was a huge
headline in the Science News. It was in the cover
of CNN, I think in the at least the front page,

(03:08):
and then also in the New York Times. It was
a big news in the science community, and it's built
over into the general news. That's right. It was everywhere.
It's all over the place, this incredible discovery in the
atmosphere of venus. And I started hearing about it a
few days before he actually came out because it started
leaking in the science gossips, Science gossips, physical gossips. This

(03:30):
is such a big deal that the people involved couldn't
help talk about it. I mean, the results were like embargoed.
Nobody was supposed to say anything until the papers came out.
But you know, scientists are people, and people talk, people
have spouses. How's your day? Oh, I discovered life on Venus.
How's your day? You know, things happen, people chat. Yeah,
how's your day? I made a black hole. We're all

(03:51):
going to die in a few seconds. Pack up the car, honey,
we're getting ready. Back up the rocket ship. But yeahn't
heard Daniel. You heard about it a few days ago,
but you didn't tell me. This is the first time
I hear about it. Oh, I sent you an email.
Don't you read your email? To be honest now, But yeah,
they were gonna be talking about a big headline that

(04:12):
made the news a few days ago for those so
you listening to this episode now, But it has to
do with one of the biggest questions we've ever had
about the universe. That's right. Folks were trying to practice
for how to look at the atmosphere of planets around
other stars to guess whether or not the gases in
those planets could give hints as to whether there was

(04:33):
life on the surface, and so to practice for that
really really hard task, they tried to do something easier,
which is look at planets in our Solar system, our
neighbor planets, and practice on those. Much easier to look
at planets to see are there gases there that could
give hints of life. Yeah, and so they got a
very big surprise. So to be on the podcast, we'll

(04:54):
be talking about is their life on Venus? Now? Is
it on Venus or in Venus or around Venus? I
think it's actually above Venus because you know the surface
of Venus is like totally inhospitable, you know, it's like
hundreds of degrees and crazy pressure. So what they actually

(05:17):
found might be consistent with life sort of floating in
the upper atmosphere. So it's grammatically debatable life over Venus.
But it was a huge headline. It was in all
the major papers, I think, and I was a little
confused because the headlines varied a lot, Like some of
them were like we found it, we found life in
other planets, and other headlines were like, we think maybe

(05:40):
possibly there are some signs. So I feel like, you know,
the Science committee was being you know, maybe careful this time. Yeah. Well,
the scientists, if you read their papers, they're very careful
to talk about what they actually know and what they
don't know and what they're not claiming, Like it's unusual
in a paper to specify what you're not claiming, you know,
like we're not saying this is the discovery of X

(06:02):
y Z. But in these papers, because they knew it
could be over interpreted, they were very clear to say
they are not claiming discovery of life on Venus, but
they were claiming things that suggested there might be. But
you're right, in the coverage of it, there are a
lot of science communication journalists that jumped to life probably
found on Venus, which is a very different statement, and

(06:23):
so I thought would be helpful to break down exactly
what they found at what it means, and what we
should do next. Yeah, some of are like they are
green and have China heads. That's right. Well, you know,
there's no social life here on Earth, things in the pandemic,
so maybe there's life on Venus. It's just about the
universe that might be. Maybe that's why my zoom connections

(06:43):
are so bad. My collaborators are actually on Venus. Boy,
imagine that the lag and the delay having that conversation.
Can you hear me? Is my mic on and then
you have to wait like three days. Yeah, but I
can hear you. You know, given how hard it is
to have a zoom conversation with humans using equivalent technology
here Earth, I can't imagine what it would actually be
like to meet aliens and talk to them. You know,

(07:05):
the first ten minutes would definitely be like, I can't
hear you. Is this thing on? Like? What kind of
program are you using? Upgrade your version of Skype? Yeah,
I'm looking forward to zoom prying what books are on
their bookshelves? What kind of aren't they put up on
their wall? To serve humanity? Cut the connection quick, But
we were curious how many people had heard of this

(07:26):
and what they thought about it, And I didn't have
time to reach out to my community of folks who
answer our questions online. So I did a quick Twitter
poll to see what our listeners were thinking of this news. Yeah,
it's hot news and it just happened. So we went
to get people's quick reactions. And so the pole on
Twitter says, life in Venus news is option a yawn,

(07:52):
weird chemistry, be totally bananas and see oh my god,
oh my god, aliens Before we reveal the results. I
did get some flak for calling it yawn weird chemistry,
Like people are like, why isn't it? Oh my god,
weird cheanis chemis? Was it the chemistry lobby? I think

(08:13):
so our chemistry fans, No, weird chemistry is yawned inducing.
What are you talking about? But you know, compared to
the opportunity that we have found life, then weird chemistry
is definitely yawn. Well, so you've sent this hole out
and we got back to results pretty quick. Yeah, so
just about half the folks who responded thought it was

(08:33):
probably just some weird chemistry, about a third of them
thought it was totally bananas, and just under a quarter
thought it's aliens. Now, Daniel, it does this mean of
them think that it is bananas on venus or that
the idea is bananas. It would be bananas to find
bananas on venus, like that would be pretty cool, right.

(08:54):
Did they find potassium it's kind of potassium gas. If
they ended up discovering that this weird chemical was outgassed
by a big deposition of alien bananas, wow we would
be vindicated. Did we see a bunch of aliens slip
on banana peals on the surface of Venus, or maybe
that explains what the aliens are doing. They're stopping by
Venus on their way to stealing all the earthly bananas.

(09:15):
All right, Well, anyways, scientists have found something that they
think might be signs of life on Venus. So we'll
get into that today. And how excited should we be
about this question? And so Daniel step us through here?
What did they actually fine? Like, did you read the
paper I did? There are two papers that came out,
one in Nature and one in Astrobiology what at the

(09:37):
same time, at the same time. In these papers, they've
been working on it for a couple of years, sort
of in secret and in parallels of these teams put
these papers out together and it was an embargo until Monday,
and the papers detail what they actually found and what
they have is evidence for the existence of a weird
gas in the atmosphere of Venus, a gas called phosphene,

(09:58):
and that's the chemical formula is pH three, meaning like
a phosphorus with three hydrogen atoms. Yeah, and it looks
sort of like a little pyramid. The phosphorus is in
the middle and it's got three little hydrogen sort of
underneath it, and so it's a pretty simple little chemical,
though it's surprisingly difficult to make normal conditions. Really it
doesn't just happen, or it does happen, but maybe not

(10:20):
as much. It turns out, it's not something we really
understand very well, but we think that it's most often
produced by life, at least here on Earth. It's the
kind of thing that you find in the presence of
life and you don't find otherwise though, you know, we
only have sample of one planet to really examine in detail,
and it's difficult to make otherwise. And so that's why

(10:43):
they think it's probably a good marker of life. Like
they can't think of a way that this would have
been made on Venus other than life. Interesting, and how
did we actually see this if it's on or around Venus. Yes,
so we don't have a lander on Venus or a
rover or anything to drive around on Venus. Venus is
very inincipitable. We've only sent probes to Venus a few

(11:04):
times and they've only last you know, like minutes or
hours because of the crazy conditions. They get like crushed.
So most of our information from Venus comes from looking
at it from Earth, which means that we're looking at
light from Venus using telescopes here on Earth, and maybe
let's paint the picture because you just mentioned something interesting,
which is that we've sent probes to Venus into Venus,

(11:27):
but they don't last very long because Venus it's not
somewhere you want to go on vacation. No, it's definitely not.
It's ridiculously hot. It's like eight hundred degrees on the
surface and the pressure is really really high. It's like
pounds per square inch, it's like forty five bars. Is
that just from the like the temperature because it's so hot. Yeah,

(11:48):
there's just a lot more gas there that's been outgassed
by the volcanoes. So the surface of Venus is basically
like all volcanoes all the time. And the way a
planet gets atmospheres basically buy volcanoes, you know, farting that
out onto the surface and then then gravity holding it in.
And I don't know what sounds more unpleasant, volcanos or

(12:09):
constant farts. Well, you know, the atmosphere is basically the
planet's farting and then gravity holds it to you. You
were lucky that we're not so large that our farts
are bound to us gravitationally, they disperse in the atmosphere.
But if your planet, you're not so lucky, and which
your volcanoes burp out sticks around. So it's a lot
of volcanoes on Venus pumping out gas, and that's why

(12:30):
you have this really high pressure. And how do we
see these molecules of gas? And so what we can
do is we can tell what's in the atmosphere of
Venus just by looking at the light that comes here
from it. And that's because every kind of gas interacts
with light differently. So looking at the light that we
see coming from Venus, we can tell what kind of

(12:51):
gas there is because every different kind of gas absorbs
different frequencies of light and emits different frequencies of light.
They're like fingerprints. Yeah, and it's due to quantum effects, right,
Like it has to do with the electrons and they're leveled. Yeah,
that's right. You can think of an atom as having
electrons in sort of a ladder, and in order for
the electron to jump up a ladder, they have to
receive a photon that has just the right energy, just

(13:14):
enough energy to move them from one state to the next.
If the photon is too much energy, the electron just
cannot absorb that. And that's a purely quantum mechanical effect.
As you said, in classical physics, there would be no
limit to where the electron could be. It could be
in any orbit like the Earth around the Sun. But
electrons are not really in orbits. There in quantized states
around the nucleus. So they're limited to absorbing photons of

(13:36):
certain frequencies. And this is different from atom to atom.
So you can tell how much hydrogen is there in
gas by shining light through it and then seeing which
frequencies are absorbed. And hydrogen has a certain frequency of
light it likes to absorb. The clue there is not
seeing the light right. You shine white light through a gas,

(13:57):
and where it's absorbed with the hen see the light
dips is where the gas is interacting with that light.
And so that's how you tell what's in the gas.
It's kind of like each gas has a color, but
it's almost like the anticolor, like it absorbs the specific color. Yes,
it absorbs those frequencies and lets everything else through. And
it's a really powerful technique because each one has its

(14:19):
own fingerprint, and so even if your gas is a
big mixture hydrogen in this and that and the other thing.
You can tell the relative components by looking at all
these intensities because they don't typically overlap, right, There unique
different shapes and you can measure how much is absorbed
at different frequencies. So it's a really powerful technique. It's
really cool, and it lets us tell what's in the

(14:40):
atmosphere of other planets if we can look at light
that's come through that atmosphere. Yeah, it's it's like a fingerprint,
like you said, like stars have fingerprints. From this effect,
you can tell what gases are inside of a star
just from what frequencies get absorbed before the light comes out.
That's right. And stars are a little bit more complicated
becau as there's active fusion going on and so photons

(15:02):
also being emitted from that fusion. But absolutely we can
tell the chemical composition of stars by looking at their spectrum.
And this is why it's so exciting. We can use
the same technique on exoplanets, like if there's a planet
going around a star really really far away in another
solar system, as that planet goes in front of the sun,

(15:22):
the light from the star passes through the atmosphere before
it comes to us. If we can see a difference
between the light that passes through the atmosphere and just
the light that's directly from the star, we can tell
what's in that atmosphere, like is there water in that atmosphere?
Is their oxygen? And those are fascinating clues about what
might be living on that planet, right, because it's not

(15:43):
just gas, it's like other things to write, liquids and rocks,
that's right. And we gave a sort of simplified description
of the absorption lines as being just because electrons move
up and down the ladder. It's a little bit more
complex than that because they're also like rotational and vibrational states.
So these complex atoms can absorb photons have lost of
different frequencies, not just to move the electrons up and down,

(16:05):
but they can absorb it to go up an energy
level in vibration or rotation or all sorts of stuff.
But each one has a unique spectrum that's pretty well studied, right,
And so we've used this technique to now detect a
very special kind of molecule on Venus, this pH three phosphene,
and we think it might be due to some life there.

(16:26):
So let's get into what that means and how excited
should be. But first let's take a quick break a right, Daniel,
So Venus has been farting and we've seen the evidence.

(16:50):
We smelt it through light. That's right. Well, we know
it has an atmosphere, and the atmosphere is probably all
because of volcanic verbs, and that atmosphere has one really
fascinating element of it, this element phosphine. And phosphine is
fascinating because as far as we understand it, it's really

(17:10):
hard to make just chemically, like to create the conditions
to make phosphine is very difficult, very rare. It's made,
for example, in the core of gas giants under really
really high pressure and temperature. But on rocky planets, we
don't know of a way to make phosphine really other
than being assisted by biological life. So yeah, maybe step

(17:33):
me through, because I'm kind of confused, like, why couldn't
this molecular just form spontaneously like under because you just
said Venus is under high pressure and temperature. Couldn't these
molecules and atoms just kind of click together by accident?
They could write and it's certainly possible, but we're talking
about like the rates of things. You know, chemistry is
a mess, right, if you ever took organic chemistry, you

(17:54):
know it's complicated, Like how these lego pieces like to
click together. Have to be in the right can figuration.
You have to have the right energy, you have to
have the right situation, and they tend to like to
do other things first. They tend to like to do
the least energetically expensive thing first. So if you have
a big mix of all the components you need phosphorus
and hydrogen together with other stuff, it tends to form

(18:18):
other things and sort of lock these components into other molecules.
So you don't tend to make pH three because it's
energetically just very unfavorable. It takes a lot of energy
to make it. It It can happen like if you have
a random a lot of false phosphorus and hydrogen together
and you mix it, pH three is not what they
would make. That's right. And in one of these papers

(18:39):
to have this amazing diagram when they show like, well,
if you have phosphorus and hydrogen together with other stuff,
here's what typically happens, and here all the steps you
would have to go through to make pH three and
a lot of those steps are very difficult or very
very rare, so in their model, and this is the
key bit in their model, they cannot explore lane this

(19:00):
much phosphine, like maybe a little bit, maybe a tiny
little smidge, But what they see on Venus is much
much more than they can possibly explain given their understanding
of the chemistry. And I guess relative to all of
the other things they see, because that maybe is it
that they don't see the other things that phosphors and
hydrogen would like to make instead. I know they see

(19:22):
those as well, but they just see much much more
phosphine than they expect. And you know, it's still it's
not a lot. We're talking like twenty parts per billion.
That means you take a random molecule of the Venusian
atmosphere and you get, you know, like twenty phosphenes. That
doesn't sound like a lot. No, it's not a lot,
and it's sort of amazing that they can even still
see it, right, But it's a lot more than you

(19:44):
would expect if you just sort of let chemistry run
its course. Given our understanding of what's on Venus and
the chemical processing. So even twenty parts per billion is
a lot, is like unusual, it's very unusual. They don't
expect to see essentially any of it because it's so
difficult for chemistry to make it, Like you just leave
a bunch of stuff on the surface of Venus. Even

(20:05):
under those conditions, you do not expect to get, you know,
more than a few parts per trillion. So this is
much much more, and it's even much much more than
we have on Earth. Like on Earth, we have phosphine
in the atmosphere we think produced by life, but it's
that like a thousand times less than we're seeing it
on Venus. So there's either a thousand times more life

(20:27):
on Venus. It's kind of like you're saying, well, we
also have a different atmosphere, and so phosphine may not
survive as long in our atmosphere. Fosphine is flammable, and
so it tends to light up and be destroyed very
quickly if there's any exposed flame. You know, some people
think that phosphine is the source of the will of
the wisp. You know, it tends to be produced in

(20:47):
like swamps and boggy environments, so it may be responsible
for like very quick brief bursts of observable flame in
bogs that like you know, lead people to go investigate
and follow them into the wood. What are you talking about?
The fire swamp from Princess Bryan, that's exactly to phosphine.
It turns out it's all about fosphen. Are the rats

(21:11):
of unusual size also due to phosphene? I don't know,
but you know, fosphine is actually fascinating. Anyway, I went
and I asked my wife, who's a microbiologist and a
biochemist about this to understand, like why is it so
hard to make fosphen and why is it something that
life can do but like chemistry can't. Yeah, like does

(21:31):
the heart of planets and finds it hard to make. Yeah,
and yet we can make it, and yet we can
make it. And it turns out she doesn't know. Biology
doesn't know. We don't actually know how fosphin is made
by life forms. Yeah, they see it in association with
like bacteria, and we know it's produced like in our
intestines when there's all sorts of microbial activity and swamps

(21:54):
and all sorts of stuff, But we don't actually understand
the mechanism. It's not like we know this protein takes
the phosphorus and does this. Nobody's even understood that here
on Earth. How can we not know? Don't we know
everything there is to know about like cell metabolism and stuff.
Oh my gosh, we definitely don't. And there's lots and
lots of bacteria that we just don't understand. Like remember,

(22:15):
there's like millions and millions, maybe billions, of different kinds
of bacteria even just in our gut that we haven't
even mapped before. My wife likes to call it biological
dark matter for obvious reasons. And dark energy what's the
equivalent then, a dark energy? But the rough idea is
that you know, life has proteins, and proteins are these

(22:37):
little machines that can sort of assist chemical reactions. Like
if there's some transition you need to go through to
make phosphine from its basic elements, and that transition is
unstable or therefore unlikely or very chemically expensive, then a
protein can sort of help it happen. It can like
catalyze and take you from one step to the other

(22:58):
if that's really important for something that the life is doing. Right,
So the proteins are like these little chemical helpers, Like
their proteins like little little machines are kind of literally
putting these atoms together. Yeah, they're essentially little biological robots.
Proteins are really pretty super awesome. But that's just speculation,
Like we don't actually understand that. So that's another important

(23:21):
qualifier to keep in your mind. Like we're projecting that
fosph being may be made in Venus by microbial life,
but that's not something we actually understand here on Earth.
So that's also a bit of a leap. And and
are we sure that we're making it and not just
kind of like breathing it in and somehow processing it
and then you know, farting it out. We're pretty sure
because fosphing doesn't last that long. It breaks down in

(23:43):
sunlight and other things. Other radicals can get rid of it. Really. Yeah,
on the time scale, you know, like thousands of seconds
or depending on the conditions, maybe up to you know,
tens or hundreds of years. So if fosphin had been
produced sort of geologically along time ago, it would have
all broken down and gone away. So we're pretty sure
it's being replenished by some lifelike process here on Earth,

(24:07):
and that's what makes it also exciting to see it
on Venus because on Venus their estimates are that it
shouldn't last for more than a thousand years. So that
means that something has been producing phosphine on Venus in
the last thousand years. Interesting. It means it's fresh, like
if you see posphine's it hasn't been there for eons.
It's like it was it was recent somebody something or

(24:29):
somebody made that recently. That's why somebody deals it recently.
It's like if you see fresh milk, it's like you
have to think it's it's recent, Like it's you see
fresh milk that doesn't taste bad, then you know it
it wasn't made like by dinosaurs or a long time ago.
And that's exciting, right. That tells you that there's something
out there that we only understood to be made by

(24:52):
life and is fairly recent and we don't think that
there's any way to make it un organically, So it's
it citing possibility. It's like it's a good hint if
you could like dial up your request for like what
would I hope to see in the atmosphere of Venus.
This would be pretty far up there. In fact, there
were papers written in the last ten years suggesting this, like, Wow,

(25:14):
this would be an awesome bio marker. If we could
see this on Venus, that would be very strong evidence
for life well before this discovery. That just makes me suspicious, Daniel, sure, like,
if we see this, we'll see aliens and then and
then they saw it. It could be actually good science
or it could be a conspiracy. Now, so then the

(25:36):
hypothesis is that maybe there are bacteria on Venus, then
that is making this phosphene gas? Is that the kind
of running explanation for this gas that we're seeing. It's
a bit of a piecemeal explanation. Nobody has a completely
coherent hypothesis that actually works. But the sketch, the outline
of it is microbial life, right, not like civilizations and

(26:00):
aliens trying to connect with us on Zoom. Microbial life
because again, that's the only thing that produces phosphen here
on Earth, is microbial life. And also not on the surface,
because the surface is totally inhespitable, and where they find
the phosphene is in the atmosphere. It's like fifty kilometers
up what so it's not just aliens, it's flying aliens.

(26:21):
It's floating aliens. Because it's about fifty kilometers up is
where the pressure starts to get reasonable. It's like similar
to the pressure and temperature of the atmosphere of Earth.
And so life could exist in little water droplets floating
in the Venusian atmosphere. What like rain life, cloud life, Yeah, exactly,

(26:44):
a life in the cloud decks. You know. It's like
forty five to sixty kilometers above the surface is where
they call the temperate zone, and the pressure there is
about in the same as Earth pressure, and the temperature
is you know, in a reasonable range. You know, it's
pretty hot still, but we think microbes could survive there. Wow.
And so that that's the sketch of the idea, is

(27:04):
that maybe there are a whole bunch and you have
to have a lot, right, there might be a whole
bunch of bacteria living in the clouds of Venus. You'd
have to have a whole bunch. And the other cool
piece of information is that the fospan doesn't seem to
be present at the polls. It's mostly like around the
equator and more in the temperate zones. And so that's interesting. Interesting, Yeah,

(27:25):
what does that mean they're all vacationing at the same time.
It's summer around Venus. Man, we don't know. But it's
also kind of hard to imagine anything living in those clouds.
I mean, Carl Sagan famously speculated about life in the
clouds of Venus. What is a pretty difficult environment to
survive in. It's very dry, actually, and it's very acidic.

(27:46):
I mean, these clouds are talking about are not clouds
of water vapor there clouds of sulfuric acid. And so
it's a difficult environment. But we have bacteria here, right,
They can live in in acid and in extreme conditions. Yeah,
bacteria basically can live anywhere. My wife likes to say
that bacteria can eat anything and live anywhere and have
these great stories. And when they try to sterilize stuff

(28:08):
at JPL before sending it into space by spraying some
sort of bleach solution onto it, and they discovered that
essentially what that was doing was selecting for some bacteria
that like to eat the bleach solution. And so it's
basically impossible to kill bacteria once you once you created,
and so there certainly could be something that's capable of
surviving those conditions. We just haven't imagined you, all right,

(28:32):
So it's living in the rain droplets of sulphuric acid
in the clouds of Venus. That's the sketch of the idea. Right,
We're a long way from confirming that, but that's like
the thing that we can't rule out that we'd love
to conclude. But it's a pretty big leap, right. The
other explanation is, oh, there's some weird chemistry happening that

(28:52):
we never imagined before in the internals of the volcanoes
on Venus. That could also explain it. All right, Well,
then put on our other head and ask how excited
she would be about this discovery and what it can mean.
But first let's take another quick break. All right, Daniel

(29:22):
Day may have found life on Venus. We're not sure.
They found a gas phosphene. That is usually the signature
of life here on Earth, micropial life. And so the
question is are there microbes in the clouds of Venus?
Is it infected? Is Venus infected? Is it infected? Well,

(29:42):
you know one idea I had when I first heard
about this is didn't we send landers to Venus? How
do we know those landers were sterile, right. I just
told you that it's basically impossible to sterilize anything. So
dot dot dot, are you saying that maybe we sent
satellites to Venus probes and somehow those infected Venus and

(30:05):
that's where all that bacteria comes from. I mean, if
bacteria is very hard to kill, then perhaps it survived
the sterilization. Almost certainly some of them survived the sterilization,
and perhaps some of them could survive also the trip
planet to planet, right, And then if they found an
element of the Venusian atmosphere as they're falling in towards
the planet, they could have landed there and spread quickly

(30:28):
with no competition. You could very rapidly have trillions of
microbes in the atmosphere of Venus. Oh man, I wonder
if you ask that, and that's how they cleaned what
would they say, Maybe they said maybe they would say,
but we cleaned it with sulphuric acid. We don't know
how this could possibly happen. Yeah. I think it's a
sort of modern understanding of microbes that they can basically

(30:51):
live anywhere, that they are everywhere, and they can live
almost anywhere. It's essentially impossible to kill all of them. Wow,
so we spread life to Venus potentially potentially Yeah, I
mean we don't know that. That's just speculation, but we
can't rule it out either, because these microbes are very
hard to kill. Now, you know, for that to happen,
need to have enough of them survived the sterilization process

(31:13):
so that some fraction of them could survive the month
long journey to Venus and re entry. But it's certainly possible.
Has enough time passed for you know, like a few
microbes that we sent by acon in to have multiplied
so much by now it's been decades. And remember, the
life cycle of microbes is short, so they adapt and
spread very rapidly, especially if you just dump them into

(31:36):
nutrients with no competition and no predators. Venus should have
been wearing a mask. See folks, we your masks or
our landers should have been wearing a mask. But I
wouldn't say that's likely. I'm just saying it's it's a possibility.
You know, it's something we can't actually rule out. We'd
actually have to go and study that life, and if
we found it, then we could pretty definitively say whether

(31:59):
it was Earth based. But I guess one question I
have is how is this microbial life? If it's there,
how is it surviving? Like doesn't they need to eat
things and then consume some kind of nutrients. Yeah, but
you know, microbes formed here on Earth and they consumed
sunlight or just got energy from various chemical processes, and
so there's definitely sources of energy for them on Venus.

(32:20):
I mean there's heat, there's sunlight, there's everything you need.
From a microbes point of view. Something's got to be
the bottom of the food chain, right right. Oh, I see,
it's kind of like algae almost like it's it's just there,
somebody there. Yeah, it's just like the first microbes on Earth, right,
they didn't need anything else to eat. Well, Um, I guess, Daniel,
how excited should we be about this news discovery that

(32:42):
should we be excited? Should we be skeptical? Should we
just kind of wait and see? We should be very excited.
I mean I participated in that poll and I'm the
one who clicked on oh my god, Oh my god,
aliens because I'm excited. I think there's a good chance
that there's some weird chemistry that's produced seeing this, But
I also think that there's a good chance that there's

(33:03):
microbial life on Venus. I think billions of years have passed,
the conditions are there, why shouldn't there be life. I'm
the kind of person who believes that life is probably
ubiquitous in the galaxy. It's just probably mostly boring microbial
life that hasn't really done anything up. Note careful that
we're going to get letters from all the microbiologists saying

(33:25):
there's no boring, that's just things boring, biopic That's right.
I'm showing my preference here. I would prefer to meet intelligence,
civilized technological venusans than microbial venutions. But hey, that's just me. Yeah.
But I think what you're saying is that it's exciting
because if we find microbial life in Venus, which is
like just another planet in our solar system, that's already

(33:47):
two planets in one solar system with microbial life. So
maybe like the whole universe is full of microbial life,
which means the likelihood that it would progress to something
more intelligent is very very high. Well, that's fascinating, right,
I totally agree with you up to that last statement,
and the history of this question are we alone is
the history of discovering that all the elements are much

(34:09):
more likely than we expected. Right, the number of stars
in the universe turns out to be a much bigger
number than we ever imagined. The number of stars with
planets around them turns out to be a much bigger
fraction than we even dreamed. The number of stars with
planets that are rocky in the hospitable zone is even
higher than we ever hoped to dare. It's like, of

(34:29):
all those planets, and now, if we discovered that microbial
life on such planets is not unusual, that takes us
one step further to concluding that maybe there's intelligent life everywhere.
But we can't just leap to say if microbial life
is everywhere, then intelligent life probably is. Also because we
don't know what the fraction of microbial communities that generate

(34:52):
intelligent life is. Right. Each of those is an independent question,
but it's exciting if we can knock one more down.
If you could say, ah, crobial life, the basis for
intelligent life is ubiquitous, and so you're right. If we
discover it on Venus, then wow, that's a huge signal
that it's probably everywhere in the universe, right, because if
if it is on Venus and it formed on its

(35:14):
own and we didn't accidentally infected Venus, that means like
out of nothing, life originated there. Like life just spontaneously
happened in a place like Venus. That's crazy. It's not
hard to imagine, but it is crazy because Venus, we think,
you know, like a billion years ago, looked a lot
more like Earth before runaway climate change on Venus. We

(35:37):
think Venus was cooler and didn't have as much sulfur
in the atmosphere, and so there probably was an opportunity
for a huge flowering of life on Venus. And it
may be that what they're still is just the remnants
the only thing that survived as Venus got sort of
crazy and bonkers and floated up into the sky. But
absolutely it would be wonderful to be fantastic to discover
life on Venus, right, Yeah, I think the theories that

(36:01):
Venus was once like Earth, nice and in fun to
live in, but then they had crazy climate change. Basically, yeah,
essentially got too hot and that released more stuff into
the atmosphere which helped blanket it, and that made it hotter,
which released more of that climate changing gas, which then
essentially led to a runaway greenhouse effect, and now it's

(36:21):
super hot and super dense and so not a place
we'd like to live, although you could imagine building colonies
that float in the Venusian atmosphere like that could be
a thing. Oh man, are you saying that maybe there
were aliens there intelligent and they took to the clouds. No,
I'm saying if we wanted to establish a base on Venus,

(36:44):
we could build a floating base in the clouds of
Venus to study the Venusian alien. She just went to
Cloud City from Star Wars. And you know, this isn't
the first time we've had similar hints of microbial life
in their planets in the Solar System. Really, we've detected
signals and other planets. Yeah, remember a few years ago

(37:04):
they saw this signature of methane on Mars. Methane is
another one of these things that doesn't last very long,
and it's typically made by organic processes, meaning you know,
microbial processes producing methane. And they saw it in the
atmosphere of Mars, and not just to do see it
in the atmosphere of Mars, but they see like seasonal variations,

(37:25):
as you would imagine if like things go to sleep
in the winter and then wake up in the summer
and start metabolizing and releasing methane and all sorts of stuff.
So that was pretty exciting. So we think that maybe
there is life on Mars. Well we don't know, but
we know that there's liquid water on Mars. We know
there's methane produced in the atmosphere, and so again those
are both strong hints towards macrobial life. It's a far

(37:48):
from being able to claim that there is life on Mars,
but it's the kind of evidence that's consistent with life
on Mars and difficult to explain otherwise. And that's the
kind of thing we learned about Venus this week, that
there's something similar are on Venus, some process making a gas,
as far as we know, can only be made by life,
and it is being made on Venus. Well, pretty exciting.

(38:08):
It sounds, Daniel, like you're telling me that we should
be excited about this news. It is worth the other
front page of newspapers. It's definitely worth the other front page.
And you know, even if it turns out to be weird.
Chemistry Hey, we've learned something about chemistry, and that helps
us understand whether this is a fascinating signal to look
for an exoplanets or not. And you know, I'm less

(38:29):
excited to learn about new chemical pathways to make phosphine
that I am to discover life on Venus. But you
know it is still exciting, right, And what's interesting is
that we could go there and check it out. Like
it's not like an extra planet that's millions of light
years away, I mean Venus. We could potentially go there
and scoop some of that gas up and see if

(38:50):
there are bacteria there. Absolutely. The next step is to
do a much more detailed study of the different kinds
of gases in the atmosphere. You know, we've seen one,
you but to understand whether there's life there, we need
to scoop up that gas and see, like, well, what
is this being made from? What else is happening? Because
if there is life in the atmosphere is Venus, it's
not just making Phosphenes's kind of making other stuff. And

(39:14):
so these things are called metabolites, the product of metabolism,
and we can do metaboli mix to understand like what
are they doing, What are they breathing, what are they eating,
what are they producing? And that will give us a
clue as to what might be there and so more details,
study the atmosphere and then yeah, go descend into Venus
and scoop some of this stuff out or actually study.

(39:35):
Just make sure we wear a mask, right, that's right.
And so there's a bunch of folks gearing up to
do studies of Venus. People are talking about sending another
probe to Venus, and even small companies. There's a small
company I was reading about yesterday called Rocket Labs and
they're building sort of a low budget probe that there
were any way planning to send to Venus because they
felt like Mars has too much attention what about Venus?

(39:58):
And so they're planning to launch a think it's next year,
a spacecraft called the Photon on a rocket they called
the Electron and send it to Venus. And so we
could get some more answers pretty soon. Wow. So if
we haven't infected Venus, we we probably will soon. I
think it's what you're saying, that's right, and you know,

(40:18):
that's a fascinating idea. I think what I said before
it was not actually correct, because if we go to
Venus and we discover these micro groups, we can't actually
tell if they came from Earth or not. Like say
that they are DNA based microups that look a lot
like Earth microbes. That either tells you, well, we infected
them from Earth, or this is the way to make

(40:40):
microbial life. If it's really independent and it arises totally
separately and ends up looking very very much like Earth.
That tells you that life can really only happen one way.
So that would be a huge discovery, or it would
mean that we'd infected. It would mean that in Star
Trek when all the Aliens looked the same with four
limbs and five fingers, it's because of a reason, that's right.

(41:01):
There's actually science behind it, and that's why it's so
important to not infect these planets, Like you don't get
two chances. If you infect Venus, then we can no
longer ask that question of whether life can arise independently
and look similar to life on Earth. So I really
hope that we haven't infected Venus. That's my worry, my anxiety,

(41:22):
But I'm hopeful that it's not the case. Well, I
guess the answer is let's wait and see. Maybe we'll
find life right here in our neighborhood. We need more observations,
All right, Well, we hope you enjoy that, and we
hope that cleared up that headline that was in the
news all of this week and maybe got you a
little bit excited about discoveries and other planets and the
potential for us not being the only things alive in

(41:46):
our universe. That's right, and we're happy to share with
you our enthusiasm or excitement about this potential big news,
but also to remind you that it's a long cry
from actually discovering life on venus. I mean, we know
the probability of seeing phosphen given life is high. We
don't know what the probability of life given phosphing is

(42:07):
and so we're excited, we're hopeful, but we're also still cautious. Yeah,
thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast for

(42:28):
my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ye