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Life on Venus??
4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago687 words
Aliens Interesting UFOsWorld News
As you've probably already seen, phosphine - a molecule only known to be produced by life - has been detected in the atmosphere of Venus. Could we be very close now to finally discovering that life on Earth isn't unique??



I found out on the day of the initial announcement from a Reddit thread, which hadn't got much attention, and to which the lovely Reddit types were replying mostly with "I'm too clever to fall for this crap!" incredulity (because being fooled and looking stupid is something to be avoided at all costs for some people). Personally I like to see the wonder and possibility and ~magic in the universe~ and all that, so I tweeted about it... though I wondered based on those Redditors' comments whether I'd just fallen for some dubious fluff story that'd amount to nothing and embarrassed myself.

Looks like it's actually serious though, and a ton of news sources have been reporting about it. I've looked into it a bit, and watched a few videos by space-related youtube channels that seem excited about it.

Here's an interesting one:



Purely because it's titled This Unusual Gas Phosphine Is a Definite Sign of Alien Life, and, notably, it was released in January, so it wasn't a response to this new discovery. Interesting!

Here's another, which is also months old and talks about various oddities on Venus suggestive of life:



Apparently, phosphine is found in gas giants and is understood to be produced by abiotic means on those, but the pressure isn't nearly enough on Venus for it to produce it in the same way - or... something - so there's no way to explain its presence on Venus other than as a product of life, especially in the volume it's been discovered. There are also visible things in the clouds which are apparently absorbing UV light and which have previously gone unexplained.

Spacecraft have been sent to Venus before and weren't exactly swarmed by Venusian bats or anything, but I suppose if the life was microscopic and they weren't built to detect it, they could have flown right through clouds of it without noticing.

Hopefully this will spark interest in sending an explorer there specifically looking for life - sounds like a few people are already quite interested - though it's a shame thinking how many years it's likely to be before anything comes of that... It's all so slow! Even slower than waiting for games to finish being made! How frustrating!!



What are your thoughts about this? Do you think it could be an answer to 'are we alone?' at long last? How do you think the world - or your perceptions of it - would change if it was?

Personally I'd be excited by the discovery of extraterrestrial life, though if it's just microbes, it does feel a bit deflating. It'd be very interesting to see whether they shared biochemistry with us, or whether they were something entirely different. Just knowing that life is right next door would say a lot about how abundant it probably is.

(One of the videos I saw talked about how the James Webb telescope, which is - or at least was? - set to be released next year, will be able to detect phosphine on planets within several lightyears of Earth. It'll be interesting if that reveals it's more common than not!)

It could be though that life on Venus and Earth are related, and since they're neighbours, it doesn't seem too unlikely. Perhaps life started there and was seeded here, or even vice versa. Venus used to have fairly Earth-like conditions once, apparently.

Wouldn't it be interesting if intelligent life evolved there, and the hellscape we see now is the result of their self-annihilation?? Surely the very real UFOs - or UAPs or whatever they're calling them now - are the last remaining Venusians, and that explains why they can get here without travelling for an eternity across the cosmos. SURELY THIS IS IT!!!

(I doubt it, but I find it entertaining to speculate!)

12 COMMENTS

purplerabbits148~4Y
One of my friends is studying Astrophysics and she is pretty excited about it. For me, Im not believing that its the ancient Aliends that have created humanity and are wating us from Venus this whole time. To me its more likely life that's similar to extreemophile Bacteria or Archaea. Those buggers are just flat out weird, but are able to live in those conditions. I mean even on earth we got bateria that are completely immune to radioactivity and live in the atmospheric layer touching space.

I remember seeing that there are Mars rocks with fossilized bacteria, so I believe that those types could survive in Venus's atmosphere.

On the soecukative side, it's interesting to thing, maybe those bacterja are the wag how lu e on venus Devolved by shrinking themselves so that they can ride the atmosphere. Not the first time an andvanced species has evolved to become tiny and lose advanced features. I think it's fairy flies that have gotten so small that they dont even have a circulatory system in the typical way, they just diffuse air liquids and the like through it's membranes, because it's more efficient that way when there's a high surface area to volume ratio.

I'm excited fro the James Webb telecope though, actual data coming is is really exciting.
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Tobias 1115~4Y
It's not that I'd seriously expect to be meeting ET and discovering the secrets of the universe here, but I'm most interested to see - assuming something is eventually found - how it is biochemically. It's unlikely that it's going to be bacteria as we know it, because that's a specific thing that's evolved on Earth; would whatever it is even use DNA? Be carbon-based? If not, it'd mean all the kinds of alternate possible bases of life would be more than just speculative, but if it is exactly like life on Earth, that'd suggest there might be only one way that life could ever form. Which wouldn't be so good for the many sci-fi creators who dream up all intelligent shades of the colour blue and such!

If there was more advanced life once and there are only specks of it left left in the Venusian clouds, I'd see those like the cockroaches-surviving-the-apocalypse scenario; not so much adaptation through drastic devolution, but just only the hardiest extremophiles were able to survive. That'd be sad, especially if it'd be a hint at what could happen to us if humanity keeps on the path it's on. Maybe life on Mars will flourish in billions of years, and they'll look up at the pair of hellish planets between them and the sun and dismiss them for eons in their own search for life because of how completely inhospitable they obviously are.
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purplerabbits148~4Y
Im really curious to how life evolved on Venus. Like have they been that way for a long time or has the conditions been right for life form recently?

The biochemistry would be very interesting since even on earth there js some weird stuff that evolved. For example Octopuses have copper in their circulatory system so their blood is blue, un like the iron based blood we have. (I studied marine biology I know what I am talking about. Octopi came about because there was some form of language upheaval and then they reverted it back to Octopuses currently because Octopi doesnt translate from the correct Latin root.) And for spiders they have trasparent blood.

Seeing how weird Earth has it, I realky want to know just how weird Venus's life can get.

I do put bets that if they are atmonspheric then they'll probably have an enzyme that can repair their genetic coding . like the Earth's equivelent atmonspheric bacteria and their enzyme telomerase.
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Tama_Yoshi82~4Y
I've already said I believed there existed other forms of extra-terrestrial life forms out there in the universe, based on the cheer size of the (observable) universe, and based on what may very well exist beyond that. We already know from estimates that there are more planets orbiting around stars than there are grains of sands on the entirety of Earth. Some of these planets exist in systems that are even more stable than our sun (e.g. neutron stars, which have already "died" in the way our current sun is expected to die in billions of years, meaning these systems are likely to go on living for even longer than ours).

I've read a semi-speculative book called Our Mathematical Universe which discussed about the possibility of having parallel universes with similar, or entirely dissimilar properties to ours. Speculating about parallel universes is this weird pocket of stuff that is both "scientifically plausible" since it can be reasonably extrapolated from our current astrophysical models, but it is also "pseudoscientific" in the sense that by definition parallel universes are not observable, so we cannot ever hope to confirm they exist (for now at least; maybe one day they won't be pseudoscientific and we'll be able to observe them in some way). It hits that niche of plausibility that I like to contemplate when I get that existential vibe.

When looking at videos like this, [LINK] or games like this [LINK] or even scientific documentary series like Cosmos, which inevitably tackle the scope of the universe and the possibility of alien life...

It's easy to feel like humanity is an insanely small part the story.
In games like Outer Wilds, this kind of scope insensitivity is weaponized into this weirdly dreadful design where you keep witnessing the end of systems and alien civilizations. [LINK]

As for Venus, compared to everything else it probably is the least curious aspect of the question, except perhaps if there were ancient civilizations on Venus a long time ago. I don't know if there are explanations for the current green house nature of Venus, apart from that it was created by a long dead civilization. I think I recall theories according to which biological life in space can be scattered by ways of meteorites containing extremophiles (extremely resilient microscopic life forms, such as tardigrades), where life wouldn't start in a "primordial soup" manner (as is theorized in our case) but by such a meteorite striking a planet and kickstarting the beginning of life on that planet. Weird stuff either way.

Thinking about "life out there" is a bit like thinking about time travel. It adds scope to the nature of what there is out there, which can feel quite nice. But when I think about it too long, it also makes me uncomfortable... if you arbitrarily increase the scope of life, it's not only the good parts you magnify.
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Tobias 1115~4Y
It seems ridiculous not to assume there's life out there somewhere considering the scale of things, so I think whether life exists somewhere other than here isn't worth wondering about for very long... unless we're in an ancestor simulation or something and the lack of other life is deliberate. The other universes thing is interesting since it's essentially the same question; are we the only life here? Are we the only universe here? Or are there others?

So having some definite proof that we aren't unique would be revolutionary! It's not like we can talk to microorganisms if that's all that's found on Venus, but just knowing that the number of habitable planets is greater than 1 makes it much easier to accept that it's even greater than that. If life there or here was a result of panspermia, you could say Earth and Venus are or were in a kind of linked system so life didn't arise two independent times, but even that could open up the possibility that the original life started elsewhere or was delivered from one of these two planets to others.

I'd be particularly interested to see how religions react if extraterrestrial life is proven!
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Tama_Yoshi82~4Y
If we look at how religions have formed and sustained themselves historically, we can have a good idea of how religious will evolve as a result of a discovery of extraterrestrial life. We know from other related phenomena that it would cause:

- schisms between denominations
- people who will speculate about these alien species having caused our existing (there are already sects who believe this anyway)
- religions whose frameworks rely on anthropocentrism will deny the science as it comes
- if the evidence is too overwhelming, they will begin to take the "specist" route of assuming the aliens are intrinsically inferior and less moral than human beings (similar to racism, except it would be akin to how some religions are very dismissive of vegan philosophy on the basis that animals would be there "for" humans to eat).
- a lot of weird new metaphors will rise, revolving around extra-terrestrial identity and (if we make close contact) concepts typical of those extra-terrestrial entities. For instance if they have big ears, metaphors around sound will be used to either delegitimize the aliens, or legitimize them.
- smaller groups of people will take Jesus' teachings and extend it to the aliens, and (if we make close contact) the extent and form this takes will depend on how peaceful our interactions are.

If you ever read into ancient Christianity, one source of creativity from religious thinkers was the struggle between legitimizing historically valued philosophy - especially those that came from the Greeks - and the absolutist wisdom of the Church (who had to know it all and could not afford secular thought to beat it). This led to weird things like the idea that God was not merely "good," but "Super good" (a not very subtle linguistic trick, where Super meant "necessarily," iirc). Or that God was the Trinity. Or that Jesus was both God and Human. Or that it was okay to eat meat, actually, because (cough) we need more followers than those Jews and Muslims who are making the mistake of imposing unappealing dietary bans on their people.

The evolution of theological thought is very... creative.
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Tobias 1115~4Y
The religious response to non-Earth life might 'cause some ruckus', so that's something!

I try to pay attention to this stuff since whether or not we're alone in the universe is the question I most hope is answered in my lifetime, and I haven't seen anything before which seemed as promising as this!
0
Maniafig222~4Y
I'd always thought alien life was inevitable given just how huge the universe is. Given so many planets, I'd be shocked to find out there would be no other life out there, and that would be impossible to prove anyway. In that sense, to me this news feels like a confirmation of an obvious truth.

Of course there's life somewhere out there. We're not really all that special, after all. We're just hardwired to think we are special as a species, and that the Earth is special as a planet, since that makes sense for a species's continued survival as a whole. But we're really just a species on a rock, and there's a lot of other rocks, and some of them probably have species too.

Still, even with other life out there, it still feels like we are alone here on Earth. It could very well be there is life on some ridiculously distant planet that we can interact with on a level beyond the observation of some single-celled organisms, but I really doubt we'll ever meet.

It's kind of like knowing that there is that special perfect soulmate for you out there on the other side of the planet, but you don't know who they are and you'll never meet them. Life wouldn't really seem any different whether or not that person existed.

I'd prefer to find my comfort with someone who I could be with.
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Tobias 1115~4Y
There are a whole bunch of hypothetical answers to why we're apparently alone in the universe despite the scale of it - I think it's called the Fermi Paradox? - but what I wonder is whether any advanced species end up building virtual worlds to sink into instead of bothering to travel the ludicrous vastness of space for the potential to find something unknown. If we could have all our needs met through some fully immersive, all-senses-catered-to VR experience where we could literally make our wildest dreams come true, why would anyone want to go and explore the stars?

Or maybe they ascend to another plane of existence or something. When they're finished playing Biological Life, they move onto the sequel!

I'm excited about alien life mainly because I'm curious about their biochemistry, how they're built and how they function, and how similar or not to Earth life!
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Wolf21~4Y
It's definitely an interesting area of study and theory. For a long time we looked for life in forms very similar to the ones we know- and this is an extension of that, looking at byproducts. But we seem to have started to apply more abstract thinking to the problem rather than "examine planets in habitable zones with specific atmospheres and assume", which is one major way we've approached the search for many years.

As a bit of a sci-fi nerd I've always enjoyed weird theories like the great filter, so I'm not surprised at the finding. There have been theories postulated in the past like 'the first life on earth might have been caused by microbial life surviving an impact event' so I've never really found the concept of extra-terrestrial life that strange (even though it might have been disproven or fallen from the 'probable' list). The likelihood of encountering sentient extraterrestrial life still seems pretty unlikely given the scale of our universe, and I'm not sure that will change unless we find some way to get around what we understand to be the fundamental foundations of physics.

I'm not entirely sure what practical purpose this particular discovery could serve (though these things don't need to have a practical use, or potential practical use in the future, to be worth researching and understanding). I've seen some articles talking about potentially living there and I don't think that's very likely as Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system. Though if it just results in more funding for science/space programs that in itself will be good.

Also, side note, I really like the fact you went out of your way to look further into this than the average person. Most people I know who've discussed this with me in real life have read an article or three that all source the same initial report. Looking further, examining details and looking back at older articles on similar things are the sorts of things that makes a good researcher/journalist/sceptic.
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Tobias 1115~4Y
It always seemed so naive to me when people tied together 'has water' and 'potential for life', as if life could only exist in conditions similar to Earth. Despite all the extremophiles we have here! So I'd be particularly curious to see if alien life is biochemically drastically different to Earth life, in which case the filter we're using to gauge the habitability of planets would become a lot less restrictive.

Whether or not we're alone in the universe is the question I most hope will be answered before I die, so when something as promising as this comes up, I can't not look into it further! I'm surprised how other people aren't more excited about it, really; I wonder whether there'd still be a largely 'meh' response even if some spacecraft literally brought back macroscopic life samples from another world. I suppose unless it's actually changing everyday life in any noticeable way, it just becomes one shiny thing on the conveyor belt...
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