Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is there life on Venus?

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

The internet went crazy talking about phosphine on Venus! What does it mean? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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No, we're still at zero world destroying black holes. So did the news go crazy over something that is not quite real? A 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. Hi, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never been to Mars. Or Venus. Or are you admitting that information on purpose? I'm purposely not answering that question. You are from Venus. I knew you Daniel. But welcome to our show. Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. In which we take 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 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 promise to keep up to date called Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet.com. As of this morning, the answer is no.

The physics forecast says no chance. That's right. Smoky skies, but no black holes. But yes, welcome to our podcast in which we talk about the science 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. 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 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 about.

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 at least the front page. And then also in the New York Times, it was a big news in the science community. And it spilled over into the general news. That's right. 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 community. Oh, gossip. Science gossips? Physical gossip. This 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 is your day? Oh, I discovered life on Venus. How was your day? You know, things happen. People chat. Yeah.

How was your day? Oh, I made a black hole. We're all going to die in a few seconds. Pack up the car, honey. We're getting out of here. Back up the rocket ship. But yeah, I'm 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, no. But yeah, today we're going to be talking about a big headline that made the news a few days ago for those of you listening to this. episode now, but it has to do with one of the biggest questions we 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 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 the end of the podcast, we'll be talking about. Is there 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 in crazy pressure. So what they actually 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 life in other planets. And other headlines were like, we think maybe possibly there's 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 are not saying this is a discovery of X, Y, Z. But in these papers, because they knew it could be overinterpreted, 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 jump to life probably found on Venus, which is a very different statement.

And so I thought it would be helpful to break down exactly what they found and what it means and what we should do next. Yeah, some of are like, they are green and have giant heads. That's right. Well, you know, there's no social life here on Earth, thanks to the pandemic. So maybe there's life on Venus. It's about the universe. That might be. Maybe that's why my Zoom connections are so bad.

My collaborators are actually on Venus. Boy, imagine 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. Yep, I can hear you. You know, given how hard it is to have a Zoom conversation with humans using equivalent technology here on Earth, I can't imagine what it would actually be like to meet aliens

and talk to them, you know? The first 10 minutes would definitely be like, I can't hear you. Is this thing on? And 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 art they put up on their wall? To serve humanity.

Oh, cut the connection quick. But we were curious how many people had heard of this 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 poll on Twitter says,

Life and Venus news is option A, yawn, weird chemistry, B, totally bananas, and C, oh, my God, oh, my God, aliens. And before we reveal the results, I did get some flack for calling it yawn, weird chemistry. People are like, why isn't it? Oh, my God, weird chemistry. Was it the chemistry lobby? I think so, yeah.

Our chemistry fans? No weird chemistry is yawn-inducing. What are you talking about? But, you know, compared to the opportunity that we have found life, then weird chemistry is definitely yon-inducing. Well, so you've sent this poll out and we got back to results pretty quick. Yeah, so just about half the folks who responded thought it was 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, does this mean that 30% 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? Did they find potassium? It's a 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 in 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. All right. Well, anyway, 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 find? Like, did you read the paper? I did. There were two papers that came out, one in nature and one in astrobiology. What? At the same time? At the same time, and these papers, they've been working on it for a couple of years, sort of in secret and in parallel. And so these teams put these papers out together, and there 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 phosphine. And that's a chemical formula is pH3, 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 in normal conditions.

Really? It doesn't just happen, or it does happen, but maybe not 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 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? Yeah. So we don't have a lander on Venus or a rover or anything to drive around on Venus. Venus is very inespitable. We've only sent probes to Venus a few 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 probed to Venus into Venus, 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 800 degrees on.

the surface and the pressure is really, really high. It's like 1,300 pounds per square inch. It's like 45 bars. Is that just from the like the temperature? Because it's so hot. Yeah, 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 atmosphere is basically by volcanoes, you know,

farting that out onto the surface and then the gravity holding it in. I don't know what sounds more unpleasant. Volcanoes or constant farts? Well, you know, the atmosphere is basically the planet's farting and then gravity holds it to you. We're lucky that we're not so large that our farts are bound to us gravitationally. They disperse in the atmosphere.

But if you're a planet, you're not so lucky. And with your volcanoes burp out, sticks around. So it's a lot of volcanoes on Venus, pumping out gas. And that's why you have this really high pressure. Oh, wow. And how did we see these molecules of 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 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 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. They're in quantized states around the neutral. nucleus, so they're limited to absorbing photons of 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 and where it's absorbed where the intensity of 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 anti-color. Like it absorbs a specific color. Yes, it absorbs those frequencies and lets everything else through. And it's a really powerful technique because each one has its own fingerprint. And so even if your gas is a big mixture, hydrogen and 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. They're unique different shapes. And you can measure how much

which is absorbed in different frequencies. So it's a really powerful technique. It's really cool. And it lets us tell what's in the atmosphere of other planets if we can look at light that's come through that atmosphere. Yeah, 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 because there's active fusion going on. and so photons 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, 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 there oxygen? And those are fascinating clues about what might be living on that planet. Right, because it's not just gas, it's like other things too, right? The 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 of lots of different frequencies, not just to move the electrons up and down, 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 pH3 phosphine. And we think it might be due to some life there. So let's get into what that means and how excited should we be. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plane site that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law

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podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro? Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit,

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and it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so Venus has been farting and we've seen the evidence. We smelt it through light.

That's right. That's right. Well, we know it has an atmosphere, and that atmosphere is probably all because of volcanic burps. And that atmosphere has one really fascinating element of it, is element phosphine. And phosphine is fascinating because as far as we understand it, it's really hard to make just chemically. Like to create the conditions to make phosphine is very difficult and very rare.

It's made, for example, in the core. core of gas giants under really, really high pressure and temperature. But on rocky planets, we don't know of a way to make phosphate other than being assisted by biological life. So, yeah, maybe he stepped me through because I'm kind of confused. Like, why couldn't this molecule 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, right? 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 know it's complicated. Like how these Lego pieces like to click together. They have to be in the right configuration. 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 other things and sort of lock these components into other molecules. So you don't tend to make pH3 because it's energetically just very unfavorable. It takes a lot of energy to make it.

It can happen. Like if you have a random, a lot of phosphorus and hydrogen together and you mix it, pH3 is not what they would make. That's right. And in one of these papers, they 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 are all the steps you would have to go through to make pH3. 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 explain this 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 maybe is it that they don't see the other things that phosphorus and hydrogen would like to make instead? I know they see those as well, but they just see much, much more phosphine than they expect. And, you know, it still is not a lot. We're talking like 20 parts per billion.

That means you take a random molecule of the Venusian atmosphere and you get, you know, like 20 phosphines. 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 would expect if you just. sort of let chemistry run its course, given our understanding of what's on Venus and the chemical processes. Wow. So even 20 parts per billion is a lot. Yeah. It's 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 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 is it like a thousand times less than we're seeing it on Venus? Wow. So there's either a thousand times more life on Venus is kind of what you're saying? Well, we also have a different atmosphere, and so phosphine may not survive as long in our atmosphere.

Phosphine 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. It tends to be produced in 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, led people to go investigate and follow them into the woods. What? Are you talking about the fire swamp from Princess Bride? That's exactly what is. Like is this all due to phosphine?

Turns out it's all about phosphine. Are the rats of unusual size also due to phosphine? I don't know. But, you know, phosphine 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 phosphine and why is it something that life can do, but, like, chemistry can't. Yeah. Like, does the heart of planets 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 phosphine is made by life forms. What? Yeah. They see it in association with like bacteria. And we know it's produced like in our intestines where it's all sorts of microbial activity and in swamps 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. Wait, 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, 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 of dark energy? But the rough idea is that, you know, life has proteins, and proteins are these 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 catalyze and take you from one step to the other if that's really important for something that the life is doing, right? Really? So the proteins are like these little chemical helpers. Like through proteins, like 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 qualifier to keep in your mind. Like, we're projecting that phosphine 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 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 phosphine doesn't last that long. It breaks down in 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 phosphine had been produced sort of geologically a long 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. 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 1,000 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 phosphine, it hasn't been there for eons. It's like it was recent. Somebody something or somebody made that recently. That's right. Somebody dealt it recently. It's like if you see fresh milk, it's like, oh, you have to think it's recent. You see fresh milk that doesn't taste bad, then you know it wasn't made by dinosaurs or a long time ago. Yeah, and that's exciting, right?

That tells you that there's something out there that we only understood to be made by life and is fairly recent. And we don't think that there's any way to make it unorganically. So it's an exciting 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 10 years suggesting this. Like, wow, this would be an awesome biomarker.

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. They're like, if we see this, we'll see aliens. And then they saw it. It could be actually good science or it could be a conspiracy. Now, so then the hypothesis is that maybe there are. are bacteria on Venus then that is making this phosphine 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 aliens trying to connect with us on Zoom. Microbial life. Because again, that's the only thing that produces phosphine here on Earth is microbial life. and also not on the surface

because the surface is totally inhospitable and where they find the phosphine is in the atmosphere it's like 50 kilometers up. What? So it's not just aliens, it's flying aliens. It's floating aliens because it's about 50 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 that's floating in the Venusian atmosphere. What? Like rain life. Cloud life, yeah, exactly. Wow, cloud, yeah. Life in the cloud decks, you know.

It's like 45 to 60 kilometers above the surface is where they call the temperate zone. And the pressure there is about, you know, 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's the sketch of the idea is that maybe there are... 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. The other cool piece of information is that the phosphine doesn't seem to be present at the poles. It's mostly like around the equator and more in the temperate zones. And so that's interesting. Interesting. Yeah. What does that mean? They're all vacationing at the same time.

That's right. It's summer on 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, but it's a pretty difficult environment to survive in. It's very dry, actually, and it's very acidic. I mean, these clouds we're talking about are not clouds of water vapor. They're clouds of sulfuric acid. What? And so it's a difficult environment. But we have bacteria here, right? They can

live 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. I mean, they have these great stories of when they try to sterilize stuff 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 create it. And so there certainly could be something that's capable of surviving those conditions.

We just haven't imagined it yet. I see. All right. So it's living in the rain droplets of sulfuric 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 we never imagined before in the internals of volcanoes on Venus. That could also explain it. All right. Well, then let's put on our other head and ask, How excited should we be about this discovery and what it could mean? But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane. Think you could do it?

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Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Daniel, they may have found life on Venus. they found a gas phosphine that is usually the signature of life here on Earth, microbial life. And so the question is, are there microbes in the clouds of Venus? Is it infected? Is Venus infected? Is it infected? Well, 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. Interesting. Dot, dot, dot. Are you saying that maybe we sent satellites to Venus or probes and somehow those infected Venus? And 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 with no competition. You could very rapidly have trillions of microbes in the atmosphere of Venus. Oh, man. I wonder if you asked NASA how they clean it. What would they say? Maybe they said, maybe they would say, but we cleaned it with sulfuric 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 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, you need to have enough of them survive the sterilization process so that some fraction of them could survive the months-long journey to Venus. and re-entry, but it's certainly possible. It has enough time pass for, you know, like a few microbes that we sent by accident 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 nutrients with no competition and no predators. Oh, wow. Venus should have been wearing a mask. See, folks? Wear your masks. Or landers should have been.

wearing a mask. But I wouldn't say that's likely. I'm just saying it's a possibility. 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 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 it need to eat things and consume some kind of nutrient? 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. I see.

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 just there someday. Yeah.

It's just like the first microbes on Earth, right? They didn't need anything else to eat. Well, I guess, Daniel, how excited should we be about this news discovery then? 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 producing this, but I also think that there's a good chance that there's 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 of note. Oh, wait, careful there. We're going to get letters from all the microbiologists saying there's no boring.

That's just thinking it's boring biochemistry. That's right. I'm showing my preference here. I would prefer to meet intelligent, civilized, technological venusians than microbial venus. 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 soul. solar system. That's already 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 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 20% of 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 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, microbial 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 it is on Venus and it formed on its own and we didn't accidentally infect 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 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's there 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'd be wonderful, it'd be fantastic to discover life on Venus. Right. Yeah. I think the theories that Venus was once like Earth, nice and fun to live in, but then they had crazy climate change, basically. Yeah. Essentially, it 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 super hot and super dense. Wow. 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, we could build a floating base in the clouds of Venus to study the Venusian alien. Just went to Cloud City from Star Wars. And, you know, this isn't the first time that we've had similar hints of microbial life in our planets in the solar system. Really? We've detected signals in other planets? Yeah, remember a few years ago, they saw this signature of methane on Mars.

Methane is another one of these things that doesn't last very long and is typically made by organic processes, meaning microbial processes producing methane, and they saw it in the atmosphere of Mars. And not just did they see it in the atmosphere of Mars, but they see seasonal variations. As you would imagine, if 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 microbial life. It's far 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 on Venus, some process making a gas that as far as we know can only be made by life and is being made on Venus. Well, pretty exciting. It sounds, Daniel, like you're telling me that we should be excited about this news. It is worthy of the front page of newspapers. It's definitely worthy of the 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 on exoplanets or not. And, you know, I'm less excited to learn about new chemical pathways to make phosphine than 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 exoplanet 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 there are bacteria there. Absolutely. The next step is to do a much more detail study of the different kinds of gases in the atmosphere. You know, we've seen one clue. 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 of Venus, it's not just

making phosphine. It's got to be making other stuff. And so these things are called metabolites, the product of metabolism. And we can do metabolomics to understand like, what are they doing? What are they breathing? What are they eating? What are they producing? And that'll give us a clue as to what might be there. And so more detail study the atmosphere. And then, yeah, go descend into Venus and scoop some of this stuff out or actually study. Yeah. Just make sure we wear a mask, though, 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 they were any way planning to send to Venus because they felt like Mars has too much attention. What about Venus? And so they're planning to launch. I think it's next year, a spacecraft called the photon on a rocket, they call 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 probably will soon. I think is what you're saying. That's right.

And, you know, 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 microbes, we can't actually tell if they came from Earth or not. Like, say that they are DNA-based microbes that look a lot like Earth microbes. That either tells you, well, we infected them from Earth, or this is the way to make 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. It would mean that in Star Trek, when all the aliens look the same with four limbs and five fingers,

it's because of a reason. That's right. There's actually science behind it. And that's why it's so important to not infect these planets. 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, 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 enjoyed 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 in other planets and the potential for us not being the only things alive in our universe. That's right. And we're happy to share with you our enthusiasm, our 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 phosphine given life is high. We don't know what the probability of life given phosphine is. 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 Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great bevdas you've come to expect.

Listen to the new season of Dashes Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof, trying to tell us how to spend our own money? no thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I-feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

One Tribe saved my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of The Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.