Is the signal real?
If the signal is real,
we still have to be able to explain what or who is making it.
I've dedicated my entire career to finding life beyond our Earth, and
lately I've been trying to find it on Venus, the planet next door.
Oh WOW!
Life on Venus.
That just blew me away.
Venus is an absolute hell.
The temperatures on the surface average about four hundred and
seventy Celsius, which is hot enough to melt lead.
Air pressure on the surface is what it would feel like to be about
a mile under the ocean.
Because the clouds of sulfuric acid are so
dense with haze, Venus became a desolate hellscape.
The Venera missions were an extraordinary programme, several of
the Veneras didn't even attempt to land.
One of them lasted 127 minutes and provided a lot of data.
Some tried to take pictures, but the lens caps wouldn't come out.
And by the time we got to 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Venera
missions, we had managed to get to the surface of Venus, take
measurements and be sure of its intense temperatures and pressures
and also the hurricane level winds that were passing in the
atmosphere.
When they eventually got the correct sort of radar gone through
the clouds and see what was going on, then it got really exciting.
Then we thought this is a planet with a lot of volcanoes on it
and even more fascinating volcanoes, unlike any we see on the Earth.
These volcanoes had been partly responsible for spewing out gases
that led to Venus becoming the fiery hell it is now.
But recent data shows there may still be life left in them yet.
They found that Venus had hot spots within it, something active
on Venus. That really is quite exciting to actually see this.
We do know life is very resourceful, and there is one place on Venus
that could host life.
If there is alien life in the clouds of Venus
or anywhere else beyond the Earth.
We have very little hope of ever actually seeing them, but we can
look for the gases that that life produces.
And that is what I've dedicated my entire career to do.
My specialty is looking for a gas called phosphine.
It was just here, you know, I was actually trying to find my
phosphine molecule.
OK, well, we lost phosphine, which actually is
very fitting.
On Earth phosphine,
it's produced by life that doesn't care for oxygen.
So I thought maybe we could find phosphine on other planets that are
oxygen poor, and there it would be a very robust sign of life.
An astronomer from Cardiff named Jane Greaves reached out to me
saying,
Oh WOW!
Perhaps there really are these floating microbes.
They needed some help interpreting a potential signal from Venus
obtained with the ALMA telescope that seemed to indicate there was a
sign of phosphine in the clouds of Venus.
When you go really high up.
So about 50 kilometres up, the pressure in the clouds is like it
is at the surface of the Earth and the temperature is actually like 20
or 30 centigrade. So it's really quite habitable.
Jane and the rest of our team used two telescopes, many months apart and in
completely different parts of the world, to look at the atmosphere of
Venus. And these two independent observations agreed with one another.
So that was January 2019 when I was reasonably sure and
that's June of 2019.
Here it is again.
I at first did not believe it, but there was a small part of me that
thought my whole career had been for something.
It's really obvious there's something there.
So that kind of blew me away.
Maybe, maybe all the work I'd done saying the phosphine was a sign of
life was just going to pay out right now.
Astronomers have announced they've found what could be evidence of
life elsewhere and not on Mars, but on the much more inhospitable
Venus.
There's something seriously weird going on that perhaps, perhaps
this is life. And that just blew me away.
It was so exciting.
So you can see that really they look very like each other.
So it was a robust result, two telescopes, nothing to do with each
other, saw the same thing.
My second instinct that kicked in quite quickly was,
is the signal real? If it is, is it for sure phosphine or could there be
another molecule mimicking it?
And if it is real and it is phosphine, was I right in saying
that only life could produce it?
Well, there are two ways that it could possibly be life.
One is there's just a completely different biochemistry there,
it's radically different from anything
we imagine on the Earth.
The other way that in principle, a more water loving
life, a bit more like the biochemistry you see on Earth,
could hide itself away inside a protective shell of some sorts,
inside the sulfuric acid droplets.
There's questions on whether even the signal is real. If the signal
is real, there are questions on whether it is phosphine or
potentially other molecules that can mimic the same signal like
sulfur dioxide.
If the signal is real and it is phosphine, we still have to be able
to explain what or who is making it.
And only then could we consider that we have found life.
We're all just trying to figure out the truth, and I would love for
there to be phosphine, but primarily I would love to know
what's happening in the clouds of Venus, phosphine or no phosphine.
And the rest of the community is doing the same thing.
Really hoping somebody will come in and say we could start to plan for
a space mission and fly through the atmosphere would be super
exciting. And given they've managed to get a lander to the surface
and signals out in 1985.
That's got to be possible.
Right?
We are only just now beginning to be able to even interpret the
signals from places that could host life.
It's a really exciting time to be discovering potentially the first
one of those signs on the planet next door.
But there will be many, many more to come.