Here's What Discovery of Phosphine On Venus Really Means

for many years now i've been speculating that we're going to find even more signs of life on venus and well looks like we got what i was asking for hello wonderful person let's talk about this new discovery new very exciting discovery that suggests that there might be something happening on venus after all but i'm not going to go in the women say that this is life for sure because it could be something else let's talk about this in a little bit more detail and begin with a cautionary tale of the past from our neighbor mars you might remember back in the 90s bill clinton made a pretty famous by now announcement suggesting that we found life on mars all of which was based on the discoveries coming from an asteroid we discovered in antarctica that did come from mars this is sort of what we found there these formations that you see right here from the asteroid known as alh or allen hills 8400 were according to some scientists these signs that life bacterial life existed on mars and this by the way was back in 1996. now back then i was about to start college and i got very lucky to work with one of the professors who was working with different asteroids and who was also trying to investigate alh 84001 but he was doing it from a scientific perspective trying to see if anything else can actually produce similar effects and trying to find some other signs suggesting that this is not life now years later actually decades later we know that this was not signs of life at all this was a chemical reaction that was successfully recreated in the lab as well so in some sense the premature announcement that we found life on mars is a really good warning for us that we should not rush into saying that we found life on venus as well the one major thing that came out of this study was that we should not use morphology or shapes in other words to suggest that life was found because if something looks like life it doesn't really mean it's life on the other hand if something smells like life is it life well chances are that it can still be just a chemical reaction which is pretty much what we found on venus now so we found these molecules known as phosphines not to be confused with phosphines which apparently is spelled just a little bit different but means a completely different thing so we're talking about this not this this here refers to a psychological perception of light without any light being produced so in other words this is a completely different concept this here is a molecule and this molecule is also extremely toxic as a matter of fact in the last few years several major incidents occurred when this molecule leaked somewhere resulting in several fatalities and this is something that actually happens every few years here and there so this is a pretty dangerous gas but how can a dangerous gas be connected to life well it turns out that here on planet earth the only way we've discovered that this gas is produced is with certain bacteria so called anaerobic bacteria that does not require oxygen a lot of different types of these anaerobic bacteria exist on our planet some of them can even be found inside of you right now inside of your guts and they do produce all sorts of different gases by the way completely not related but that's exactly where the gas comes from when you pass gas it's the anaerobic bacteria producing all sorts of stuff inside of you but certain bacteria do produce phosphine and for what reason we don't really know there have been speculations that maybe it's used as a kind of a protection because it's toxic maybe some bacteria use it to kind of cover their area with it so that other bacteria don't get in there and so it could be used as a sort of a protection for various types of bacteria or it could be just their waste we don't really know what phosphine is for but we do know that on earth no geological or chemical process ever produces it it's always bacteria it has even been suggested that phosphine is a very important part of the phosphorus cycle on our planet essentially this is how phosphorus is recirculated and reintroduced back for other life to use but all of these are very early assumptions because we just don't know enough about it but then again we've actually found phosphine on other planets specifically our large cousins jupiter and saturn both of these do contain a lot of phosphine and so today the scientists believe that it can be produced in the extreme conditions in these gas giants extreme pressures possibly extreme temperatures do produce phosphene in inorganic ways which once again takes us back to venus as it usually happens in science this was a completely accidental discovery as a matter of fact the scientists were almost doing the opposite they were using this beautiful telescope known as james clerk maxwell telescope to try to rule out extreme scenarios and to try to establish a kind of a base for what we should be looking at when looking at other planets now this telescope is able to observe in sub-millimeter range and is able to see certain wavelengths in extreme precision and it just so happens that one of these wavelengths is apparently the absorption spectrum of phosphate as well now this is where i actually don't know enough about chemistry to speculate that maybe there is another chemical out there that could be similar to phosphine in that sense so if you do know enough about chemistry please let me know in the description because maybe it's just a chemical that's very similar to phosphine has a similar absorption spectrum that's not phosphine anyway long story short they use the telescope they looked at venus specifically the absorption spectrum and they saw the spectra that are very similar to phosphate and this of course was very unexpected they did not expect to find this in the atmosphere of this planet now you might have seen my older video from a few months back based on another paper that very strongly suggested that phosphine can only mean alien life and in retrospect i sort of regret making the strong statement because now i'm doubting myself what if there are ways for phosphine to be created inorganically and what if venus actually has one of these conditions for phosphine to be formed now right now our understanding of how chemistry works on other planets is not particularly good because we haven't really been able to create a lot of situations where venusian conditions for example are recreated and here we are of course talking about about 93 atmospheres of pressure and almost 500 degrees celsius of temperature so in that sense maybe there is something going on here that makes this possible without any bacteria whatsoever but then on the other hand if you've been on the channel long enough you probably know that i'm a strong believer and a proponent in thinking that there is definitely life on venus i'm just not entirely sure that this was the sign of it maybe one of the signs but not a definitive sign and by the way a lot of the speculations and a lot of the ideas behind the life of venus began when we started observing unusual formations inside the clouds of venus that were absorbing the light coming from the sun in a very unusual and very peculiar manner these so called light absorbers as they known today are still a mystery and are definitely yet another sign that life could be present on venus after all but the other obvious reason why we believe life is totally possible here is because life can exist in the upper atmosphere one of the previous papers i've mentioned had this beautiful illustration and it's suggesting that well right around here around 50 to maybe even 70 kilometers above the ground is where life can definitely exist and even thrive because we get about one atmospheric pressure which is similar to earth and the temperatures are also very similar to what we have on the surface of the planet the only difference being that it's also a little bit more acidic but we also know that here on earth we have extremophiles that absolutely thrive in acidic conditions we found them everywhere on the planet especially in extreme very hot very acidic places the most famous example of course is the yellowstone national park which is what you see right here and these bright colors are all bacterial in nature this is all produced by all sorts of different extremophiles so in that sense finding a life in there is totally not unusual it just we haven't really had enough signs of life yet we have visual signs now we have chemical signs but we're still missing some in other words it can still be a chemical reaction of some sorts and because we've learned a lesson from the martian announcement that was premature and did not involve any life found we now need to take a little bit more caution but luckily for us there's at least one mission that's currently very actively investigating the potential presence of life on venus at least from the perspective of atmosphere japanese zakatsuki is still there it's still actively getting a lot of data from venus and in the next few years we're going to get enough data from the upper atmosphere of venus to maybe make other conclusions and come up with some other explanations for what we're observing here and why phosphine is present maybe it's some sort of a solar reaction for all we know so we're not going to rush into saying that this is definitely life it's very likely life like i've been saying for years but not 100 yet and the only way we're going to be certain about this being life is only if we launch something like this to venus that's been suggested for decades now as a matter of fact soviet union was able to launch a balloon with an actual detector and a sensor back in mid 80s that was like 35 years ago i think even more than that so the technology is definitely there why haven't we done it yet well there is no political pressure there is no public interest and most importantly there's just no will no desire to go there from any major organization and those that possess the ability to go and have the will are going to the wrong place elon musk seriously mars no you gotta go to venus but let's just assume for a second that this is indeed life and they're basically eating all of the stuff in the atmosphere and producing phosphine for one reason or another how are they doing it so there are still quite a lot of mysteries here first of all where is the hydrogen coming from phosphine is basically phosphorus and hydrogen and we don't really know where either one of these molecules is coming from in the atmosphere we know for example that there is oxygen and the oxygen is being lost by the planet we've seen this as a kind of a tail coming from venus and in some sense we know that there are acidic conditions which usually include hydrogen so whatever is happening there has to be getting hydrogen from these acids and right now once again the best explanation turns out to be in bacteria yet again acidic extremophiles specifically they would love to use acid and get all of the hydrogen from those acids but what about phosphorus well on earth phosphorus is in a kind of a cycle the bacteria get phosphorus from other organic matter that they consume is that what's happening on venus as well do they have other organic organisms circulating in the atmosphere that this bacteria eats that's kind of what sort of is being implied here at least that's if we use our earthly comparison chances are whatever is happening here is for the lack of better word alien but what's really interesting about this discovery is that the scientists found a lot of the phosphine in the atmosphere the amount they discovered here translates to about 20 parts per billion and though it doesn't sound like a lot according to the scientists behind this paper that's about 10 000 times more than any chemical reaction would produce anyway so if this is a chemical reaction it's an extremely active chemical reaction that once again we don't really know how to explain right now on top of this phosphine doesn't really stay stable for a very long time especially when there's a lot of ultraviolet light such as there is in the upper atmosphere of venus in this case phosphate molecules end up being destroyed and consumed by either water or carbon dioxide and there's a lot of carbon dioxide on venus so in that sense unless something is replenishing phosphine in the atmosphere it shouldn't exist once again in other words the more we try to explain this as some kind of a chemical reaction the more it seems that it's not it is very difficult for us to currently explain this without invoking alien life which honestly makes me super happy this is one place i was hoping would find life for a very long time but despite my excitement and despite my enthusiasm i'm still going to be a little bit skeptical simply because of that announcement by bill clinton which to this day is still there on nasa's page and that is a good reminder for us to be really careful this time so even though maybe in my heart i believe that it's life my brain tells me otherwise my brain tells me to be very careful and hopefully your brains will tell you the same but hypothetically let's assume that this is a life well if this is life we suddenly have a lot of other topics to talk about for one panspermia did this life come from earth or vice versa did the life on venus create life on earth later on many modern studies suggest that venus looked something like this billions of years ago so it did have habitable conditions if it was created here first and then transferred to earth that would actually be really exciting for us to study because we would get to see what ancient bacteria looked like also since according to the scientists the detection of phosphine happened exactly in the habitable zone of the atmosphere of venus the follow-up question here is of course well what other types of life are we going to find here it's very unlikely that there's just going to be one type of micro believe in here it's very likely that it's a community that sort of circulates and recycles materials from one another which would of course solve the mystery of where the hydrogen and the phosphorus come from so definitely a lot of exciting questions possibly a lot of exciting studies and discoveries in the next few years but what i'm hoping for is more missions a lot more missions honestly forget about mars at least for the time being let's focus all of our attention on venus and try to find what we can discover there now nasa currently has at least two major missions planned for venus but they're still in a far enough future one of them the veritas mission is going to hopefully have a lander that will hopefully explore the surface of venus a few months ago i made a video that you can find somewhere above my head that talked about the absolutely incredible competition and designs that nasa was able to collect from all over the planet that are hopefully going to result in an incredible new invention essentially a kind of a robot mechanical robot that has no electronics on the inside that's going to go to venus and explore it but that's in the future possibly in the next five years or so for now we don't really have anything going on for the next two years so this is where we need private companies possibly spacex maybe some other company electron maybe you guys anyway someone needs to go there and find out what's happening and all we need is just a tiny balloon something that can go into the upper atmosphere grab a few samples and return them back to earth the soviet space program was able to achieve this back in the 80s but they had an active balloon system so building from that should not be too difficult we definitely have the technology for this so if all goes well in the next five years we'll have the answer to the question of is there life on venus for now it's a really really big yes maybe anyway on that note thank you so much for watching subscribe if you haven't share this with someone who loves to learn about space and sciences but also check out some of the previous venus videos i made and most importantly other videos that relate to the alien life and the possibilities of alien life somewhere out there on that note thank you so much for watching i'll see you tomorrow possibly support this channel patreon or by buying the wonderful prison t-shirt either way i'll see you tomorrow space out and as always bye you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 158,469

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, phosphine, alien, aliens, alien life, extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial life, venus, life on venus, venutian, venutian life, is there life on venus, life on mars, venus absorbers, gas on venus, phosphine on venus, venus phosphine, what's phosphine, what does phosphine do, phosphine gas, phosphine on other planets, carl sagan

Id: osSf-Ho8mj8

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020