StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Life on Venus, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

this is star talk cosmic queries this is the venus edition is there life work is there not and my co-host for this is a long time friend and sonny is all get out paul mercurial paul welcome back welcome back to star talk dude thank you yeah it's been a while it's great always fun i was on i was on your podcast yes yeah and the name of your podcast was the paul mercurio show is that like the best name you could come up with well we workshopped it for six months it's like we focus grouped it yeah exactly uh yeah it's on itunes and we got all i i guess have an array of interesting people so it's everybody from you to paul mccartney kevin costner and oh excuse me name excuse me yeah i got people i got to get people to go listen to it i got to no draft great so it's great to have you on and so i you know i've read about venus but i'm not an expert on it and so i had to call one of my old-time friends and colleagues david grinspoon dr funky spoon david welcome back to star talk thanks neil it's it's great to see you and always always fun to uh to do star talk is your twitter handle still dr funky spoon oh yeah yeah i'm i am dr funky spoon on twitter okay and you're also a part-time musician uh i guess this is you you you you ripped some lines about was it the big bang or planets on an earlier episode well we did we did the astrobiology blues basketballs yeah especially these days when we're all kind of uh stuck stuck at home i've been i've been playing a little bit right excellent i see a guitar in your back back there and uh where are you now in this moment in washington dc in my uh in an undisclosed location in a basement also in your parents basement okay let the record show he hasn't moved out he still hasn't launched like that scene with uh with uh the will farrell mom meatloaf and he just screams hey you're making me hungry so uh but anyhow you've um literally wrote the book on venus a few years back the book venus revealed so venus is one of your planetary objects of affection uh as a working scientist at the planetary science institute based in arizona but you're in a satellite location there in washington dc so just welcome back to star talk thanks yeah venus has been an obsession of mine uh you know since graduate school um and so it's always fun when you see it uh when i see it get get a little extra attention well what we did was we solicited as we always do for cosmic queries questions from our fan base on all the various social media platforms about venus about the possibility of life on venus and just but paul and paul you have all those questions right so i haven't i haven't seen him i don't know david you haven't seen them either have you i have not yeah yeah so he's gonna he's gonna pull out the hard ones [Laughter] okay this is for a new car wait wait before you begin i just want to just establish this so david you've been a planetary guy your whole life yeah i've been doing research projects with uh paul mccartney and kevin costner no yeah i i i have i mean literally my whole life in the sense that even as a kid um you know like a lot of uh uh scientists my generation after the the moonlighting that was it i was gonna be a space person in some way and then i was uh pretty much obsessed with planetary exploration as a teenager all the first missions were going out to you know venus and mars and stuff and then um undergraduate grad school uh planetary science researcher it's uh you know that's that's been my my thing my literally pretty much my whole life okay paul might be your age and so he had the same moon landing experience but he didn't become a scientist so paul what's what happened to you wow i gotta go if i want to be heckled i'll do the 2 30 spot at the comedy center i don't need this the background no wait exactly exactly well in fifth grade i made a solar system out of styrofoam balls so there okay there you go okay no i you know i i it's just never been i like science i just wasn't i didn't feel like that was sort of mine you have good science literacy otherwise you wouldn't keep inviting you back just so you know i do thank you yeah i do enjoy it i do read up on it and uh so and i and when i leave these shows i always feel both dumber and smarter at the same time so that's a good thing actually yeah yeah that's a good thing yeah so you know that you don't know everything and you're proud of what you do now yeah exactly the place to be so paul what do you have for us okay here we go first one is uh from uh patreon uh izzy rohr so much about venus is still a mystery to us and since our early reference point for the life for life is earth-based isn't it hard to say that the phosphine found on venus is a sign of life could it just as easily be caused by something that we never encountered before and so wouldn't even know to think of what do you make of it whoa so there david yeah no i mean that's a great question i mean you know start off by starting but by giving a three-minute two-minute overview of that of that press conference and what news that we're all reacting to here yeah so the big news this week uh is that um it was announced that um a a discovery was made about venus um which is that a gas called phosphine was detected in the atmosphere of venus um using two different radio telescopes on earth um a spectroscopic signal a line an absorption line that shouldn't be in the atmosphere of venus and they couldn't find any other gas that would explain it except for this gas called phosphine which is just a phosphorus atom with three hydrogen atoms hanging off it a simple molecule which on earth is only produced in our atmosphere basically by life or by industrial processes including meth labs but nobody's saying hey there's meth labs on venus but but um you know this pole is pretty sure yeah probably we'll we'll go there for sure by the way i hope this leads to an outer space reboot of breaking bad that's all i want to see happen i think it needs to happen so so so this is a surprising result because phosphine is a chemical that should not be in the atmosphere of venus meaning that if some of it if you just put some in the atmosphere of venus you would expect it to go away very quickly because the other chemicals there you would expect them to to eat it it's not stable there and so this is a known way of searching for life on well on exoplanets especially planets around other stars where you can only look at the atmospheres because the idea is that if something is producing an unexpected gas in an atmosphere it could be a sign of life and so there's this unexpected gas in the atmosphere of venus which on earth is only made by life and so the scientists have said well what if could it be volcanoes and they did calculations and they said no there's no way it could be volcanoes could it be cosmetics venus has volcanoes venus does have volcanoes so that's an obvious thought but it you know if they've done their calculations right and you can be sure all of this is going to be scrutinized you know it ought to be scrutinized you know is there a problem with the observation maybe it did they do their calculations wrong maybe there's some obvious way to make the phosphine they're not thinking of but you know at this point it seems like a big mystery why this biogenic gas is is in the atmosphere of venus so but but you know the question um is well taken because yes absolutely um it could be a sign of something else that we haven't figured out yet it's just that simply that nobody has yet figured out a good way to make it that's not life so that doesn't mean oh we've fought it doesn't mean oh we found life on venus it means we found this mysterious indicator that has been um before this discovery it was already published the idea that if you found phosphine in an atmosphere uh it could be a sign of life so so there it is isn't one theory that this life i mean it's 800 degrees on venus but somehow some of it got into the atmosphere of venus which is more life-friendly it'd be like 85 degrees fahrenheit i was reading in that atmosphere and that's where it sort of has maybe taken hold yeah paul that's a very important point because you know anybody listening to this who knows you know basic um facts about the solar system knows that venus is not a place you would expect life because the surface is is 900 degrees fahrenheit and it's you know it's hell there so why are we even talking about this but there's a layer up in the atmosphere about 35 miles up where there are cl permanent global cloud decks and it's rather comfortable at least in terms of temperature and pressure it's like earth surface conditions and there are you know potential flows of nutrients and energy and you know all the stuff you might need for life up there and that's part of you know what this is this idea that i've been pushing for a while it's like hey there could be a habitable zone up in the venus atmosphere and uh could you just go up with a mirror and see if there's any fog on the mirror and then that's life form you know like a dead body kind of a thing that's the old days yeah paul how old are you that's that was a 19th century way to know if someone was dead i'm 100 i'm 106 years old there it is because if you fog the mirror that was evidence you're still alive well you know we're looking we're looking hard for techniques to go go there and test this so all suggestions are uh you know we'll put that one in the uh mirror just in case you never know wait wait so so david if i don't know if you're a betting man but let me just ask you what are the chances it's actually life versus a completely yet to be discovered way to make phosphine that no one is dreamt of yet yeah man it's how do you balance this because both are extraordinary yeah right because we think we think we got a good chemistry we you know we've been doing chemistry forever right we think we got that so where do you if you're a betting man where would you put it yeah boy it's hard to put a number on it i mean you know there's there's a third likely possibility which unfortunately which is that maybe the observation is wrong and it's it's very difficult inference and i mean to me it seems as though it's very solid work the way they've described it but you know people are going to be looking really hard and trying to repeat the observation and maybe the phosphine will go away because it'll say oh well actually it's something else or it was was a mistake but let's assume that there really is phosphine there what are the chances it's life uh you know so people keep asking me that it's so hard to put a number on it so yesterday um on facebook i said i'm gonna say five percent but i'll probably change my mind tomorrow and you know i reserve the right to to have a very fluid opinion of this because we just don't know and of course you have to you know our friend carl sagan extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and if there was ever a place where this applied you know we need better evidence much more evidence more evidence before we say oh life but this is a legitimate mystery that has a legitimate um you know logical um path to infer that it could be life and you know whether that's one percent or ten percent i don't know but it's you know it's it's less than 50 it's more likely that it's something else but it's not zero that it's life and that in itself is is a pretty exciting thing to realize and just for people to recognize when you have results that are interesting and unexpected they naturally attract more scientific scrutiny to see if it's correct so that that's a very natural urge that we all have that's in fact paul it's a problem if you get a result that's not particularly interesting and wrong very few people will find out that it's wrong because they don't care so the verification process is not a level playing field right if you make a really interesting mistake then everybody's gonna know about it all right so what else you got people move on okay uh philip lyons patreon my question is simple when can we get a sample and bring it back to earth to be studied i think you can get it on amazon you got to be a you got to be a prime member and yeah and they deliver tomorrow exactly no it's actually august or somebody's 2032. somebody's selling them on ebay right now but i wouldn't you know give it a lot of uh you know credence um but so that does leave the question like which i was thinking is sort of this is a two is this a two a parallel track issue of you make this discovery but then you also have to create or invent a way to kind of confirm this or sort of get to the next level with this so do you have to develop processes and techniques oh yeah at the same time no very much there we need follow-up uh experiments i mean first of all just in in on earth in labs people are going to be going crazy saying well let's mix phosphine in a venus-like environment and put this and then can we do it how else can we make it just here on earth trying to simulate it but you can be sure that we are going to be sending i mean we've been trying to some of us have been trying to send new missions to venus anyways and there's momentum and i think this is going to be happening even i would have said that even before this discovery but now there's that much more incentive we've got to go there and understand uh what's going on there now bringing back a sample would not be the next step that's a hard thing to do uh you know it's hard enough to bring back a rock from mars which you know we've been trying for a long time and we're still trying and there's something in the works but it's not it's not very easy but an atmospheric sample from a you know think about it you're going to enter into the atmosphere you're going to scoop something up and then you're going to launch not from a surface but from an aerial platform and it's inherently harder to get something off venus than mars because it's a bigger planet with more escape gravity or you know with more gravity higher escape velocity so that i think probably will be done eventually but the next step is actually to just go there and do experiments in place bring the right scientific instruments into the atmosphere and the clouds to investigate and send the data back rather than trying to bring a sample back david you're not talking about rovers because this is 35 miles up in the atmosphere so you need some kind of floater yeah yeah i mean well i mean even you know the easiest thing to do um is just drop an entry probe and you're briefly traveling through that environment and you take measurements on the way down that's been done but not in the 21st century with modern instrumentation and that you can still learn a lot even with a quick trip through with the right instrument sending back data but then uh as you as you say neil it would be even better to bring a platform where you could reside in the clouds for a while either a balloon or um some kind of a solar powered glider there are plans and ideas to do this and i think you know a balloon would be great because then you could actually spend some time and sample more than one location and you know really look around and get to know the environment a little bit rather than just flying through it i have a quick question related to this so if the heat weren't the issue is pressure on the surface also an issue here because it's 90 times that of earth so you have to grapple with that at the same time is the heat issue in terms of trying to find the sample right and paul's showing off that he did his homework before yeah yeah i i i have my sixth grade science teacher sitting off to the side right here and he's because he said he's signing me well it's got 90 times their pressure that's pretty good yeah that's pretty good that's pretty good yeah no i mean that that's yet another reason why the surface environment is a um you know a very challenging environment both for life to survive and for our machines to survive if we gonna want to go investigate it which we should i mean the mystery of venus even if we're talking about a mystery up in the clouds it's related to surface processes because i mean one of the things that that makes venus such an interesting planet is that it seems to have an active surface and that's connected to the chemistry of the clouds they're active you mean geologically active yeah geologically active and that seems to include active volcanoes which is really important for this story although you know i say seems to include we've got a lot of circumstantial evidence we don't have what they they call the smoking gun where we've seen a volcano going off but there are clues in the atmosphere and the smoking volcano yes exactly the smoking caldera we don't have that but but we do have we see things in the atmosphere and patterns on the surface that make the most sense if there is active volcanism so we think there probably is on venus but we we want to confirm that but it's important to this story because it's probable that the chemistry whatever's going on in the clouds has to do with gases that are coming out of the circle and cycling through the atmosphere and then reacting with surface rocks so just as on earth we talk about the carbon cycle and these these different chemical cycles on venus there's a sulfur cycle and probably other sulfur cycles involving the clouds in the atmosphere and the surface so if we want to understand what's going on in the atmosphere ultimately we do have to investigate the surface but is that what you wouldn't need you wouldn't need a rover or something like that to do a dedicated mission just to to look at what's going on up in the cloud so if there's a sulfur cycle that's where you get i've always read that venus has sulfuric acid droplets in the upper atmosphere and i always wondered you know how they get there why don't we have some of that and so it's got a sulfur cycle huh yeah i mean interestingly we do have some of that and when when there's a big volcano volcanic eruption on earth and you get those colorful sunsets and sometimes there's even a temporary cooling because that stuff spreads through the stratosphere that's actually mostly sulfuric acid droplets that you get a little bit of temporarily on earth and but on venus of course the clouds are almost all sulfuric acid and we believe that is related to volcanic flow from the surface again this is something we want to verify with with more investigations and missions but uh calculations that actually which which uh i did with with my research team several years ago where we tried to look at at the lifetime of the cloud particles we actually believed that the clouds would go away in about 10 million years or maybe 30 million years if they weren't continually fueled by a flow of sulfuric gases from the surface which if that's true it's pretty cool because it means that when you go out at night and you observe venus with your naked eyes and you see how beautiful and bright it is you're actually observing the effect of volcanoes on the surface because that the reason why venus is so cloudy and so bright and you can see that on any any given evening or morning when venus is in the right place that is connected we believe to an ongoing existence of volcanoes so so so you can verify that with that with your senses is there anything here on earth like sulfur springs that we can use that we use or can use to advance our knowledge to work in this capacity in the context of venus and phosphine and all of that we gotta get to that answer after this break okay so paul mercurial wants to know if they're sulfur creatures it's in hot springs on earth when star trek returns cosmic queries the venus edition we're back cosmic query the venus edition life on venus edition paul mercurio my co-host paul dude we have david grinsmoon this this is like i i feel like i should be this should be like a master class that series and i should be paying money or something this is amazing you'll get our bill that's fine but when right when we left uh you had a question this wasn't from our list right you posed the question yeah uh whether our sulfur springs can help us understand sulfur conditions on venus yeah yeah enormous in any way it's very very relevant to to this whole story because uh you know one of the ways we try to understand where in the universe there may be potential for life is by looking at the range of conditions that life can inhabit on earth and as we've learned more and more about what we call these extremophile organisms the lovers of extremes we realize that it's a much wider range of conditions than we once thought and there's a whole category of extremophiles that are that are acidophiles that that we've discovered organisms that love to live in strong acid including acid hot springs uh of the kind you mentioned and that's one of the reasons why some of us think that you know we shouldn't fully count out the clouds of venus as a habitat now it's true the clouds of venus are more acidic than the places on earth so far that we found um acid-loving organisms but we do not know really what the extreme limit of of of uh how acidic an environment can be and support life and so people that are interested in these questions they study that environment you mentioned the acid hot springs you know they go on field trips to places like yellowstone and they look for uh life that lives in these uh these extreme environments that are at least more venus-like than than other places on earth so david when when tourists go take hot baths in these sulfur springs would you consider those humans extremophiles i'm just wondering yeah yeah absolutely i mean i guess i can i love hot springs and so i guess uh next time i'm i'm in one i should contemplate the fact that i don't know yes i think it depends if they're wearing a bathing suit or not if they're not wearing a bathing suit there you go they are very bold people yeah uh should we move on yeah yeah paul keep going paul's got any questions this is mcquarries this is vincent zimmerman on twitter is there life in the clouds of venus what liquid is that life using on earth we use water as solvent i think it's sorak vodka isn't it that's right uh no it's sort of related to what we're talking about an extension of that yeah no i mean absolutely i mean one of the challenges is as far as we know life needs water and that as far as we know has to be emphasized because maybe we're just not being imaginative enough and and you know so much about the universe we learn through exploration not through modeling and expecting what we're going to find and uh you know wait so is it that life needs water or that life needs a liquid yeah well that's a great question so so you could look at it both ways um the chemistry of life you could think of life you know on earth as this dance of organic molecules which take advantage of the fact they're in liquid so they can do this you know 3d coming together and um doing all the the complex interactions that molecules do it's hard to imagine that happening not in a liquid medium uh and people have said well what about ammonia or this or that or you know it's an interesting question although nobody's come up with a full theory of how that would work maybe that's just i saw a comic it might have been the new yorker where there's the alien crash lands in the desert and it's crawling along the dunes and it says ammonia ammonia yeah exactly exactly yeah so so are we just being uh geocentric when we say life needs water yeah this is one centric yeah this is one of the hydrocentric this is one of the great questions with all of your fancy water and you know this this is one of the big motivations for finding alien life i mean of course the biggest motivation is just we want to know are we alone but in terms of the science once we have multiple samples then we could start to really address this question is it all basically the same chemically or are there completely other bases so most of what we do is search for water-based life um when we think about astrobiology and other environments maybe that's just our narrow-mindedness but you got to start somewhere and we at least know how life and water would work now sulfuric acid is kind of a borderline case because in a certain sense it is water with just a lot of um acid mixed in it's a it's a concentrated mix of you know it's it's water with the sulfuric acid molecules and so in a certain sense the clouds of venus are uh are strictly speaking a water environment it's just that we don't know of life that can live in water that's that polluted with a strong acid you know so would it be life as we know it uh it's borderline it would have to be life that had evolved these sort of mechanisms to maybe pump its interior free of of acid or a different kind of chemistry that can work with those acid molecules so but in response to the question there is plenty of liquid there's plenty of liquid there and that's one of the things that makes some of us uh you know not want to rule out that environment uh twitter uh at doodle whoopsie uh whoopsie doodle whoopsie yeah or a big fan of the show apparently yes exactly it's whoopsie doodle doo doo doo doo whoopsie apparently i guess at whoopsie doodle was taken already so they had to flip it anyway uh hi doctor they're living backwards in time leads forward to them exactly what is the most basic and trusted way to search life in the universe oh that's a great question of course there's a lot of effort going into answering that but interestingly the most common answer you would probably get now especially because we have discovered exoplanets and we want to know what they're like and if they might have life all the planets around other stars that we can't just send a spacecraft to you know in in a few months it would take a few centuries so so we have to rely on remote observations and the best way is to search for weird gases anomalous gases in the atmosphere like phosphine for instance so um you know what just to be clear it's not just that they're weird gases they're gases associated with the existence of life yeah yeah weird in a particular way that's right um out of equilibrium things that shouldn't shouldn't be in the atmosphere and are plausibly associated with some kind of biological metabolism but paul did you know that humans and life in general is hugely out of equilibrium with its environment did anybody ever tell you that no what does that mean you know are you really just talking about me that i'm not with the rest of them it's not just you if you've been wondering we're all out of equilibrium so just think about it i mean the air around you let's say 72 degrees and your body temperature is 27 degrees warmer than that and it stays that way that's not an equilibrium with your environment what a challenge for us be able to exist in that way if we're out of equilibrium you keep eating yeah you regulate your internal environment and you put energy into that but also earth yeah by the way if i if i stop giving you food you will eventually be you'll you will die and you'll reach the temperature of the air and then you'll be in equilibrium is that what you want paul uh yeah i think i do uh no and all your molecules will oxidize i mean the thing is earth itself is not an equilibrium state if you were an alien looking at our atmosphere you'd say what's all that oxygen doing there and what are these traces of methane doing there and you know there are things in our atmosphere that would not be there on a lifeless earth and that's the idea that we we learn to understand what life does to its atmosphere and then we search for those signs elsewhere so those those greenhouse gases are knocking that this whole this our environment and the people are living it more out of equilibrium then right because sort of we're not in the natural state of yeah not just greenhouse gases but some of them are greenhouse gases which is very interesting because then life starts to interact with the climate of a planet methane you know i mentioned is a greenhouse gas and it is um at least uh partly on earth a product of life and then you get to this these weird potential mechanisms where life can feed back on the planet and do things like change its own climate what is the is is there a there is there a basic or trusted way not necessarily there are a lot i mean do you list define life i mean do you leave food out overnight like treats and if someone comes and get it then you know there's life like what no what is there to address whoopsie doodles uh question is there something how about this david if you just rank the gas's top three uh that would be the most tantalizing suggestion that there was like what would it be um oxygen which is not a hundred percent because there are natural you know non-biological ways to make oxygen but if we saw a planet with as much oxygen as earth we'd go wait a minute what's going on there and at least you consider life well methane is a good one again not there are other ways to make it but you know we find little wisps of methane on mars and we go hmm what what is that and life is at least one possibility but there are others and i would actually um farm animal farm animals on that's right mars yeah cow farts yeah they're cows on what mars cows but but interestingly um uh phosphine is potential just to be clear wait wait david just to be clear uh paul i don't know if you knew this right so methane is the byproduct of anaerobic metabolism which goes on in the guts of animals right especially in ruminants right like cows and methane is the gas that's the gas of choice in cities for gas stoves so that old camp thing that you always wanted to do to see with a lighter if it's flammable yeah it's really true you know i tried i did i tried that on the subway and got arrested for it so apparently you're not supposed to do that on the subway at least you were doing it uh doing atmospheric disequilibrium experiments officer i'm officer i'm a scientist i'm just trying to explore the universe more i'm sure that was very effective yeah but but so top three oxygen methane and then you know quite possibly phosphine um is in that top three it's been you know they've been pa before this discovery on venus there were papers that were published saying that phosphine is an ideal biosignature gas an ideal sign of life because it's hard to come up with mechanisms to make it on a rocky planet that are not biological now you can be sure you know every chemist on earth since monday is now uh trying to come up with new ways to make phosphine and you know if if we don't learn about life on venus from this we will learn new things about chemistry on venus because uh somebody's gonna figure out some other way to make phosphine that we didn't know but but right now you know it's in the literature as a very promising biosignature gas that if you found it on an exoplanet you'd say hey wait a minute this could be a sign of life so it's pretty wild to find that gas right right here on the planet next door and just to be clear the rover that's on route to mars right now perseverance so let's just call it percy percy i like that so just to be clear paul we can look at the chemistry of the atmosphere of these exoplanets or you know if an alien comes out from under a rock and rides the rover that would be that would count as evidence too like wouldn't it david yeah yeah no i mean it's it's true i mean you know the question is it's really they're taking it's a really good question what's the best way to find life and you know we focus a lot on these gases that we could find on exoplanets because that's all you can do on exoplanets right now but absolutely when we send um instruments with with cameras uh it's worth looking on a place like mars you know especially the first the first ever landers on mars you know carl sagan used to talk about well we should at least take pictures and see if there's a turtle walking by you know because who knows or even look for look for turtle tracks in the sand maybe there's like a probe from another planet or venus and in it is a their version of a chuck berry song so then exactly we know that there's like we gotta take a quick break and we'll be back with our third and final segment of star talk cosmic queries the venus edition we're back star talk cosmic prairie the venus edition uh paul mccarron my co-host paul what's your twitter handle at paul mercurio m-e-c-u-r-i-o one-armed very creative yes i'm sorry i can't be whoopsie-doodle-doodle-dude you know all right so paul give me some more matt hairfield patreon how do you think life would have evolved under the conditions on venus do you do does venus have liquid water at some point did venus have liquid water at some point quick answer so we're back in time dave yeah go back in time yeah what are we talking about quick answer we think venus had oceans when it was younger we're not exactly sure how long they lasted but they might have lasted for billions of years and then the idea is probably if there was an evolution of life it started and and advanced on the surface and then when that surface broke bad um then maybe it ended up in the atmosphere i mean if i mean if there was life and it did evolve it had with the harsh conditions it had to be complaining like the whole time like ah it's so hot i can't go out oh where's my with their runaway greenhouse effect they just burned too many fossil fuels that's what they that was their problem well that you know actually that was irresponsible venusians man well interesting david i didn't thought of that if there was life on the surface and that became inhospitable and they had some way to fly then they could just continue to ascend away from the heat and so far we know there's whole floating cities in this layer of the atmosphere where they found the phosphine yeah i mean we're starting with the hypothesis of of microbes but we don't actually have observations that would rule out something much more complex and so in the movie avatar they had floating islands [Laughter] recently um this is a stupid completely irrelevant comment but you know the flintstones pioneered chewable vitamins right for kids and they still salt for sale and i thought to myself they're the stone age they wouldn't have known anything about vitamins but the jetsons would have so there really should have been jet chewable vitamins that's what i'm thinking that's very profound neil that felt a little uh passive aggressive hi paul give me some more what do you got we will go to uh ashley uh steadly on facebook could these be the same extra extremophiles that were on early earth if these are microbes or bacteria what might happen if we brought some to earth two good questions um yeah dave if we go to venus with a sample return and oh my gosh there are bugs and there are microbes that doesn't sound very very wise yeah yeah i mean with uh we always um consider what we call planetary protection when we talk about sample returns especially from a possibly inhabited environment you know how do you uh be really sure you're not bringing something back that could be dangerous and so you know there are protocols where you just you keep it in a contained environment at first but if you're talking about life in the clouds of venus i think you know of course you always want to be cautious but that seems like less of a consideration because it's such an extreme environment it doesn't seem like it would very easily overlap environments on earth that are inhabited so it's probably the case that if some if there were venetian bugs in an extreme extreme extreme acid environment and they sort of got out of your laboratory that they would not do well and not be able to um hurt any multiply and hurt anything on earth that's my first reaction but i also think you know you just you're we're inherently cautious about these things um as far as far as the first part of the question um could these be similar to life on early earth it's possible but you know we don't know that much about the environment of early earth and it's true that some of the theories of origin of life involve hot springs on early earth but probably not as extremely acidic so i want to say they're not it's not my picture of the first life on earth but on the other hand we're still very ignorant about what that early life was was like and so it's not it's not impossible it's fair to say that if you brought a venus bug here it would say oh it's not acid enough i'm dying i'm melting i need more acid is that would it pull a wicked witch of the west on us but it would but it would say it in venusian so [Laughter] well you know i don't know about the three i mean like if it's anything i i lived in dc and when i moved back home i brought cockroaches with me and man all hell broke loose so like maybe they have cockroaches they seem to live everywhere that's a good example of why we uh do uh planetary protection yeah and and uh well this also by the way could be a movie the three of us should pitch like venus you know microbes come to earth and it's a movie and paul giamatti is like the misunderstood clever brilliant scientist who's the only one that sees the problem like that i think that's a movie we should pitch but so apologiamati is playing me sorry about that i just want to pursue the wicked witch of the west scenario again i mean think about it presumably they only poured a bucket of water on her and water is is acidically neutral correct so if she yeah that's a good point why did water make her melt right and i'm saying because she she must not be acidically neutral she's either very acidic or very um basic in either direction she's far away from what water would do she was from venus she was from venus she was actually the wicked witch of venus i thought there was something extremophile about her i really did and it and it's evidence that aliens are green just to put that one to so maybe there's flying monkeys there too right boy those scared the heck out of me when oh my god everybody didn't they i mean i'm like why this isn't fun you can't list this as a comedy like what is this this is like it was the worst it's like you got a green woman no fashion sense the witch had no fashion sense it was either all black or way over the top with jewels flippers don't get me started all right uh we'll go to another one paul i didn't know you still had issues i do no one i need a hug uh i need a venusian hug uh all right we're gonna go to another one all right all right here we go yeah let's get to them quick okay here we go see as many as we can do okay uh this is uh instagram sam z uh hi dr tyson and dr david so if venus is a terrestrial planet then why is the atmosphere's pressure so high also you mentioned in a previous video that saturn protects us from asteroids and stuff what if anything does venus do for us okay personally i wouldn't have said saturn i would have said jupiter that jupiter has all the the good gravity out there to to bat wayward comets and asteroids out of harm's way but david yeah why why is our twin sister planet so different from us yeah so i mean he said if venus is a terrestrial planet well terrestrial planet uh really just means a rocky planet um you know like venus earth mars mercury and um they can have all different kinds of atmospheres we've learned that just in our solar system and we imagine if you included the terrestrial planets out there in the galaxy to be even more diverse but the reason why venus's atmosphere is so thick we think has to do actually with the very high temperature in a kind of feedback where once it gets that hot it's hard to remove gases the reason why earth doesn't have that much carbon dioxide in its atmosphere is because there's a cycle a carbon cycle where carbon dioxide over time gets removed from the atmosphere and turned into carbonate rocks that cycle depends on water and rainfall where the water gets dissolved in rainfall and runs over the rocks and reacts and ends up some of that carbon ends up as as ions in the ocean and then gets precipitated on the surface and then ends up in the interior there's this whole complex cycle on earth where carbon is removed from the atmosphere but if you take an earth and you dry it out so there's no surface water and no rainfall then the carbon dioxide's still coming out of the volcanoes over and over millions of years it's going to build up but you've sort of broken the part of the cycle where the water helps you remove the carbon from the atmosphere so we think that's what's happened on venus is that once it lost its surface water it still kept accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but now there's sort of no way to pull it out because you don't have those chemical reactions mediated by water so it's sort of stuck with all this uh atmosphere and no place to put it is there any of this any understanding why the water on venus disappeared is it haven't we been able to figure that out at all well it's it's a you know so there's this idea of the runaway greenhouse where what because water itself is a greenhouse gas it absorbs infrared radiation so you add water vapor to a planet and it's going to heat up so um then you can have this feedback where if if there's a certain amount of sunlight hitting a planet like venus that has that used to have oceans presumably then that evaporates some of the ocean which increases the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere which heats up the planet more which then evaporates more of the ocean so it can kind of run away so that may be why venus lost its oceans although we're still sort of really trying to figure out that history and it's of course it's the details get complicated and are are debated well basically you're saying the aliens on venus had a terrible energy policy and when it hit 500 degrees they should have done something about it but they totally ignored it that's what you're saying they totally say do not let this happen to your planet have astrobiology this is david hemseth uh hemsath at patreon have astrobiologists previously tried mapping earth's extremophiles to venus's environments oh let's make that a bigger question david all the earth's extreme files can we find a place for every one of them in in the local solar system or even across the galaxy wow that's that's that is a much bigger question that would be a fun exercise actually take take the whole map of all the extremophiles and then um take either real or imagined planets and say this is the planet where these guys would be at home and here's what its qualities are i don't know of anybody that's done that neil so we should we should talk that'd be a fun thing to do as far as mapping specific extremophiles to venus uh people have tried and there are organisms that sort of get us closer there i mentioned acidophilus loving organisms we as far as we understand the clouds of venus and their conditions and again this is a region that we need to explore more carefully there's no known earth organism that you could just plunk there and it would be be happy and say i love it here and just multiply and keep living but there are organisms that sort of get us part way there that are resistant to ultraviolet light and that are um that can exist in in strong acid and um you know there's a big effort now also to figure out what's living in earth's clouds because there are organisms in earth clouds but we still don't understand their sort of entire life cycles so so there's an area of investigation where we do look at extremophiles and try to map them into venus's uh conditions but nobody sort of nailed it and said ah here's this bug that would love it there i saw that episode of watchmen where a squid come from the sky this is it it rained squid in one of the episodes just but aren't there actual actual historical um recountings of like frogs raining from the skies and and you know weird um episodes maybe there's something maybe there's a whole biota in a layer of the atmosphere and we're discounting these legends and these mythological accounts but in fact it's another place it's like odds it's beyond the reality of what we accept next week on the history channel [Laughter] squid squid nato and you and neil are fighting squids falling from the sky inexplicably and you've got guns and lasers we got two yeah we've got two movies we've got to pitch now there's a lot to do should we do one more uh uh ishaan ishanbasi and instagram there uh there have been a few venus missions in past although none of them survived for very long is there a slight possibility possibility that they might have introduced this life form into the atmosphere of venus quick answer i'm going to say no because um you know when something falls into the atmosphere of venus it's surrounded by a bald fire before anything and then there's this this basic fact that the conditions are just so different that it's hard to imagine something um leaping off a spacecraft and surviving come on not like a discarded taco bell cup nothing there's gonna be something plastic supermarket shopping bags come on well wait wait david viruses get around you know i mean viruses invented people so that people would invent airplanes so that viruses can go transcontinental and infect more people that's true but viruses that so we could have darwinian evolution accounting so we could have dumped some viruses accidentally on venus but viruses don't live without other cells to invade so i still don't think the viruses would be thriving there and doesn't your answer presuppose it's sort of the lack of knowledge we have which is uh infinite right so in other words we don't know if there is some form of life that could drop into that atmosphere and survive because we don't really understand it yet i mean you asked for the short version of the answer the longer version is like well caveat caveat caveat who knows maybe this may be that but paul stopped leading him off all right sorry okay i'm sorry he's trying to stretch this answer out all right all right let's go one one more a quick one okay all right here we go uh and tomorrow david i want a one word answer to this one whatever it is i don't care okay tomorrow life instagram can life and venus exist in the animal ballpark or just as microbes slash bacteria no maybe excellent we got to stop it at the maybe paul always good to have you always a lot of fun i always learned something thank you for having me and david don't be such a stranger dude it's been too long yeah on the show it's true uh especially when this uh when this pandemic is over we gotta uh go out for a glass of wine yeah and we'll get you to play some more uh alien blues uh i'm i'm ready okay acid loving venusian blues that's it love it venetian blues this has been star talk cosmic prairie venus edition i'm will degrasse tyson you're a personal astrophysicist you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 263,110

Rating: 4.9156699 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Paul Mecurio, David Grinspoon, Dr. FunkySpoon, Venus, life on Venus, phosphine, runaway greenhouse, carbon cycle, microbes, Wicked Witch of the West, venus life, venus planet, aliens, et, extraterrestrial, astrobiology, david grinspoon venus

Id: -wzsdoyd4NE

Length: 47min 54sec (2874 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020