so this is lit as shit. theyre saying there is a source of PH3 in the atmosphere of venus, an atmosphere which rarely has any sort of bond containing hydrogen. this implies it could be life.
however, they also mentioned it appearing near the equator. and that made me remember some articles about phosphine in comets and some others about how asteroids tend to hit our equator more. how much yall wanna reckon a giant comet hit that motherfucker many years back and had ph3 in it? they say that the phosphine would deplete in 10^3 years if it is not renewed, i didnt see any info on whether the concentration changed in their year of observation
here's their bit on anomalous events, which doesnt seem to mention asteroids or comets:
Energetic events are also not an effective route to making PH3. Lightning may occur on Venus, but at sub-Earth activity levels33. We find that PH3 production by Venusian lightning would fall short of few-ppb abundance by factors of 107 or more. Similarly, there would need to be >200 times as much volcanic activity on Venus as on Earth to inject enough PH3 into the atmosphere (up to ~108 times, depending on assumptions about mantle rock chemistry). Orbiter topographical studies have suggested there are not many large, active, volcanic hotspots on Venus34. Meteoritic delivery adds at most a few tonnes of phosphorus per year (for Earth-like accretion of meteorites). Exotic processes such as large-scale tribochemical (frictional) processes and solar wind protons also only generate PH3 in negligible quantities (W. Bains et al., manuscript in preparation, submitted to Astrobiology as ‘Phosphine on Venus cannot be explained by conventional processes'; also see Extended Data Fig. 10).
i do like that theyre going for the gold and asking for a new visit to venus and some new telescopes though.
There are two possible scenarios here and both of them excite the shit out of me.
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Motherfucking life on another planet. FUCK.
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Somehow the probes we sent to Venus had microbes that survived and are now alive on another planet. LESS COOL BUT STILL AMAZING.
idk 20 parts per billion is quite a lot of ph3 to produce in a 40 year time span
i do like this one theory of 'three planets' that were all life compatible and just so happened to be close enough to spew gene shit all over each other when life worked on one of them. there was a period of time where mars, venus, and earth may have each been habitable during a time frame. earth was mostly frozen to shit at the time
i think it's more fascinating to think that life developing given the right conditions is just the natural order of things. i think the universe would be infinitely more interesting knowing that life can evolve from basic planetary ingredients, because it virtually guarantees that humans are not alone in the universe and there is other highly intelligent life - likely a lot of life much more intelligent than us.
It's almost guaranteed that if life has arisen on Earth by some abiogenic process, it will be quite prolific. Life started on Earth basically as soon as it was cool enough that liquid water could form, about a billion years after Earth formed (about 3.5 billion years ago).
Multicellular animals, on the other hand, only evolved some 600 million years ago. To me this paints a slightly bleak view of life in the universe where almost all of it is just these sludge pits with unicellular life without nuclei or organelles in general. Zipf's law or the Pareto principle kinda implies that we ought to be the most numerous of sentient technological life in the galaxy.
On the one hand it makes it a little lonelier, but it also makes Earth and humanity writ large so much more important to protect as the rare jewels they are.
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Fuck I typed smtn and closed the window.
So I find this super interesting and have since reading: Life on venus CS Cockell - Planetary and Space Science, 1999 - Elsevier
I think that the potential applications for a bacterium from such an environment for bioremediation on earth would be very impactful. As Venus was held up as an example of what we would be headed towards on earth if climate change wasnt addressed.
However I believe now that as we grapple with becoming a stage 1 on Kardashev scale we will be unable to deal with the existential pit fall of such a transition due to survailence/information/data based capitalism.
I know it’s not related but it’s funny to see Elsevir outside of a work context. I edit for an Elzevir journal and we’ll often have reviewers turn us down because they hate Elsevir’s business practices. I’m sympathetic but come on you’re just making my job harder, I didn’t make this publisher be a shit
I also beleive that the Anunnaki, are a race of large & potentially winged humanoids see the nephalim that interacted with humanity during the Akkadian empire in order to engage in genetic engineering to create new species but I dont have a scientific article to back that up just my trance based conversations with Enki and Ianna.
I dont wanna derail a science based discussion with my spiritual stuff but 2 years ago I did the ritual of the gates in Simon's necronimicon and during that scryed visions during the trance brought on by the rituals that were super enlightening.
It's kinda sad that the last time humanity actually went to Venus to explore it was in the 80s (courtesy of the USSR of course). I'm excited for this too, I personally doubt the presence of life. If anything we might've accidentally seeded it with some weird-ass archaea somehow rather than it being novel life that evolved separately.
How fast the partial pressure of PH3 decreases depends on the rate constant of decomposition. I'm sure it exists in literature at the same or near the same ph and temp that is present on Venus. I tried to look through quickly on google, looks like it's a first order reaction. If it's first order than it very quickly depletes and then peters off (on a ln[conc]/time graph it would be a straight line). If a comet hit it some time ago and seeded a bunch of PH3, then we'd be seeing the tail end of the concentration and it might not change all that much over a couple days. It could be concievable some comet hit it 800 years ago or something, deposited a shitload of PH3, and we're only now seeing it finally die away - I wonder if there's any anthropological stuff in the middle ages about a comet striking Venus?
Rocket Lab oder Roscosmos
When you code switch without thinking about it
the paper mentions that this area is one of the areas that contains phosphine, the fact that it correlates to many of the conjectures by grinspoon and even sagan has a lot of people raising eyebrows
I love this shit. Space stuff is amazing, and I'd love to see a mission sent there to retrieve some samples and return to Earth.
Building telescopes and sending new missions? This is a perfect use of NASA and our research establishment.
and return to Earth.
Literally like 3-4 steps from being impossible. We need like 100+m rockets just to get into earth orbit. You'd have to move an entire rocket like that to Venus. And thats ignoring the fact that Venus atmosphere is thicc af which would need even more fuel to get off Venus
EDIT: actually now that I think of it you could do some kind of balloon that picks the samples into high altitude and then have some kind of spaceplane pick it up mid air (like what CIAs corona program did, but with a space plane instead of a regular one). Still an insane feat tho
the biggest reason we need giant rockets isn't to get into space - it's to get enough speed to stay in space. we can launch a rocket towards venus, have it collect atmospheric samples in the upper atmosphere at 10,000 miles an hour, and then loop around and come back to earth using barely any fuel in the process (relative to the amount it took to launch off earth).
Ahh, you're thinking that way. My mind went to soil samples. If it's only atmospheric samples then yeah, ez pz in comparison
Oh, I apologise, I wasn't clear. I would think an atmospheric scoop would be enough, since that seems to be where these things are, but I absolutely didn't say that in my initial post.
A lander would be real tough given Venus's atmosphere!
It's really all about finding more efficient fuels. If you can find a fuel that we can accelerate out of a rocket at incredibly high speeds, we could dramatically decrease the launch mass of any given rocket. That's specific impulse, baybee. Plus, given a large enough budget, there could also be the possibility of launching parts of a rocket to LEO and assembling them, which makes getting a payload of a spaceplane with the necessary equipment for this mission a lot more feasible, but maybe I'm a little bit KSP-brained.
EDIT: actually now that I think of it you could do some kind of balloon that picks the samples into high altitude and then have some kind of spaceplane pick it up mid air
You could theoretically pull this maneuver with a normal atmospheric entry vehicle by taking advantage of boost-gliding (aka skip reentry). Basically, objects entering the atmosphere of a planet will exhibit different behaviors based on their speed, shape and trajectory, as well as the atmospheric density and gravitational field of the planet. In the specific case of an object with a large flat surface (eg. a spacecraft with a heat shield) entering at a shallow angle and at high speeds, it will tend to gain enough lift from the atmosphere that it actually ricochets back out into space. This would be more fuel efficient than a plane since it could be done entirely using ballistics (except at the terminal phase of the maneuver where the spacecraft may need to expend fuel in order to keep itself in orbit due to speed lost due to air friction) , but it does also mean that the collection would have to occur at extreme altitudes and speeds which could make it very impractical or even dangerous.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2020.2244
some interesting speculation on lifeform propagation
i didnt see any info on whether the concentration changed in their year of observation
Their signal-to-noise is pretty low, there's basically no way they'd be able to discern a decrease in concentration over a single year with the instruments they're using. Even then, you'd want multiple years to make sure you're not just seeing a seasonal effect or something.
yeah. plus if theyve already determine itd deplete in 10^3 years through other natural processes i doubt we'd see any easily measurable variations due to our limited timescale
I'm a little skeptical of that. They note very large uncertainties for PH3 lifetime at middle atmospheric altitudes, potentially lasting much longer than 10^3 years, which is the timescale of atmospheric mixing. So if there's some process that ends up concentrating PH3 at intermediate altitudes (and intermediate latitudes) and the atmosphere isn't actually well mixed on the 10^3 years timescale, then maybe it is able to build up over time. That's what I'd put my money on, at any rate.
yeah, its a puzzler to me if it isnt a catastrophic event. they also mentioned the possibility of it being a chemical compound that is not yet known and happens to share a similar code for ph3 on their equipment, but they think thats very unlikely
but they think thats very unlikely
I mean, so is every other possible explanation.
its rare but it is speculated that some of these comets carrying phosphine originate from giant gas clouds after the destruction of a star. these are obviously rarer conditions than what would be found typically on a planets surface, which usually contains more recent processes. most of these findings are based on the rosetta probe.
it has also been documented that there is a phosphine creation cycle on various gas giants that relates to extremely high pressure, while venus is a high pressure environment it is not sufficient enough and the paper goes into that
