Life on Venus: BUSTED! (Patreon)

THERES NO WATER ON VENUS!!!!!

Okay... steady now... calm down!  Apparently they've discovered evidence of life on Venus.  Scientists have detected phosphine.  One of the authors states that 'if phosphine is found on ANY terrestrial planet, it can ONLY mean life'.  Except no.  For life you need lots of hydrogen.  A lot of it for the solvent (which will be something like liquid water), and a lot for the biomolecules.  You can only get this out of the complex chemistry of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.  Sugars, base pairs, lipids, and amino acids are all about 50 atom percent hydrogen.  Sadly theres basically no hydrogen on Venus.  The atmosphere is a mere 20 parts per MILLION water.  This means there is no part of the Venus atmosphere where you could get liquid water. 

Meanwhile in the paper, they make every possible effort to discredit natural sources of phosphine, but then apply none of that skepticism to phosphine produced by life.  Instead they do exactly the opposite and make every possible excuse as to why life cannot be ruled out.  All this despite the fact that there are none of the building blocks for life present on Venus, let alone life floating in the atmosphere!