Life on Venus - Deep Dive! (Patreon)

It really pushes all the wrong buttons for me when a paper like this comes out! They are hyperskeptical about any other possible origin of phosphine in the atmosphere, but then are hyperUNskeptical when it comes to proposing life as an origin for phosphine.

I was originally very critical of some other science commentators who didn’t pick up on the most obvious line of all: there is basically no hydrogen on Venus:- this is a show stopper in itself for proposing life and you don’t need to be an expert on Venus to work this one out!

However as I read more and more about Venus, the more it became clear just how little we knew about Venus. But far from prying open the door a little to allow the suggestion of life, it nailed that door shut! Firstly, it turns out all the probes that samples the atmosphere showed the main form of particulates in the air below the cloud decks were partially reduced phosphorous oxides. This is immediately odd. Where does that phosphorous oxide come from? It also provides a very VERY simple mechanism to get to phosphine. That P4O6 reacts with the small amounts of water in the atmosphere to give H3PO3, which then disproportionates to give phosphine.

To drive some more nails into that door, these probes found the particulates in the clouds were mostly likely sulfuric acid and their density was that of the thinnest of clouds on Earth- hardly enough to make clouds, let alone floating life. Hell, the conditions here are Earth are a utopia for floating life compared to that of Venus, and we don’t have floating life here! (beyond little bits of crap blown into the atmosphere).