Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds

Having doubt is the default position in science. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

It’s an interesting finding, but it’s prudent to remain skeptical.

>Still, John Carpenter, an ALMA observatory scientist, is skeptical that the phosphine observations themselves are real. The signal is faint, and the team needed to perform an extensive amount of processing to pull it from the data returned by the telescopes. That processing, he says, may have returned an artificial signal at the same frequency as phosphine. He also notes that the standard for remote molecular identification involves detecting multiple fingerprints for the same molecule, which show up at different frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s something that the team has not yet done with phosphine.

>“They took the right steps to verify the signal, but I’m still not convinced that this is real,” Carpenter says. “If it’s real, it’s a very cool result, but it needs follow-up to make it really convincing.”

>Sousa-Silva agrees that the team needs to confirm the phosphine detection by finding additional fingerprints at other wavelengths. She and her colleagues had planned such observations using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a plane-mounted telescope, and with NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. But COVID-19 got in the way, and the team’s attempts have been put on hold.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/possible-...

>Feels like the relevant question is "Is the evidence, circumstantial though it may be, compelling enough to justify looking more closely?"

What will the likely answer be if there is there is a chance of increased funding on the horizon?

The paper posits the microbes living in droplets in the clouds hypothesis. Heat and pressure at ground level are not as conducive to life.