21–28 of 28 posts
even Venus life moved into the clouds
I think that's unclear at this time; IIUC, the phosphine could be generated at ground level, since Venus's atmosphere is so thick that it'd have to be lifted up a bit before UV light can start breaking it down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source on these doubts? This discovery is backed by the Royal Astronomical Society and MIT, which seems to imply the observations have been sound.
>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 identi…
The reality is that John Carpenter was taken over by an alien in 1982. This, finally, is confirmation that the alien came from Venus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 identi…
At the same time, that comment is based on someone, working in exo planetary science, skimming the paper for at most two hours before commenting. Just looking at figure 2[0], it doesn't look like the ALMA a detection is particularly weak and looks like a proper line. Of course, I don't know the full analysis chain, so I can't say how hard it is to make a line like this completely by accident, but I doubt you could te…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the same time, that comment is based on someone, working in exo planetary science, skimming the paper for at most two hours before commenting. Just looking at figure 2[0], it doesn't look like the ALMA a detection is particularly weak and looks like a proper line. Of course, I don't know the full analysis chain, so I can't say how hard it is to make a line like this completely by accident, but I doubt you could te…
One of the authors agrees that the finding needs additional confirmation in the last paragraph.
Given how low my prior would be that life currently exists on Venus compared to all the other possible explanations for this, I wouldn't count on it at this point Surprised this comment has a negative score, I'd be willing to bet at 50/50 that life on Venus won't be found within the next 5 years, there are a lot of alternative explanations with reasonable priors
Don't hold your breath. 1) there is doubt about the quality of the radio detection 2) the same group of authors have been promoting this for years 3) Nature Astronomy, not Nature proper
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?