In the search for alien life, we don’t always hear much about the planet Venus. There’s a lot of effort going into detecting possible signs of life on Mars, and looking for potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system. But Venus seems a crazy place to look for aliens: its surface is burning hot, hot enough to melt lead; and it has clouds made of concentrated acid. But could a very different kind of life from ours be living in those cloud droplets?

My guest in this episode is astronomer Jane Greaves, from the University of Cardiff. A few years ago, she used a telescope in Hawaii to scan Venus’s clouds for a molecule called phosphine. On earth, phosphine is pretty rare, its only natural source is microbes in certain oxygen-starved environments. We don’t currently know of any way it could possibly be made on Venus, apart from life, but Jane figured why not just have a look anyway. And she found it…

Some findings immediately touch a nerve, and this was one of them. Researchers immediately criticised her work, attacking the team both scientifically and personally. But Jane and her colleagues have been working to gather more data and they’re building an ever-stronger picture that phosphine really is there in the clouds. That would mean either some really fascinating chemistry we’ve never thought of before – or potential life. And this just adds to a list of mysterious features on Venus, from strange particles in the clouds; to gases in amounts very different from what we’d expect; to something unexplained that is absorbing huge amounts of energy from the solar radiation hitting the planet...

Jand and I chat about her latest results, and what she thinks about the chances of life elsewhere, as well as the importance of going against the grain sometimes, to explore questions others might think are too crazy to even ask.

Jane Greaves at Cardiff University

https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/greavesj1

Jane and her team’s 2020 paper reporting phosphine in Venus’s clouds

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4

The team’s response to criticisms of the 2020 paper

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01424-x

Guardian story on 2024 evidence for Venus phosphine & maybe ammonia

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2023.0082

2024 review of unexplained features on Venus

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2022.0060

2024 paper showing amino acids are stable in concentrated sulfuric acid

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2023.0082

NASA’s Pioneer Venus mission

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/pioneer-venus-1/

Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada https://www.yada-yada.net/

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