British astrophysics egghead Dave Clements earlier this month delivered a Venus-shattering presentation on recent indications of two compounds, phosphine and ammonia, are present in the atmosphere of Earth’s hellish neighbor, both of which could be signs of life, CNN reports.
“We had three observation campaigns and in just one run, we got 140 times as much data as we did in the original detection. And what we’ve got so far indicates that we once again have phosphine detections,” said Clements to the July 17 Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Hull, England.
Clements, whose team got the data from a new instrument adapted to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, said the ammonia “is arguably more significant than the discovery of phosphine. We’re a long way from saying this, but if there is life on Venus producing phosphine, we have no idea why it’s producing it. However, if there is life on Venus producing ammonia, we do have an idea why it might be wanting to breathe ammonia. By all normal expectations, [neither compund should] be there. Phosphine and ammonia have both been suggested as biomarkers, including on exoplanets. So finding them in the atmosphere of Venus is interesting on that basis as well.”
We’re excited for everyone to pretend to be excited over some boring microbial extremophiles on Venus being mankind’s first discovery of extraterrestrial life and for some dickhead to say on television that it “completely changes our understanding of the universe,” but at least that news cycle would be over quickly. More concerning would be is if they were aerial jellyfish-like blobs that float around aimlessly in the thicker parts of the upper atmosphere. That would be so goddamned annoying to watch science pretend that they’re deeply fascinating and worthy of attention.