Page 2 of 2

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:54 pm
by Floppykid
Not even two pages before the shit flinging starts.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:30 pm
by Ewinkum
What ever happened to the promising methane emissions from Mars’ crack?

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:34 pm
by PornDog
Floppykid wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:54 pm Not even two pages before the shit flinging starts.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition - or in this instance the Knights of Columbanus.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:43 pm
by HighKingLeinster
lorcanoworms wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 9:40 am Munster are busy looking for the bacteria's agent.
I hear Boris has opened trade negotiations with Venus

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 10:05 pm
by flaggETERNAL
Floppykid wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:54 pm Not even two pages before the shit flinging starts.
And this is why aliens won't talk to us.

Would have thought Europa was a better bet for etlife anyway from what little I know.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 10:39 pm
by Bindi
Hellraiser wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:41 pm
Bindi wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 1:28 am
Hellraiser wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 12:28 am
Bindi wrote: Mon Sep 14, 2020 10:55 pm
Hellraiser's point is refuted. There's no evidence that phosphine levels probably aren't a measure of biological activity.
Read what I actually wrote, moron.
I did; it was laughable. Your a priori justification is that life cannot exist on Venus, therefore any evidence that it does is misinterpreted.

That isn’t the way science works; when an astonishing but repeatable result comes up like this, it can’t be explained away without a mechanism. Either it’s life, or it’s a currently unknown mechanism.

The authors, who are experts, couldn’t come up with a way that it isn’t life. It’s simply an open question now, not something explained away with a bit of deductive reasoning. It is certainly something that should be investigated, with actual evidence determining the outcome.

You're a painfully stupid individual.
I thought I’d managed to block most of the worthless posters here, but somehow I’d never noticed you before.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 11:48 pm
by Leinster in London
HighKingLeinster wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:43 pm
lorcanoworms wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 9:40 am Munster are busy looking for the bacteria's agent.
I hear Boris has opened trade negotiations with Venus
Well I suppose that's a polite euphemism for the transaction.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 11:54 pm
by DOB
AlanBengio wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:51 am I always thought, with no scientific basis, that Venus is Earth as it used to be, Earth is Earth as it currently is, and Mars is Earth as it will be in the future (ie impling that all three planets did experience / will experience life of some sort at a certain point)
It could be the other way around. The thick atmosphere on Venus could be the result of life getting out of hand and reaching some apex of unsustainability, or teh whole thing just getting too close to the sun. Some process on the planet, be it natural or artificial, heated up and accelerated by an at-the-time-expanding sun, that ended up belching out all the CO2 and other toxic gases that killed all life or chance of life that may or may not have ever been there. And Mars is a lump of rock still collecting gases and an atmosphere (and having a harder time doing it, being smaller than all the other rock planets), but may one day develop a thick enough atmosphere to support some form of life.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2020 1:59 am
by Pat the Ex Mat
The Drake equation should be interesting now

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2020 2:31 am
by Bindi
Given life has managed to colonise pretty much everywhere on earth where there's energy available, it doesn't suprise me that life could adapt to Venus's atmosphere where the temperatures and pressures aren't extreme.

Don't know too much about organic chemistry, but given some plastics are resistant to sulphuric acid and plastics are often hydrocarbons, is it not possible that bacteria or bacterial analogs could evolve a similar acid resistant coating? The building blocks are all there. Venus wasn't always like it is now, so seems quite plausable that something could adapt as the atmosphere changed.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:47 am
by Nolanator
DOB wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 11:54 pm
AlanBengio wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:51 am I always thought, with no scientific basis, that Venus is Earth as it used to be, Earth is Earth as it currently is, and Mars is Earth as it will be in the future (ie impling that all three planets did experience / will experience life of some sort at a certain point)
It could be the other way around. The thick atmosphere on Venus could be the result of life getting out of hand and reaching some apex of unsustainability, or teh whole thing just getting too close to the sun. Some process on the planet, be it natural or artificial, heated up and accelerated by an at-the-time-expanding sun, that ended up belching out all the CO2 and other toxic gases that killed all life or chance of life that may or may not have ever been there. And Mars is a lump of rock still collecting gases and an atmosphere (and having a harder time doing it, being smaller than all the other rock planets), but may one day develop a thick enough atmosphere to support some form of life.
Mars is geologically dead, though.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2020 10:02 am
by PornDog
Nolanator wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 9:47 am
DOB wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 11:54 pm
AlanBengio wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:51 am I always thought, with no scientific basis, that Venus is Earth as it used to be, Earth is Earth as it currently is, and Mars is Earth as it will be in the future (ie impling that all three planets did experience / will experience life of some sort at a certain point)
It could be the other way around. The thick atmosphere on Venus could be the result of life getting out of hand and reaching some apex of unsustainability, or teh whole thing just getting too close to the sun. Some process on the planet, be it natural or artificial, heated up and accelerated by an at-the-time-expanding sun, that ended up belching out all the CO2 and other toxic gases that killed all life or chance of life that may or may not have ever been there. And Mars is a lump of rock still collecting gases and an atmosphere (and having a harder time doing it, being smaller than all the other rock planets), but may one day develop a thick enough atmosphere to support some form of life.
Mars is geologically dead, though.
Depends on what you mean by geological activity I suppose. Sure there aren't going to be any volcanic eruptions of molten rock, but there has been recent evidence of the likes of carbon monoxide geysers and such.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2020 11:18 am
by jezzer
Ewinkum wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:30 pm What ever happened to the promising methane emissions from Mars’ crack?
No, that was Uranus.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Sep 16, 2020 11:32 am
by koroke hangareka
Bindi wrote: Wed Sep 16, 2020 2:31 am Given life has managed to colonise pretty much everywhere on earth where there's energy available, it doesn't suprise me that life could adapt to Venus's atmosphere where the temperatures and pressures aren't extreme.

Don't know too much about organic chemistry, but given some plastics are resistant to sulphuric acid and plastics are often hydrocarbons, is it not possible that bacteria or bacterial analogs could evolve a similar acid resistant coating? The building blocks are all there. Venus wasn't always like it is now, so seems quite plausable that something could adapt as the atmosphere changed.
Very much this. We don't know how likely it is that life will develop on a given planet; it's certainly not clear that Venus couldn't have produced life at some point in its history. And all the evidence available to us suggests that once life does develop, it's damned hard to eradicate.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 2:13 am
by Flyin Ryan
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/0 ... s.html?m=1
Whatever Happened to Life on Venus?

Sabine Hassenfelder, March 20th, 2021

A few months ago, the headlines screamed that scientists had found signs of life on Venus. But it didn’t take long for other scientists to raise objections. So, just exactly what did they find on Venus? Did they actually find it? And what does it all mean? That’s what we will talk about today.

The discovery that made headlines a few months ago was that an international group of researchers said they’d found traces of a molecule called phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.

Phosphine is a molecule made of one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms. On planets like Jupiter and Saturn, pressure and temperature are so high that phosphine can form by coincidental chemical reactions, and indeed phosphine has been observed in the atmosphere of these two planets. On planets like Venus, however, the pressure isn’t remotely large enough to produce phosphine this way.

And the only other known processes to create phosphine are biological. On Earth, for example, which in size and distance to the Sun isn’t all that different to Venus, the only natural production processes for phosphine are certain types of microbes. Lest you think this means that phosphine is somehow “good for life”, I should add that the microbes in question live without oxygen. Indeed, phosphine is toxic for forms of life that use oxygen, which is most of life on earth. In fact, phosphine is used in the agricultural industry to kill rodents and insects.

So, the production of phosphine on Venus at fairly low atmospheric pressure seems to require life in some sense, which is why the claim that there’s phosphine on Venus is BIG. It could mean there’s microbial life on Venus. And just in case microbial life doesn’t excite you all that much, this would be super-interesting because it would give us a clue to what the chances are that life evolves on other planets in general.

So, just exactly what did they find?

The suspicion that phosphine might be present on Venus isn’t entirely new. The researchers first saw something that could be phosphine in two-thousand and seventeen in data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, which is a radio telescope in Hawaii. However, this signal was not particularly good, so they didn’t publish it. Instead they waited for more data from the ALMA telescope in Chile. Then they published a combined analysis of the data from both telescopes in Nature Astronomy.

Here’s what they did. One can look for evidence of molecules by exploiting that each molecule reacts to light at different wave-lengths. To some wave-lengths, a molecule may not react at all, but others it may absorb because they cause the molecule to vibrate or rotate around itself. It’s like each molecule has very specific resonance frequencies, like if you’re in an airplane and the engine’s being turned up and then, at a certain pitch the whole plane shakes? That’s a resonance. For the plane it happens at certain wavelengths of sound. For molecules it happens at certain wave-lengths of light.

So, if light passes through a gas, like the atmosphere of Venus, then just how much light at each wave-length passes through depends on what molecules are in the gas. Each molecule has a very specific signature, and that makes the identification possible.

At least in principle. In practice… it’s difficult. That’s because different molecules can have very similar absorption lines.

For example, the phosphine absorption line which all the debate is about has a frequency of two-hundred sixty-six point nine four four Gigahertz. But sulfur dioxide has an absorption line at two-hundred sixty-six point nine four three GigaHertz, and sulfur dioxide is really common in the atmosphere of Venus. That makes it quite a challenge to find traces of phosphine.

But challenges are there to be met. The astrophysicists estimated the contribution from Sulphur dioxide from other lines which this molecule should also produce.

They found that these other lines were almost invisible. So they concluded that the absorption in the frequency range of interest had to be mostly due to phosphine and they estimated the amount with about seven to twenty parts per billion, so that’s seven to twenty molecules of phosphine per billion molecules of anything.

It’s this discovery which made the big headlines. The results they got for the phosphine amount from the two different telescopes are a little different, and such an inconsistency is somewhat of a red flag. But then, these measurements were made some years apart and the atmosphere of Venus could have undergone changes in that period, so it’s not necessarily a problem.

Unfortunately, after publishing their analysis, the team learned that the data from ALMA had not been processed correctly. It was not their fault, but it meant they had to redo their analysis. With the corrected data, the amount of phosphine they claimed to see fell to something between 1 and 4 parts per billion. Less, but still there.

Of course such an important finding attracted a lot of attention, and it didn’t take long for other researchers to have a close look at the analysis. It was not only that finding phosphine was surprising, not finding sulphur dioxide was not normal either; it had been detected many times in the atmosphere of Venus in amounts about 10 times higher than what the phosphine-discovery study claimed it was.

Already in October last year, a paper came out that argued there’s no signal at all in the data, and that said the original study used an overly complicated twelve parameter fit that fooled them into seeing something where there was nothing. This criticism has since been published in a peer reviewed journal. And by the end of January another team put out two papers in which they pointed out several other problems with the original analysis.

First they used a model of the atmosphere of Venus and calculated that the alleged phosphine absorption comes from altitudes higher than eighty kilometers. Problem is, at such a high altitude, phosphine is incredibly unstable because ultraviolet light from the sun breaks it apart quickly. They estimated it would have a lifetime of under one second! This means for phosphine to be present on Venus in the observed amounts, it would’ve to be produced at a rate higher than the production of oxygen by photosynthesis on Earth. You’d need a lot of bacteria to get that done.

Second, they claim that the ALMA telescope should not have been able to see the signal at all, or at least a much smaller signal, because of an effect called line dilution. Line dilution can occur if one has a telescope with many separate dishes like ALMA. A signal that’s smeared out over many of the dishes, like the signal from the atmosphere of Venus, can then be affected by interference effects.

According to estimates in the new paper, line dilution should suppress the signal in the ALMA telescope by about a factor 10-20, in which case it would not be visible at all. And indeed they claim that no signal is entirely consistent with the data from the second telescope. This criticism, too, has now passed peer review.

What does it mean?

Well, the authors of the original study might reply to this criticism, and so it will probably take some time until the dust settles. But even if the criticism is correct, this would not mean there’s no phosphine on Venus. As they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If the criticism is correct, then the observations, exactly because they probe only high altitudes where phosphine is unstable, can neither exclude, nor confirm, the presence of phosphine on Venus. And so, the summary is, as so often in science: More work is needed.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:02 pm
by eldanielfire
Nolanator wrote: Mon Sep 14, 2020 11:57 am Protomolecule is building something.
Binged that series late early in 2021 and obviously that's exactly what I thought when I read this story :lol:

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:21 pm
by Morgan14
A well written article. Also, provides closure (for me, at least) on this issue.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:21 pm
by Flyin Ryan
Morgan14 wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:21 pm A well written article. Also, provides closure (for me, at least) on this issue.
She's a German physicist that has been most known for being heavy on the "this string theory multiverse is all bullshit" the past half-decade.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:45 pm
by Morgan14
Flyin Ryan wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:21 pm
Morgan14 wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:21 pm A well written article. Also, provides closure (for me, at least) on this issue.
She's a German physicist that has been most known for being heavy on the "this string theory multiverse is all bullshit" the past half-decade.
Interesting. I thought I read recently that they may have discovered a couple of particles that would lend support to that theory (may even have been required by it in order for it to hold true), but I may have my facts wrong. I probably read a couple of paragraphs about it on Reddit and am now an 'expert'.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 5:07 pm
by Flyin Ryan
Morgan14 wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:45 pm
Flyin Ryan wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:21 pm
Morgan14 wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:21 pm A well written article. Also, provides closure (for me, at least) on this issue.
She's a German physicist that has been most known for being heavy on the "this string theory multiverse is all bullshit" the past half-decade.
Interesting. I thought I read recently that they may have discovered a couple of particles that would lend support to that theory (may even have been required by it in order for it to hold true), but I may have my facts wrong. I probably read a couple of paragraphs about it on Reddit and am now an 'expert'.
The Large Hadron Collider finding the Higgs boson but nothing else that backers thought it should see was incredibly damaging. The main problem seems to be there's nothing experimental about what some people theorize that you can test - which is very unscientific - so you had bad theory built upon bad theory.

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12245
The Future of Fundamental Physics
Posted on March 24, 2021 by woit

IAS director Robbert Dijkgraaf will be giving the CERN colloquium tomorrow, with the title The Future of Fundamental Physics. Here’s the abstract:
The reports of the death of physics are greatly exaggerated. Instead, I would argue, we are living in a golden era and the best is yet to come. Not only did the past decades see some amazing breakthrough discoveries and show us the many unknowns in our current understanding, but more importantly, science in general is moving from studying `what is’ to `what could be.’ There will be many more fundamental laws of nature hidden within the endless number of physical systems we could fabricate out of the currently known building blocks. This demands an open mind about the concepts of unity and progress in physics.
I don’t know of any “reports of the death of physics”, but there are a lot of reports of the death of string theory (Dijkgraaf’s specialty) and of the larger subject of attempts to go beyond the Standard Model, experimentally or theoretically. CERN yesterday announced new results from LHCb testing lepton universality (a prediction of the Standard Model). LHCb sees a ratio of decays to muons vs. electrons in a certain process that is off from the Standard Model prediction by 3.1 sigma.

If this result is confirmed with better data and careful examination of the theory calculation, that will be a dramatic development, indicating a significant previously unknown flaw in the Standard Model. BSM theory and experiment would be very much undeniably alive (no known relevance of this though to the troubles of string theory). Unfortunately, the experience of the past few decades is that 3 sigma size violations of Standard Model always go away after more careful investigation (see for instance the 750 GeV diphoton excess). It’s exactly this pattern that has people worried about the health of the field of high energy physics.

Dijkgraaf’s claim that “we are living in a golden era” is an odd one to be making at CERN, which has seen some true golden eras and is now facing very real challenges. Even odder is arguing at CERN that the bright future of science is due to it “moving from studying `what is’ to `what could be.’” CERN is at its core a place devoted to investigating “what is” at the most fundamental level. I’m curious to hear what those at CERN make of his talk.

Dijkgraaf’s abstract to me summarizes the attitude that the best way to deal with the current problems of HEP theory is to change the definition of the goals of the field, thereby defining failure away. The failure of heavily promoted ideas about string theory and supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model is rebranded a success, a discovery that there’s no longer any point to pursue the traditional goals of the subject. Instead, the way forward to a brighter future is to give up on unification and trying to do better than the Standard Model. One is then free to redefine “fundamental physics” as whatever theorists manage to come up with of some relevance to still healthy fields like condensed matter and hot new topics like machine learning and quantum computing. I can see why Dijkgraaf feels this is the way forward for the IAS, but whether and how it provides a way forward for CERN is another question.

Update: I just finished watching the Dijkgraaf talk, together with the question session afterwards. Dijkgraaf basically just completely ignored HEP physics and the issues it is facing. He advertised the future of science as leaving the river of “what is” and entering a new ocean of “what can be”, with the promising “what can be” fields biotech, designer materials and AI/machine learning. He hopes that theorists can contribute to these new fields by trying to find new laws governing emergence from complexity, perhaps via new ideas using quantum field theory tools.

With nothing at all to point to as a reason to be optimistic about HEP, a couple questioners asked whether his river of “what is” might be now hitting not an ocean but a desert, and he didn’t have much of an answer. All in all, I’m afraid that the vision of the future he was trying to sell is not one in which high energy physics has any real place. It fits well with the depressing increasingly popular view of the field, as one which had a great run during the twentieth-century, but now has reached an end.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 8:17 pm
by towny
HighKingLeinster wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:43 pm
lorcanoworms wrote: Tue Sep 15, 2020 9:40 am Munster are busy looking for the bacteria's agent.
I hear Boris has opened trade negotiations with Venus
:lol: :lol:

Criminally underrated post.

Re: Life on Venus (possibly)

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 8:22 pm
by towny
eldanielfire wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:02 pm
Nolanator wrote: Mon Sep 14, 2020 11:57 am Protomolecule is building something.
Binged that series late early in 2021 and obviously that's exactly what I thought when I read this story :lol:
Season 5 was exceptional. It’s become a truly great tv show.