Neat!

OT: Life on Venus? by Huinesoron on 2020-09-15 08:04:18 UTC Reply

It's a godawful acid place

Barely visited in Space Race

And the surface is burning hot

And the pressure is really a lot

But Roscosmos, Esa and Nasa

Say it's not really very far

To the brightest of nighttime lights

To the Morning and Evening Star

And the clouds thirty miles high

Form a habitable zone in the sky

Though still acid and filled with wind

Still we're starting to look for:

*

Phosphine, thousand times what Earth has!

Where from? Scientists were feeling shook,

Worked their way through the book!

But they couldn't find any

Source they thought was plausible

Save one, not from any Chem textbook

But let's give Bio a look:

Is there life on Venus...?

(With apologies to David Bowie)

Seriously, this is some crazy news. And unlike other recent "Life In Space" stories (eg, ʻOumuamua, various 'alien megastructures'), this one actually seems to have gotten the astro crowd excited.

Neat! by Tomash on 2020-09-16 07:22:17 UTC Reply

I'm wondering if this'll pan out and I'm looking forward to hearing more.

(and this also seems like pretty reasonable science journalism, which is a plus)
That's so cool by ShriekingOrneryShrike on 2020-09-15 08:21:20 UTC Edited Reply

I'm going to be honest - my first thought when I read the article was "Venus is alive". Imagine a whole living planet. I can see the sci-fi book now - my first instinct would be a horror novel, following our intrepid explorers as they attempt to find the source of life on Venus only to realize that the planet itself is alive... and it wants them gone. Or maybe it's curious, and it wants to keep them or study them for its own purposes. (We named our planets after gods, we never considered that they might really be gods.) Heck, you could even take a Lovecraftian spin on it, make the planet a Great Old One or something similar.

Either way, that's amazing! It's always super exciting to me when the space dudes find new stuff.