Abiogenesis goes to theology, philosophy, also statistics

[pim]

[fat]

Enthralling - thanks pim
Ex nihilo - the big bang
Ex nihilo - life

[Gort]

Today we read reports about gas detection on Venus that *could* be signs of microbial life.*

Not news really. Everyone knows that Women come from Venus, Men from Mars.






* Actually, very probably is a sign of microbial life.





Phosphine discovery points to the possibility of life on Venus

ABC Science / By Genelle Weule
Posted 8hhours ago, updated 44mminutes ago


Astronomers have detected a rare molecule in the clouds of Venus.(Wikimedia: JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Meli Thev)

Life in the clouds sounds romantic, except when those clouds are made of sulphuric acid.

Yet scientists are pondering whether life could exist around Venus after a rare chemical was found in its atmosphere.

The discovery, published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, not only has implications for Venus, but the search for life beyond our solar system.

Phosphine, a short-lived toxic gas, is produced on Earth either by microbes that thrive in the absence of oxygen, or by industrial processes.

"[The discovery] suggests either some exotic chemical process occurs we haven't got or thought of on Earth — or maybe that some kind of very robust organism survived the runaway greenhouse effect, and evolved up to live in the clouds," said Jane Greaves of Cardiff University.

The idea that life could exist in the clouds of Venus is not new.

It was considered a possibility right up until the 1960s when spacecraft sent back the first details of our closest planetary neighbour.

Those craft revealed thick, acrid clouds that let through only 3 per cent of sunlight and a surface temperature that exceeds 470 degrees C. It was the epitome of hell.

Despite high levels of acidity, the clouds 50 to 60 kilometres above the surface are a balmy 30 degrees C. And that's where phosphine has now been found.

"This brings back into play the longstanding — but not much tested — idea of habitable cloud decks on Venus," said Professor Greaves, who led the international research team.

Mysterious gas


Phosphine, which is a biomarker on Earth, is made up of phosphorus and hydrogen.(Supplied: ESO/M. Kornmesser/L. Calçada & NASA/JPL/Caltech)
Professor Greaves and her team first detected the tell-tale wavelength signature emitted by the molecule using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii.

"When Jane sent me the spectrum I sat in front of my computer blinking for about half an hour. I didn't believe she'd actually found it," said the telescope's deputy director, Jessica Dempsey.

Further observations at the more sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile confirmed the result.

"We aren't saying it's a 100 per cent robust detection of life, but what we can say is that we've opened it up to the possibility that it is that," Dr Dempsey said.

"We don't know any other process that can explain the phosphine detection that we see."

Professor Greave's colleagues have modelled a number of different scenarios — including chemical reactions in the clouds, minerals being blown up from the surface, volcanoes, lightning or delivery by meteors — and none could explain the amount of phosphine seen the atmosphere.

And while the gas has been detected in the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn, Professor Greaves said the same processes do not exist on Venus.

"[On these planets] there is abundant hydrogen to form it at high pressure, deep down, and then it wells up. [But] free hydrogen isn't present on Venus or Earth," she said.

Is it life, but not life as we know it?

If life did exist in the clouds of Venus it would be very different to anything on Earth, Dr Dempsey said.

"We know that extremophiles on Earth can exist in acidic environment, but that acidic environment might only be 5 per cent, and it's still very much water based.

"Whereas the clouds in question we're talking about are more like 90 per cent acid."


The surface of Venus is uninhabitable, but a billion years ago it probably had water just like Earth.(Supplied: NASA/JPL)
Venus was probably habitable up until about a billion years ago, said planetary astrophysicist Stephen Kane of the University of California, Riverside.

While life could no longer exist on the blistering surface, Dr Kane said it would be extraordinary to know whether any last traces of life from that time could still survive in the clouds.

But he believes the signal is more likely to come from a geological or chemical process we don't understand.

"We do see phosphine produced on Earth by biological processes, much more so than geological, but that's not to say it would happen that way everywhere," he said.

Lucyna Kedziora-Chudczer, a planetary astrophysicist at Astronomy Australia who studies the atmosphere of Jupiter, agreed

"There are too many difficulties to justify the similarities of life that we have on Earth happening on Venus," Dr Kedziora-Chudzer said.

But, she said, the discovery of the gas — a difficult feat to have achieved — adds to our toolbox for looking for life on other planets.

"If we can learn how molecules which we associate with life can be produced — and how can they survive — in atmospheres like Venus, that will help us get to the core question: is there life somewhere else?"

The presence of phosphine has been proposed as a potential marker of life around alien rocky planets like ours.

The discovery of the molecule around Venus still needs to be verified by other studies, said Frank Mills, a planetary scientist at the Australian National University.

But if phosphine really is present and is a so-called "biosignature", it would expand the scope of feasible extraterrestrial life being considered, said Dr Mills, who worked on Europe's Venus Express spacecraft.

Venus close enough to find out if it is real

The beauty is that Venus is close enough for us to explore that question, said Dr Kane, who is working on one of the two discovery projects greenlit by NASA to go to the planet in the next decade.

"Venus is our opportunity to actually … go there and find out if it is real."

"If we can't do that here, then we have no chance of finding [biosignatures] around planets that are light years away and are completely inaccessible," he said.

And the discovery renews focus on Venus.

The last NASA mission specifically tasked with exploring Venus was in the 1990s when the Magellan spacecraft mapped the planet's surface before plunging through its atmosphere.

Since then, orbiters from the European Space Agency (Venus Express) and Japan (Akatsuki) have studied the planet's atmosphere and weather from afar.

"Venus is a very mysterious planet in many ways … but we have so much to learn," Dr Kane said.

Dr Dempsey agreed.

"We are really glad there is a new focus coming back on our next door neighbour," she said.


Clouds on Venus taken by the Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft in 2016.(Supplied: PLANET-C Project Team/ISAS/JAXA)

"We've been looking in the other direction for life on planets," she said of the focus on Mars, and moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

"Maybe we were looking in the wrong direction."


www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-09-15/life-on-venus-hint-phosphine-gas-discovered-in-clouds/12655772

[KTJ]

from The Washington Post…

• Scientists spot potential sign of life in Venus atmosphere

[pim]

We want to believe in ET don't we KTJ. We want so hard to believe.

Ahh faith ... it can move mountains and sway governments to fund the space programs

[KTJ]

Note the word scientists and not priest or reverend or pastor.

Evidence-based science is believable … blind faith is delusional.

Anyway, in another three days time, it will be fifty years since the greatest guitarist ever died.

[pim]

I'm quite relaxed about abiogenesis and indeed if it can occur here through random chemical processes then why not elsewhere? Irony is we've been so focussed on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn as possible environments within which abiogenesis could occur or may have occurred that we're surprised at finding indications on Venus of all places that could be evidence that could, perhaps, just possibly and who knows ... lead to peer-reviewed proof. Remember you set the "proof" bar KTJ! You want empirical "proof"! You need to be able to touch it, taste it, see it, maybe even hear it. "Empirical" proof means you can perceive it through one or all of the five senses. Of course that leaves no room for proof arrived at through deductive reasoning which is a major flaw in your scenario but let's not quibble. The scientists involved in the Venus announcement have known about all this stuff since 2017 but they waited until they'd gone through all the peer-review processes before going public with it, which is most commendable of them. That's what good science should be - careful, measured, not rushed and hedged at all stages with healthy scepticism. If you read the reports carefully you'll note that the boffins take pains to stress that this in no way constitutes proof of life on Venus. That's a long way off and probably not in my lifetime. But the media will take no notice of that and will trumpet the "discovery of life on Venus". They'll even use the word "proof"!

But back to abiogenesis. As I said I'm quite relaxed about it and so should a religious person be relaxed about it. But like Occam's argument about Causality (which I demand that the trolls treat with respect!) which raises as many questions as it seeks to answer - as good theology and good philosophy should! Remember that crap theology, crap philosophy and crap atheism claim to have the "answers" while good theology, good philosophy and good atheism welcome questions, revel in doubt and scepticism and hold questions to be more important than answers - so too does the notion of abiogenesis and the Big Bang. Why should either/both of them be one-off events? If a random confluence of chemicals in a particular environment can result in cellular forms that can self-replicate, multiply and diversify, why should it only have happened once? I don't just mean on other planets but also on this one. Why shouldn't there be an environment somewhere on planet Earth in which abiogenesis is taking place right now as I type this? Maybe all life on Earth is descended from a single cell that self-replicated in the primordial ooze, multiplied and diversified and ultimately led to a bipedal talking ape who thinks s/he might have discovered evidence of life on Venus. Maybe it did happen that way, but must it be so? If abiogenesis ends up being a phenomenon so common throughout the universe that our descendants end up describing it as a natural process and maybe even reducible to mathematical equation and a chemical formula then why shouldn't it be a continuous process everywhere? Including here on this planet?

The theory of abiogenesis that holds that all life forms on Earth are descended from the Single Cell in the primordial ooze, let's call the cell "Adam", which divided to produce "Eve" and we're all of us, from humans through to funnel web spiders, descended from these Adam & Eve cells, that leads you straight into notions of the unity of all life which is common to all religions. But what if abiogenesis is so random and so frequent that there is no unity of all life? If we accept that abiogenesis may well be a "thing" then you can't rule out the possibility of multiple life forms originating from multiple abiogeneses (he says, trying frantically to invent a plural for "abiogenesis"). So no unity of all life. Paleo atheists like KTJ, in their shallowness and utter lack of poetry, might shrug their shoulders. But real atheists like Bertrand Russell, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Chris Hitchens - all of them dead white males but in their time they were atheists of intellectual and philosophical substance who didn't lack a suitably appropriate sense of awe and wonder at the majesty of the universe - would have formulated a view. Camus and Sartre certainly did. They called it (in French) "L'Absurde". Their response to the argument put forward by proponents of a creator god with a purpose and an agenda that a godless universe must perforce be an absurd universe was to embrace "L'Absurde" and to place it at the core of their atheism. I don't necessarily share their point of view but I acknowledge its intellectual and philospohical integrity. As I acknowledge yours and Fat's, Occam. As for the trolls and their shallow bullshit masquerading as "atheism", I piss on it from a great height.

[Gort]