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[MetalSlimeHunt]

Holy. Fucking. Shit. (don't @ me about this being a UFO conspiracy channel, I know, but they're the only ones so far to reupload MIT's video which has nothing do do with conspiracy)

An atmospheric study of Venus has discovered the presence of phosphine in the planet's aerial habitable zone. Phosphine has no known abiotic source on terrestrial planets (gas giants do have such a source). Phosphine is unstable and would require a continuous source in order to be present in Venus' atmosphere.

Thus leaving us with two basic possibilities. Either we do not understand the generation of phosphine in some fundamental way, or...a source which is biological.

Which would of course be disastrous since it indicates that life is extremely common in the universe, and thus there is a great filter, and thus we are most likely fucked. Also before you ask, it's unlikely in the extreme that the USSR Venus mission somehow seeded life there and it was able to propagate in such a relatively short time span.

20-God-Damn-20, man.

[Egan_BW]

Anybody ready to get filtered?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I for one wish we had been filtered sooner!

Also I swear to fuck if the actual first discovery of alien life is now on the bottom post of a page

[feelotraveller]

Apparently there's an embargoed press release (Royal Astonomical Society) scheduled to drop on 14 September, so either today or tommorrow depending on the vagaries of time-zones, that concludes the phosphine is not from abiotic sources.  That spin will be all over the place then.

[wierd]

(Ironic joke alert)

The hyper-lifeforms are SuperWoke, and SpaceTwitter is VERY fast to Cancel Culture.


The problem is that you don't have any idea what the Hyper-lifeforms find objectionable.

Enjoy your filtering experience-- the exit questionnaire before oblivion is sometimes considered worse than the extinction level event that precedes it.

/joke

[Cthulhu]

Great Filter could still be in the past, and there's other ways Earth could have seeded life on Venus, I remember reading somewhere that even Chicxulub had enough force to put rocks in escape velocity, not to mention moon formation, other impacts we don't know about, etc.

But yeah, if abiogenesis happened on Venus that's fucking huge, either we won the lottery twice in a row (possibly more if Mars, Europa, etc. also end up having their own life, even fossilized) or life is god damn everywhere.

[voliol]

I’m still vexed by the previous topic of destroying the sun, but this blows (pun intended) those thoughts away. What’s up with this year? Are we inside some kind of reversed lotus-eater machine, i.e. one designed to make things as wack as possible? A lotus-regurgitation machine?

[Cthulhu]

Bitcoin mining is massively increasing load on the simulation.  Non-critical functions like the procedural story generator are going on low priority, degrading their functionality.

[Bralbaard]

Ah another great filter discussion. I would not write off humanity just yet.  Venus atmosphere and geology are quite different from Earth, odds are it is soms abiogenic process we have not yet thought off.

[Zangi]

Venus: Aylium microbes live in Penguin guts.

[Starver]

It's the Treens.

[Egan_BW]

Spoiler: SMBC to the rescue (click to show/hide)

[martinuzz]

My newspaper had an article on it this afternoon.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/mogelijk-teken-van-leven-ontdekt-op-venus~b772108f/

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

[Maximum Spin]

there's other ways Earth could have seeded life on Venus, I remember reading somewhere that even Chicxulub had enough force to put rocks in escape velocity, not to mention moon formation, other impacts we don't know about, etc.

Yep, there are all kinds of reasons to think that basically the entire region around Earth's orbit is one gigantic biocontamination zone. Astrophysicists have known this for many years now.

[Egan_BW]

Give us a few thousand years without going extinct and we'll start expanding that bubble to nearby stars.