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Sept. 14, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

12:28

Special - Is There Life On Venus?

A short Special Edition about today's news of the apparent discovery of life-linked phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus...

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	Hello, it's Howard in London at the Home of the Unexplained with a bizarre and exciting, of course, breaking story.
	If you were listening to my radio show last night, the 13th of September, you would have heard me talking with Dr. David Whitehouse, a former BBC Space and Science editor, a very important man in his field, the author of the new book Space 2069, talking about reports that had the internet on fire over the weekend.
	Twitter was ablaze with it.
	A number of websites, including some respected ones, had carried this story ahead of its official release.
	The idea that organisms may be floating in the clouds of Venus, the planet Venus.
	The discovery of phosphine in those clouds of Venus.
	On Earth, phosphine is associated with life, with microbes living in the guts of animals like penguins, or in the oxygen-poor environments such as swamps.
	Apparently, there are only two ways that you can make phosphine, that is from living things or in a laboratory.
	And I'm assuming there are no laboratories on Venus.
	So scientists have made this discovery, but the way that it got out was, I think, the most bizarre I've ever seen in my lifetime.
	And Dr. David Whitehouse, I was guided by him yesterday.
	He said that he was very happy, more than happy to talk about this, even though it had been broken effectively on Twitter and a number of space websites that had carried the story.
	Now that has been confirmed on Monday that phosphine, it seems, has been discovered in the clouds above the planet Venus, which is an enormous discovery and is an extremely strange way for this news to have got out to the world.
	But I'm now looking at the news wires.
	It's all over them now.
	And the BBC reporting, is their life floating in the clouds of Venus?
	Question mark.
	So this is a big discovery, and we talked it round Dr. David Whitehouse and I last night on the show.
	I want you to hear that conversation.
	It's just the raw conversation, so when it ends, it ends.
	But here is the conversation from my radio show last night about this discovery around Venus with Dr. David Whitehouse.
	So David, we both know that Twitter today and to a small extent yesterday has been on fire with unconfirmed reports that we're getting an important space announcement very soon, possibly signs of an indicator of life beyond this planet.
	Now I've seen, as you have seen, a thousand hoaxes and a thousand misinterpretations over a lifetime.
	So I'm wondering, how much of this are you able to tell me?
	Well, I don't think it's unconfirmed now.
	I think it's definite that there is an interesting molecule called phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, which is very difficult to make, except in circumstances of life, except by bacteria that don't like oxygen.
	And it's tantalizing, and people are going away trying to think of other ways to produce this interesting molecule that doesn't involve life.
	But it's a fascinating subject.
	There'd been speculation for decades that the dark streaks in the Venusian atmosphere had some absorber.
	They should call it the unknown absorber and may have properties like bacteria.
	But these are observations made with Hawaii in South America, which look at the spectra.
	And yes, a case, it is phosphine.
	Where it came from is the question.
	It could be life.
	This could be a wonderful, amazing, history-making observation.
	But there's more work to be done on it to see if you can find another way to explain it.
	But it is absolutely fascinating.
	And as you pointed out, it is fascinating the way the story came out.
	Oh, it's bizarre.
	Well, yes.
	In fact, what happened was it's been rumours about this for many months.
	But I think about at the beginning of the month, Skype Night magazine tweeted that they were postponing their Sky Out Night, which should be on tonight, till tomorrow because of a big discovery.
	Now, you and I both know in journalism, if you're going to announce a big discovery, you don't give people two weeks plus advance warning that something's going to happen, but not tell them what it is because somebody's going to be able to do that.
	Well, no, you don't.
	Because human curiosity is everybody will want to try and find out, and inevitably somebody will.
	That's right.
	And in fact, it was also badly organized in the sense that MIT, one of the universities involved, had on their YouTube website a video explaining all of this that was accessible to the public until a few years ago.
	And can I just stop you there, David?
	I've seen that.
	Did that come from them?
	Yes, it did.
	It's a MIT PR department-made video explaining what it's all about.
	And it was presumably meant to be released when the embargo on this story lifted at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon.
	But as you and I have journalism backgrounds, you know that embargoes happen all the time, especially in science.
	And we have to explain just to our listener quickly that an embargo is where somebody believes they have a great story.
	They want all the media to cover it simultaneously.
	And so what they do is they send out a news release to everybody and they say this story is embargoed.
	In other words, you cannot use it until a particular date and time.
	But unusually and bizarrely, this story was flagged up to journalists a couple of weeks ago, but it's crept out already.
	And indeed, as you say, on a video released by one of the research organizations involved in the research already.
	That's right.
	And by a website which probably accidentally jumped the gun on this.
	But it's everywhere now.
	And, you know, if I remember as a journalist, you know, you had embargo, you know, you do the preparation for it.
	You release it when the announcement is made.
	And in fact, a lot of people were invited to the press conference and not told what it was about.
	So they weren't subject to any embargo because they didn't know what the subject was.
	But there comes a time when the embargo is broken.
	And I reckon, by my estimates, millions of people on Twitter and Facebook and the internet have already seen this story in front of them.
	So it's rather like politics.
	You know, you get the Prime Minister giving a big speech on Tuesday.
	It comes out in the Sunday newspapers and everybody forgets about the embargo and the story goes.
	Politics should be the same as science in This respect.
	Science journalists are not behaving like journalists, standing around thinking, well, it might be all over Twitter, and there might be lots and lots of the public talking about it, but I'm not going to talk about it at all for 24 hours later.
	I think the story's out, and that's why I feel happy talking about it.
	And I feel great.
	I feel happy to let you talk about it because you are the man we used to see on BBC's 9 o'clock news when it was 9 o'clock news and 10 o'clock news talking about space.
	So you know your stuff and you've also seen the genesis of this thing.
	And you confirmed to me that that video that appeared on YouTube actually came from the people who did the research or at least some of it.
	So look, we've said in a very roundabout way, and forgive me for having tiptoed my way into this instead of having jumped into it shouting, wow, what an amazing discovery.
	Let's just underline it now for my listener, because we may be the first to talk about this, who knows?
	But there will be others, many, I'm sure.
	Let's just explain that something called phosphine, they call it a very smelly gas, has been identified, they think, in the atmosphere of Venus.
	Now, it would have to be up there because the actual surface of Venus is a very forbidding place, yes?
	Exactly.
	The surface of Venus is 460 degrees centigrade hot.
	You would be crushed, fried.
	You know, it's an inhospitable place.
	But there are certain parts of the clouds of Venus, which aren't, it's a nasty place in general.
	There are layers of sulfuric acid droplets in some parts of Venus's atmosphere.
	But there are certain parts of it which are quite temperate and may be a temperature rather like the Earth's atmosphere.
	And it's postulated this phosphine might come from bacteria in those regions.
	And certainly phosphine is a very difficult molecule to make in other circumstances other than life.
	We may not find out more about phosphine in the future and find that it's not life, but this does look very, very promising.
	The problem, of course, as you said, is the surface, is that nothing could live on the surface.
	So a theory I've heard is that perhaps in the past, billions of years ago, when Venus was much cooler, was much more like the Earth, perhaps bacteria started then and somehow found a part of their life cycle being blown around in the clouds.
	And then as the surface became hotter and the atmosphere became thicker, they carried on and they've been there for a long time.
	This is all speculation, all interesting, but it is.
	This is potentially one of the biggest discoveries of all time.
	It is, and we're talking in very measured tones, and we're not screaming and shouting about it.
	But, you know, what you may just have heard is the nub, the genesis of something absolutely huge.
	First disco.
	Sorry, you were saying.
	First discovery of life off the Earth.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	And you heard it here.
	I can't believe we're saying these words.
	Now, we may well discover more.
	Of course, we will discover more because that's science.
	But let me just quote this.
	One of the things I read about phosphine was this.
	As far as scientists know, there are only two ways to produce it.
	You said this already anyway.
	Either artificially in a laboratory, which they haven't got on Venus as far as we know, or by certain kinds of microbes that live in oxygen-free environments.
	So if it's the microbes, then we have to start asking, how would microbes get there?
	And isn't this exciting?
	Because, as Esther Ranson used to say, that's life.
	Well, and Jeff Goblin said life finds a way, didn't he, in Jurassic Park?
	Who knows?
	I mean, it may well be, there's been lots of speculation for many decades that life might have started on Mars and rocks thrown off Mars by collisions might have reached the Earth and seeded the Earth or vice versa.
	It might well even be that life started on Mars or the Earth and seeded Venus.
	We don't know.
	I mean, it's all great stuff of scientific investigation and speculation.
	But if that phosphine comes from life, there is life on another planet.
	It was quite amazing because had you, although there'd been talk about life in the atmosphere of Venus for many decades, everybody thought it would be Mars where you found it first.
	And doesn't that just show you how science works?
	Crept up behind us, Venus might be the first place we found life in the universe other than on the Earth.
	And isn't that amazing?
	If all this turns out the way we think it might, then it's also bizarre and so human the way that this actually has crept out.
	It's got out by accident in an unintended way.
	Well, I think actually it got out because the management of the announcement of this story was very, very poor.
	I think that whoever organised press conference and then gave lots of time between the invitation and sending out a press release to some people and the press conference, you know, lasted far too long and was asking for somebody to nip in and break the embargo.
	And it's one thing to, I mean, I remember in my days as a journalist, you'd see the story all over the place, even in newspapers.
	But the original source of it would say, no, the embargo is still on.
	You can't talk about it.
	Well, nonsense to that.
	If the whole world is talking about it, if millions of people are talking about it on Twitter and Facebook, then any mainstream journalist is doing a disservice to their audience if they ignore it for another 24 hours.
	Why should their audience suffer?
	Very quickly then, David, I hear what you say.
	One quick question and then we have to take some commercials.
	If you were doing the BBC science beat now for television, would you have been on the television news tonight with this?

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