If there was ever a time to listen to the opinions of skeptical experts, that would be this time (or any other time when such a big claim is made).
I do have to note though that one of the researchers behind the announcement sounds very much like an expert on Phosphine, in particular. This is from the leaked article:
Clara Sousa-Silva at MIT, whose career specialty is studying phosphine, said in a statement:
Itβs very hard to prove a negative. Now, astronomers will think of all the ways to justify phosphine without life, and I welcome that. Please do, because we are at the end of our possibilities to show abiotic processes that can make phosphine.
Finding phosphine on Venus was an unexpected bonus! The discovery raises many questions, such as how any organisms could survive. On Earth, some microbes can cope with up to about 5% of acid in their environment, but the clouds of Venus are almost entirely made of acid.
What they would love is debate on the basis of this sketchy non-evidence, and it would fit in with the pathological nature of the science community today. Really they should simply be asked to show spectroscopic evidence of some other complex molecules.
People need to think less about people's university credentials when they assess credibility. Especially at places like MIT which burn through them like kindling.
Clara is a postdoc@MIT, and an expert in the _spectral lines_ of phosphine. The paper she refers to about known abiotic routes is really cursory and by no means exhaustively searches for routes to phosphine (https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018....). It considers a handful of reactions for a compound which has millions of chemical equilibria. The most obvious omission is hydrogen sulfide which is all over venus.
Well, the cat is out of the bag now, as they say, and there was an announcement by the Royal Society, no less. If you're right, there's going to be some very poignant egg on some very prominent faces.
Honestly, I have no ability to judge this way or that in this thing. It's completely outside my expertise. Also, I have no idea of how common it is for people to make unsubstantiated claims in astronomy (or is it astrobiology in this case?). In my field, AI, it's common for people to use big words and say big things they can't really back up with anything concrete. I hope that's not the way it is in astronomy. I'm a little concerned by your turn of phrase "the pathological nature of the science community today". If this announcement turns out to be a dud it might make some damage, I guess.
My question would be if the phosphine is being constantly produced from phosphate minerals does that mean that Venus at one point had an oxidizing atmosphere that produced those phosphates?
I do have to note though that one of the researchers behind the announcement sounds very much like an expert on Phosphine, in particular. This is from the leaked article:
Clara Sousa-Silva at MIT, whose career specialty is studying phosphine, said in a statement:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200914003530/https://webcache....Sounds to me like there's going to be some er, lively debate around this. Or not, I'm not an expert in any of this, lucky me :)