Life on Venus
I read with only passing interest that scientists have discovered phosphine gas in the clouds surrounding the planet of Venus. This is considered by many to be a thrilling piece of evidence that there may be life somewhere other than on Earth since phosphine is most often made by microbes and microbes have been long suspected to inhabit the clouds around Venus. The view is that the temperatures on Venus are too hot to allow life and the clouds surrounding Venus might have been too acidic unless the specific microbes could tolerate the acidity, which was at least conceivable. This new phosphine evidence it a major leap forward to those theories that life must be in those Venusian clouds. And if life could form somewhere off Earth like Venus (even off-planet and in the atmosphere), that was a clear message that life is not unique to Earth and could be present in any number of the billions and trillions of potentially life-supporting planets in the universe. Case closed, but further search implied.
I find the topic of extraterrestrial life mildly interesting as do most people. It would be made very real and very interesting if it involved something greater than a microbe of single-cell life form. If it involved less-evolved beings than humans that would be fascinating. If it involved beings of similar aptitude and capability as humans that would be scary but curious. And if it involved more evolved and powerful beings that would clearly dominate humans, it would be frightening. Star Trek did a decent job of exploring most of these levels and went on to hypothesize about how we would react to all of that. While there are many variants of the Star Trek vision, the point is that we have been conjecturing about what this might all mean at some point to us on Earth and the simple fact is that we cannot really fathom the possibilities. Our feeble human minds cannot grasp the totality of the universe as any of us who have tried to ponder it can attest. Maybe Einstein got further down the road on that but after 100 years his theories are still found to be ponderous and confusing to most mere mortals. We have settled in on the round world and now have sufficient evidence of that reality to get past it. Time travel and relativity are still at the fringes of our imagination. Life as we cannot know it are simply too far out there for us to get our arms and heads around.
Good scientists will call hogwash on my comments because they understand that science is the essence of incrementalization. I learn that every day running our little scientific R&D company. It is frustrating how hard it is to move science faster than it naturally wants to move in uncovering its secrets to us. It’s the itsy bitsy spider in its plodding movements forward. But given enough time, the spider does get up the water spout and even after getting washed down, eventually succeeds in getting where it wants to go. Where it wants to go may be the only real projective thinking we can apply to the question.
So, what do we want from the search for life in the cosmos? I suppose we can say that we want to protect ourselves or we want to ally ourselves with whatever is out there. Fair enough, but of all the risks faced by mankind, alien forces are very low on the list of logical concerns. And when they are upon us it is unclear we have enough of a clue to defend ourselves effectively no matter how much thinking or R&D we have applied against the problem. I am reminded of a story they tell in Chile about when the arch-nemesis Argentina became governed by the military Junta and needed a fight to stabilize its power base. They wanted to attack Chile on some false pretense or other since they knew that Chile was not enough of a threat to present any real and present danger to Argentina. They ordered the military to launch the attack, but before they could do so they discovered that their fifty millimeter guns were in the North and the one hundred millimeter guns were in the South and the ammunition for each was sent to the wrong location (or some such similar confusion). The Chileans say that they averted disaster through no preparation or action of their own, but rather by the sheer luck of the circumstances of the universe. The Argentine Junta then used the excuse of their failed efforts on the Eastern Front to turn their attack in the other direction, which meant an attack on the Malvinas Islands, also known by their British occupiers as the Falkland Islands. Hence the craziness of the Argentina attack on Great Britain is explained away as an outcome of the incompetence of the Argentine military, the passivity of the Chileans and the aggressiveness of the Argentine Junta in search of relevance. We need to be more like the Chileans with regard to life elsewhere and less like the Argentines.
I just got a wonderful outreach from National Geographic, one of the few sources of truth that I cling to in these uncertain times. I am waiting for their analysis of the phosphine gas on Venus and what it will say about the chances of life elsewhere in the universe. In the meantime, they are publishing a new upcoming documentary called Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas of David Bohm. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of the guy. Their tag line is to ask whether there is a scientific basis for world peace. That’s intriguing concept for a scientific dialogue. I will have to wait for the documentary, to come on September 20th for that and the follow-on discussion of Quantum Potential: A Pathway to Peace. It seems worth watching since David Bohm was a disciple of Albert Einstein (Einstein called him his “spiritual son”) and he studied directly under Robert Oppenheimer, who used some of his thesis equations in the building of the first atomic bomb. His radical theories that went from science into societal issues caused him to get lost in obscurity, only to be reborn during this time of quandary for new direction.
A famous physicist and philosopher, Shantina Augusto Sabbadini has said of Bohm, “Bohm’s theory is a revolution. It has radical implications about how we live our lives, how we interact with the Earth, and how we interact with each other. And that revolution is unfinished.” Bohm has said that “Deep down, the consciousness of mankind is one.” If that is true and there is some direction to his thinking that can help us in our Uber-divided state of distress, we need to hear it and apply it. Maybe there is a new Nuclear Age on the horizon that can cause us, force us, compel us to live together in harmony. If that is even remotely possible, then maybe we can afford to look more for life on Venus.