Cosmic Queries – Life on Venus

Is there life on Venus? Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Paul Mecurio, and astrobiologist David Grinspoon investigate the recent discovery of phosphine gas in Venus’s atmosphere and answer your Cosmic Queries.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries. This is the Venus edition. Is there life or is there not? And my co-host for this is longtime friend and funny as all get out, Paul Mecurio. Paul, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 0:33Paul Mecurio?

  Thank you. Yeah, it's been a while. It's great. Always fun.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was on your podcast?

• 0:37Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the name of your podcast was The Paul Mecurio Show? Is that like the best name you could come up with?

• 0:43Paul Mecurio?

  Well, we workshopped it for six months. It's like we focus grouped it.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Focus group.

• 0:51Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, it's on iTunes and we got all, I guess, have an array of interesting people. So it's everybody from you to Paul McCartney, Kevin Costner and...

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, excuse me. Name drop. Oh, excuse me.

• 1:04Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, I got people, I gotta get people to go listen to it. I gotta drop your name.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's great. So it's great to have you on. And so, you know, I've read about Venus, but I'm not an expert on it. And so I had to call one of my old time friends and colleagues, David Grin spoon. Dr. Funky Spoon. David, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:24David Grinspoon?

  Thanks, Neil. It's great to see you and always, always fun to do StarTalk.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is your Twitter handle still Dr. Funky Spoon?

• 1:31David Grinspoon?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm, I am Dr. Funky Spoon on Twitter.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And you're also a part-time musician, I guess. This is you, you riffed some lines about, was it The Big Bang or Planets on an earlier episode of StarTalk?

• 1:48David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, we did, we did the Astrobiology Blues.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astrobiology Blues, Looking for Life Blues. Yeah, very, that was fun.

• 1:54David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, especially these days when we're all kind of stuck, stuck at home. I've been, I've been playing a little bit.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Excellent. I see a guitar in your back, back there. And where are you now in this moment?

• 2:06David Grinspoon?

  In Washington DC in my undisclosed location in a basement.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so in your parents basement, okay. Let the record show, he hasn't moved out yet. He still hasn't launched.

• 2:18Paul Mecurio?

  Mom, meatloaf!

• 2:19David Grinspoon?

  I'm trying.

• 2:21Paul Mecurio?

  Like that scene with Will Ferrell, "Mom, meatloaf!" And he just screams for meatloaf.

• 2:29David Grinspoon?

  Hey, you're making me hungry.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but anyhow, you literally wrote the book on Venus. A few years back, the book Venus Revealed. So Venus is one of your planetary objects of affection. As a working scientist at the Planetary Science Institute based in Arizona, but you're in a satellite location there in Washington DC. So just welcome back to StarTalk.

• 2:53David Grinspoon?

  Thanks. Yeah, Venus has been an obsession of mine, you know, since graduate school. And so it's always fun when you see it. When I see it, get a little extra attention.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what we did was we solicited, as we always do for cosmic queries, questions from our fanbase on all the various social media platforms about Venus, about the possibility of life on Venus. And just, but Paul, and Paul, you have all those questions, right? So I haven't, I haven't seen them. I don't know. David, you haven't seen them either, have you?

• 3:19David Grinspoon?

  I have not.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So he's gonna, he's gonna pull out the hard ones.

• 3:27Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, this is for a new car.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, before you begin, I just want to just establish this. So David, you been a planetary guy your whole life?

• 3:37David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I've been doing research projects with Paul McCartney and Kevin Costner. No, yeah, I have. I mean, literally my whole life in the sense that even as a kid, you know, like a lot of scientists, my generation, after the moon landing, that was it, I was gonna be a space person in some way. And then I was pretty much obsessed with planetary exploration as a teenager. All the first missions were going out to, you know, Venus and Mars and stuff. And then undergraduate, grad school, planetary science researcher. It's, you know, that's, that's been my, my thing. My, literally, pretty much my whole life.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul might be your age, and so he had the same moon landing experience, but he didn't become a scientist. So Paul, what's what happened to you?

• 4:23Paul Mecurio?

  Wow, I gotta go.

• 4:28Paul Mecurio?

  If I want to be heckled, I'll do the 2:30 spot at the Comedy Cellar. I don't need this. No, wait. Exactly, exactly. Well, in 5th grade, I made a solar system out of styrofoam balls, so there, okay? Beat that.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go, okay.

• 4:41Paul Mecurio?

  No, I, you know, I, it's just never been, I like science, I just wasn't, I didn't feel like that was sort of my...

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you have good science literacy, otherwise we wouldn't keep inviting you back, just so you know.

• 4:52Paul Mecurio?

  I do, thank you, yeah, I do enjoy it, I do read up on it, and so, and when I leave these shows, I always feel both dumber and smarter at the same time, so it's good.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good thing, actually. Yeah, that's a good thing. So you know that you don't know everything, and you're proud of what you do know.

• 5:07Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good place to be.

• 5:09Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, what do you have for us?

• 5:11Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, here we go. First one is from Patreon, Izzy Roar. "So much about Venus is still a mystery to us, and since our early reference point for life is Earth-based, isn't it hard to say that the phosphine found on Venus is a sign of life? Could it just as easily be caused by something that we never encountered before, and so wouldn't even know to think of? What do you make of it?"

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. And just start off by, start off by, by giving a 3-minute, 2-minute overview of that, of that press conference, and what news we're all reacting to here.

• 5:46David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, so the big news this week is that it was announced that a discovery was made about Venus, which is that a gas called phosphine was detected in the atmosphere of Venus, using two different radio telescopes on Earth, a spectroscopic signal, a line, an absorption line, that shouldn't be in the atmosphere of Venus, and they couldn't find any other gas that would explain it, except for this gas called phosphine, which is just a phosphorus atom with three hydrogen atoms hanging off it, a simple molecule, which on Earth is...

• 6:25David Grinspoon?

  Only produced in our atmosphere, basically by life or by industrial processes, including meth labs, but nobody's saying, "Hey, there's meth labs on Venus." But, but, um... Paul is, Paul is pretty sure. Yeah, probably. We'll, we'll go there for sure.

• 6:40Paul Mecurio?

  By the way, I hope this leads to an outer space reboot of Breaking Bad. That's all I want to see happen.

• 6:44David Grinspoon?

  I think it needs to happen. So, so, so this is a surprising result because phosphine is a chemical that should not be in the atmosphere of Venus, meaning that if some of it, if you just put some in the atmosphere of Venus, you would expect it to go away very quickly because the other chemicals there, you would expect them to, to eat it. It's not stable there. And so, this is a known way of searching for life on, well, on exoplanets, especially planets around other stars where you can only look at the atmospheres. Because, uh, the idea is that if something is producing an unexpected gas in an atmosphere, it could be a sign of life. And so, there's this unexpected gas in the atmosphere of Venus, which on Earth is only made by life.

• 7:28David Grinspoon?

  And so, the scientists have said, "Well, what if, could it be volcanoes?" And they did calculations and they said, "No, there's no way it could be volcanoes." Could it be caused by lightning? Venus has volcanoes. Venus does have volcanoes, so that's an obvious thought. But it, you know, if they've done their calculations right, and you can be sure all of this is gonna be scrutinized, uh, you know, it ought to be scrutinized, you know? Is there a problem with the observation? Maybe. Did they do their calculations wrong? Maybe there's some obvious way to make the phosphine they're not thinking of. But, you know, at this point, it seems like a big mystery why this biogenic gas is, is in the atmosphere of Venus. So, but, but, you know, the question, um, is well taken because, yes, absolutely, um, it could be a sign of something else that we haven't figured out yet.

• 8:11David Grinspoon?

  It's just that, simply that nobody has yet figured out a good way to make it that's not life. So that doesn't mean, "Oh, we've found," it doesn't mean, "Oh, we found life on Venus." It means, "We found this mysterious indicator that has been, um, before this discovery, it was already published, the idea that if you found phosphine in an atmosphere, uh, it could be a sign of life." So, so there it is.

• 8:34Paul Mecurio?

  Isn't one theory that this life, I mean, it's 800 degrees on Venus, but somehow some of it got into the atmosphere of Venus, which is more life-friendly? It'd be like 85 degrees Fahrenheit, I was reading, in that atmosphere? And that's where it sort of has maybe taken hold?

• 8:50David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, Paul, that's a very important point because, you know, anybody listening to this who knows... You know, a basic facts about the solar system knows that Venus is not a place you would expect life because the surface is 900 degrees Fahrenheit and it's, you know, it's hell there. So why are we even talking about this? But there's a layer up in the atmosphere, about 35 miles up, where there are permanent global cloud decks and it's rather comfortable, at least in terms of temperature and pressure. It's like Earth's surface conditions. And there are, you know, potential flows of nutrients and energy and, you know, all the stuff you might need for life up there. And that's part of, you know, this is this idea that I've been pushing for a while. It's like, hey, there could be a habitable zone up in the Venus atmosphere.

• 9:34Paul Mecurio?

  And could you just go up with a mirror and see if there's any fog on the mirror? And then that's life form, you know, like a dead body kind of a thing?

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the old days, yeah. Paul, how old are you? That's how it was in 19th century way to know if someone was dead. You put up and see if they-

• 9:47Paul Mecurio?

  I'm 106 years old.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is, because if you fog the mirror, that was evidence you're still alive.

• 9:52Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 9:53David Grinspoon?

  Well, you know, we're looking, we're looking hard for techniques to go, go there and test this. So all suggestions are, you know, we'll put that one in the, in the-

• 10:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, bring a mirror, it's just in case.

• 10:04Paul Mecurio?

  You never know.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, wait, so David, if, I don't know if you're a betting man, but let me just ask you, what are the chances it's actually life versus a completely yet to be discovered way to make phosphine that no one has dreamt of yet?

• 10:21David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, man, it's-

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you balance this? Because both are extraordinary.

• 10:25David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? Because we think, we think we got a good chemistry. We, we, you know, we've been doing chemistry forever, right? We think we got that. So where do you, if you're a betting man, where would you put it?

• 10:35David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, boy, it's hard to put a number on it. I mean, you know, there's, there's a third likely possibility, which unfortunately, which is that maybe the observation is wrong and it's, it's very difficult inference. And, I mean, to me, it seems as though it's very solid work, the way they've described it, but you know people are going to be looking really hard and trying to repeat the observation. And maybe the phosphine will go away because it'll say, oh, well, actually it's something else, or it was, was a mistake. But let's assume that there really is phosphine there. What are the chances it's life? Uh, you know- People keep asking me that. It's so hard to put a number on it. So yesterday on Facebook, I said, "I'm gonna say 5%, but I'll probably change my mind tomorrow." And, you know, I reserve the right to have a very fluid opinion of this because we just

• 11:19David Grinspoon?

  don't know. And of course, you have to, you know, our friend Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And if there was ever a place where this applied, you know, we need better evidence, much more evidence, more evidence before we say, "Oh, life." But this is a legitimate mystery that has a legitimate, you know, logical path to infer that it could be life. And, you know, whether that's 1% or 10%, I don't know. But it's, you know, it's, it's less than 50%. It's more likely that it's something else. But it's not zero that it's life. And that in itself is, is a pretty exciting thing to realize.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just for people to recognize, when you have results that are interesting and unexpected, they naturally attract more scientific scrutiny to see if it's correct. So that's a very natural urge that we all have. In fact, Paul, it's a problem if you get a result that's not particularly interesting and wrong. Very few people will find out that it's wrong because they don't care. So the verification process is not a level playing field.

• 12:25David Grinspoon?

  Right. If you make a really interesting mistake, then everybody's gonna know about it.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So what else you got, Paul?

• 12:33Paul Mecurio?

  Okay. Philip Lyons, Patreon. "My question is simple. When can we get a sample and bring it back to Earth to be studied?" I think you can get it on Amazon. You gotta be, you gotta be a Prime member.

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they deliver tomorrow.

• 12:48Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, exactly. No, it's actually August 2032.

• 12:52David Grinspoon?

  Somebody's selling them on eBay right now, but I wouldn't, you know, give it a lot of credence.

• 12:57Paul Mecurio?

  But that does leave the question like, which I was thinking is sort of this is a two, is this a two, a parallel track issue of you make this discovery, but then you also have to create or invent a way? To kind of confirm this or sort of get to the next level with this. So do you have to develop processes and techniques at the same time?

• 13:14David Grinspoon?

  Oh, yeah. No, very much. We need follow-up experiments. I mean, first of all, just on Earth in labs, people are going to be going crazy saying, "Well, let's mix phosphine in a Venus-like environment and put this and that. Can we do it? How else can we make it just here on Earth trying to simulate it?" But you can be sure that we are going to be sending... I mean, we've been trying to... Some of us have been trying to send new missions to Venus anyways, and there's momentum. And I think this is going to be happening even... I would have said that even before this discovery, but now there's that much more incentive. We've got to go there and understand what's going on there. Now, bringing back a sample would not be the next step. That's a hard thing to do. You know, it's hard enough to bring back a rock from Mars, which, you know, we've been trying for a long time, and we're still trying, and there's something in the works,

• 13:59David Grinspoon?

  but it's not very easy. But an atmospheric sample from a... You know, think about it. You're going to enter into the atmosphere. You're going to scoop something up. And then you're going to launch, not from a surface, but from an aerial platform. And it's inherently harder to get something off Venus than Mars because it's a bigger planet with more escape gravity, or, you know, with more gravity, higher escape velocity. So that, I think, probably will be done eventually. But the next step is actually to just go there and do experiments in place. Bring the right scientific instruments into the atmosphere and the clouds to investigate and send the data back, rather than trying to bring a sample back.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, David, you're not talking about rovers because this is 35 miles up in the atmosphere, so you need some kind of floater.

• 14:44David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, I mean, even... You know, the easiest thing to do is just drop an entry probe, and you're briefly traveling through that environment, and you take measurements on the way down. That's been done, but not in the 21st century with modern instrumentation. And that, you could still learn a lot, even with a quick trip through with the right instruments sending back data. But then, as you say, Neil, it would be even better to... Bring a platform where you could reside in the clouds for a while, either a balloon or some kind of a solar-powered glider. There are plans and ideas to do this. And I think, you know, a balloon would be great, because then you could actually spend some time and sample more than one location and, you know, really look around and get to know the environment a little bit, rather than just flying through it.

• 15:29Paul Mecurio?

  I have a quick question related to this. So if the heat weren't the issue, is pressure on the surface also an issue here? Because it's 90 times that of Earth. So you have to grapple with that at the same time as the heat issue in terms of trying to find the sample, right?

• 15:45David Grinspoon?

  Paul's showing off that he did his homework before.

• 15:47Paul Mecurio?

  No, I have my sixth-grade science teacher sitting off to the side right here, and he's signing me.

• 15:55David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's got 90 times their pressure. That's pretty good. Yeah. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah, no, I mean, that's yet another reason why the surface environment is a, you know, a very challenging environment, both for life to survive and for our machines to survive if we want to go investigate it, which we should. I mean, the mystery of Venus, even if we're talking about a mystery up in the clouds, it's related to surface processes. Because, I mean, one of the things that that makes Venus such an interesting planet is that it seems to have an active surface. And that's connected to the chemistry of the clouds. There are- Active, you mean geologically active? Yeah, geologically active. And that seems to include active volcanoes, which

• 16:38David Grinspoon?

  is really important for this story. Although, you know, I say seems to include, we've got a lot of circumstantial evidence. We don't have what they call the smoking gun, where we've seen a volcano going off. But there are clues in the atmosphere and on the surface. It'd be the smoking volcano. Yes, exactly. The smoking caldera. We don't have that. But we do have, we see things in the atmosphere and patterns on the surface that make the most sense if there is- Active volcanism. So we think there probably is on Venus, but we want to confirm that. But it's important to this story because it's probable that the chemistry, whatever's going on in the clouds, has to do with gases that are coming out of the circle and cycling through the atmosphere and then reacting with surface rocks.

• 17:19David Grinspoon?

  So just as on Earth, we talk about the carbon cycle and these different chemical cycles. On Venus, there's a sulfur cycle and probably other sulfur cycles involving the clouds in the atmosphere and the surface. So if we want to understand what's going on in the atmosphere, ultimately, we do have to investigate the surface. But you wouldn't need a rover or something like that to do a dedicated mission just to look at what's going on up in the clouds.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if there's a sulfur cycle, that's where you get...I've always read that Venus has sulfuric acid droplets in the upper atmosphere. And I always wondered, you know, how'd they get there? Why don't we have some of that? And so it's got a sulfur cycle, huh?

• 17:57David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean, interestingly, we do have some of that. And when there's a big volcano, volcanic eruption on Earth, and you get those colorful sunsets, and sometimes there's even a temporary cooling because that stuff spreads through the stratosphere, that's actually mostly sulfuric acid droplets that you get a little bit of temporarily on Earth. But on Venus, of course, the clouds are almost all sulfuric acid, and we believe that is related to volcanic flow from the surface. Again, this is something we want to verify with more investigations and missions. But calculations that actually which I did with my research team several years ago, where we tried to look at the lifetime of the cloud particles, we actually believed

• 18:41David Grinspoon?

  that the clouds would go away in about 10 million years or maybe 30 million years if they weren't continually fueled by a flow of sulfuric gases from the surface. Which, if that's true, it's pretty cool because it means that when you go out at night and you observe Venus with your naked eyes and you see how beautiful and bright it is, you're actually observing the effect of volcanoes on the surface. Because the reason why Venus is so cloudy and so bright, and you could see that on any given evening or morning when Venus is in the right place, that is connected, we believe, to an ongoing existence of volcanoes. So you can verify that with your senses.

• 19:18Paul Mecurio?

  Is there anything here on Earth like sulfur springs that we can use, that we use or can use to... Advance our knowledge to work in this capacity in the context of Venus and phosphine and all of that?

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta get to that answer after this break. Okay, so Paul Mecurio wants to know if there are sulfur creatures

• 19:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in hot springs on Earth. When StarTalk returns, Cosmic Queries, the Venus Edition.

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, Cosmic Queries, Venus Edition, Life on Venus Edition. Paul Mecurio, my co-host, Paul.

• 20:10Paul Mecurio?

  Hey, how are you?

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, dude, we had David.

• 20:13Paul Mecurio?

  This is awesome. This is like, I feel like I should be, this should be like a masterclass, that series, and I should be paying money or something. This is amazing.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you'll get our bill. That's fine. But when, right when we left, you had a question. This wasn't from our list, right? You posed the question.

• 20:28Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether our sulfur springs can help us understand sulfur conditions on Venus.

• 20:35Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah. If they form us in any way.

• 20:37David Grinspoon?

  It's very, very relevant to this whole story because, you know, one of the ways we try to understand where in the universe there may be potential for life is by looking at the range of conditions that life can inhabit on Earth. And as we've learned more and more about what we call these extremophile organisms, the lovers of extremes, we realize that it's a much wider range of conditions than we once thought. And there's a whole category of extremophiles that are acidophiles, that we've discovered, organisms that love to live in strong acid, including acid hot springs of the kind you mentioned. And that's one of the reasons why some of us think that, you know,

• 21:19David Grinspoon?

  we shouldn't fully count out the clouds of Venus as a habitat. Now, it's true, the clouds of Venus are more acidic than the places on Earth so far that we've found acid-loving organisms. But we do not know really what the extreme limit of how acidic an environment can be and support life. And so, people that are interested in these questions, they study that environment. You mentioned the acid hot springs, you know, they go on field trips to places like Yellowstone and they look for life that lives in these extreme environments that are at least more Venus-like than other places on Earth.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So David, when tourists go take hot baths in these sulfur springs, would you consider those humans extremophiles?

• 22:04David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess I love hot springs and so I guess next time I'm in one, I should contemplate the fact that I am an extremophile.

• 22:14Paul Mecurio?

  I think it depends if they're wearing a bathing suit or not. If they're not wearing a bathing suit.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 22:19Paul Mecurio?

  They are very bold people, yeah. Should we move on to the next question?

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Paul, keep going. Paul's got the question. This is Cosmic Queries.

• 22:26Paul Mecurio?

  This is Vincent Zimmerman on Twitter. "Is there life in the clouds of Venus? What liquid is that life using? On Earth, we use water as solvent." I think it's Syrah vodka, isn't it?

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 22:39Paul Mecurio?

  No, it's sort of related to what we were talking about, but an extension of that.

• 22:43David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. One of the challenges is, as far as we know, life needs water. And that, as far as we know, has to be emphasized because maybe we're just not being imaginative enough. And, you know, so much about the universe, we learn through exploration, not through modeling and expecting what we're going to find. You know.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so is it that life needs water or that life needs liquid?

• 23:06David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, that's a great question. So you could look at it both ways. The chemistry of life, you could think of life, you know, on Earth as this dance of organic molecules, which take advantage of the fact they're in liquid so they can do this, you know, 3D coming together and doing all the complex interactions that molecules do. It's hard to imagine that happening not in a liquid medium. And people have said, "Well, what about ammonia or this or that?" And, you know, it's an interesting question, although nobody's come up with a full theory of how that would work.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw a comic, it might have been The New Yorker, where there's the alien crash lands in the desert and it's crawling along the dunes and it says, "Ammonia, ammonia."

• 23:46David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, so are we just being geocentric when we say life needs water?

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, hydrocentric, yeah.

• 23:54David Grinspoon?

  This is one of the hydrocentric. This is one of the great questions.

• 23:57Paul Mecurio?

  Earth with all of your fancy water, ooh.

• 24:00David Grinspoon?

  And, you know, this is one of the big motivations for finding aliens. In life, I mean, of course, the biggest motivation is just we want to know, are we alone? But in terms of the science, once we have multiple samples, then we could start to really address this question, is it all basically the same chemically, or are there completely other bases? So, most of what we do is search for water-based life, when we think about astrobiology and other environments. Maybe that's just our narrow-mindedness, but you've got to start somewhere and we at least know how life in water would work. Now, sulfuric acid is kind of a borderline case, because in a certain sense, it is water with just a lot of acid mixed in.

• 24:40David Grinspoon?

  It's a concentrated mix of, you know, it's water with the sulfuric acid molecules. And so, in a certain sense, the clouds of Venus are strictly speaking, a water environment. It's just that we don't know of life that can live in water that's that polluted with a strong acid. You know, so, would it be life as we know it? It's borderline. It would have to be life that had evolved these sort of mechanisms to maybe pump its interior free of acid, or a different kind of chemistry that can work with those acid molecules.

• 25:12Paul Mecurio?

  But in response to the question, there is plenty of liquid.

• 25:16David Grinspoon?

  There's plenty of liquid there, and that's one of the things that makes some of us, you know, not want to rule out that environment.

• 25:22Paul Mecurio?

  All right, so what else you got, Paul? Twitter, @doodlywhoopsie. Doodlywhoopsie. Doodlywhoopsie, yeah. A big fan of the show. Yes, exactly. It's whoopsie doodle, @doodlywhoopsie. Apparently, I guess, @whoopsiedoodle was taken already, so they had to flip it. Anyway, hi, Dr. Tyson. Were they living backwards in time, and it reads forward to them? Exactly. What is the most basic and trusted way to search life in the universe?

• 25:51David Grinspoon?

  Oh, that's a great question. Of course, there's a lot of effort going into answering that. But interestingly, the most common answer you would probably get now, especially because we have discovered exoplanets, and we want to know what they're like, and if they might have life, all the planets around other stars, that we can't just send a spacecraft to, you know, in... In a few months, it would take a few centuries. So, so we have to rely on remote observations. And the best way is to search for weird gases, anomalous gases, in the atmosphere. Like phosphine, for instance. So, um, you know, what's...

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, just to be clear, it's not just that they're weird gases. They're gases associated with the existence of life.

• 26:33David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, weird in a particular way, that's right. Um, out of equilibrium, things that shouldn't, shouldn't be in the atmosphere and are plausibly associated with some kind of biological metabolism.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Paul, did you know that humans, and life in general, is hugely out of equilibrium with its environment? Did anybody ever tell you that?

• 26:52Paul Mecurio?

  No, what does that mean?

• 26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it means.

• 26:55Paul Mecurio?

  And are you, are you really just talking about me, that I'm out of equilibrium with the rest of the world?

• 27:00David Grinspoon?

  It's not just you, if you've been wondering. We're all out of equilibrium.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, just think about it, I mean, the air around you, let's say, is 72 degrees, and your body temperature is 27 degrees warmer than that. And it stays that way. That's not in equilibrium with your environment.

• 27:14Paul Mecurio?

  And what accounts for us being able to exist in that way if we're out of equilibrium?

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You keep eating.

• 27:19David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, you regulate your internal environment and you put energy into that. But also, Earth...

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, by the way, if I, if I stop giving you food, you will eventually be... You will, you will die, and you'll reach the temperature of the air. And then you'll be in equilibrium. Is that what you want, Paul?

• 27:36Paul Mecurio?

  Uh, yeah, I think I do. Uh, no.

• 27:39David Grinspoon?

  And all your molecules will oxidize. I mean, the thing is, Earth itself is way, is not in equilibrium state. If you were an alien looking at our atmosphere, you'd say, "What's all that oxygen doing there? And what are these traces of methane doing there?" And, you know, there are things in our atmosphere that would not be there on a lifeless Earth. And that's the idea, that we learn to understand what life does to its atmosphere, and then we search for those signs elsewhere.

• 28:05Paul Mecurio?

  So those, those greenhouse gases are knocking that, this whole, this, our environment and the people that live in it more out of equilibrium then, right? Because sort of, we're not in a natural state of...

• 28:16David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, not just greenhouse gases, but some of them are greenhouse gases, which is very interesting, because then, life starts to interact with the climate of a planet. Methane, you know, I mentioned, is a greenhouse gas, and it is, um, at least, partly on Earth, a product of life. And then you get to this, these weird potential mechanisms where life can feed back on the planet and do things like change its own climate.

• 28:39Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's amazing. So, I mean, so what is the, is there a, is there a basic or trusted way? Not necessarily. There are a lot, I mean, do you just find life? I mean, do you leave food out overnight, like treats, and if someone comes and get it, then you know there's life? Like, what, no, is there, to address Whoopsie Doodles' question, is there something?

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about this, David, if you just rank the gases, top three, that would be the most tantalizing suggestion that there was life, what would it be?

• 29:11David Grinspoon?

  Oxygen, which is not 100%, because there are nat, you know, non-biological ways to make oxygen, but if we saw a planet with as much oxygen as Earth, we'd go, wait a minute, what's going on there? And at least you consider life. Methane is a good one. Again, not, there are other ways to make it, but, you know, we find little wisps of methane on Mars, and we go, hmm, what, what is that? And life is at least one possibility, but there are others. And I would actually...

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Farm animal, farm animals on...

• 29:37David Grinspoon?

  That's right.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars.

• 29:39David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, cow farts. Yeah.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are cows on Mars, cows.

• 29:44David Grinspoon?

  But, but, but interestingly, phosphine is potentially...

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, wait, wait, David, just to be clear. Paul, I don't know if you knew this, right? So methane is the byproduct of anaerobic metabolism, which goes on in the guts of animals, especially in ruminants, right, like cows. And methane is the gas that's the gas of choice in cities for gas stoves. So, that old camp thing that you always wanted to do, to see with a lighter, if it's flammable?

• 30:17Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's really true.

• 30:22Paul Mecurio?

  You know, I tried, I did, I tried that on the subway and got arrested for it. Apparently, you're not supposed to do that on the subway.

• 30:29David Grinspoon?

  You are doing atmospheric disequilibrium experiments on the subway.

• 30:33Paul Mecurio?

  Officer, I'm, officer, I'm a scientist. I'm just trying to explore the universe more.

• 30:40David Grinspoon?

  I'm sure that was very effective. Yeah, but so top three, oxygen, methane, and then, you know, quite possibly phosphine is in that top three. It's been, you know, there have been, before this discovery on Venus, there were papers that were published saying that phosphine is an ideal biosignature gas, an ideal sign of life because it's hard to come up with mechanisms to make it on a rocky planet that are not biological. Now, you can be sure, you know, every chemist on Earth since Monday is now trying to come up with new ways to make phosphine. And, you know, if we don't learn about life on Venus from this, we will learn new things about chemistry on Venus because somebody's going to figure out some other way to make phosphine that

• 31:25David Grinspoon?

  we didn't know. But, but right now, you know, it's in the literature as a very promising biosignature gas, that if you found it on an exoplanet, you'd say, hey, wait a minute, this could be a sign of life. So it's pretty wild to find that gas right, right here on the planet next door.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, the rover that is en route to Mars right now, Perseverance.

• 31:45David Grinspoon?

  We'll just call it Percy.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Percy, very, I like that. So just to be clear, Paul, we can look at the chemistry of the atmosphere of these exoplanets, or, you know, if an alien comes out from under a rock and rides the rover, that would be, that would count as evidence too. Wouldn't it, David?

• 32:00David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's true. I mean, you know, the question is, it's a really good question.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They start taking selfies with the rover camera.

• 32:08David Grinspoon?

  No, I mean, it's

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's life.

• 32:09David Grinspoon?

  It's a really good question. What's the best way to find life? And, you know, we, we focus a lot on these gases that we could find on exoplanets because that's all you can do on exoplanets right now. But absolutely, when we send instruments with, with cameras, it's worth looking on a place like Mars. You know, especially the first, the first everlanders on Mars, you know, Carl Sagan used to talk about, well, we should at least take pictures and see if there's a turtle walking by, you know, because who knows? Or even look for, look for turtle tracks in the sand.

• 32:36Paul Mecurio?

  Or maybe there's like a probe from another planet or Venus, and in it is their version of a Chuck Berry song, so then we know.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 32:44Paul Mecurio?

  We know that there's life there.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah, actually, we gotta take a quick break, and we'll be back with our third and final segment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the Venus Edition.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Time for a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons, Patrick Gibbs and Jonathan O'Rear. Guys, thank you for the gravity assist as you help us make our way across the cosmos. We couldn't do it without you. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Cosmic Ferry, the Venus edition. Paul Mecurio, my co-host, Paul, what's your Twitter handle?

• 33:43Paul Mecurio?

  @paulmecurio, M-E-C-U-R-I-O, one R in my last name.

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very creative. Just the guy.

• 33:51Paul Mecurio?

  I'm sorry, I can't be whoopsie doodle doodle doodle, you know?

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So, Paul, give me some more.

• 34:02Paul Mecurio?

  Matt Harefield, Patreon, how do you think life would have evolved under the conditions on Venus? Does Venus have liquid water at some point? Did Venus have liquid water at some point?

• 34:13David Grinspoon?

  Quick answer.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go back in time, David. Go back in time. What are we talking about?

• 34:17David Grinspoon?

  Quick answer, we think Venus had oceans when it was younger. We're not exactly sure how long they lasted, but they might have lasted for billions of years. And then the idea is probably if there was an evolution of life, it started and advanced on the surface. And then when that surface broke bad, then maybe it ended up in the atmosphere.

• 34:35Paul Mecurio?

  I mean, if there was life and it did evolve, with the harsh conditions, it had to be complaining like the whole time, like, ah, it's so hot, I can't go out. Ah, where's my hat?

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With their runaway greenhouse effect, they just burned too many fossil fuels. That's what they, that was their problem.

• 34:50Paul Mecurio?

  Well, that, you know, actually, that's.

• 34:51David Grinspoon?

  Those irresponsible Venusians, man.

• 34:54Paul Mecurio?

  Well, Jay.

• 34:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting, David, I didn't thought of that. If there was life on the surface and that became inhospitable and they had some way to fly, then they could just continue to ascend away from the heat. And so, Paul, we know there's whole floating cities in this layer of the atmosphere where they found the phosphine.

• 35:12David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean, we're starting with the hypothesis of microbes, but we don't actually have observations that would rule out something much more complex. And so, you know.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the movie Avatar, they had floating islands because of unobtanium.

• 35:23Paul Mecurio?

  The Jetsons? What about the Jetsons?

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forgot the Jetsons.

• 35:30Paul Mecurio?

  Alright, so...

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I was just thinking about the Jetsons recently. This is a stupid, completely irrelevant comment, but, you know, the Flintstones pioneered chewable vitamins, right, for kids, and they still sold for sale. And I thought to myself, they're the Stone Age, they wouldn't have known anything about vitamins, but the Jetsons would have. So there really should have been Jetsons chewable vitamins, that's what I'm thinking.

• 35:53David Grinspoon?

  That's very profound, Neil.

• 35:58Paul Mecurio?

  That felt a little passive-aggressive.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, Paul, give me some more, what do you got?

• 36:07Paul Mecurio?

  We will go to Ashley Steadley on Facebook. "Could these be the same extremophiles that were on early Earth? If these are microbes or bacteria, what might happen if we brought some to Earth?"

• 36:22David Grinspoon?

  Two good questions.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Dave, if we go to Venus with a sample return, and oh my gosh, there are bugs and there are microbes, that doesn't sound very wise.

• 36:32David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean, we always consider what we call planetary protection when we talk about sample returns, especially from a possibly inhabited environment, you know, how do you be really sure you're not bringing something back that could be dangerous? And so, you know, there are protocols where you just, you keep it in a contained environment at first. If you're talking about life in the clouds of Venus, I think, you know, of course you always want to be cautious, but that seems like less of a consideration, because it's such an extreme environment, it doesn't seem like it would very easily overlap environments on Earth that are inhabited. So, it's probably the case that if some, if there were Venusian bugs in an extreme, extreme, extreme acid environment, and they sort of got out of your laboratory, that they would not do well,

• 37:17David Grinspoon?

  and not be able to hurt any, multiply and hurt anything on Earth. That's my first reaction, but I also think, you know, you just, you're, we're inherently cautious about these things. As far as, as far as the first part of the question, could these be similar to life on early Earth? It's possible, but, you know, we don't know that much about the environment of early Earth, and it's true... True that some of the theories of origin of life involve hot springs on early Earth, but probably not as extremely acidic. So I want to say they're not, it's not my picture of the first life on Earth. But on the other hand, we're still very ignorant about what that early life was was like. And so it's not, it's not impossible.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it fair to say that if you brought a Venus bug here, it would say, oh, it's not acid enough. I'm dying. I'm melting. I need more acid. Is that, would it, would it pull a wicked witch of the West on us?

• 38:11David Grinspoon?

  It would, but it would say it in Venusian, so.

• 38:16Paul Mecurio?

  Well, you know, I don't know about the, I mean, like, if it's anything, I, I lived in DC. When I moved back home, I brought cockroaches with me and man, all hell broke loose. So like, maybe they have cockroaches. They seem to live everywhere.

• 38:28David Grinspoon?

  That's a good example of why we do planetary protection.

• 38:32Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, and, and, well, this also, by the way, could be a movie. The three of us should pitch like Venus, you know, microbes come to Earth. And it's a movie and Paul Giamatti is like the misunderstood clever, brilliant scientist who's the only one that sees the problem like that. I think that's a movie we should pitch, but.

• 38:49David Grinspoon?

  So Paul Giamatti is playing me?

• 38:53Paul Mecurio?

  Sorry about that.

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to, I just want to pursue the wicked witch of the West scenario again. I mean, think about it, presumably they only poured a bucket of water on her. And water is, is acidically neutral, correct? So if she.

• 39:08David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, that's a good point. Why did water make her melt?

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And I'm saying, because she, she must not be acidically neutral. She's either very acidic or very basic in either direction. She's far away from what water would do.

• 39:21David Grinspoon?

  She was from Venus.

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She was from Venus.

• 39:23David Grinspoon?

  She was actually the wicked witch of Venus.

• 39:28Paul Mecurio?

  I thought there was something extremophile about her. I really did.

• 39:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and it, and it's evidence that aliens are green, just to put that one to.

• 39:35David Grinspoon?

  So maybe there's flying monkeys there too.

• 39:38Paul Mecurio?

  Right. Boy, those scared the heck out of me when I was a kid.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody.

• 39:42Paul Mecurio?

  Didn't they? I mean, I'm like, why? This isn't, you can't list this as a comedy. Like, what is this? This is like, it was the worst. It's like you got a green woman, no fashion sense. The witch had no fashion sense. It was either all black or way over the top with jewels, slippers. Don't get me started. All right. We'll go to another one.

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, I didn't know you still had issues.

• 40:03Paul Mecurio?

  I do. No one, I need a hug. I need a Venusian hug. All right, we're gonna go to another one?

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 40:10Paul Mecurio?

  All right, here we go.

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's get to them quick.

• 40:11Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, here we go.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See as many as we can do. Go.

• 40:14Paul Mecurio?

  This is Instagram, Sam Z. Hi, Dr. Tyson and Dr. David. So if Venus is a terrestrial planet, then why is the atmosphere's pressure so high? Also, you mentioned in a previous video that Saturn protects us from asteroids and stuff. What, if anything, does Venus do for us?

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, personally, I wouldn't have said Saturn. I would have said Jupiter. Jupiter has all the good gravity out there to bat wayward comets and asteroids out of harm's way. But, David.

• 40:47David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David, why is our twin sister planet so different from us?

• 40:51David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, so I mean, you said if Venus is a terrestrial planet. Well, terrestrial planet really just means rocky planet. You know, like Venus, Earth, Mars, Mercury. And they can have all different kinds of atmospheres. We've learned that just in our solar system. And we imagine if you included the terrestrial planets out there in the galaxy, it'd be even more diverse. But the reason why Venus's atmosphere is so thick, we think, has to do, actually, with the very high temperature and a kind of feedback where, once it gets that hot, it's hard to remove gases. The reason why Earth doesn't have that much carbon dioxide in its atmosphere is because there's a cycle, a carbon cycle, where carbon dioxide, over time, gets removed from the atmosphere

• 41:35David Grinspoon?

  and turned into carbonate rocks. That cycle depends on water and rainfall, where the water gets dissolved in rainfall and runs over the rocks and reacts and ends up... Some of that carbon ends up as ions in the ocean and then gets precipitated on the surface and then ends up in the interior. There's this whole complex cycle on Earth where carbon is removed from the atmosphere. But if you take an Earth and you dry it out, so there's no surface water and no rainfall, then the carbon dioxide's still coming out of the volcanoes and over millions of years, it's gonna build up. But you've sort of broken the part of the cycle where the water helps you remove the carbon from the atmosphere. So we think that's what's happened on Venus, is that, once it lost its surface water, it still kept accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

• 42:20David Grinspoon?

  But now, there's sort of no way to pull it out because you don't have those chemical reactions mediated by water. So it's sort of stuck with all this atmosphere and no place to put it.

• 42:29Paul Mecurio?

  Is there any understanding why the water on Venus disappeared? Have we been able to figure that out at all?

• 42:36David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's, you know, so there's this idea of the runaway greenhouse. Where, because water itself is a greenhouse gas. It absorbs infrared radiation. So you add water vapor to a planet and it's gonna heat up. So then you can have this feedback where if there's a certain amount of sunlight hitting a planet like Venus that has, that used to have oceans presumably, then that evaporates some of the ocean, which increases the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, which heats up the planet more, which then evaporates more of the ocean. So it can kind of run away. So that may be why Venus lost its oceans, although we're still sort of really trying to figure out that history and it's, of course, the details get complicated and are debated.

• 43:20Paul Mecurio?

  Well, basically you're saying the aliens on Venus had a terrible energy policy and when it hit 500 degrees, they should have done something about it, but they totally ignored it. That's what you're saying.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They totally, yeah.

• 43:29David Grinspoon?

  Do not let this happen to your planet.

• 43:33Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, have astrobiologists, this is David Hemseth, HemSaff at Patreon, have astrobiologists previously tried mapping Earth's extremophiles to Venus's environments?

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, let's make that a bigger question. David, all of Earth's extremophiles, can we find a place for every one of them in, in the local solar system or even across the galaxy?

• 43:58David Grinspoon?

  Wow, that's, that is a much bigger question. That would be a fun exercise, actually.

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 44:05David Grinspoon?

  To take the whole map of all the extremophiles and then take either real or imagined planets and say, this is the planet where these guys would be at home and here's what its qualities are. I don't know of anybody that's done that, Neil, so we should, we should talk. That'd be a fun thing to do. As far as mapping specific extremophiles to Venus, people have tried and there are organisms that sort of get us closer there. I mentioned acidophile, acid-loving organisms. We, as far as we understand the clouds of Venus and their conditions, and again, this is a region that we need to explore more carefully, there is no known Earth organism that you could just plunk there. And it would be be happy and say, I love it here and just multiply and and keep living. But there are organisms that sort of get us partway there that are resistant to ultraviolet

• 44:50David Grinspoon?

  light and that are that can exist in in strong acid. And you know, there's a big effort now also to figure out what's living in Earth's clouds. Because there are organisms in Earth's clouds, but we still don't understand their sort of entire life cycles. So there's an area of investigation where we do look at extremophiles and try to map them into Venus's conditions, but nobody sort of nailed it and said, ah, here's this bug that would love it there.

• 45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw that episode of Watchmen where a squid come from the sky. This is it rains squid in one of the episodes, just so you know.

• 45:24David Grinspoon?

  Aren't there actual, there's actual historical recountings of like frogs raining from the skies and and you know, weird episodes that are.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe there's something, maybe there's a whole biota in a layer of the atmosphere. And we're discounting these legends and these mythological accounts. But in fact, it's another place. It's like Oz. It's beyond the reality of what we accept.

• 45:47David Grinspoon?

  Next week on the History Channel.

• 45:51Paul Mecurio?

  Squid, Squid NATO.

• 45:55Paul Mecurio?

  And and you and Neil are fighting squids falling from the sky inexplicably and you've got guns and lasers. We got two, we got two movies we gotta pitch now. There's a lot that, uh, should we do one more?

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 46:09Paul Mecurio?

  Isan, Isan Basie on Instagram. There have been a few Venus missions in the past, although none of them survive for very long. Is there a slight possibility, possibility that they might have introduced this life form into the atmosphere of Venus?

• 46:24David Grinspoon?

  Ooh, love it. Quick answer, I'm going to say no, because, um, you know, when something falls into the atmosphere of Venus, it's it's surrounded by a ball of fire before anything. And then there's this this basic fact that the conditions are just so different that it's hard to imagine something leaping off a spacecraft and surviving.

• 46:46Paul Mecurio?

  Come on, not like a discarded Taco Bell cup, nothing? There's gotta be something. Plastic supermarket shopping bags? Come on.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, David, viruses get around, you know? I mean, viruses invented people so that people would invent airplanes so that viruses can go transcontinental and infect more people.

• 47:05David Grinspoon?

  That's true, but viruses, so we could have take-

• 47:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Darwinian evolution.

• 47:09David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, so we could have dumped some viruses accidentally on Venus, but viruses don't live without other cells to invade, so I still don't think the viruses would be thriving there.

• 47:19Paul Mecurio?

  And doesn't your answer presuppose it's sort of the lack of knowledge we have, which is infinite, right? So in other words, we don't know if there is some form of life that could drop into that atmosphere and survive because we don't really understand it yet.

• 47:35David Grinspoon?

  I mean, you asked for the short version of the answer. The longer version is like, well, caveat, caveat, caveat, who knows, maybe this, maybe that, but-

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul stopped leading him on.

• 47:43Paul Mecurio?

  All right, sorry, okay, sorry.

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop baiting him.

• 47:46Paul Mecurio?

  I was trying to stretch this answer out. All right.

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go one-

• 47:50Paul Mecurio?

  One more?

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A quick one, a quick one.

• 47:52Paul Mecurio?

  All right, here we go.

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And David, I want a one-word answer to this one, whatever it is, I don't care.

• 47:57Paul Mecurio?

  Tomorrow, Life Instagram, can life in Venus exist in the animal ballpark or just as microbes slash bacteria?

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 48:05David Grinspoon?

  Maybe.

• 48:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, we gotta stop it at the maybe. Paul, always good to have you on the show.

• 48:16Paul Mecurio?

  It's always a lot of fun, always learning something. Thank you for having me.

• 48:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And David, don't be such a stranger, dude, it's been too long since we've had you on the show.

• 48:23David Grinspoon?

  It's true, especially when this pandemic is over, we gotta go out for a glass of wine.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and we'll get you to play some more Alien Blues.

• 48:32David Grinspoon?

  I'm ready.

• 48:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For us.

• 48:34David Grinspoon?

  Acid-loving Venusian Blues.

• 48:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Acid-loving Venetian Blues. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries, Venus Edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep working on it.