YouSaid · the spoken record

Clara Sousa-Silva

lines on the record: 118
first: 2021-06-28
most recent: 2021-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, it's not as good as the TV signals we've been sending out. Those are slightly more robust than oxygen. Oxygen on its own has false positives for life. So there's still ways of making it. But it's a pretty robust sign of life in the context of our atmosphere with the radiation that the sun produces, our position in relation to the sun, the other components of our atmosphere, the volcanic activity we have, all of that together makes the 20% of oxygen extremely robust sign of life. But outside that context, you could still produce oxygen without life.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's many, so there's water. We know that's important for life as we know it. There's molecular oxygen on Earth. That's probably the most robust sign of life, particularly combined with small amounts of methane. And it's true that the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is a product of life. And so if I was an alien astronomer and I saw Earth's atmosphere I would get a Nobel, I think, on, you know.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can prank us to some extent, but this work of interpreting an alien atmosphere means you're reading the atmosphere as a message. It is very hard to hide signs of life in an atmosphere because Can try to prank us, but you're still going to fart and breathe and somehow metabolize the environment around you. And call that whatever you call that, and release molecules. And so that's really hard to hide. You know, you can go very quiet. You can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further, but we can still see all your other metabolites.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. How cool would that be if we could scan an alien planet and go, oh, this is what the clouds are made of? This is what's in the surface. These are the molecules that are mixing. Here are probably oceans because you can see these types of molecules above it. Are the Hadley cells? Here are how the biosphere works. We could map this whole thing.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're unique for each molecule. So these, the networks that you mentioned. That's actually not too difficult a layer of quantum physics by then all the energies are mapped. So we've had high school children work on those networks. And the trick is to not tell them they're doing quantum physics until like three months in when it's too late for them to back out. And then you're like, you're a quantum physicist now, and it's really nice.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some molecules have what we call forbidden transitions, which aren't really forbidden because it's quantum. There are no rules. No, there are rules. It's just the rules are...”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get islands sometimes. You get. Molecule can only jump from one set of states to another, and it's trapped now in this network. It can never go to another network that could have been available to other siblings.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our rules for each molecule on which energy levels they can jump from and to and how likely it is to make that jump. And so if you plot all the routes it can take, you get this energy network, which is like a ball.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I'm very thankful for all the experimentalists in my life. But I'll do the theory. They do the experiment. And then we talk to one another and make sure it matches, you know.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many of them give you cancer. It's just so cruel. Some people love this work, but I've never enjoyed experimental work. It's so ungrateful. It's so lonely”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sanity But I only worked there for a few months. It was really terrifying. There's just so many ways to die. You know, usually you only have a handful of ways to die every day, you know. But if you work in a lab, there's so many more. Orders of magnitude more. And I was very bad at it. I'm not a good hands-on scientist. I want to laptop connect it to a remote supercomputer or a laptop connected to a telescope. I don't need to be there to believe it. And I am not good in the lab.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's horrific. It's so scary. And I love my job. I'm willing to clearly sacrifice a lot for it. Know job stability, money.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fall from birth to death. Yes, I worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory when I was. Much younger in Slovenia, and there I worked in the lab actually collecting spectrum and predicting spectrum.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, I need to be able to test the outcomes with experimental data, which means convincing someone in a lab to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases in chambers and measuring them at outrageous temperatures. So it's a work in progress.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Currently, you've laid out exactly the problem, the training set is awful. And because there's so, a lot of the data that I'm basing it on is literally many decades old. The people who worked on it and data that I get, often they're dead. And the files that I've used, some of them were hand-drawn by someone tired in the 70s. So, I could, of course, Have a program training on these, but I would just be perpetuating these mistakes without hope of actually verifying them. So, my next step is to improve this training set by hand and then try to see if I can apply machine learning on the full code and the full 16,000 molecules and improve them all.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the next step, which is what I'm working on, is telling you something more useful than it could be one of those 816 molecules. That's still true. I wouldn't say it's useful. So I can tell you, but only 12% of them also have a feature in this region, so go look there. There's nothing there, it can't be those, and so on. It can also tell you things like, you will need this much accuracy to distinguish between those 816. So that's what I'm working on. It's a lot of work”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close right now, it is so complete, so it has all of these molecules that it can tell you, say you look at an alien atmosphere and there's a feature there. It can tell you, oh, that feature, that's familiar. It could be one of these 816 molecules. Best of luck.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some people go, Oh, yeah, that's a really broad feature every time that combination of atoms and bonds. So I've collected them all and I've created this giant dictionary of all these kind of puzzled pieces, these LEGO parts of molecules. And I've written a code that then puts them all together in some kind of like Frankenstein's monster of molecules. So you ask me for any molecule and I go, well, it has these bonds and this atom dangling off this atom and this cluster here. And I tell you what it should look like. Kind of works.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has other features that distinguish them from one another, but they have that feature in common. We call these functional groups. And so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass spectrometry, we got nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. So people don't really need to do that anymore. But these ancient textbooks still exist. And I've collected them all as many as I could. And there are hundreds of these descriptions where people have said, oh, whenever you have an iodine atom connected to this one, there's always a feature here. And it's usually quite sharp and it's quite strong.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago when organic chemists wanted to know what a compound might be. They will look at a spectrum and see a feature and they would go, I've seen that feature before. That's usually what happens when you have a carbon triple bonded to another carbon. And they were mostly right. Almost every molecule that has a carbon triple bonded to another one looks like that.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out Pretty crappy No one has any idea what these molecules look like. Anything is better than nothing. And so I thought, how long will it take me to create better than nothing spectra for all of these molecules? And so I created rascal, rapid, approximate spectral calculations for all. And what I do is, I use organic chemistry and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat them both. I just try to figure out what is the fastest way I could run this. And I simulate rough spectra for all of those 16,000. So I've managed to get it to work. It's really shocking how well it works, considering how bad it is.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't spend the next 62,000 years doing this work. And I don't want to, even if somehow I was able, that's not, that wouldn't feel good. So one of the things that I try to do now is move away from how I did phosphine. So I did phosphine really the best that I could, the best that could be done with the computer power that we have, you know, trying to get each one of those 16.8 billion transitions mapped accurately, calculated. And then I thought, what if I do a worse job? What if I just do a much worse job? Can I just make it much faster? And then it's still worth it. How bad can I get before it's worthless? And then could I do this for all the other molecules? So I created exactly this terrible, terrible.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've already started out of those 16,000, we understand water quite well, methane quite well, ammonia quite well, carbon dioxide. Could keep going. And then we understand molecules like acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, more or less. And that takes us to about 4% of those 16,000. We understand about 4% of them, more or less. Phosphine is one of them. The other 96%, we just really have barely any idea at all of where in the spectrum of light they would leave a mark”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's absolutely correct. I could have not said it better myself. Did you take that from my website? Yeah, I think I stole it.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I calculated if I did the work I did for phosphine again for all the molecules for which we don't have spectra, for which we don't have a fingerprint, it would take me 62,000 years, a little over.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on kind of the shape of the matrix. So they're not random matrixes. So some are more diagonal than others. And so some need more treatment than others. Most of the work ends up going in describing the system, this quantum system in different ways until you have a matrix that is close to being diagonal and then it's much easier to clean it up.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And transitions can occur between pairs of these states. And there's a certain likelihood that they'll happen. This is the quantum world. Nothing is deterministic. There's just a likelihood that we'll jump from one state to another. And these jumps, they're transitions, and there's 16.8 billion of them. When energy is absorbed, that corresponds to this transition. We see it in the spectrum. This is more quantum chemistry than you had asked for, I'm sorry.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I study the quantum behavior of molecules, hence the quantum and the chemist. Specifically, so I can detect them in space and see Astro. So, what I do is I figure out the probability of a molecule being in a particular state. There's no deterministic nature to the work I do. So it's every transition is just a likelihood. But if you get a population of that molecule, it will always happen. And so this is all of the quantum level. It's Schr ⁇ dinger equation on, I think, 27 dimensions. I don't remember it by heart. And what this means is I'm solving these giant quantum matrices. And that's why you need a lot of computer power, giant computers to diagnose these enormous matrices, each of whom describes a single vibrational behavior of a molecule. Think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so I'm a quantum astrochemist. Hi, I'm Clara. I'm a quantum astrochemist. How we should have started this conversation?”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're very much at that edge, but there'll be many other telescopes in the coming decades that will be able to tell us quite a lot about the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's going to be above the atmosphere, and we will be doing lots of different astrophysics. And so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets. But there's an entire astronomy field fighting for time before the cryogenic lifetime of the instrument. And so when I was looking for the possibility of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets, I used JWST as a way of checking with this instrument that we will launch later this year, could we detect phosphine on an oxygen-poor planet? And there I put very much a hard stop where some of my simulations said, yes, you can totally do it, but it will take a little under the cryogenic lifetime of this machine. So then I had to go, well, that's not going to, no one's going to dedicate all of JWST to look for my molecule that no one cared about.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. JWST launching later this year will be able to get a very rough sense of the main atmospheric constituents of planets that could potentially be habitable. And that's this year.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few, but outside the solar system, all are kind of promising candidates. We know so little about them. For most of them, we barely know their density. Most of them, we don't even know if they have an atmosphere, never mind what that atmosphere might contain. So we're still very much at the stage where we have detected promising planets, but they're promising in that they're about the right size, about the right density. Could have an atmosphere and they're about the right distance from their whole star. But that's really all we know. Near future telescopes will tell us much more. But for now, we're just guessing.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data, figuring out how the clouds move, what's in them, how often is there lightning and volcanic activity? What is the topography? Is it changing? Is there a biosphere actively doing things we should be monitoring this from afar? And so I'm for over the atmosphere, hopefully around Venus. That would be my choice.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and the place is nasty, you know, it's not going to be easy to build something that can do the task reliably and can be trusted. The measurements can be trusted and then pass that message on. So actually I'm for an orbiter. I think we should have orbiters around every solar system body whose job is just to learn about these places. I'm disappointed we haven't already got an orbiter around every single one of them. It can be a small satellite”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to scoop specifically because if it is life, I want to know everything I can, remotely, before I interfere. So that's my. I've got ethical reasons against the scoop more than engineering reasons against the scoop. But I have some engineering reasons against the scoop. Scoop is not a technical term, but I feel like now it's too late.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are pretty good, but the Earth's atmosphere is a pain. I mean, I'm very thankful for it, but it does interrupt a lot of measurements and a lot of regions where phosphine would be active. They are not available. The Earth is not transparent in those wavelengths. So being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference. Then proximity matters a lot less, but just escaping the Earth's atmosphere would be wonderful. But then it's really hard to stay very stable. There is phosphine on Venus, there's very little of it in the clouds. And so the signal is very weak and the telescopes we can use on Earth are much bigger and much more stable. So it's a bit of a trade-off.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can go back to Venus actually and show that. So, with this, I mentioned there were two molecules that could be responsible for that signal, the resolution that we have. It was phosphine and SO2 sulfur dioxide. And that resolution could really be one of the other. But in that same bandwidth, so in the kind of the same observations, there was another region where phosphine does not absorb. We know that. But SO2 does. So we just went and checked and there was no signal. So we thought, oh, then it must be phosphine. And then we submit to the paper. Rest is history”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot. We don't have the instruments to break these, break any light into this many tiny segments. And so with the instruments we do have, there's huge amounts of overlap. Methane, as an example, a lot of the ways it's detectable is because the carbon and the hydrogen, they vibrate with one another, they move, they interact, but every other hydrocarbon acetylene, isoprene, has carbon and hydrogens also vibrating and rotating. And so it's actually very hard to tell them apart at low resolutions. And our instruments can't really cope with distinguishing between molecules particularly well. In an ideal world, if we had infinite resolution, then yes, every molecule spectral features will be unique.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because methane took it. And so with phosphine, it's the same thing. It has specific colors, 16.8 billion colors, that it absorbs it and nothing else does. And so if you can find them and notice them missing from the light of a star that went through a planet's atmosphere, then you'll know that atmosphere contains them molecule. How cool is that?”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That light goes through a gas. We may not see that gas. We certainly cannot see the molecules within that gas. But those molecules will steal, absorb some of that light, some, but not all. Each molecule absorbs only very specific colors of that rainbow. And so if you know, for example, that shade of green can only be absorbed by methane, then you can watch as a planet passes in front of a star, the planet's too far away, you can't see it. And it has an atmosphere. That atmosphere is far too small, you definitely can't see it. But the sunlight will go through that atmosphere, and if that atmosphere is methane, then on the other side, that shade of blue, I can't remember if I said blue or green, but that color will be missing.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the path can go this way. You've got light, kind of pure light. You can crack that light open with a prism or a spectroscope or water and make a rainbow. And if that light was truly pure, you could consider that rainbow to just cover continuously all of these colors.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much so I finished my PhD in 2015. Found the first So, exoplanets were known. It was known that some had atmospheres, and from there, it's not a big jump to think. Well, if some have atmospheres, some of those might be habitable and some of those may be inhabited.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was all on phosphine, 100% on phosphine. With a little bit of ammonia, I have a chapter that I did where I talked about phosphine and ammonia. But no, falsfin is very much my thes”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overwhelmingly, most planets are oxygen poor. And so finding the sign of life that would be welcomed by everything that would live without oxygen on Earth seemed so cool.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I read every paper that's ever been published about phosphine. It was quite easy because there aren't that many. And that's when I started learning about where we had already found it in the universe and what it meant. I started finding out quite how little we know about it and why. And it was only when I joined MIT and I started talking to biochemists that it became clear that phosphine wasn't just weird and special and understudied and disgusting, it was all these things for oxygen loving life. And it was the anaerobic world that would welcome phosphine. And that's when the idea of looking for it on other planets became crystallized because oxygen is very powerful and very important on Earth. But that's not necessarily going to be the case on other exoplanets. Most planets are oxygen poor.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't love at first sight. It was somewhere between. Long relationship and Stockholm syndrome. When I first started my PhD, I knew I wanted to learn about molecular spectrum, how to simulate it. I thought it was really outrageous that we as a species couldn't detect molecules remotely. We didn't have this perfect catalog ready of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule we may want to find in the universe. And something as basic as phosphine, the fact that we didn't really know how it interacted with light, and so we couldn't detect it properly in the galaxy. Just I was so indignant. And so initially I just started working on phosphine because people hadn't before. And I thought we should know what phosphine looks like. That was it.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult, if I'm not mistaken, even the scent of truffles obviously a billion dollar industry, huge deal. Until quite recently, it wasn't known exactly how those scents, those molecules that create this incredible smell were produced. And this is a billion dollar industry. As you can imagine, there is no such pressure. There's no phosphine lobby or anything. Would push for this research, but I hope someone picks it up and does it. And it isn't crazy because we know that phosphine is really hard to make. We know it's really hard for hit tap and accidentally, even lightning and volcanoes that can produce small amounts of phosphine. It's extremely difficult for even these extreme processes to make it. So it's not really surprising that only life can do it because life is willing to make things at a cost.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know yet. The enzymatic pathways of phosphine production by life are not yet known. This is not actually as surprising as it might sound. I think something like 80% of all the natural products that we know of, so we know biology makes them, we don't know how. It is much easier to know life produces something because you can put bacteria in a petri dish and then watch and then that gas is produced. You go, oh, life made it. That actually happened with phosphine. That's much easier to do, of course, than figuring out what is the exact metabolic pathway within that life form that created this molecule. So we don't know yet. Phosphine is really understudied. No one had really heard of it until nowish.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very vivid. And so I didn't call it that. Someone else did. And so it's just this horrific molecule, but it is produced by life. We don't know why. And when it is produced by life, it's done with enormous sacrifice. And the universe does not sacrifice life sacrifices. And so it's this strange, contradictory molecule that we should all be avoiding. And yet seems to be an almost unambiguous sign of life on rocky planets.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source