YouSaid · the spoken record

Clara Sousa-Silva

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118
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2021-06-28
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2021-06-28
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Made by life, and we don't even know why life clearly finds a use for it. It's not the only molecule that life is willing to sacrifice energy to make, but we don't know how or why life is even making it. So absolutely mysterious, absolutely deadly, smells horrifically when it's made, it produces other kind of diphosphines and it's been reported as smelling like garlicky fishy death once someone referred to it as smelling like the let me see if I remember the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.”

    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

  2. “Still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it. It's a really difficult module to make, thermodynamically speaking. It's really difficult to make that phosphorus want to be together with that hydrogen. So it's horrible. Everyone avoids it. When they're not avoiding it, it's extremely difficult to make. You would have to put energy in, sacrifice energy to make it. And if you did go through all that trouble and made it, it gets reacted with the radicals in the atmosphere and gets destroyed. So we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet we do.”

    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

  3. “And everything you know and love uses oxygen metabolism. And it interacts fatally. So it kills in several very imaginative and very macabre ways. So it was used as a Chemical warfare agent in the First World War and most Really bad. Most life avoids it Even life that might not avoid it, so life that doesn't use oxygen metabolism, anaerobic 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

  4. “That is right here. I'm less sure now than my claims are being tested. So phosphine. Phosphine is a fascinating molecule. So it's shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top and then three hydrogens. It's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways. the most popular elements in the universe, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur. When you add hydrogen to them, it makes quite simple, quite famous molecules. You know, you do it to oxygen, you get water. You do it to carbon, you get methane, you do it to nitrogen, you get ammonia. These are all molecules people have heard of. You do it to phosphorus. You get phosphine. People haven't heard of phosphine because it's not really popular on Earth. We really shouldn't find it anywhere on Earth because it is extremely toxic to life. It interacts with oxygen metabolism.”

    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

  5. “I did. Yes. And no one cared. In that paper, I said something like if we find phosphine on any terrestrial planet, it can only mean life. And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds about right. Let's go. And then Venus shows up and I was like, are you sure? I'm like, I was sure before I was sure now”

    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

  6. “Dr. Phosphine, yes. You will be surprised here it wasn't taken already. I could just grabbed it. Didn't have to buy it off anyone.”

    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

  7. “Heartbreaking would it be if we found life on another planet and then we're like, oh, we brought it with us, it was my sandwich.”

    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

  8. “Doesn't mean it would handle us, you know, it could be like war of the worlds. Come just because you're resilient in your own planet doesn't mean you can survive another. Even our extremeophiles, which are very impressive, we should all be very proud of our extremophiles. They wouldn't really make it in the Venusian clouds. So I wouldn't expect, because you're tough, even Chuck Norris tough, that you would survive on an alien planet.”

    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

  9. “And I often think of alien astronomers watching us and how disappointed they would be if we messed this up. So I really want to be very careful with anything that could be life. Certainly I wouldn't be scared. Humans are plenty capable of killing one another. We don't need extraterrestrial help. Destroy ourselves.”

    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

  10. “I feel those things. I just don't know if those are the right things to feel. I don't certainly don't feel scared. I think it's rather silly to feel scared. Definitely don't touch them. You know, sometimes in. Movies don't go near it, don't interfere. I think. Of the things with Venus is because of phosphine, now there is a chance that Venus is inhabited. And in that case, We shouldn't go there. We should be very careful with messing with them, bringing our own stuff there that contaminates it. And Venus has suffered enough if there's life there, it's probably the remains of a living planet, the very last survivors of What once was potentially a thriving world. And so I don't want our first interaction with alien life to be massacred. So I definitely wouldn't want to go near out of a, let's say, galactic responsibility. Galactic ethics.”

    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

  11. “And we actually have more digits than that, but I don't remember by heart. And Alma in particular is a very, very good telescope, array of telescopes. And it can focus on exactly that frequency. And in that frequency, there are only two known molecules that absorb at all. So that's how we do it. We look at that exact spot where we know phosphine absorbs. the other molecules, SO2.”

    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

  12. “So, the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave, and a lot of that is noise, and it's a baseline. And so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave, you can cancel that shape out and you should be left with a straight line and if there's something there, an absorption, so a signal. So that's what we did. We tried to find out what was this baseline shape, cleaned it out, and got the signal. That's part of the problem. If you do this wrong, you can create a signal. That signal is at 8.904 wave numbers.”

    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

  13. “Really hard to spot. They're all in terrible places in the electromagnetic spectrum. And the instruments we use to find this one can't really find any other one. There's another one of the 16.8 billion we could find, but it would take many, many days of continuous observations, and that's not really in the cards right now.”

    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

  14. “Phosphine, like every other molecule, has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint, meaning it rotates and it vibrates in special ways. I calculated how many of those ways it can rotate and vibrate. It's 16.8 billion ways. What this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light, and that light has gone through phosphine gas on the other end, there should be sixteen point eight billion tiny marks left indentations left in that spectrum. We found one of those on Venus, one of those 16.8 billion. So now the game is, can we find any of the other ones?”

    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

  15. “I've been working on phosphine for over a decade. Way before it was cool Before anyone could spell it or heard of it. And at the time, people either didn't know what phosphine was or only knew it for being just possibly the most horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth. And so no one was a fan. And I had been considering looking for it because I did think it was an unusual and disgusting but very promising sign of life. I've been looking for it everywhere. I really didn't think to look in the solar system. Thought it was all pretty rough around here for life. And so I wasn't even considering the solar system at all, never my next door of Venus. It was only the lead author of the study, Jane Greeves, who thought to look in the clouds of Venus and then reached out to me to say,”

    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

  16. “Signal with a bath water, whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be. And so I think the healthy discourse that you described is exactly this. There are ways of processing the data, completely legitimate ways, checked by multiple people and experts where the signal shows up. And then phosphine is in the atmosphere of Venus. And some where it doesn't. And then we disagree what that signal means. If it's real, and it is an ambiguously phosphine, it is very exciting because we don't know how to explain it without life. But going from there to Venusians is still a huge jump.”

    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

  17. “The most morphosophical end of how this happened, I think it is a distinction, and myself and other co-authors were talking about this, it's a distinction between hypotheses generation and hypothesis testing. Now hypothesis testing is something that I think is the backbone of the scientific method, but it has a problem, which is if you're looking through very noisy data and you want to test the hypotheses, you may by mistake create a spurious signal. The safest, more conservative approach is hypothesis generation. You see some data and you go, what's in there? With no bias. Now this is much safer, much more conservative, and when there's a lot of data, that's great. When there isn't, you can clean the noise and take out the signal with 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

  18. “Let's try and break it down. The short answer is we don't know. I think you and the rest of the public are now witnessing a pretty exciting discovery, but as it evolves, as it unfolds, we did not wait until we had. Years of data from 10 different instruments across several layers of the atmosphere. We waited until we had two telescopes with independent data months apart. Still, the data is weak. It's noisy. It's delicate. It's very much at the edge of instrument sensibility, sensitivity. And so we still don't even know if it is phosphine. We don't even really know if the signal is real. People still disagree about that. And I think 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