David Kipping

biosignature discovered or something like that on TRAPPIST-1 or some other planet.

And then there will be years of back and forth in the literature.

And that might seem frustrating, but that's how science works.

That's the mechanism of science at play, of people scrutinizing the results to intense skepticism and

It's like a crucible.

You burn away all irrelevances until whatever is left is the truth.

And so you're left with this product, which is that, okay, we either believe or don't believe that bite signatures are there.

So there's inevitably going to be a lot of controversy and debate and argument about it.

We just have to anticipate that.

And so I think...

You have to basically have a thick skin to some degree academically to dive into that world.

And you're seeing that with phosphine.

It's been uncomfortable to watch from the outside the kind of dialogue that some of the scientists have been having with each other about that because... They get a little aggressive.

Yeah, and you can understand why because...

Jealousy?

I don't know.

I'm sure there's some envy and jealousy involved on the behalf of those who are not part of the original discovery.

But there's also, in any case, just leave the particular people involved in Venus alone, in any case of making a claim of that magnitude, especially life, because life is pretty much...

one of the biggest discoveries of all time that you can imagine scientifically.

You can see, and I'm so conscious of this in myself when I get close to, as I said, even the much smaller goal of setting an exomoon, the ego creep in.