Dr. Sara Seager

Well, another astronomer across the globe, Professor Jane Greaves, was also working on phosphine.

Very unusual for two astronomers to be thinking about this molecule.

And she was purposely trying to find signs of life on Venus by looking for this molecule, which has a signature at radio wavelengths where she's an expert.

Someone connected our two teams.

And together with a large team led by Professor Jane Greaves, you may remember this, you may have talked about it on your show, but it was a report about five years ago of the detection of phosphine gas in the Venus atmosphere, which couldn't be produced by lightning, volcanoes, meteorites, or any way with known chemistry, thus leaving the possibility for life in the clouds.

Do you remember that?

Lots of pushback.

And this ended up very controversial for a number of good reasons.

You know, the data is all public.

Number one reason is the signal real.

People analyze the data.

Many groups did not recover the signal, although some groups did recover it.

Second reason is if the signal is real, is it attributed to the right gas, phosphine, or could it be another gas?

Let's assume for a moment those are true, that the signal is real and that it is phosphine gas.

Then the question where all the money is, question number three is, is this gas made by life or is it made by some other chemical process?

And I'll tell you what, those three questions, people strongly disagree on all three of those points.

Let's now switch back to exoplanets.

If we're going to fight over this about Venus, how much harder is it going to be for exoplanets?

Exoplanets are very far away.

They're not even a point of light, really.