Possible Sign of Life on Venus Stirs Up Heated Debate - National Geographic

The telltale signature of extraterrestrial life may have been found--but don't look outward towards Mars, the Jovian moons, or addresses much further afield. Nope, the signs may be in the clouds of Venus, the hottest planet in the solar system, featuring crushing surface air pressures and a carbon dioxide atmosphere whose clouds are mostly sulfuric acid. And the potential "signature" for biology is itself "a smelly, flammable gas...that annihilates life-forms reliant on oxygen for survival." Nadia Drake has the remarkable story how Venusian phosphine may indeed be the product of living organisms, how that realization occurred, and some of the problems that beg for further study. Sarah Scoles focuses upon the human story behind the discovery with 'Dr. Phosphine' and the Possibility of Life on Venus. Another recent unearthly possibility for life was "the first identified interstellar object," popularly thought to be a possible ET spacecraft, that accelerated while coursing through our solar system. Chelsea Gohd says that the Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua could actually be a cosmic dust bunny, instead of a "Rama-like" Arthur C. Clarke alien starship. Gohd reports on the submission by Jane X. Luu et al. 'Oumuamua as a Cometary Fractal Aggregate: The "Dust Bunny" Model. If that's not a buzzkill, Rob Schwarz says that a 10-million-star Survey Finds No Trace of Alien Technosignatures. A "lengthy" 17-hour survey "looking more than 100 times broader and deeper than ever before" turned up nothing indicating alien technological activity, but the two astronomers involved admit their search looked just for low-frequency radio waves and covered an infinitesimally small portion of the starry firmament. (WM)

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from THE ANOMALIST https://on.natgeo.com/2E3uu2h