MIT Thinks They Have Proof of Alien Life

While humans have spent the last thirty years searching for life on Mars, researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are convinced they've found proof of life on our other planetary neighbor Venus. It all comes down to their understanding of chemistry, and what chemical compound has positively been identified in Venus' atmosphere.

In what reddit decided was a "leaked video," the discussion of this discovery takes a very remedial path to explain what the discovery is. Understandably, as with most science, the more things you discover, the more questions you have. The argument here being that the chemical compound they've found doesn't happen naturally in the universe, but does come about through biological influence... but there's the rub.

I fully believe that we are not alone in the universe. It's simply too massive to think we are. I don't even think we're alone in our galaxy, but I do think we are still too stupid to make that kind of a discovery without another species making it happen first. Even now, at the pinnacle of human development, we're dumb. Just look at the world around us... Now I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm smarter than anyone else, or that I can comprehend fully what is being peddled as "proof of alien life," but if I may offer a logical explanation.

The quote is:

"There's a compound in the atmosphere and we can't explain how it got there."

Now, I enjoy chemistry. It's amazing to me that you can make pretty well anything good or bad by mixing a few or many otherwise innocuous chemicals... but just because they've discovered a compound in the atmosphere of one planet, that doesn't happen naturally here on Earth, it's a little big of a jump straight to "We've found alien life." If anything, they've discovered that there is a planet where the chemistry makes this compounds natural occurrence possible. That's where my rub is. Just because it doesn't happen on our planet, it doesn't mean it also doesn't happen on other planets.

Take the planet they're talking about for instance... Venus has an atmosphere made up of 96.5% carbon dioxide, 3.5% nitrogen, and a mix of other detectable gases. Add in a common mean surface temperature of 842 degrees, perhaps that's the correct condition for the argued chemical compound to be found occurring naturally in... and before you say it, there's no way we could reproduce that environment to test the natural occurrence hypothesis on Earth. At least, there's no way to scale on that level since we're only detecting traces of the "life-proving" compound.

If anything, researchers have proven that phosphine can, in fact, naturally occur without a biological aid under the correct conditions, of which none are found on Earth. But that's the thing about chemistry... it's not absolute. It's one of the concrete sciences that still changes everyday. To say anything different is nothing more than egotistical shortsightedness.