Phosphine? Perhaps Not

The announcement a molecule of possible biological origin had been detected in the atmosphere of Venus drew my attention back to a world I hadn’t thought about very much for a while, but I did think at the time there had been other hopeful announcements in that vein that had just sort of faded from wider attention. Before this news could quite fade, there were follow-up reports of questioning the detection in the first place and not being able to find the molecule with a different method. Thinking about it, I can remember “not so fast” cautions about some of those previous announcements too as part of the fading away. “Questioning and reproducibility” are part of the scientific method, of course, but so far as out-and-out speculation goes I have run across worries that if life even of a simple sort is utterly common in the universe, it becomes just a bit easier to jump to dark suppositions about the apparent continued absence of advanced intelligence being due to “it doesn’t last.”