3 ms·
abiotic pathways ruled out To the best of the reasearchers' knowledge: All known pathways to produce phosphane couldn't explain the observation (they were tal
by cygx 6y ago
abiotic pathways ruled out
To the best of the reasearchers' knowledge: All known pathways to produce phosphane couldn't explain the observation (they were talking several orders of magnitude off). Abiotic 'exotic' chemistry is still an option (ie the 'unknown unknown' hasn't been ruled out).
- tantalor 6y agoYou don't need to state the obvious. It's impossible to rule out an "unknown unknown" by definition, because if you did then it wouldn't be "unknown" anymore.
- cygx 6y agoNo-go theorems exist (conservation of energy for example, hence no perpetual motion machines). Instead, they tediously had to exclude any process they could think of one by one.
- formerly_proven 6y ago> No-go theorems exist That's K-K, not U-U.
- cygx 6y agoThere are known abiotic pathways. They've been ruled out. There are unknown biotic pathways known to exist (from the press conference, biotic phosphane production on earth apparently still has some large question marks attached?). There might be unknown abiotic pathways ('unknown unknowns'). In principle, there could be some clever way to rule them out based on the constraints of the Venusian environment.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jandrese 6y agoHumans don't have nearly as much experience dealing with conditions like we find on Venus, so it's entirely possible this is a yet-unknown chemical reaction. Most chemists don't like dealing with blazing hot highly pressurized strong acids all day long.