>>12386455Astronomers never said there was life on venus.
The more recent big media buzz about phosphine comes from a tentative results study that was posted, but never made a claim one way or another.
Here's the original analysis.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2009/2009.06593.pdfNotice how tentative it is. They give a high error bar and stop short of indicating that there are positive signs of life on Venus.
Which is fair because peer review
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.12758https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09761https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14305https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.08176Found that there was no evidence of phosphine in the atmosphere of venus.
Peer review in this case, as it usually does, was able to test the claim and found the original conclusion to be false.
So in the time it took for the news to spread like wildfire, peer review essentially debunked the claim.
