The initial report was met with an avalanche of skepticism and sparked intense debate within the scientific community, but Greaves and his colleagues have now presented new evidence at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Hull, England, that further supports their hypothesis.

This time, they focused on the presence of ammonia, another gas produced mostly by biological processes on Earth.

The most interesting thing is to assume that ammonia produces some kind of microbial life because that would be a great way for it to regulate its own environment.
Greaves said in an interview with CNN:

He explained that microbial production of ammonia could make the environment less acidic, potentially making it as livable as the most extreme environments on Earth.

Dave Clements of Imperial College London, who presented separate evidence for ammonia on Venus at the meeting, emphasised its functional significance.

We don’t understand how ammonia is made, just as we don’t understand how phosphine is made, but if ammonia exists, it must have a function that we can understand.
– said.

Despite these intriguing findings, many scientists remain cautious in their assumptions and interpretations.

Javier Martín-Torres, professor of planetary sciences at the University of Aberdeen, had previously disputed Greaves’ findings, arguing that the water content in Venus’s atmosphere was too low to support life. But he was intrigued by the new data on the presence of ammonia.

He admitted that this “challenges our understanding and suggests that more complex chemical processes may be occurring here.”

The quest to understand Venus’s potential for life will continue with NASA’s planned Inert Gas, Chemistry, and Imaging of the Deep Atmosphere of Venus (DAVINCI) mission. Planned for the 2030s, this mission aims to probe Venus’s atmosphere and provide more definitive answers about its chemical composition and potential for life.