Visions of Phosphine Earth
Film
14 min
Director - Wendi Yan
CGI set and animation - Wendi Yan
Ijen and MIT footage - Iaroslav Iakubivskyi
Music composition - Jessica Shand
Editor - Wendi Yan
Dr. Sara Seager—the 2024 Kavli Prize winner—and her team at MIT have researched exoplanets and the possibility of life in Venus's clouds. "Phainoterra", the "phosphine Earth", is their speculative exercise imagining alien life in the clouds of an alternate Venus.
Working with Dr. Iaro Iakubivskyi from the Seager Lab, Yan developed a virtual 3D environment in Unreal Engine for Phainoterra, encompassing planetary views, cloud formations, and detailed landscape models featuring animated acidic pools, atmospheric vapors, and dynamic cloud systems. Yan also modeled a balloon vehicle suspended within the clouds, drawing from MIT's Venus Morning Star Missions.
The film interweaves footage captured by Dr. Iakubivskyi at Indonesia's Ijen volcanic lake and within MIT laboratory settings with Yan's hand-crafted 3D animations and AI-generated hallucinations of microscopic imaging. Through this multifaceted visual approach, audience journeys through an environment harboring forms of life fundamentally different from Earth's biology.
Yan's work examines how the knowledge-production methodologies employed by Dr. Seager and Dr. Iakubivskyi constantly navigate between different planes of reality. Their scientific endeavor to transcend Earth-conditioned comprehension of life represents a profound act of epistemic courage—a theme the film explores through its liminal positioning between scientific inquiry and speculative imagination.
Dr. Sara Seager, Professor of Planetary Science, Physics, and Aerospace Engineering at MIT
Dr. Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department Of Earth, Atmospheric, & Planetary Sciences, MIT
Proxima Kosmos Team
Director and Editor - Claire Webb
Producer - Adrianne Toomey
Managing Editor - Ulysses Yarber
About Proxima Kosmos
Developed under the leadership of Dr. Claire Isabel Webb, Proxima Kósmos is an interdisciplinary collaboration uniting leading planetary scientists, astrobiologists, designers, and science-fiction writers to construct a simulated exosolar system—each of its nine planets shaped by scientific modeling and radical imagination. The project challenges assumptions about habitability, evolution, and intelligence beyond Earth.