The idea that life might reside in Venusian clouds has been floating around in the astronomy community for decades. Carl Sagan, the astronomer who popularized the “extraordinary claims” mantra, explored the concept in a 1967 paper** with the biophysicist Harold Morowitz. Before Venus became a planet-size furnace, it was a watery world, covered in oceans that flowed for billions of years, as habitable as the seas of Earth. As the atmosphere swelled with heat-trapping gases and water evaporated into space, life-forms on the surface, forced to adapt, could have escaped into the skies. If life indeed resides in Venus’s atmosphere, it might be the last remnant of a wrecked biosphere.
Sousa-Silva daydreams often about what such aerial life-forms might be like. “It’s fascinating to imagine what kind of complexity could arise if you’re not scared of sulfuric acid,” she said. Venusian life-forms would have a more difficult existence if they resembled earthly microorganisms, Sousa-Silva says, because they would have to work hard to extract the very little water vapor in the atmosphere to survive.
Or maybe we should be a bit cautious:
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