Venus Life in the Cloud Prospects - Venus Cloud Life - MIT

How the Venusian clouds could have become inhabited is unknown. The most conceivable scenario is that life originated on the surface when Venus was a cool planet with water oceans. At that time, large numbers of microbes may have temporarily resided in the atmosphere, as they do on Earth. As Venus became hotter and hotter the planet eventually went into a “greenhouse runaway” where the oceans boiled off and the temperatures became inhospitable. The concept is that any surface life would have died off, while microbial life evolved to permanently live in the clouds. Any microbial life that might exist in Venus’ atmosphere will be so different than any Earth life in terms of its composition, because of the extreme conditions in Venus’ atmosphere. Conditions in Venus’ habitable atmosphere layer are fifty times drier than the driest place on Earth (the Atacama Desert) and billions of times more acidic than the most acidic environment on Earth (Ethiopia’s Dallol pools). An unknown chemical i

How the Venusian clouds could have become inhabited is unknown. The most conceivable scenario is that life originated on the surface when Venus was a cool planet with water oceans. At that time, large numbers of microbes may have temporarily resided in the atmosphere, as they do on Earth. As Venus became hotter and hotter the planet eventually went into a “greenhouse runaway” where the oceans boiled off and the temperatures became inhospitable. The concept is that any surface life would have died off, while microbial life evolved to permanently live in the clouds. Any microbial life that might