Dr. Sara Seager

Well, first, the way you listed what it's like in the Venus atmosphere, it doesn't sound too friendly to me either.

So, yes.

Well, when we think about what life requires, if we want to truly boil down to the fundamentals, there's just a few things.

One is temperature, the right temperature for covalent bonds, so complex molecules of the kind life needs to use can form.

The second is energy.

And of course, there's energy from the sun on Venus.

And the third is a liquid environment, liquid so that chemical reactions can happen.

So if you just boil it down to that, Venus does have what we require.

And although the surface, as you pointed out, is so hot, hot enough to melt lead, just like here on Earth, if you hike up a mountain or go on an airplane, it gets colder and colder as you go above the surface.

And the cloud layers with the liquid are the right temperature for life.

And this is why, over half a century ago, Carl Sagan first put out the idea, based on these fundamentals, that perhaps...

there could be life in the clouds of Venus.

Well, at the very basics, first of all, if there is any life in the Venus clouds, it's incredibly primitive.

We don't have evidence for it, not yet anyway.

But think about like the most primitive type of like single cell type of life possible.

So first of all, it would be like that.

Secondly, is it like Earth-like life?

No, because our Earth life cannot survive in sulfuric acid.

Specifically, our DNA is rapidly destroyed.

So if there is life there, it's going to be incredibly primitive in the cloud particles, and it has to have a different biological makeup than Earth life.