Looking for life in the clouds of Venus
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What motivated researchers to explore life in the clouds of Venus?
Hi, Ira here, and you're listening to Science Friday. Dr. Sarah Seeger has made a career out of looking for signs of life in outer space, searching for exoplanets thousands of light years away. But now Dr. Seeger has come home, sort of. She has turned her attention to our neighbor, the planet Venus. At first, it would seem like an unlikely place to look for life. Its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead.
What are the extreme conditions on Venus and how do they affect the possibility of life?
It has a smothering carbon dioxide atmosphere, all topped off with sulfuric acid clouds. But Dr. Seeger thinks it might be possible for some form of life to survive there, not on the planet's surface, but up in those clouds. Dr. Sarah Seeger is an astrophysicist, planetary scientist at MIT, and part of a team leading a proposed series of missions to Venus to sample those clouds for evidence of life. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira. You know, when I list the conditions on Venus, life doesn't seem likely. The idea that life might exist in the clouds there, where does that come from and why are you hopeful about that?
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.
Right.
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.
How would that life form be? Would it be the kind of life we have here on Earth?
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.
How does Dr. Seager justify the potential for life in Venus's atmosphere?
Now, how would you know that, that life exists there?
Well, we don't know if life exists there. And this is like the billion dollar question that everyone has of how do we know if there's life anywhere? And at the moment, what scientists are doing is they draw a dividing line. in chemistry. And on one side of the line are the kinds of basic molecules that nature provides, like from photochemistry or from volcanoes or minerals or just chemicals that are just present. And on the other side of that line are incredibly complex molecules. so complex that we think only life could make the molecules. And therefore, one of the main ideas is if we can find complex molecules, we can infer the presence of life. The only problem is where do you draw that line? And also that line keeps changing.
Is it possible to sort of experiment to create the kind of life you might see in those clouds?
Well, I would say yes and no. I mean, if you think about it, people are trying to create life on Earth in the lab, like life that may have arisen here on Earth first early on in water, and scientists still haven't been successful at that, although they've been successful in many separate areas in the formation and origin of life. So we can repeat those same experiments. Like, for example, here on Earth, in the laboratory, people take lipids, like fats with heads, like polar head groups, and they put those in water to try to form little compartments, vesicles.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What motivated researchers to explore life in the clouds of Venus?
0:03–0:30
2
What are the extreme conditions on Venus and how do they affect the possibility of life?
0:30–3:00
3
How does Dr. Seager justify the potential for life in Venus's atmosphere?
3:00–15:24
4
What experiments are being conducted to understand life in Venus's clouds?
15:24–28:13
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Science Friday
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