There is Evidence of Life in the Atmosphere of Venus

It's not likely that you'll ever be offered the opportunity to visit Venus. But on the odd chance you are, you might want to decline. The temperature on the surface of the planet is around 870° F (465° C)—hot enough to melt lead—and the atmospheric pressure at Venusian sea level (not that there are any seas) is 92 times what it is on Earth.

But if it's unlikely you — or any other organism — could survive on the surface of Venus, it's possible things could be very different up in the Venusian clouds. According to a new study published in the journal Astrobiology, the temperature, pressure and chemistry of the atmosphere 30 miles above ground may be just right for vast colonies of otherworldly bacteria to survive.

That there may be airborne life on Venus is not an entirely new idea. The planet is generally believed to have once been running with water as Earth is now, but it lasted only between 650 million to two billion years before boiling off into the clouds. Earth, however, needed less than a billion years to develop microbial life. If the same happened on Venus, its microbes would not have had to vanish when the water did. Earthly bacteria have routinely been sampled up to 25 miles high, swept aloft by winds and surviving perfectly well in the wet, comparatively temperate conditions at those altitudes. Venusian bacteria could have done the same.

The new paper makes a strong case for that scenario, analyzing the conditions in the planet's sky and finding them hospitable to biology. The first two boxes for sustaining life—tolerable temperature and pressure—are easily checked. Thirty miles above ground, Venus's air pressure is roughly equivalent to the 15 pounds per square inch on the ground on Earth. The temperature, meantime, is a hot but...