Life on Venus

The planet Venus might seem a hellish destination and an unlikely place to find extraterrestrial life. And yet, many experts agree that life may have existed in the planet's ancient oceans -- and may thrive yet within the upper atmosphere. Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick in a quest for Venusian aliens. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
McCormick and Robert. I've got a question for you today.
Hit me in your opinion. What is the creepiest image

(00:23):
photograph produced by human space exploration. Well, since we're talking
about exploration, I imagine this rules out weapons tests. No, no,
no, no no, I'm not interested in any clear bombs. Yeah,
because we have some pretty creepy new test footage such
as nineteen sixties Operation UH Dominique, which was involved the

(00:44):
atmospheric sort of slash space detonation of nukes. I don't
think I've ever seen that. Oh yeah, it's a For instance,
there was the Starfish Prime event in which a one
point for megatun bomb detonated two hundred and fifty miles
or four two kilometers above the planet. And that's above
the the Carmen line. So like that's pretty disturbing when
you when you think about it, like a Cold War

(01:06):
UH space detonation test. But as far as like pure
space exploration goes, I'm always a sucker for stuff like
the you know, the so called Martian face, or even
something like the Hexagon of Saturn, something that just inspires
this sense of mystery where you're asking, like, what what
is this place? Really? Oh, the hexagon on the I
believe it's the north pole of Saturn. It's either the

(01:27):
north or the South pole. I can't recall. I believe
I believe it's north. We we talked about it in
one of our previous episodes, Haunted Geography and Haunted Geometry,
very love craft in Yeah, I guess they're forbidden. Geometry
is all through the Lovecraft cosmos, right, you know it.
But I've got a different answer my and for a
long time this has been my answer. My favorite creepy

(01:47):
space images have got to be the photos taken by
the Venera thirteen lander Robert. I've got them in the
notes here. But have you ever looked at these before? Yes,
you know, I'm not sure I've seen the color corrected ones,
but but certainly I've seen the the the other ones
that have that that deep kind of reddish orange tinge
to them. Yeah. I mean, it's funny to try to

(02:10):
explain what's disturbing about them, because they're just pictures of
some rocks you know, it's just you're you're looking at
some rocks and soil. Now what the Venera Landers were.
It was a series of space missions to the planet
Venus that was done by the Soviet Space Program. They
launched these missions to put landers down on the surface

(02:31):
of Venus for the first time. There had mid Landers
sending things back from Venus or the surface of Venus
before this, but they sent a bunch of missions in
the seventies and the eighties. And one of the things
about landing on Venus, and we'll definitely get more into
this in the episode, is that you've got a very
short window of time to send stuff back because Venus
is a death trap. Yeah, it will destroy you, even

(02:51):
for highly shielded, powerful machines. You put a machine down
there and it's a suicide mission. The machine is gonna
gather some data and transmit as long as it can,
but eventually the crushing heat and pressure of the atmosphere
of Venus will kill that robot and it will only
have this last sort of death note to send back

(03:12):
to Earth. And one of these missions managed to send
some really striking pictures as that last death note. Specifically,
it was the Venera thirteen lander, which was launched on
October one, and it landed on Venus on March first night.
So even the idea of a lander setting down on Venus,

(03:32):
if you know anything about the Venusian atmosphere, is kind
of creepy to imagine, because first you're going into this
haze of sulfurous clouds. But as you go further and
further down, the atmospheric pressure gets so much and so
dense and so thick that it's almost more like sinking
into a liquid uh. And so you've got to imagine
this lander sinking down into this atmospheric ocean surrounding Venus,

(03:56):
this boiling hot, lead melting atmospheric ocean of of carbon
dioxide and nitrogen, with all this sulfur everywhere. And then
finally it sets down on the surface and takes these
images and sends them back to Earth. And there's almost
nothing in the images. You just see the edge of
the lander in the foreground, and it has some appropriately
creepy looking triangular teeth all around it, and then beyond

(04:20):
that there's some soil and some flat rocks. But nevertheless,
something about these images messes with me. I find them
absolutely creepy. And haunting. They have this dirty grindhouse kind
of yellow film effect to them. Uh. And that's of
course the atmospheric effects that we see from from the
glow of Venus. Uh. It's almost as if we're looking

(04:41):
at everything through an evil haze. For me, I think
it's because it's the it's like the last known photograph
from from from the from the very you know, borders
of the known world. Yea. Um. It's like if somebody
went to the Texas Chainsaw mascre house and took a
picture of their feet by accident, and then that's all
you had to go on, right, so you know, do

(05:02):
you know something terrible happened afterwards? You don't have a
lot of details, but you have this picture of somebody's
feet on a front porch in Texas. That's exactly right. Yeah,
it feels like that. And another creepy thing about them
is that you notice a difference that unlike Mars, where
if you see images back from the surface of Mars,
they can sometimes look kind of creepy, but it can
also just look kind of like, I don't know, a

(05:24):
desert on kind of an overcast day, it was just
a very bare in area with sand and rocks and
kind of a gray white sky. But unlike on Mars,
one thing you'll notice is the effects of sunlight and
the directionality of the sunlight, where if there's a thing
sticking out of the rover, you can see it casting
a shadow on the ground. These these pictures have no

(05:44):
indication of shadows really, you know, looking at them again,
as we podcast here, I do think there is a
sense of one taking a picture of one's own feet here,
So there's an incompleteness to it. No, it's that just
that just gets at you. Whereas at least with it
with the Mars images, we have more of a true,
uh you know, panoramic vision of what's going on there. Well,

(06:06):
Mars has been thoroughly explored on the surface at this point.
I mean, we have all kinds of pictures of what
Mars looks like at different times of day, different times
of the year, you know, from multiple different landers and rovers.
Mars almost feels like, I don't mean to pooh pooh Mars.
I mean, Mars is still fascinating and mysterious and wonderful,
but it's it's very much more explored territory at this point. Yeah,

(06:27):
we know As we've mentioned before, we have more detailed
information about the surface of Mars than we have about
the bottom of the ocean. In some ways, that is
definitely true. Um, but the surface of Venus is like,
it's this mystery hell, you know, it's this hazy mystery
that's beyond the gate. And because it feels like this
hazy mystery that's beyond the gate, for some reason, the

(06:47):
idea of life on Venus has always seemed more creepy
and interesting and tantalizing a possibility to me than the
idea of life on Mars. I don't know if you
feel the same way. Yeah, I definitely think so. I
think it's kind of a shame that Venus doesn't get
more attention, especially in terms of our our science fiction,

(07:09):
because when you think of life on another planet within
our Solar system, you think of really the rich history
of imagining life on Mars, both in the future and
the past, because you have everything from of course the
old Edgar Rice Burrows novels to uh Total to Total Recall.
I mean, there's there's so much great stuff there. But
when you start looking for really cool examples of life

(07:30):
on Venus, there are some great examples, but there there
aren't as many. It's not it's not the place that
the human imagination instantly goes to. But as we'll discuss
in this episode, we really should because there's a there.
There are some strong cases to be made for life
on Venus, either now or in the past. Yeah, and
so that's going to be the main subject of today's episode.

(07:51):
If there are, or if there have been, creatures of Venus,
what are they like and how would we know about them? Now?
If we just turn to fiction for if you examples? Uh,
we don't have time to catalog everything, but I wanted
to mention a few that came to my mind. Anyway.
There is an HP Lovecraft story from ninety nine that
he wrote with Kenneth Sterling titled In the Walls of Erics,

(08:15):
which features a muddy jungle Venus and a maze with
invisible walls. That feels about right. Yeah, it's pretty good.
I remember I remember dating that story when I read it. Uh. C. S.
Lewis took us to Venusian Paradise in his novel Peralandra. Uh.
This involves an alien Adam and Eve and there and
then of course you have the Devil Show up as well,

(08:36):
possessing the body of a character by the name of
Professor Weston. Professor Weston, I wonder if that's named after
Jesse Weston, who wrote the book about the Grail legend
that was so popular in the early twentieth century. You know,
I don't, I don't remember, but U but it's a
Paralalandro was was a book I really loved when I
was younger, and we'll probably read again at some at
some point. I've never read it, but that seems interesting

(08:59):
to explore, especially because you've got, I mean, you've got
multiple mythic associations with Venus throughout history. You know, you've
got the god of love and the Eros and the
Venus aphrodite kind of association. But you've also got the
lucifer association. Yeah, yeah, and both are explored in Peralandra.
In Perilandro, Venus is also a water world. They're like
these kind of floating wraths of land that everyone is everyone.

(09:22):
It's like three or four people, three or four individuals
anyway they lived there. But yeah, it's it's a it
is an interesting take on Venus as well. Stephen King
took us to Venus twice as it turns out once
in a nineteen sixties self published short story titled The
Cursed Expedition, which I have not read. I'm not sure
that's one that's actually readily available or it's kind of

(09:43):
like a you know, a vault story of kings. Uh.
And then there's of course his short story I Am
the Doorway, which doesn't actually visit the planet, but a
character is takes part in a manned Venus fly by
and comes back in centially infected with an alien organism. Well,
it's interesting to think about that this is a time

(10:04):
period at which the Venera missions were underway. Yeah, there's
also a similar Outer Limits episode from nineteen four titled
Cold Hands, Warm Heart that actually stars William Shatner. So
Shot goes to Venus or he's from Venus or what.
I haven't seen this episode, but he is involved in
some sort of space mission involving Venus. So you can't

(10:25):
give me the deets on the chat. I mean, things go,
you know, weird. That's that's the Again, this is not
an Outer Limits episode that I've seen, but perhaps we
have listeners you can chime in on it. And then,
of course Venus plays an important role in the expanse
uh TV series adaptation of the novels. No spoilers, but

(10:46):
it does have a pretty cool plot line involving Life
and Venus. And there's also early mentioned in the books
and perhaps the TV series as well, about a failed
attempt by humans to establish cloud colonies there. Oh yeah,
that is an intra sting idea. I've read about the
idea of trying to create um I don't know whether
you call them aerostatic or hydrostatic, basically floating colonies. That

(11:08):
would be not too hard to do, actually, because of
how dense the atmosphere is. Yeah, cloud City right out
of Empire. Yeah, except I don't know, best Bin didn't
look all that cloudy compared to Venus. Yeah, well, I
mean they were up there, right, It's been a long
time since they've seen Empires. I don't remember how cloudy
was or if it became more cloudy in the special
editions that came out. Who knows. Oh yeah, they're really

(11:29):
cged some more clouds in there. It's uh, it was
worth it. Uh No. I think it's interesting that Venus
doesn't get as much attention as Mars does in terms
of the possibility of finding microbial life forms. I mean,
you know, way back in the day, people used to think,
before we'd explored Mars that there, you know, there might
be whole civilizations there. People would look through telescopes and

(11:51):
see what looked like canals on Mars, and they'd say, oh,
you know, there are people on Mars, just like there
are people here. Now we pretty much can rule that out.
I wonder of part of it is because we went
from being so geocentric, the idea that the Earth is
the center of all things, and then we went to
a heliocentric model, and then of course we expanded beyond that.

(12:13):
But if if we're still kind of thinking heliocentrically, so
the Sun is the center of of our solar system,
and therefore it's kind of a center of order and
and the known. And this is not doesn't something not
not something that actually matches up necessarily with our our
scientific understanding of everything. But it is. It is a center.
And therefore Venus is closer to the center. It's closer

(12:36):
to the center of the known, whereas Mars is a
little beyondest, like Mars is a little more on the outskirts.
And therefore it makes this more it makes more sense
that it would have more mystery to it. That's where
the that's where the ghosts and goblins are going to live, right,
They're not gonna live in the middle of the city.
They're gonna live on the outskirts of town. Well, yeah,
it's the outer limits. You don't talk about the inner

(12:57):
limits though, I do. Really eno always science fiction that
that goes inward instead of goes outward. Actually, I mean,
this is something I really liked about that movie Sunshine
that came out, which you know, I had a lot
of problems. I think some of the writing kind of
fell apart in the third part of the movie, but
it explored the idea that there was this deep, kind
of ghostly mystery to the sun, and as you come

(13:20):
closer and closer to the Sun, it's sort of activates
these instincts within you that are sort of borderline supernatural,
but at least seemed to go deeper than the human
or mammalian parts of your nervous system. Where you know,
where the Sun is the closest thing to a literal
god there is in the physical universe, right, it's the
creator of us. Yeah, yeah, I think that ye coupled

(13:42):
with the fact that every humans just want to keep
going out. It's one of the reasons probably that more
people have been to the Moon than to the bottom
of than to the deepest portions of the ocean. Well,
I think we should ignore this impulse to go out
and we should go in. Let's go in towards Venus,
get closer to the Sun, move one orbit in and
are looking at this hothouse planet. Yeah, why go to

(14:03):
a planet that doesn't have enough atmosphere when instead you
can take your your dreams and your imagination to a
place that has more atmosphere than you can handle. Let's
take a quick break and when we come back, we
will explore the surface of Venus. Thank you, thank you. Alright,
we're back now. You're probably familiar with some of the
most basic features of Venus as a planet, right that

(14:23):
it's very much known as an Earth analog, and that
is a fair way to characterize it. It's very close
to the size and mass of the Earth. It's gonna
you know, it was created around the same time and
the accretion disk of the inner rocky planets um so
in many ways it is a lot like the Earth
until you get down into the atmosphere. So, Robert, can

(14:44):
you take me on a tour of the surface of Venus. Yeah.
Actually chatted with astrobiologist David Grinspoon about the surface of
Venus several years back, as well as with JPL scientists
Susanne smrit Car. So I want to run through some
of the attributes of the planet ended here that they
stressed to me. All right, let's take a stroll through
the toxic soup. Alright. So, so Grinspoon pointed out that

(15:06):
first and foremost, this is a planet that's very rich
and volcanoes and mountains and tech tonic features. Now not
to be confused with tectonic activity. We'll get back to that.
You won't find signs of a water erosion. Uh, probably
unless they're very very ancient. And a lot of the
topography is dominated by a sort of low aligning rolling

(15:29):
planes that are largely ash. And this is punctuated by
some high volcanic mountains and some other sort of high
plateaus of titanically disrupted areas with with flows of ash.
So this is a planet surface that has been sort
of like hit and paved by volcanic activity. Yes, yeah,

(15:50):
they're also he says they're seemingly steady slow winds, always
blowing east to west, and uh as we've already touched on.
The atmospheric pressure is very high. Now. One interesting thing
about the directionality of the movement of the atmosphere there
is that Venus rotates opposite of the way that most
of the planets in our Solar system rotate. It rotates

(16:12):
in a retrograde way to its orbit. So the sun
actually rises in the west and sets in the east
on Venus. Yeah, it's it's interesting. It has also has
an extremely slow rotation two forty three terrestrial days, that's
how long it takes, but its atmosphere only needs four
days to write to rotate. So yeah, there's already you
can tell there's a lot of a lot of by

(16:33):
the from a terrestrial standpoint, a lot of screwy things
going on with Venus. If you were approaching the this
is like approaching the Texas chainsaw mask er house and
finding all sorts of bone based you know, voodoo doo,
Dad's hanging in trees and bushes, right, some skull furniture.
So the pressure is high, roughly ninety times the pressure

(16:54):
at sea level on Earth. That's a lot of pressure.
Of of course it's going to vary though depending on
you know exactly what al to you're at Venus. We've
already touched on the light a little bit. You'd find
very dull light. Grinsman says that if you were suddenly
transported to Venus, you would notice that the light is
very different. It's always cloudy, and there's a very thick uh,

(17:15):
the very thick atmosphere. So light is, he says, is
kind of diffused and gathered so so much that it's
a it's kind of reddish, and there are, as you said,
no shadows because there's no direct sunlight. It's all just
clouds and scattered light. He says that there would be
enough daylight to see, but it will be like a
heavily overcast day on Earth. And of course on the

(17:35):
night side it would be dark. Aside from whatever kind
of like you, you would probably notice the dull red
glow of the red hot rocks in the ground lighting
things a bit creepy. And he pointed out that it
is pretty much Earth's alter ego. It's the only Earth
sized planet in our Solar system only uh, and the
only other roughly Earth sized planet that we can send

(17:57):
a spacecraft too and study in detail. Uh, that will
and that's going to be true for a long long time.
And Uh, indeed, Earth and Venus probably had similar origins. Uh,
it could have been and they could have been a
nearly identical states in the beginning, and yet we have
gone down very difficent routes in terms of how our

(18:17):
climates and surface conditions have turned out. So, yeah, if
we started in similar states, what happened to Venus to
make it so different from us? Well, runaway greenhouse effect
boiled away the oceans long ago and they were lost
to space, and then it it became essentially stuck with
its present climate. It's so it's it's often touted as
kind of a worse case example of what climate change

(18:40):
on Earth could amount to. Yeah, now you might have
heard of this idea of the runaway greenhouse effect invoked.
But if you're wondering exactly how that works, Basically, what
happens is you've got some liquid on the surface of
your planet. You've got like liquid water oceans, and if
you heat the oceans up too much, they begin to
evaporate a lot of water very bur into the atmosphere.

(19:01):
But of course, water vapor is an excellent greenhouse gas.
And then when there's a lot of water vapor in
the atmosphere, because it's a greenhouse gas, sunlight can pass
through it one way, coming in to heat the Earth
or heat the planet, but then it does not allow
as much energy to reflect back off of the planet
and radiate back out into space. So like other greenhouse gases,

(19:22):
this water vapor let's energy in but not back out,
and this warms the planet even more. As the planet warms,
the water vapor just keeps evaporating even more because it's
getting hotter and hotter, making the effect worse and worse
in this net positive feedback loop. So there's sort of
these tipping points for planets with liquid on the surface.

(19:43):
You don't want to get the water hotter than a
certain level because if you do, it's just going to
create this runaway effect that you kind of can't stop. Now.
I mentioned plate tectonics earlier. There are no plate tectonics
that we know of on Venus of all, but the
certainly there's a lot of volcanic activity. The volcanoes, though,
don't spring up along plate borders like they do on Earth.

(20:05):
They just pop up all over. So there's just kind
of surprise volcano. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's a different
pattern of convection. Uh, or so it seems according to Grinspoon. Now,
in addition to the greenhouse gas issue, uh, he did
drive home that a lot of the differences may also
just be due to orbit. You know, obviously Venus is

(20:27):
more of an inner planet than Earth, and and they're
just going to be uh, certain differences in place just
on where you are in relation to the Sun. Right,
So it is closer to the Sun than Us, but
that's that's not the only thing that plays a role, because,
for example, the surface of Venus is hotter than the
surface of Mercury, which is closer to the Sun than
Venus is. Uh So, definitely the atmosphere plays a huge

(20:51):
role in what surface conditions are like. Right, and uh
we already hit on the fact that the the atmosphere
of Venus is pretty incredible. The clouds of Venus uh
are concentrated sulfuric acid. Yeah. Uh yeah. Now that's not
to say that the atmosphere is concentrated sulfuric acid. The
atmosphere is about ninety eight point five carbon dioxide five

(21:11):
percent carbon dioxide with like three point five percent nitrogen
or so, and then it's got these aerosol ized sulfuric
acid particles like colloidal sulfuric acid suspended in the atmosphere.
Needless to say, you wouldn't want to breathe it. Noddy,
we we touch on exactly how hot the surface is,
I'm not sure we did. That's worth mentioning because it's

(21:33):
it's it's hotter than you think, Dad, hotter than you think. Yeah.
Susan Spreaker pointed out that the surface temperature is around
nine hundred degrees fahrenheit or four and eighty two celsius.
That is, it's an often sided fact hot enough to
melt lead. These are almost like metal works kind of conditions. Yeah.
And another cool thing that she pointed out is like, Okay,

(21:54):
assume you're on the on the surface, You're wearing some
sort of high tech suit that prevents you from having
to worry about melting or being crushed. Uh. And she
she points out that walking on the surface would be
really weird because it would be like walking It would
be more like walking through a fluid than what we
think of as as an atmosphere and This is again
due to that high pressure super critical c O two,

(22:17):
So in some aspects some aspects of a fluid would
be present as well as some aspects of a gas.
I wonder if that atmospheric density is part of what
contributes to the creepiness of those photos taken by the
Venera thirteen lander. I don't know, Like, is that queuing
something in my eyes? Does somehow the air look wrong,
like it looks heavier or something? Yeah, I wonder now.

(22:39):
Smart Car also pointed out that one of the biggest
mysteries about Venus is why it doesn't have plate tectonics. Uh.
And she says that the planet completely resurface sometime in
the last billion years, and so we have no record
of what happened in those first three and a half
billion years. Now. This is premised on the fact that
Venus is basically the same age as the Earth, that
they were created in this planetary accretion process, and both

(23:02):
planets are about four and a half billion years old.
But something happened about a billion years ago on Venus
that resurface most of it, uh, and hit the evidence
that they were like, we gotta get this redone, you know,
I'm sick of this old pattern. We gotta get it repaved.
But you pointed out that we really don't know if
if it was some sort of catastrophic event that caused
a huge amount of of of volcanic activity to made

(23:26):
it occur within a relatively short period of time, or
if it's just been a steady process over the last
billion years where volcanic activity has just been accumulating. Now,
one of the things we often talk about when considering
whether or not a planet can sustain life is what
the sort of the geomagnetic properties of the planet are. Now,
we know that Venus does have an iron core like

(23:46):
Earth does, but the question is if it's going to
sustain life on its surface or within its atmosphere, does
it have a magnetic field to shield it from radiation
coming from space. Well, yeah, the answer here is really
interesting because no, it does not have an internally generated magnetosphere.
The solar wind can slam directly into the atmosphere. However,

(24:07):
it does benefit from partial protection due to its induced
magnetic field. Now what's that. So you have solar ultra
violent radiation removing electrons from atoms in the upper atmosphere,
creating the electrically charged gas of the ionosphere. As on Earth,
it slows and diverts the flow of particles around the planet. Now,
that's interesting, But so far, I guess we should say

(24:29):
we've just been sort of talking about the planet in
general and kind of spitballing about what life there could
be like or or you know, things that occurred to us.
What do the experts actually have to say about the
possibility of life on Venus, either in the past or now.
I mean, it's hard to imagine life on the surface
of Venus now, given how hot and high pressure it is.
But let's not pre judge the question what what what

(24:52):
would for example, David Grinspoon have to say about life
on Venus. Well, he's very clear about the fact that
there's nothing controversial at all about speculating, uh, that that
ancient Venus might have boasted life, because he says, if
you go back four billion years, you'll find an environment
very similar to Earth. Yea, And so much of our
speculations of regarding life on other worlds, you know, it

(25:15):
centers around the question how much like Earth is it
or was it? Yeah? Now, of course that's premised on
the fact that we basically know of one way biochemistry
can work, and that has certain physical tolerances built into it.
Biochemistry can work in a carbon based way with water
as a solvent, and so we know that can only

(25:35):
happen in a place where there's the right kind of
temperature to have liquid water, where it doesn't freeze or
boil um and you've got you know, you've got the
right kind of organic molecules present, so that sets these
tolerances there. But then again, there are other ways we
maybe aren't even imagining that biochemistry could work. Just don't
based on our limited imagination, but still based on what

(25:57):
we know, there's nothing wrong with saying, well, life could
have existed on Venus. I mean, you know, a place
like Earth can have life, And Grinspoon says it's even
conceivable that life could have begun on Venus, and then
we're all essentially Venusians. Uh. You know, it points out
that you have rocks being blasted between the planets, so

(26:17):
there was contact, So some form of pants burmia is possible, uh, possible, Uh,
concerning life on Earth and possible life on Venus, now
that's something people bring up as a possibility, but not
to say that there's a strong reason to favor that
hypothesis right now. Some of are really a lot of
the key theories regarding life on Venus do in the

(26:39):
past revolve around the idea that there may have been
oceans there in the past, right and we still don't
have definitive proof. I think that there were oceans on
Venus in the past, but there's there are pretty strong
reasons to think that it at least might have had oceans.
I was looking at one study by our No Salvador
at all from the Journal of Geophysical Research arch Planets

(27:00):
in and this was kind of interesting. So the background
on the study is that they talk about how early
in the history of a solar system you've got young
inner planets and they get bombarded by lots of impacts
from rocky objects orbiting the Sun. Right the early the
early Solar system is very dirty and it's very full
of stuff, and over long periods of time, eventually it

(27:23):
gets kind of cleaned up. But early in the Solar
system you've got big rocks slamming into young planets, and
they slam into them from space and can actually heat
planets up a lot, and big enough impacts can even
melt large portions of the mass of the planet which
surrounds it in this ocean of melted rock. But after
this happens, the molten ocean cools and then releases volatile

(27:45):
compounds to create the atmosphere. And in this study, the
authors create a model where they can sort of play
with model planets in this state. Right, you've got model
planets in early stages of formation that are releasing certain
out of C O two or water onto their surface,
and that's affecting, you know, what, whether it has oceans

(28:05):
or what the atmosphere looks like. And so that you
can place a model planet like that in orbit at
different distances from a host star and then predict what
kind of surface the planet will evolve in its geohistory.
And their models suggests, based on what we know about
Venus today, that it could have had water oceans earlier
in its history. That it's consistent with what they've found
now the presence of some sort of an alien Adam

(28:27):
and Eve that there's no proof for that. You have
to leave that to C. S. Lewis. Even though it
might be hard to know for sure whether there was
life on Venus a long time ago, we can at
least get good clues about whether there would have been
windows of opportunity for it. Right. Yeah. According to a
Sanjay Limay and co authors in a two thousand eighteen
astrobiology paper, Venus could have boasted a habitable climate and

(28:50):
liquid water for as long as two billion years. That's
that's that's longer than it might have occurred on Mars.
So you have a pretty pretty long period of time.
I'm there. Uh, that is enough time based on our
terrestrial model, for at least simple life to emerge. Yeah.
Now if you look at that period of time on Earth,

(29:11):
you're not really getting beyond single celled organisms. Yeah. I
mean to put that in perspective, two billion years of
life on Earth was enough to get us from the
deep sevent life to single cell life, you know, be
able to get us to photo since this and atmospheric oxygen.
But you'd need another one point five billion years of
Earth life to get to like multicellular life and sexual reproduction.

(29:34):
So is there based on the Earth model, was their
life on Venus? Maybe? Was there sex on Venus? Probably not,
but maybe maybe? Okay, imagine on Venus for some reason,
life evolves faster. Maybe there's maybe there's a faster mutation
rate something like that. I want to by the end
of this episode, I want to be imagining what it
could have been like if there was fully evolved, intelligent

(29:55):
civilization on Venus that is now just paved over by
volcanic activity, and we and see any trace of it. Well,
it would be a shame, wouldn't that the planet name
for the Goddess of Love would have never known sexual
reproduction it was just all a sexual That would be
a cruel irony. Well, anyway, so we've been exploring this
question of whether whether life could have existed on Venus

(30:17):
in the past, but we should transition to talk about
whether life exists on Venus today. Yeah, because this is
where we really get into the uh, the the imagination
capturing aspects of of of exploring Venus, the idea that
we could send something there, some sort of probe and
discover life like actually harness and study an example of

(30:40):
of life on another world. Now you're probably thinking, no,
wait a second. Earlier, didn't you say that the surface
of Venus had ninety times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere
at the surface and was like five hundred degrees celsius
or like nine hundred degrees fahrenheit. So you may be
thinking skeptically, you're not suggest sting that life exists on

(31:01):
the surface of Venus, or are you? Well, not on
the surface. We've got to get our heads in the clouds.
That's where things become more tolerable, at least in terms
of modern Venus. All right, we will explore that when
we come back from this break. Than alright, we're back.
We've been talking about the conditions on Venus as we
know them today, conditions on Venus in the ancient past,

(31:25):
and the big question was their life on Venus and
is their life on Venus. So we've speculated on the
possibility that there could have been life on Venus in
its ancient oceans, should if they existed. But when we
look at the planet today, the surface again is just
an intolerable hellscape. But when we get up into the clouds,

(31:46):
that's where we start seeing, uh, conditions that makes sense
for life as we know it now, to be fair
to the surface of Venus. Of course, the surface of Venus,
like the surface of Earth, is not exactly the same
from equator to poll right. Yeah. In fact, it has
been proposed that Venus might boast acidic polar seas. Back
in nine seventy, Joseph sec Bach and W. F. Libby

(32:09):
suggested that photosynthetic life could exist in such an environment,
based on experiments with algae grown in pure C O
two under pressure with an acidic nutrient medium at elevated temperatures.
And I mean, we've seen extreme aphile organisms on Earth
that survive in in highly pressurized environments and very very
hot environments, that live in geysers or around geothermal vents.

(32:33):
You know, these are conditions of life that US surface
dwelling land lovers can't really imagine. But certain single telled
organisms are simpler life forms have evolved to specialize in
these types of extreme conditions. They're usually called extreme aphiles.
Now we don't know if that's actually possible in the
surface of Venus. I mean, the surface of Venus is
maybe too extreme for even the most extreme extreme of

(32:54):
file you can imagine. But the tolerances of life, if
you expand your definition of life so far beyond what
you might imagine just looking at the life forms that
inhabit You're nearby forests, are looking into a tide pool. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, certainly when you start looking at a deep
hydrothermal vent uh environments, you start looking at the creatures
that thrive there. It does shift your expectations a little.

(33:18):
And then also when you get outside of because when
you look at those vents. I think one of the
things about deep hydrothermal vent environments that are really captivating
is you get to see things like the hoff crab,
you know, the it's not really a crab, it's more
a variety of lobster. But these pale crustaceans that that
swarm around these vents. UM Like that captures our imagination

(33:38):
because we can say we can look at that and
we can say, okay, it's a crab, it's an animal. Uh,
I can I can relate to that more. But when
you're just breaking it down to to to to microbes
and simpler life forms, then it's um, it's it's life,
but it's not the it's not the kind of of
life that we necessarily dream about discovering on other worlds.

(34:00):
I'm sorry I haven't heard your last couple of sentences, Robert,
because you got me googling half crabs. Yeah, the half
crabs are incredible. There's like squat little lobster creatures. It
looks like a mountain of skulls. Is like on a
mountain of skulls in the Castle of Pain, I sat
on a throne of blood. Yeah, basically they're there. If
you look at pictures of these guys, they're jocking position

(34:22):
for their jocking for position in order to get closest
to the superheated water, because that's where they're going to find. Uh,
the little creatures that they eat. This is crazy. I've
never seen that. Well anyway, I'm sorry, but yes, yes,
I should acknowledge your point. The more willing we are
to think of organisms less and less inherently like us,
the farther out into the extremes of of physics and

(34:45):
of nature, that life can extend. Yeah, as they said earlier,
we really have to look at the clouds that the
the atmosphere of Venus. That is where you can get
away from those hellish surface conditions and you encounter conditions
that are are far more in line with what we
typically think of as life sustaining conditions. Grinspoon has written

(35:06):
a number of papers on this. He points out that
there are pockets of Venus that you quote can't completely
rule out his habitats for life based on what we know,
and in particular, the clouds of Venus are really interesting
environments because unlike the surface, they are not particularly hot,
and they are a continuous and sort of chemically and
energetically lively environment in terms of the sort of availability

(35:29):
of possible nutrients and availability of energy sources and liquid
media and the biogenic elements. And he also pointed out
this is this I found super interesting. In his book
Venus Revealed, he proposed that a photosynthetic pigment may serve
as the quote unknown ultra violent absorber. Uh. And this

(35:51):
is this is what may represent one of four possible
signs of life on Venus, along with absorption of solar
energy by micro organisms as a driving force for super rotation,
the presence of larger and irregularly shaped cloud particles that
maybe quote unquote creatures, and the presence of of bright
radar signatures on the mountaintops which may be covered with life.

(36:12):
So that's another thing to keep in mind when you're
talking about the hellish surface of Venus. There are there
are peaks, there are places that are gonna be be
elevated from the from the truly like pressure cooker environment
that you find find lower down. Absolutely, and I think
in your talk with the Susanne Smurkar she also mentioned

(36:34):
that the cloud environments of Venus could host microbes, right, yeah. Yeah.
The interesting thing is this isn't crazy, Like we don't
often stop to consider this, but here on Earth life
is actually not confined strictly to the surface of the
planet and the water that's beneath the oceans. You know.
Of course, we know we've got flying birds and so forth,
but there's plenty of evidence that if you were to

(36:55):
fly up up into the clouds and sort of take
a bite out of a cloud, you would probably end
up with some life forms in your mouth. Yeah, breathe deep, yeah,
dirty clouds. Uh. There's a great article by Leslie Evans
Ogden called Life in the Clouds in the October issue
of Bioscience. Uh. This is a fun read and it
talks about clouds full of bacterium called Pseudomonas syringe a.

(37:21):
It's bacteria that seemed to float up into the clouds
and perhaps spur ice nucleation, which gives them enough weight
to come falling back down to the surface. And the
article discusses the idea that micro organisms living in clouds
might play a major role in weather and rain cycles
on Earth, and this is known as the bio precipitation theory. Yeah,
people often forget that when you're dealing with drops, the precipitation, rain, snow, frost,

(37:45):
et cetera. It has to form around something, it has
to condense around something. There has to be a starting point,
and that point can be a microbe. Yeah and yeah,
and so it's obviously the case that with very light microbes,
they contend to be boy within the atmosphere. Like a
turbulent air current can churn up a bunch of dust
that has microbes living within it, and that can get

(38:07):
sent up into the atmosphere. And suddenly you are a
macro organism that is miles above the ground and you're
up here in the cloud. How are you going to
get back down to a place that's better for you
in terms of reproduction, because the upper atmosphere of Earth
is probably not a good home for micro organisms on
a permanent basis. Right high up in the atmosphere is
often very cold, it can be very dry. You can

(38:29):
get desiccated if you're a cellular organism that needs liquid water,
and there's exposure to high levels of UV radiation from
the sun, which of course can burn your life away.
But it's a great plate way to get from one
place to the other. Right, it's kind of like when
humans fly up into the upper atmosphere. It's it's it's
about getting from one point on the surface to another

(38:50):
point on the surface. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. It's
been sort of hypothesized that what if air currents like
the jet stream in a way, can could function to
train in support interesting bacterial mutations from one population of
of bacteria somewhere to another, sort of like a gene
conveyor belt. But even if it is useful for for

(39:12):
the genetic diversity of a bacterial population around the world,
like that, microorganisms that travel in the Earth's clouds don't
generally want to live there forever. But Venus's atmosphere is
actually not the same as Earth's, as we've been discussing,
and despite how hostile Venus is, in many ways, Venus's
atmosphere might be a better place for organisms than Earth's atmosphere.

(39:34):
Organisms that might dwell within it, of course, are also
different from the organisms that live on Earth and might
make their living in a different biochemical way. So, Robert,
you mentioned a paper earlier by Sanjay Lemia at all,
the one that's in astrobiology this year, and that the
earlier thing that we talked about from that paper was
the conclusion that Venus might have had oceans for two

(39:55):
billion years, which you give plenty of time for organisms
to possibly evolve there. But the authors of this paper
also talk about the possibility that there are organisms living
in the clouds of Venus today, just like a grinspoon
is talking about. So the authors note that there are
lots of good reasons to look for life forms in
the lower cloud layer of Venus, which is about forty

(40:16):
seven point five to fifty point five kilometers from the surface. Now,
if you look at this layer of the atmosphere, it's
got very moderate temperatures roughly sixty degrees celsius, which is
about a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit. It's got moderate pressure,
it's like one Earth atmosphere roughly, it's got moderate radiation exposure.
They write that the UV levels in the upper atmosphere

(40:38):
of Venus are probably similar to the UV levels of
the archaean Earth's surface, where of course we know micro
organisms thrived without being destroyed by radiation, and they mentioned
that it has quote micron sized sulfuric acid aerosols, which
are water droplets containing sulfuric acid dispersed throughout the clouds. Yeah. Really,
when you when you think about it, the the atmosphere

(41:01):
of Venus is kind of it's more it's more like
the surface of Earth in many respects, you know, uh,
or at least what we thought without a ground. Yes,
but but really when you when you think of Earth, though,
I think of the fact when if you're dealing with
the hard surface of Earth, most of the hard surface
of Earth is a is it is it is a cold,

(41:22):
lightless desert environment. Uh, that is underneath the ocean. That's
a very good point. Maybe you should think about the
atmosphere of Venus being less like the atmosphere of Earth
and more like the waters of the oceans on Earth.
But anyway, all of this that we've been saying so
far is just to the point that it's not impossible
that there could be microorganisms living within the clouds in Venus.

(41:45):
You know, there there are some favorable conditions. Are there
any positive reasons to think that there might be organisms there. Well,
this comes back to the unknown you the absorber that
we talked about earlier. Right, So there's this thing that
we have observed embedded within the Venusian clouds. So let
me think that, Yeah, there could be alien bacteria in
the clouds and and when we were looking at the

(42:08):
unknown UV absorber, this could be it. So NASA has
studied the unknown UVY absorber for some time and basically
we're talking about an atmospheric anomaly that where we see
UV light being absorbed by something. Right. In general, Venus
is highly reflective. It's a bright planet, like it shines
things back out into space when the sun shines on it,

(42:30):
and the clouds that surround it reflect a lot of sunlight.
But there is this weird, mysterious UV absorption then creating
this contrast within the clouds. They're dark patches and patterns
within the reflective clouds. And the question is what could
that be? Now we can say what it almost certainly
is not. It's not going to be say, giant atmospheric

(42:51):
like Manta rays or anything like that. You know, it's
not going to be space whales in the atmosphere of Venus. Uh.
But it could potentially be like clouds of microorganisms, like
colonies of microorganisms, kind of uh, you know, not not
to exaggerated too much, but kind of like the krill
of Venus, but with no whales coming around to scoop
them up. No, that's a very very good point of comparison, actually, people,

(43:14):
in fact, the scientists who worked on this have compared
it to the way you would look at algal blooms
and bodies of water here on Earth. Uh. That that's
a good point of comparison because one of the most
interesting things about these dark patches is that they have
this kind of shimmering, moving kind of quality to them. Uh.
A quote from Lemo which he gave in a uh

(43:35):
in a press releases, he said, quote, Venus shows some
episodic dark sulfuric rich patches which contrasts up to thirty
in the ultra violet and muted in longer wavelengths. These
patches persist for days, changing their shape and contrasts continuously
and appear to be scale dependent. So yeah, they're they've

(43:55):
got this weird dynamic quality to them, just like a
bloom of organism in ocean water. Might. Now I know
some of you are probably remembering, well, you said that
there are sulphuric acid clouds up there. How is life
thriving up there? What? One of the points that the
lamait makes is that, well, if you consider the fact
that life on Earth as we know it can thrive
in acidic conditions, that it can feed on CO two

(44:17):
and produce sulphuric acid. Uh, it all lines up with
the environments that we we we know to exist in
the in the atmosphere of Venus. Yeah. Now, to be clear,
we're not saying that this is evidence that there is definitely,
you know, life in the clouds of Venus. It's just
that there's a lot of interesting evidence that would line
up with their being patches of micro organisms in the

(44:40):
clouds of Venus that are making their living this way. Now,
there there are other options too. It could be chemical, right,
maybe you've got patches of sulfur dioxide and iron chloride
absorbing u V in the atmosphere. But that doesn't necessarily
seem to explain everything we observe, at least not to
Lama and the co co authors. So there are these
light absorbing particles dispersed in clouds, and we don't know

(45:02):
for sure what they are. The idea that their microorganisms
is a very elegant and exciting hypothesis. But is there
any way we could test this to see if it's true?
There is, uh, And we should note we haven't gotten
detested because anything we've sent through has just has not
has not had the the the equipment, or or it

(45:23):
has not spent the necessary amount of time in the atmosphere.
But there is at least one really awesome proposal for
studying the atmosphere of Venus, and it involves Shatner. No,
it involves vamps. Vamps. Yes, and by vamps I don't
mean the space vampires of of our favorite Toby Hooper

(45:43):
movie Life for Life Force. Yes. Oh I thought you
were gonna say Planet of the Vampires. No, No, it
doesn't involve those space vampires either, though that is that
is also a good one. Man. I love Planet of
the Vampires. They've got the best space suits, and they do.
They're so style leather space suits. But this this is
pretty stylish too. I think, if if you'll, if you'll

(46:03):
allow me here to discuss the venous atmospheric maneuverable platform
or vamp please do Robert, which is a proposed Northrop
Grumman planetary exploration vehicle, and you should you used to
look up images of this at home. It looks kind
of like a flying wing, which is interesting considering that
Northrop Grumman made the original flying wing aircraft, the experimental

(46:26):
y B thirty five and YB forty nine, the former
with propellers the ladder with the jets uh from the
from the mid to late nineteen forties. I don't think
I know what those are? What are what are they like?
They essentially imagine a big boomerang as a nineteen forties bomber,
and that's what you have with the YB thirty five
and the YP forty nine. These are military air yes, yeah,

(46:46):
they were designed to be big bombers, and Northrop Grumman
later came back and did the B two Spirit stealth bomber.
So if you've seen images of the stealth bomber, then
you have seen a flying wing aircraft. Yeah. So they
really like the idea of a of a flying wing.
And in fact, this the VAMPS concept involves sending one

(47:06):
to Venus, So we're talking about a propeller driven flying
wing UH type of craft. That's solar powered and also
semi buoyant, So it's kind of a blimp plane hybrid,
but it's a prop plane in Venus. Yeah. Yeah, it's
a prop plane. That's this. Yeah. I love the idea
that that one day we could have a propeller driven

(47:28):
vehicle in the atmosphere of Venus. Uh. It would have
about a hundred and eighty foot or fifty five wing span,
It would fly at a mac speed of about thirty
per second or sixty seven miles per hour, and that
it's desired altitude would would be something about fifty to
seventy kilometers or thirty to forty five miles above the
hard surface of the planet. All right, So that would

(47:49):
put it within access to that nice range that La
Maya and colleagues were talking about, right. I should also
point out that this is what's categorized as a lifting
entry atmospheric flight system or a LEAF system, which has
also been proposed for explorations on Mars and Titan. Uh.
But here's here's just a quote from the material that

(48:12):
North of Grumman has on the VAMP project. The VAMP
is quote, an aeroshell less hypersonic entry vehicle that transitions
to a semi buoyant, maneuverable solar powered air vehicle for
flight in Venus's atmosphere. So it's an atmospheric rover and
it could last for up to a year in Venus's atmosphere,
just flying through the upper and mid cloud layers, equipped

(48:35):
with with with the atmospheric sampling equipment, including equipment that
could help us determine if there are signs of microbial
life within the skies of Venus. Loving this for multiple reasons.
Number one, I of course always just love good space exploration.
Uh and and let's look for life. Come on. But
on top of that, since it's a prop plane, I'm

(48:57):
imagining it's got to also have a surly mechanic with
a big wrench sticking out of the overalls. That's like
working on it. Yeah, one would imagine, um but kind
of yellow and sulfur stand right. Yeah. I do have
to point out that it's very early days still for
for VAMP, but it is one of the options. It's
very much on the table for future exploration of Venus.

(49:21):
I like it, man, Yeah, And until we send something
like that, we just we can't say for certain. When
it comes to the question of microbial life in the
clouds there. Well, I guess we'll just have to wait
and see. No, wait, we don't have to just wait
and see what we can We can publicly encourage space exploration.
Come on now, yeah, yeah, Now. Earlier on we were
talking about the possibility of life in Venus and you

(49:42):
you want to step further, and you said, well, what
about intelligent life? Now, I know that's kind of hard
to imagine because let's say, according to these predictions based
on the papers we've been talking about today, that maybe
Venus had oceans for two billion years before the runaway
greenhouse effect killed all that we know from experience in
the history of the Earth that two billion years of

(50:04):
access to oceans is not enough time to evolve complex
multicellular organisms with brains and the ability to build civilizations
and all that. But let's just imagine things went different
there for some reason. Maybe evolution happened faster. We don't know. Um,
what would things be like if say, you have an
intelligent civilization on a planet, maybe at the level of

(50:26):
technological achievement that human civilization is at right now, and
you realize all your scientists tell you, okay, we've got
runaway greenhouse effect going on. We've got a couple hundred
years before things get intolerable on the surface of this planet.
What are you gonna do? And I wonder, well what
could be done? I mean, is that just definitely the

(50:47):
end for the species? Or can you somehow try to
come up with some sustainable way to retreat to the
subterranean realm? Can you get can you get geothermal power? Uh?
You know, I don't know, making lightbulbs for you to
grow plants down there? I just like wonder what's possible?
How long can you survive on a planet that doesn't
want to host life on its surface anymore? Oh? Wow?

(51:10):
I mean, well, this is this is a wonderful sci
fi question. And in fact, you have some some fairly
old works that kind of explored a bit there. The
old William Hope Hodgson book The Night Lands. Oh. I
haven't read that. It's um it's tremendous work of early
essentially post apocalyptic literature in which the earth has grown dark.

(51:32):
It's it's the night Lands now. And there's this place
called the Last Red Doubt, and so it's like a
pyramid and artificial uh structure created by humans and it's
powered by hydrothermal power. And this is where essentially the
last remnants of humanity have have have assembled themselves and

(51:52):
tried to sort of hold on to life against the
darkness and the cold. Sounds bleak, Robert, it's pretty bleak.
It's it's it's kind gorgeous in its own way. But well,
but we're talking about oblique concept. We're talking about a
life form losing its environment and having to adapt to
some sort of new take on life, either by retreating

(52:13):
into the darkness or finding a way to live up
in the clouds. Yeah. And then of course this is
premised on the idea that if the scientists of Venusian
civilization did come to them and say, look, we've only
got a couple hundred years before, you know, it's too
hot to live on this planet anymore, would people actually
pay attention to them and do anything right? It would
kind of depend on what's the lifespan of of of

(52:33):
the Venusian uh beings here. If it's like humans, then
if when you tell a human all right, we need
to do something because something bad happens in two hundred years,
they're going to say, well, I'm not going to be
alive for that, right, what's what's happening tomorrow? What's happening, Uh,
the week after next, what's happening maybe next year? Because
we as a species don't have a great track record

(52:54):
for long term planning, we can maybe think maybe thinking
to the next generation, if we're being generous. Uh. So,
I don't think the human model, uh leaves much hope
for for what a Venusian life form might have accomplished. Yeah,
you can imagine there was a lot of oh, these
you know, runaway greenhouse effect alarmists. Yeah, yeah, or two

(53:18):
hundred years. Well, in the next generation, they'll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah,
the technology will come online and they'll just fix everything. Uh.
And while they're off chatting about it, the the oceans
boil away, and then they boil away as well. But
maybe a few are able to crawl down into their crips,
you know, and maybe a few were able to make
it up into their cloud cities. I don't know if

(53:38):
they can keep the others from from dragging them out
or dragging them back down. I guess this maybe deserves
a whole episode. Someday we should come back and examine
the idea of how long could a say, an ecosystem
be maintained purely in a subterranean existence. Could you go
on indefinitely if you had incoming energy sources? Yeah. I

(53:59):
love talking about subterranean life, so that would be a
great topic to discuss in the meantime. Uh, we thank
everybody for joining us on this trip to Venus and
UH if you if you enjoy this episode, let us know,
let us know what other planets, so, what other moons
even you would like us to explore in future episodes.

(54:19):
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(54:40):
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(55:04):
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