Venutian surface 800 deg F and above, so no life as we know it. Is it possible that below the surface, temps could be lower, enough to support some type of life?
In awe of your collective wisdom (walking backwards while bowing profusely).
From my non-astrophysicisit perspective, it’s hard to see how. Why would the interior be cooler? Usually, it gets hotter as you dig into the Earth, for example. Do we know the interior temperature of Venus?
Nope. The interior just gets hotter as you go down. There’s still no liquid water.
The clouds, however, are a different story. Surprisingly enough, at an altitude of about of 55 km above the surface, the pressure is just a hair under 1 atm, and the temperature is about room temperature! The clouds are composed of droplets of liquid water.
Er . . . oh yeah . . . and sulfuric acid.
But hey, extremophile bacteria on Earth life under some pretty weird conditions, too.
Life getting started in the first place would seem to be a trick. There is no primordial soup on Venus.
Ah, but Venus is struck by meteorites that originiate on Earth. They could easily bear intact bacterial spores. Not vaporizing them in the atmopshere would be the real trick, but like the sulfuric acid, this is a mere detail! Detail, I say!
Disclaimer: I’m not actually arguing for the presence of life in the atmosphere of Venus. I did read an abstract a couple of years back the claimed that there is some sort of non-equilibrium chemical situation in the venerean clouds that could indicate the presence of life, but IANAAstrobiologist, and I haven’t heard any follow-up on that. I just think it’s keen idea. Perhaps Venus does not have lush jungles filled with bizaare alien creatures, but a few germs floating around the cloud tops? That’d be pretty exciting.
Our standards have changed since the 50’s.
The To’ul’hs (my illustration) live in the clouds of a world somewhat like Venus;
but our own sister planet is unlikely to have anything more sophisticated than cloudborne algae displaced from Earth.
Could we tell if it was earth algae or indigeneous algae from the DNA? I suppose that’s a difficult question to answer since we’ve never seen alien DNA.
Sure. If it doesn’t use DNA, it’s alien. If it uses DNA and has a different codon table, it’s alien. All earth life uses this table to translate DNA to RNA, but there’s little reason to believe that an alien lifeform would evolve the identical code.
rather: to translate DNA (RNA) to Protein
Thanks Squink. Assuming alien life does exist and that it does have DNA, I guess terrestrial evolution of DNA is likely to be highly unique because of a combination of unique terrestrial evolutionary forces and sheer chance?