Team:Stanford-Brown/VenusLife/Introduction

Life in the Clouds

With acid rain of pH 0 and blistering winds that can melt lead, the surface of Venus is hellish, and one of the most hostile places for life. However, during the earlier years of the Solar System, when the sun was cooler and the greenhouse effect hadn’t run away, Venus potentially housed oceans and thus possibly life. As the planet warmed, such microbes could have retreated into hospitable niches in the atmosphere. Today, these temperate pockets of air, 50 kilometers above the raging hell below, might serve as reservoirs for life.

Our project seeks to explore life at the extremes, to theorize whether microbial communities might indeed persist in the Venusian atmosphere. We’re looking at life in the clouds: Are aerosols viable microbial environments, to not only survive but also thrive in? Already life is found in clouds here on Earth: Fungal spores and bacteria all have been found floating in the atmosphere. Starting with three of these most prevalent organisms—Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Bacillus subtilis, and Pseudomonas syringae—we plan suspend them in aerosol using a modified Milikan Drop Aparatus and test for reproduction using fluorescent tags.

If reproduction proves viable, the conditions of nutrients, acidity, and temperature will be increased to simulate Venus, with the goal to hopeful test whether life—terrestrially engineered or extraterrestrially evolved—could possibly live on the Evening Star.