Venus clouds are too dry to sustain life as we know it

The Venus clouds, comprised mainly of sulfuric acid, are much less water and acidic than even the most severe forms of life on Earth could live. This is based on a recent examination of the atmosphere’s habitability. This finding places a damper on the latest signs of life.

The hazardous clouds of Venus revealed a substance called phosphine by the team of Jane Greaves of cardiff university, UK, in 2020. On Earth, phosphines are a by-product of life, and the researchers couldn’t come up with another way of creating it on Venus.

A new study by John Hallsworth and his colleagues at Queen’s Belfast University, UK, based on a mix of laboratory tests and findings from tests sent to Venus in the late 1970s and earlier 1980s, however, suggests that life in these clouds might not be conceivable.

They based the finding on water activity estimations in the droplets of clouds, which was similar to moisture. It would have an activity of 1 pure liquid water and complete dryness would have a value of 0. They have detected less than 0,004 water activity in the clouds of Venus, mainly because acid is lower in a droplet.

Hallsworth noted in a press conference: this is a 100-fold lower water concentration needed by the most hardy bacteria on earth. “It is a long way from what life needs to be active.”

He remarked that in a region that is arid, there would be membranes that hold cells together. “Even Venus wouldn’t have the most dry-tolerant microbium on earth.”

A Earth microbe obviously doesn’t have to be tough enough for Venus to live. “The extreme circumstances of the clouds on Venus are literally nowhere on earth,” said Janusz Petkowski of the Institute of Technology of Massachusetts.

“These clouds are more than 100 times drier than the desert of Atacama, the driest on Earth.”
It is plausible that there might be life in Venus, which is harder than here, or that creatures, unlike all life that we know, cannot be founded on water at all.

Clara Sousa-Silva of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics states that “no earthly existence — even with the most robust extremophiles — would be simple to spend.” “We don’t know, however, what are universal biological laws.” We don’t know how to discover life not like Earth, either. Unfortunately.

While the prospect of life in the Venus clouds is not so good, there may yet be a ray of hope. “Venus cloud droplets are very uncertain in their acidity,” explains Greaves. “The conditions are probably not even — as is the case on Earth — so that parts of the clouds may be more advantageous than other groups.”

In the next decade or more, three missions are due to start in Venus, which can assist uncover the clouds’ enigma. If life is not like Earthly life, these missions will not be in a position to discover it, but they will be in a position to determine whether the earth’s life can stand an opportunity in the sparkling environment.