Are we Alone in the Universe?

“We’re not saying we discovered life on Venus,” says Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yet, scientists before her would wish otherwise. In Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision,” (1950), Venus was confirmed to be hot and uninhabitable with sulfuric clouds. 

Carl Sagan, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in 1960, along with Harold Morowitz, a biochemist at Yale, found that while Venus was a desert on the ground, the clouds proved to be more hospitable at forty degrees Fahrenheit. “If small amounts of minerals are stirred up to the clouds from the surface, it is by no means difficult to imagine an indigenous biology in the clouds of Venus,” they wrote. 

David Grinspoon, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, continues this argument by pointing to new studies that concluded Venus may have lost its oceans fairly recently - about 700 million years ago. This amount of time would have allowed life on the planet to evolve and adapt to the settings of the clouds. 

The work of Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astronomer at the Technical University Berlin, and Dr. Seager and her team, offer a proposal as to how life is sustained on Venus. Microbes floating in the clouds could be covered in cyclooctasulfur which would essentially act as a sunscreen and convert ultraviolet light into visible light for photosynthesis to take place. As microbes collide and merge, more microbes would metabolize and divide. Once the sulfur around the microbes gets heavy, it would rain down. However, the acid would evaporate before reaching the ground, therefore leaving the microbes dry. These dried out spores would be light enough to be carried back into the clouds on currents of gravity waves, where they would act as seeds and restart the cycle. 

Already, plans are being made to visit our sister planet and search for life. NASA and other space organizations are looking to get to Venus and Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Foundation, known for granting scientists millions, has already announced that it will fund research towards discovering Venusian life. Astronomers Andreas Hein and Manasvi Lingam have even proposed a balloon mission that could launch in 2022 if it receives proper financing. The balloon would float into the level of Venus’s atmosphere in which the phosphine was detected and collect data. This data would then be sent back to Earth using a radio antenna. 

Are we alone in the universe? The answer is we don’t know - yet. Lack of proper technology to visit other planets and conduct research limit what we know about the world outside our planet. But whether we find life in the next ten years or the next hundred, it would be a groundbreaking discovery and launch a new era in space science.