One of the weirdest places in our Solar System may actually be a great place to search for alien life: the skies of Venus.
We don’t have evidence of life — or even indisputable evidence that life could survive — in any world but the one we currently live in. However, recent years have raised the tantalizing prospect that our Solar System, in which we thought we were alone, may be dotted with diverse, and deeply weird, homes for life: In dark water beneath the ice of Europa and Enceladus, in briny underground refugia on Mars, and even drifting in the acidic clouds of Venus.
“If it had liquid water in the past, and if we can really confirm that, then yes – Venus would likely be the planet I would place my bet on,” University of Wisconsin-Madison planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye tells Inverse.
Limaye and his colleagues, along with several other teams of researchers, presented their work in a recent collection of papers in the journal Astrobiology.
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