Scientists Just Proved That Life Could Exist on the Most Inhospitable Planet in Our Solar System

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In 2020, scientists detected phosphine in the cloudy upper atmosphere of Venus, kickstarting conversations about the possibility of microbial life in this mild-yet-acidic environment.

Subsequent studies have shown that many of life’s building blocks, including nucleic acid bases, dipeptides, and amino acids, are stable in an acidic environment, but DNA also needs a structural backbone.

A new study analyzes whether cyclopentanes—five-membered ring structures resembling DNA—could make Venus a plausible candidate in the search for life beyond Earth.

When it comes to searching for life beyond Earth, our very own Solar System has some pretty good candidates. Evidence of ancient life on Mars is looking more and more probable, and scientists are exploring the potential for life in a protected pocket of our stellar neighborhood that we’ve yet to deeply investigate. For one, Europa (the fourth-largest moon of Jupiter) contains a vast ocean beneath its icy surface that may have the perfect ingredients for life—and if so, NASA’s Europa Clipper will hopefully provide a definitive confirmation when it reaches the moon in 2030. For another, recently analyzed data from the Cassini space probe, which swan song-ed into Saturn’s atmosphere in September of 2017, allowed scientists to discover organic compounds in the icy jets of Enceladus (the sixth-largest moon of Saturn).

However, little thought has been given to Earth’s closest neighbor, Venus—and for good reason. Venus’s extremely thick atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, which superheats the planet’s surface to a sweltering average temperature of around 464 ºC (867 ºF) and creates air pressure some 92 times higher than what exists on Earth at sea level. In other words, you don’t want to be on Venus.

But what about above it?

A team of scientists from MIT have been slowly piecing together an understanding of the possibility that life’s building blocks could survive in Venus’s atmosphere. After all, the upper atmosphere can experience temperatures around 0 to 50 ºC—a much more moderate thermal experience than the roiling hellscape below.

Subsequent studies have shown that organic reactions can occur spontaneously in sulfuric acid from simple starting materials (i.e. carbon monoxide), and follow-up studies from MIT confirmed that life’s building blocks—including nucleic acid bases, dipeptides, and amino acid—are also stable in a similarly acidic environment.

Now, in a new study published in the journal Molecules, MIT researchers searched for sophisticated molecular structures (with a special focus on complex polymers) that resist degradation in sulfuric acid. Specifically, the team examined a cyclopentane motif as a stand-in for the deoxyribose linkers (five-membered ring structures) that serve as the structural background of DNA.

“Life requires far more sophisticated molecular structures—particularly complex polymers—to perform biological functions. In particular, the need for genetic polymers with functional and structural properties similar to RNA and DNA seems to be the universal requirement for life, regardless of life’s underlying chemistry,” the authors wrote. “Identifying genetic polymers that resist degradation in concentrated sulfuric acid becomes a critical step to study the possibility of life in environments where sulfuric acid is a dominant liquid.”

The team found that cyclopentane does in fact serve as a suitable replacement for deoxyribose among some nucleic acid bases. This finding provides a compelling motive for a possible mission to explore the atmosphere of Venus, especially following the 2020 detection of phosphine in Venusian clouds, given that phosphine is a biosignature of anaerobic life on Earth. The slow piecing together of what microbial life might look like on Venus is quickly making the hellish planet a surprisingly viable candidate for exploration.

“Although complex organic chemistry does not equate to life, its presence in a planetary environment provides an essential prerequisite for the possibility of life,” the authors wrote. “Our experiments aim to identify at least one robust candidate for a genetic-like polymer that could potentially persist in the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus in order to motivate space missions to search in situ in the Venusian atmosphere for signs of life or life itself.”

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