Hey, Venus!

I need a break from asinine political stories and personal accounts of sleep deprivation... how about a genuinely exciting news item? Scientists have found possible signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus! Venus has long been considered a Hell World, with surface temperatures of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit (465 degrees Celsius) due to a runaway greenhouse effect. The atmosphere is largely toxic to life as we know it- with clouds of sulfuric acid at crushing atmospheric pressure. Life, though, finds a way... even here on Earth, there are microorganisms which thrive in conditions hostile to human life. Perhaps the upper layers of Venus' atmosphere harbor life, which is what the discovery of phosphine gas through spectrographic analysis seems to suggest. If these traces of phospine are of biological origin, this is the discovery of the millennium- the existence of extraterrestrial life. Finding life in such an extreme environment would further push the boundaries of our understanding of life itself... such organisms would have to possess a biochemistry radically different from that of terrestrial organisms. The corrosive effects of sulphuric acid, so prevalent in the atmosphere of Venus, are dramatic, and rapid. A decade ago, I jocularly proposed a plan to terraform Venus using dirigibles which could house photosynthesizing cyanobacteria, thereby introducing terrestrial organisms to the less hostile precincts of Venus. If Venusian life exists, I have to rethink the ethics of such a project. This bit of nerdery was a welcome respite from the stupidity of the present political climate, which is every bit as corrosive as that of Venus. Another welcom respite is turning up the volume on the song from which I cribbed the post title: I still wouldn't want to have to write an ad campaign for travel to the planet, though