Hi, Ira here, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Dr. Sarah Seeger has made a career out of looking for signs of life in outer space,

searching for exoplanets thousands of light years away.

But now Dr. Seeger has come home, sort of.

She has turned her attention to our neighbor, the planet Venus.

At first, it would seem like an unlikely place to look for life. Its surface temperature is hot

enough to melt lead. It has a smothering carbon dioxide atmosphere, all topped off with

sulfuric acid clouds. But Dr. Seeger thinks it might be possible for some form of life to survive there,

not on the planet's surface, but up in those clouds.

Dr. Sarah Seeger is an astrophysicist, planetary scientist in MIT,

and part of a team leading a proposed series of missions to Venus to sample

those clouds for evidence of life. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira. You know,

when I list the conditions on Venus, life doesn't seem likely. The idea that life might exist in

the clouds there, where does that come from and why are you hopeful about that?

Well, first, the way you listed what it's like in the Venus atmosphere, it doesn't sound too friendly to me either.

So, yes.

Well, when we think about what life requires, if we want to truly boil down to the fundamentals, there's just a few things. One is

temperature, the right temperature for covalent bonds, so complex molecules as a kind like needs to use can

form. The second is energy. And of course, there's energy from the sun on Venus. And the third is a

liquid environment, liquid so that chemical reactions can happen.

So if you just boil it down to that, Venus does have what we require. And although the surface,

as you pointed out, is so hot, hot enough to melt lead, just like here on Earth, if you hike up a

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