Meanwhile on Venus...

 

“O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams

That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell,

How glorious once above thy sphere.”

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Life on Mars may be harsh, both for the native lifeforms as well as the astronauts, but it might be helpful to remind ourselves that it could always be worse. And to observe such an example, one has to look no farther than Venus. Although Earth’s twin teems with life, as we had long suspected, none of it consists of nubile Amazons, as your average Hollywood director had hoped, for no human life can persist on this foreboding planet without external protection.

The first realization that Venus was not the steaming jungle world of old science fiction came with the first pictures returned by the Soviet Venera 4 probe, which landed on the surface and returned pictures of only a baked, dry volcanic landscape, with temperatures approaching 400 Kelvin (Kuzmin 1974, p. 46). The big surprise then came when Venera 5 penetrated the atmosphere. Piercing into the opaque clouds of water vapor and sulphuric acid, which had long obstructed earth-based astronomers’ view of the surface, the probe was surprisingly halted by something before it could land on the surface. It had crashed on a giant biological structure, a floating reef of vegetation and other sessile organisms suspended in the atmosphere by balloon-like growths. The atmosphere of Venus has 92 times the mass of that of Earth, making flying more like swimming, despite the fairly earth-like gravity. Life here seems to have taken advantage of this, fleeing the deteriorating surface conditions by creating a new home in the sky. And quite successfully, it seems, for the biodiversity in these air reefs seems to rival that of comparable ecosystems on Earth. Some of these communities can grow large enough that it has been postulated they were the basis for the “Venus spokes” Percival Lowell allegedly saw and mistook for surface features. These reflective reefs, along with endless microbial clouds, also heighten the planet's global albedo to counteract the extreme greenhouse effect of the carbon dioxide atmosphere. Without them, it was calculated, the temperature on the surface might otherwise rise to 737 Kelvin, a number so ridiculous, many question the methodology of the study in question (Gardé 2298). But life in the clouds is all but heavenly. Ravenous floating and flying predators scour the skies in search of prey, acid rain is frequent and large hurricanes can splinter reefs into tiny pieces.

Eventually all life in the sky succumbs to these strains and, more often than not, their remains fall onto the hellish surface. After the first Venera probes, it was thought that no life remains here. Not only is it too hot for most life as we know it, the air pressure is also comparable to what one might feel a kilometre down in Earth’s oceans. Most of the surface also showed signs of volcanic resurfacing only a few hundred million years ago. At best, it was imagined, there were maybe a few extremophile microorganisms existing in the boiling lowland lakes and seas, which are only kept liquid by the extreme air pressure. That plant and animal life still has a foothold on the ground, specifically the highland tessera regions, where the altitude makes the 80° Celsius temperatures somewhat amenable, was discovered only by accident. The first to unintentionally meet and study this habitat was astronaut Daniel Flammarion, who famously and rather miraculously survived 4 years alone on the planet. After his maintenance mission to man the vacant ESA Skylab-1 in the Venusian clouds crashed during atmospheric entry, he was the only survivor and thought dead by the rest of the world. Ingeniously he managed to make it to the skylab and, salvaging what he could, was able to maintain the habitat by himself and even grow his own food for a time. He came across macroscopic surface life as he searched the summit of Maxwell Montes with a robotic drone he repaired in order to find useable material from the crashed landing ship. Among his reports were strange, crystalline and lithic plants, often with a metallic shine and radiator-like features. The one large animal he reported he called a “fish with stilt-legs”. Said organism had a large head with three mineralized eyes and a backwards-protruding jaw-hinge, much like a pelican eel or other deep sea fish. Its body seems to have been covered in a tough skin and it appears to have walked on inanimate, stilt-like organs, whose shimmer suggested they were possibly constructed out of a form of non-conducting biometal to make as little contact with the scorching soil as possible. The large sail Flammarion interpreted as a radiator-like feature, much like in the plants, to expel excess body heat. Not much is otherwise known about this organism, other than that Flammarion observed it dining on the corpse of a fallen angel (as he mockingly called it), whose body had been cooked and steamed by the intense heat and nearby volcanic fissures spewing out dangerous gases. It would be fascinating to observe this organism’s physiology up close and find out how it keeps its proteins from denaturing in these temperatures, but alas, Flammarion had no time or resources for an in-depth study. If brought up to the floating human facilities, the organism would also inevitably die from the pressure difference. Some things are maybe best left alone.

References:

• Flammarion, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe on Venus, Zürich 2345.
• Gardé, Etienne: Venus without Life. Modelling the planetary effects of biospheres, in: Astrobiology Magazine, 765, 2298, p. 567 – 578.
• Kuzmin, A.D.: Physics of the Planet Venus, Moscow 1974.