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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

There is a possibly habitable layer (for non-extremophiles) in the atmosphere of Venus. Microbes live in Earth's atmosphere.

This of course does not account for other differences such as the rate at which microbes are transported into Earth's atmosphere, and whether that possibly habitable layer on Venus is stable enough to sustain a population.

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That layer of Venus’ atmosphere isn’t habitable even for Earth extremeophiles. It’s true that the pressure and temperature are similar to that of the Earth, but the only water there is contained in droplets of nearly pure sulfuric acid. No known extremeophiles can survive that.

true, but no extremeophiles had the environment similar to Venus to evolve the ability to survive in it.

That is true and could be a way for anthropogenic panspermia to occur. My totally uneducated gut feeling is that the chemists and geologists are going to get more out of this finding than the biologists though. Theres a lot of cool rocks and an atmosphere full of SO2 (a pretty decent reducing agent) on venus - and abiogenic phosphenes are found in other parts of the solar system. Some chemical reaction with perhaps some recently expelled volcanic ash (there was recent evidence that it might still have active volcanic activity right?) seems more plausible than life, but hey, thats why we have experiments to see if the unlikely is true after all!

I know this would be tough and take a long time but we could have 2 extra planets with enough work.

1. Bombarded mars with junk (everything from the astroid belt and some rocks from the kuipler belt) to raise its mass to somewhat earth level. We'd have to be careful not to mess up Mars's orbit too much. 2. Slurp some of venus's thick atmosphere into a massive space tanker 3. Dump the atmosphere onto Mars++ 4. Let time and some engineered bacteria/plants clean up the mess

That's my long term goal if I become immortal.

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