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Comment by typicalbender | Hacker News Reader

The other place where life could exist is in the upper atmosphere where apparently temperatures are much more hospitable. There's a really good write-up with more information here [1]. On earth there exists microorganisms that live in our atmosphere so one hypothesis to explain the phosphine is that there may be a similar situation on Venus. I believe its also been theorized that we could build floating cities on Venus [2] given the climate in the upper-middle atmosphere.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Andromeda321/comments/ismnrb/venus_...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus

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In fact the atmosphere of Venus is the only place outside of Earth where humans could walk outside with just a simple oxygen mask - about 50km above the surface the temperatures are around 0-20C and pressure of one atmosphere. No other celestial body in our solar system has anywhere like that. But it's just like this article correctly identified I think - floating cities on Venus are not as cool as "normal" cities on Mars.

> floating cities on Venus are not as cool as "normal" cities on Mars.

For me floating cities are much cooler.

Well, except for the 'walking' bit, it being 50km above the surface.

> the atmosphere of Venus is the only place outside of Earth where humans could walk outside with just a simple oxygen mask

The clouds of sulfuric acid might sting a bit.

> floating cities on Venus are not as cool as "normal" cities on Mars.

Literally!

> the atmosphere of Venus is the only place outside of Earth where humans could walk outside with just a simple oxygen mask

Surely a bit of an exaggeration? The mostly carbon dioxide, 1 atm of pressure area is not bad, but it coincides with the thickest cloud coverage. The clouds which are composed of sulfuric acid.

Sure, so add a formfitting and thin fluoropolymer suit to that.

We could survive, maybe. But Cloud City would simply reek of rotten eggs, at all times, you'd never escape the stink of it.

Aside: Humans acclimate to the consistent smell of sulfure dioxide pretty quickly.

Which is fortunate, because some parts of the country have iron-eating bacteria in their water supply, which produce SO2.

New arrivals always notice though!

Re: Venus, unfortunately H2O + SO2 is a bigger problem than the smell of rotten eggs.

A new novel by Derek Kunsken called "House of Styx" explores in detail human habitation of Venus. In floating cities and airships and realistically dealing with pressures, temps, and the acidity of the atmosphere.

Did you enjoy it? I really liked The Quantum Magician (puppets!) but thought The Quantum Garden was not a worthy follow-up.

I assume the atmosphere microorganisms on Earth started in a terrestrial tidal pool though and evolved from there. There’s the rub for thinking about atmosphere organisms existing on other planets.

Venus in the distant past had hospitable surface temperatures.

Oh I did not think about that or know that. That’s true.

“Recent studies from September 2019 concluded that Venus may have had surface water and a habitable condition for around 3 billion years and may have been in this condition until 700 to 750 million years ago.”

It is interesting that this timeline lines up roughly with the appearance of plant and animal life on earth.

And than they've failed to address greenhouse gas pollution.

Right, I wont even pretend to be an armchair expert on this just regurgitating what I've read. Long and short of it is we have no idea but from what I recall the original paper was very thorough in trying to explain the phenomenon and life was the most likely hypothesis given what we know. Regardless of the origin it sounds like there is some new science to be found which is exciting.

Do microorganisms spend their entire lives in Earth's atmosphere, or are they simply found there? It doesn't seem surprising that some would find their way up there, but I have a hard time imagining how microorganisms could maintain a certain altitude. On land, they can anchor themselves to hospitable environments to breed, but in the atmosphere, how could they find one another?

Apparently they do live in the upper atmosphere. [1].

> Although many of the organisms borne aloft are likely occasional visitors to the upper troposphere, 17 types of bacteria turned up in every sample. Researchers like environmental microbiologist and co-author Kostas Konstantinidis suspect that these microbes may have evolved to survive for weeks in the sky, perhaps as a way to travel from place to place and spread their genes across the globe. "Not everybody makes it up there," he says. "It's only a few that have something unique about their cells" that allows them survive the trip.

[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/01/microbes-survive-and...

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