Scientists Thought Venus Was Too Acidic for Complex Chemistry. It May Actually Be Weirdly Hospitable

Acid clouds: This is not just a genre of house music someone ten years older than you, or younger than you, will claim exists. Swirling above the hellish surface of Earth’s nearest neighbor Venus, a surface where the average temperature could melt lead and even some aluminum alloys, layers of “superrotating” sulfuric acid clouds roil with the energy generated by the planet’s runaway greenhouse gas effect.

The prospect that extraterrestrial microbes might somehow be able to call this caustic storm…