Several folks have asked me what I think about this new paper in Nature claiming that the clouds of Venus have been shown to be “uninhabitable” because of the very low water activity: tinyurl.com/3k4d7tuf
So a short thread about it: 1/
The work is solid in that the calculations (of water activity as a function of sulfuric acid concentration) seem to have been done correctly. However, the conclusions of the paper are overconfident because we know less about both the atmosphere of Venus, 2/
Sep 14, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Here is why I I’ve long believed that life in the clouds of Venus is plausible. It's not just that the cloud environment is moderate in Temperature and Pressure (similar to Earth's surface) 1/8
And it’s not just that the clouds are a stable and long-lived liquid environment (unlike Earth's ephemeral clouds which are wispy and discontinuous, the cloud decks of Venus are permanent, deep, stable and global.) 2/8
