Could life be hidden in the cloud of Venus?

Could life be hiding in the clouds on Venus?

LAST UPDATED ON APRIL 4TH, 2018 ALEXANDRU MICU
An international team of researchers thinks Venus might hide life — floating around merrily in its atmosphere. To find out, they plan to send a half blimp, half plane robot to the scorching planet.
Here on good ole’ Earth, microorganisms — mostly in the shape of bacteria — can and often do get swept up into the atmosphere. They don’t even mind it that much; using specially-equipped ballons, researchers have detected these critters alive and well at altitudes as high as 41 kilometers (25 miles) above sea level. We also know of several different strains that can survive in ridiculously harsh environments, from the hot springs of Yellowstone and deep ocean hydrothermal vents to acid lakes or radioactive sludge.

These tidbits might seem unrelated at first, but a research team led by planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center believes that when you put the two together, they suggest life might exist on Earth’s closest neighbor — scorching Venus.
Lovely goddess, dreadful planet
So first thing first — does life have a realistic chance of sprouting up on Venus, given the planet’s notoriously hostile conditions? According to the team, yes. They note that some climate models of the planet’s history suggest that Venus had what we’d consider a habitable climate, with liquid water and stable surface temperatures, for about 2 billion years. That would be “plenty of time” for life to evolve on its own on Venus, according to Limaye — adding that it’s “much longer than is believed to have occurred on Mars”.
The second question is whether any indigenous life form could have survived the wanton climate change that turned Venus into the hellscape it currently is. According to paper co-author Rakesh Mogul, a professor of biological chemistry at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, life on Earth has already shown that biological systems can thrive in “very acidic conditions, can feed on carbon dioxide, and produce sulfuric acid”. That is actually a very important piece of the puzzle since Venus’ atmosphere is composed mostly of carbon dioxide, water droplets, and sulfuric acid.
Perhaps the most convincing argument in favor of life on Venus is the fact that a series of space probes launched to the planet between 1962 and 1978 showed that temperature and pressure levels in the lower and middle layers of its atmosphere (40 to 60 kilometers / 25 to 27 miles) could harbor microbial life as we know it. The surface, however, basking in a somewhat excessive average temperature of 450 degrees Celsius (860 degrees Fahrenheit), looks decidedly uninhabitable.
The idea to check for life in Venus’ atmosphere caught root by chance at a teachers’ workshop; it started with co-author Grzegorz Słowik from the University of Zielona Góra, Poland, who mentioned to Limaye that there are bacteria on Earth whose light-absorbing properties match those of unidentified particles that form dark patches in the iconic clouds of Venus.