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Did life die or hide? Venus’s lost oceans and a new equation stir a cosmic whodunnit

Produced by: Manoj Kumar

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Life Equation

NASA’s Venus Life Equation, revealed by Diana Gentry at LPSC 2025, retools the Drake Equation to calculate life’s odds on Venus, offering a fresh lens for interplanetary biosignature hunting.

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Venus Secrets

Despite its hellish climate today, Venus may once have harbored oceans and plate tectonics—conditions ripe for life during the same epoch when Earth’s biosphere was just forming.

Firefly Visualize Venus’s upper atmosphere with floating clouds and microbial forms. Highlight the t

Cloud Refuge

A wild but testable idea: microbial life might still survive in Venus’s temperate upper clouds—where conditions mimic Earth’s lower atmosphere, around 50 km up.

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Origin Clue

The “O” in the VLE stands for Origination—the once-and-forever value. Life either sparked (1) or it didn’t (0), whether through abiogenesis or cosmic panspermia.

Fragile Web

The “R” for Robustness gauges how resilient life would be—based on energy access, nutrient cycles like CHNOPS, and a biosphere’s ability to diversify and adapt.

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Continuity Test

The “C” factor in the Venus Life Equation asks: did life-friendly conditions persist long enough without full extinction? Earth seems to have passed that test—barely.

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Venus Mirror

Studying why Venus diverged from Earth despite their planetary similarities could be key to understanding why some exoplanets thrive—while others perish.

Framework Tool

Like the Drake Equation, the VLE is a thinking scaffold. Even without solid numbers, it sharpens the questions we ask about alien life—past, present, and future.

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Biosphere Fragility

Even a vibrant world can become sterile. Venus may reveal just how narrow the window for planetary habitability can be—even for worlds inside the “habitable zone.”

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