The Acid Challenge

The cloud layer of Venus has Earth-like temperatures and pressures, sunlight, and chemical nutrients — but it has one enormous problem that life as we know it cannot simply ignore. The clouds are made of concentrated sulfuric acid, and not the dilute variety familiar from a chemistry classroom. This episode digs into what that actually means chemically, why the acidity scale most people know breaks down entirely at these concentrations, and why even Earth's most extreme acid-loving organisms offer no real analogy. The science here is genuinely unsettling, and yet researchers have found something equally surprising in the lab: not everything is destroyed. And what survives in those conditions opens up one of the stranger questions in modern astrobiology.