Molecules That Shouldn't Survive

The conventional wisdom in astrobiology was clear: concentrated sulfuric acid destroys most organic molecules so quickly that the chemistry needed for life simply cannot exist in the clouds of Venus. Then a team at MIT put that assumption to a direct test, dissolving the nucleic acid bases of DNA and RNA into the same concentrated acid found in Venusian cloud droplets — and waiting. What happened, or more precisely what didn't happen, forced a rethink of what "habitable" can mean. This episode walks through that experiment, what it found, and why a result that looks like nothing at all turns out to be one of the most consequential findings in Venus astrobiology.