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.