Life on Earth Began on.... Venus???

In the Golden Age of science fiction, Venus was the jungle world -- full of hot, steamy swamps populated by hot, steamy aliens. Ray Bradbury ("All Summer in a Day") imagined a world of constant rain. C.S. Lewis even set a version of the Garden of Eden on Venus in his novel Perelandra.

But the real-life Venus is no Eden -- it's blanketed by clouds of sulfuric acid (ouch!) with temperatures well above 800 degrees F. The surface of Venus is both dark and hot -- not too different from classical conceptions of hell. And did I forget to mention the atmospheric pressure? It's almost 100 times higher than the Earth's.

A typical Venusian, as portrayed on The Twilight Zone

But it's easy to see why science fiction writers were free to speculate about jungles and swamps all those years -- the surface of Venus is hidden by constant cloud cover (that sulfuric acid again!) making it impossible to probe until the advent of the space program. But now scientists at NASA have come up with a startling new idea: they suggest that Venus was at one time a balmy, hospitable place after all, and possibly suitable for life.

These NASA researchers used computer climate models to extrapolate backwards a billion or so years. Their results suggest that Venus could have been habitable as recently as 700 million years ago, if it had a shallow ocean on its surface.

But wait, there's more!  Annabel Cartwright (any relation to Angela Cartwright?) from Cardiff University took the argument one step further in this paper. She suggested that life might have originated on an early, habitable Venus and was then transported to Earth on asteroids, resulting in the "explosion" of biodiversity during the Cambrian period. So maybe we are all Venusians after all.

The Three Stooges visited Venus in the late 1950s