There is a lot of microbial life on Earth living in clouds, almost all of it uncharacterized. Microbes have been found living high up into the stratosphere. At the very least, a search for life in the clouds of Venus would prompt us to learn more about this fascinating ecosystem here at home.
Review article on terrestrial life in the stratosphere for those interested: https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/38/1/8
And what about Europa?
Jupiter puts out a lot of radiation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978670
For sure, Venus needs exploration. I'd like to see an orbiting station with a 10 year mission to explore the Venusian atmosphere via drones or other methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05160 ("Venus, Phosphine and the Possibility of Life")
Either way, the discovery of the source or mechanism should prove highly illuminating to the study of exobiology. Pretty exciting, imo.
“If they really confirm phosphine and ammonia robustly it raises the chances of biological origin. The natural next thing will be new people will look at it and give support or counter-arguments. The story will be resolved by more data.”
He added: “All of this is grounds for optimism. If they can demonstrate the signals are there, good for them.”
Let’s assume that these signals are indeed based in life, and that that life is mostly boring to laymen — some type of bacteria or lava tube denizen with minimal complexity, say
And there are already plenty of cults and religions that incorporate aliens (cough Scientology cough.) It's going to be difficult to compete against Nordics and Greys and hyperdimensional ascended masters and Xenu with some Venusian moss on a rock.
the merely curious get nowhere, the financially incentivized risk takers with asymmetric upside have a selective evolution of failures and successes towards a couple that find an edge
We can, in the meantime, investigate strategies for collecting our own cloud-dwellers so we can build a probe that does the same on Venus while it descends a little through the atmosphere before launching back a sample recovery capsule.
Heat shield, parachute, balloon, stay for a couple hours collecting samples of the atmosphere, filtering particulates, making nice movies, and so on, then pop the balloon right before launching the return vehicle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Subsurface_ocean
I think there was a proposal for a solar powered winged probe which although less cool, would be probably more likely to succeed.
A powered-flight probe would be interesting in that it could be more easily directed to specific areas and have the ability to stay over a given area. A balloon would likely not be as controllable.
But would be happy with any Venus mission, even a low altitude orbiter would be cool.
Only at the surface.