Abstract

Earth’s next-door neighbour, Venus, shines brilliantly in our night sky and has represented love and beauty since antiquity. Human exploration of Venus during the space age, however, revealed that its surface is boiling hot, its atmosphere is drier than the Atacama desert, and the whole planet is engulfed in thick clouds of acid. Now, almost 40 years since our last in-situ visitation of the planet Venus, humanity is sending a new fleet of probes to constrain its ancient climate history and to discover whether it may host life today. In this talk, I will trace the past and future of Venus exploration, and answer the questions: what does Venus’s ancient past mean for the habitability of exoplanets around distant stars? and how could Venus support extraterrestrial life today?