---
title: "Venus Is the Outside Bet as the Search for Alien Life Gets Weirder"
description: "Shoebox probes, a dead-looking dwarf planet and oceans under ice: astrobiologists are betting on far more than Earth-like planets"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-11-12T10:00:00Z
modified: 2026-11-13T00:27:12Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/venus-is-the-outside-bet-as-the-search-for-alien-life-gets-w-740d2a
language: en
tags: ["venus", "life", "ceres", "europa", "space", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Venus Is the Outside Bet as the Search for Alien Life Gets Weirder

*Shoebox probes, a dead-looking dwarf planet and oceans under ice: astrobiologists are betting on far more than Earth-like planets*

By Nate Ledger · November 12, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/venus-is-the-outside-bet-as-the-search-for-alien-life-gets-w-740d2a

## In brief

- Scientists are widening the search for alien life beyond Earth-like planets to stranger worlds and new methods
- UK-led shoebox probe Verve hopes to ride ESA’s Envision mission, launching 2031, to look for phosphine on Venus
- Rocket Lab and MIT’s Morning Star Venus probe, estimated at under $10 million, has seen its launch slip repeatedly
- A 2025 study suggests Ceres may have had a heated subsurface ocean about 2.5 billion years ago, but there is no evidence of life
- Europa Clipper and Juice are headed to Jupiter, and Mimas, Triton and Pluto are now seen as possible past ocean worlds

Suppose you run a programme that looks for life somewhere other than Earth. The obvious strategy is to look for places like Earth, since that is the one place you know life exists. Rocky planet, land and water, the right distance from a Sun-like star, temperatures roughly like ours. For decades that has broadly been the approach. But as Jonathan O’Callaghan [reports for BBC Future](https://bbc.com/future/article/20261111-ice-covered-oceans-and-bleak-craters-where-alien-life-might-be-heading), scientists are increasingly spreading their bets: stranger worlds, and stranger ways of checking them.

“We have our eyes open and are thinking about different kinds of life signatures we could look for,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, a Cornell University astrobiologist and author of *Alien Earths*. “We are pushing the possibilities to not miss signs of life.”

The starting point is what every organism on Earth has in common. It needs liquid water and a source of energy (sunlight for plants, food for animals), and it is built from carbon. The new thinking is that none of this has to hold everywhere else. That makes the search more open-minded, and also harder, because if you aren’t sure what you’re looking for, you can’t be sure you’ve found it.

## The outside bet

Take Venus. The surface can get hotter than 400C (750F), and the thick atmosphere presses down about as hard as the water at the bottom of Earth’s oceans. But between about 55 and 65km (34 to 40 miles) up, the temperatures and pressures are the most Earth-like anywhere in the solar system outside Earth itself. That is where scientists think microbes could float in cloud droplets, giving off phosphine. In 2020 astronomers announced hints of that gas in the Venusian atmosphere. Volcanic eruptions can produce phosphine too, and whether it is really there at all is still contested. Carl Sagan floated the idea of life on Venus in the 1960s, but “we certainly did not expect” it, says Dave Clements, an astronomer at Imperial College London.

![A glowing droplet containing three dark microbes floats amid yellow clouds above a swirling orange planet against a deep blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/dd0241e7a06aa9cc41e30b692c861c303fc30d0f.webp)

Clements works on Verve (Venus Explorer for Reduced Vapours in the Environment), a UK-led spacecraft about the size of a shoebox. His team hopes it can hitch a ride on Envision, a European mission due to launch in 2031. Once at Venus, Verve would separate and settle into a looping elliptical orbit that swings from far above the planet down close to its atmosphere. There it would use “a receiver specifically tuned to the wavelengths we are interested in” to look for phosphine, ammonia and hydrogen. The economics are simple: getting to Venus is the expensive part, and someone else is already paying for it. The team is still waiting to hear whether the European Space Agency will let it aboard.

> This is not going to be a shaking-hands-with-little-green-men-type discovery of alien life. It’s building the evidence for a case.

I think that is the most honest sentence in astrobiology. Nobody will get one clean reading that settles it. You get a pile of suggestive measurements, and over time the pile either points somewhere or it doesn’t.

A second Venus effort, Morning Star, from the US company Rocket Lab and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plans to drop a probe into the atmosphere and look for a possible sign of life using fluorescence. The BBC says it could launch as soon as this year. The probe would get [about five minutes of measurements](https://spacedaily.com/t-rocket-lab-mit-venus-life-finder-five-minutes-under-10-million/) before sinking into deadlier conditions, and the whole mission has been estimated at under $10 million. The schedule has already slipped from 2023 and then from January 2025, and by late summer the assembled spacecraft was [reportedly waiting on Neutron](https://gagadget.com/en/724448-private-venus-mission-is-stuck-waiting-for-rocket-labs-unproven-rocket/), a Rocket Lab rocket that had not yet flown.

“Most people agree the frontrunners are Mars and Europa” to find life, Clements says. “But maybe the outside bet is Venus.” When your outside bet costs less than $10 million, you can afford to place it.

![A retro textured illustration shows a dark spacecraft with solar panels and a satellite dish flying near a large red planet against a starry cream background.](https://rews.cc/img/1f26f3a09dc197f8fe8f363c88cf075bc671a25a.webp)

## A dead-looking rock

Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is about a quarter the size of our Moon, grey, and about as lifeless-looking as a world can be. But when NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbited it from 2015 to 2018, it spotted bright patches on the surface that looked like some kind of salty brine. In a [paper in Science Advances](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40834084/) published in August 2025, Sam Courville of Arizona State University and his co-authors argued that Ceres may once have been habitable. It could have had an ocean under its surface with a steady supply of heat, and the bright spots may be what is left of that ocean seeping up from below.

“Ceres has got a bunch of the basic ingredients for life,” Courville says: carbon, sulphur, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and water. “But you also need energy.” His work suggests that about 2.5 billion years ago that energy came from chemistry in the interior, driven by the decay of long-lived radioactive isotopes such as potassium-40, which can take more than a billion years to break down. That decay could heat the interior to 500C (930F), which Courville calls “chemically significant”. According to [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-ceres-may-have-had-long-standing-energy-to-fuel-habitability/), where Courville did the research as an intern, the ocean has since probably turned into a cold, concentrated brine that is less likely to be habitable now, and there is no evidence of microorganisms on Ceres, past or present. To really know, you would need to scoop up some surface material, perhaps from a bright spot, and bring it back to Earth. “Then you can do all sorts of crazy analysis on the sample,” Courville says. NASA has considered such a mission before.

![A stylized cutaway of a cratered moon shows turquoise liquid flowing from a surface crater into an underground pool against a starry background.](https://rews.cc/img/05c65538152548273ebdecb3c42cb586f7b17c68.webp)

## Oceans under ice

Further out, the fashionable targets are oceans buried under thick ice. NASA’s Europa Clipper and ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) are both on their way to Jupiter, to study the suspected oceans beneath Europa and Ganymede respectively. Europa is especially appealing because its ocean is thought to touch a rocky sea floor, which makes nutrients for microbes more likely. Water believed to come from that ocean sometimes sprays onto the frozen surface, and Clipper will try to study it from a distance. The longer-term dream is a lander with a melt probe that would bore through kilometres of ice into the water. Saturn’s moon Enceladus is also high on the list.

The bigger change is how many other places now look like they could qualify. By re-analysing old spacecraft and telescope data, scientists have made Saturn’s moon Mimas, Neptune’s moon Triton and even Pluto good candidates for having had liquid oceans at some point. “Our thinking has changed about icy ocean worlds,” says Alyssa Rhoden of the Southwest Research Institute. That means oceans may exist on worlds that are very small or very far from the Sun, and it cost nothing extra to find out, because the data was already sitting there.

Beyond the solar system, astronomers are starting to study the atmospheres of planets around other stars with instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, though that work is still in its infancy. Systems like Trappist-1, where seven Earth-sized worlds orbit a red dwarf much smaller than the Sun, look especially promising. Harrison Smith, an astronomer at the Institute of Science Tokyo, suggests a less conventional approach: looking for the patterns left by civilisations that hop from planet to planet.

So the bet with the highest ceiling in the field involves aliens with interplanetary travel, and the one closest to launching is a shoebox waiting to hear if it can ride along.