Photo taken by the Akatsuki Orbiter.
The darkness of Venus has been revisited as a topic lately. It’s unclear what the dark spots are exactly, but we can observe the effects of them. Another name is ‘unknown absorber’ (which sounds really cool!) because they absorb solar radiation. This, in turn, affects Venus’s weather patterns. The clouds of Venus turn this energy into wind, but the absorbers disrupt this. A theory on what these unknown spots could be was first proposed by Carl Sagan and Harold Morowitz, a biophysicist. They brought up the idea that the clouds might be extraterrestrial life. Sanjay Limaye, a planetary scientist, expanded on this, saying it could be partially composed of microorganisms that evolved differently on Venus.
Now, I wonder what may happen if these creatures, should they be real at all, passed into fantasy. Would they become youkai?