Quote:Here's my take on this one: first, you have blue-green algae modded to float and work on converting the atmosphere. Combined with various extremophilic bacteria (those that live in the Yellowstone hot springs, or near the deep sea volcanic vents), you could get something that would survive. As a means of being helpful, if I were designing this (and it might well have BEEN me - I LIKE the terraformers for both Mars and Venus), I'd toss something in to speed up the process - cells from shrews and hummingbirds. Let's put the algae cycle on fast forward, shall we? As a consequence of this and the extreme conditions that the algae is living under, well....it's possible the things have gone into an evolutionary cycle measured in....years, possibly months. Especially if lingering handwavium were to give things a kick. Think the Genesis Planet, or the one movie with Fox Mulder's actor, where an alien life form was evolving in some caverns in a matter of days. This is the sort of thing that's nearly gotten me into trouble before, when I was testing exactly how fast I could get a plant to grow. The tribble rose was quite lovely - iridescent ruby-red flowers, iridescent green leaves, green-brown fur on the canes that hid the rather long thorns...and composed of a mix of species that should never have been allowed to come anywhere near each other: kudzu, multiflora rose, leafy splurge, and shrew and ruby-throated hummingbird. When you have a plant species where the leaves visibly unfold and canes visibly wrap around objects in real time...well...there's a reason it was destroyed.
Venus has cooled off enough to be able to support life with biochemistry that's compatable with human biochemistry (c.f. the thionite subplot). I have trouble seeing that happen in a decade even with Washuu-tech, but it's established that it's happened with wavetech, so we're stuck with it.
In any case, while it's pushing the envelope of disbelief, I wouldn't exactly count it out. Handwavium-altered objects are far too odd to discount so easily. Even the organic ones...possibly especially the organic ones.