If it is surface life, that would also indicate even more strongly that life is common, and that we may be looking in the wrong places for it. If life can survive there then there's a much broader range of possible environments for life than we thought.
Article: Life in deep Earth totals 15 to 23 billion tons of carbon—hundreds of times more than humans
Barely living "zombie" bacteria and other forms of life constitute an immense amount of carbon deep within Earth's subsurface—245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface, according to scientists nearing the end of a 10-year international collaboration to reveal Earth's innermost secrets.
On the eve of the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, scientists with the Deep Carbon Observatory today reported several transformational discoveries, including how much and what kinds of life exist in the deep subsurface under the greatest extremes of pressure, temperature, and low nutrient availability.
Drilling 2.5 kilometers into the seafloor, and sampling microbes from continental mines and boreholes more than 5 km deep, scientists have used the results to construct models of the ecosystem deep within the planet.
With insights from now hundreds of sites under the continents and seas, they have approximated the size of the deep biosphere—2 to 2.3 billion cubic km (almost twice the volume of all oceans) - as well as the carbon mass of deep life: 15 to 23 billion tonnes (an average of at least 7.5 tonnes of carbon per cu km subsurface).
The work also helps determine types of extraterrestrial environments that could support life.
Among many key discoveries and insights:
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I would think discovering multicellular life would squelch any serious motivation towards terraforming. It would produce a lot of ethical concerns about sending more probes, let alone bacteria filled humans.
Wouldn't Venus's interior be at least as hot as its surface? If the deep crust was cooler than the atmosphere, heat generated by radioactive decay in the interior couldn't escape - and it would have built up until a more-or-less one-directional temperature gradient from the interior to the atmosphere was established. Yeah, on Earth it's often cooler at a shallow depth under the ground than on the surface, but the rocks a few kilometers below the surface are hot. A cool Venusian deep crust might have survived for a while after the surface became the way it is now, but I doubt it would last for billions of years - especially given that Venus might have had at least one more-or-less total resurfacing event within the last billion years. I guess water might stay liquid under high temperatures and extreme pressures, but would conventional biological chemistry even be possible at 500 C?
Actual religions please?
I was replying to the OP, not you.
Sorry what I meant was I was replying to the question you posed in the OP and was confused why you were asking me specifically for the religious reactions rather than the thread as a whole.
That would be the case if it was all at once. But in practice first we're going to get some suspicious satellite pictures or soil samples, then they're going to send a follow-up probe, with the evidence mounting, and even when scientists are comfortable declaring it to be real there will still be naysayers in and out of the scientific community that its just a dirt clod or pre-life biological soup or something.
I didn't say that it would happen, or be seriously entertained by the various space programs. But various theorists would put forth alot, regardless.
Not answering my question. Are the venusians:
And if it's literally both, as in, a thriving exotic biosphere and organic extremophiles, life is presumably even more common.
