Life on Venus?

Maybe. Not giant lizard-fish, but possibly, conceivably, microbes way up in the atmosphere. Here is a good look at the story.

It won't be easy to confirm the existence of those microbes, but if it can be done, it will have large implications for SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. If I know that you own a television, that tells me almost nothing about your neighborhood. But if I know that both you and your next-door neighbor have one, it's a good bet most of the other houses do as well. Finding that life arose on Venus as well as Earth will strongly suggest that life on rocky planets is common.

Which has implications for this:

That's Drake's Equation, which will be 60 years old next year. It's a way to estimate how many technological species are in our galaxy. Each of the seven variables is the answer to a question. We're working toward solid answers to the first three; for the others, we just have no idea. Finding life on Venus would move one of them -- fl, "on what fraction of suitable planets does life appear?" -- from "wild-ass guess" toward "solid answer" and push the equation's result in the "sentient life may be common" direction.

Which in turn would bring up Enrico Fermi's famous question, asked in 1950: Where are they?