BENGALURU: Teams around the world are trying to produce life from bare chemistry, said Nobel laureate (2019) Prof Didier Patrick Queloz. he was speaking at the International Science Fiction Conference 2020 hosted by the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies and Bangalore University. while India is embarking upon Venus mission in addition to the Mars mission, Prof Queloz said that planetary exploration missions are essential to help compare with what we expect is the origin of life on earth. the rocks we bring back, he said, are going to find early ingredients -- the building blocks of chemistry that have enabled life.
“Venus is fascinating because it was like earth and possibly was also a blue planet one billion years ago. It is not at all the situation now, after the green - house fully dominated the atmosphere. Also, one cannot live there because the plate tectonics seemed to have stopped. however, it’s an interesting question as to why and when it stopped while it’s still going on here on earth. If we stopped the plate tectonics here, we could end up like Venus,” he said.
Being a difficult planet to land on, he said, the question really is what is the nature underneath of Venus. Additionally, we have no clue on what was going on in earth during the early development stage as it’s completely wiped out. Mars, he said, has some imprint of that stage. Jupiter’s sixth satellite europa is another point of interest, with many thinking of drilling it to look at what is underneath as it’s clear that there are liquid oceans, he said. Prof Sujan Sengupta, Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, expressed confidence that in the next 10 years we will be able to detect biosignature atmosphere which is essential for life.