India's IT prowess should propel Astrobiology

The grand quest for astrobiology has the potential to offer rich dividends to India if the nation decides to explore its information technology prowess.

Since the 1991 economic liberalisation, India has made great strides to become global information technology (IT) giant. Thirty years hence, India's Tata Consultancy Services is the largest IT company in the world. Today India boasts of tremendous IT ecosystems in Gurgaon, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Navi Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Our IT sector now is arterial to industries from pharmaceuticals to oil and gas and banking to telecommunications. With such a reckoning force at hand, an unorthodox question arises: why should India not go a big way with astrobiology?

India's IT sector has begun to contribute to India's prolific astronomy and astrophysics. For instance, the Pune-headquartered IT company Persistent Systems provides software support to India's Giant Meter-wave Radio Telescope and India's participation in the international Square Kilometre Array astronomy mega-project located in Australia and South Africa. India's involvement in the international Thirty Meter Telescope and its leadership with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) India project will bring tremendous IT inputs from India's reckon-worthy IT industry. What ails our attempts to create similar competence in astrobiology and search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? The reasons are linked cascadingly.

SETI and astrobiology are enormously transdisciplinary that tend to fall prey to their inherent grandeur. Finding life in the universe is often viewed as a long-range quest. Developing countries stay away from such grand searches and emphasise only solution-driven science. Furthermore, since SETI and astrobiology first began in a superpower nation, the U.S., they are branded as expensive pursuits of the developed world. Resultantly, developing countries' national space agencies do not allocate funds for these domains, which does not create a strong community of scientists and technologists. Developing nations also lack scientific philanthropy to provide grants to these domains. It does not help the philanthropists earn what they seek - social capital from investing in real-world problems. Furthermore, there is a shortage of narrative that highlights the practicality and solutionism of these domains.

Contrary to popular perceptions, astrobiology has had practical beginnings. Not many would know it shares its genesis with Artificial Intelligence back in the 1960s. The credits of their conjoined birth go to the then young Nobel laureate microbial geneticist Joshua Lederberg, who coined the term 'exobiology,' and the young Edward Feigenbaum, who is now known as 'father of expert systems' and a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence. The first output of the conjoined genesis of exobiology and artificial intelligence was Lederberg's and Feigenbaum's 'DENDRAL' project. DENDRAL was the world's first artificial intelligence expert-system that helped chemists identify unknown organic molecules' structure and composition using a mass spectrometer. DENDRAL boosted mass spectrometers' capabilities, heightening their applicability in the pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, and environmental protection areas. DENDRAL and its alter egos became vital to mass spectrometer software that flew on the VIKING, Galileo, Huygens, and subsequent missions searching for organic molecules on other planets.

Lederberg and Feigenbaum's creative synergies can be recreated, especially today when the world is on Fourth Industrial Age's precipice. The union can again engender tremendous applications for numerous domains. But spin-offs are just the tip of the iceberg.

Searching for life in the universe, finding the origins of life, and determining the universe's origins are a few of the grandest of human quests. The antiquity of these questions is not known. But in different epochs and eras, these questions have challenged philosophers, inventors, and discoverers to go deep in their investigations. It is possible that 100 years from now, the world may not find answers to these grand questions, but the quest will be fertile enough to spawn new technologies even then. To simply put, grand challenges are like 'holy grail,' which are too difficult to get hands-on, but striving for them brings about tremendous but non-formulaic dividends. A country like India, which has successfully discarded the third-world tag, must not get overwhelmed by the quest's enormity but must be excited about the recurring dividends. India must pursue astrobiology for these rewards.

China, too has realised this necessity of reaping such dividends. Today, it operates the biggest SETI radio-telescope globally, known as the Five-Hundred meter Aperture Spherical-radio Telescope (FAST) in its Guiyang province. FAST has overtaken the U.S Arecibo Observatory as the dominant astronomy device of its kind. However, China has not been content with the scientific output. It has made sure that an ecosystem of big-data innovation and technology companies integrates with the FAST facility. Doing so has used astrobiology and SETI domains to spawn high-end industry in an economically backward province.

The COVID-19 global pandemic, in its early days, has revealed tremendous loop-holes in India's ability to source analytical instrumentation and medical devices. Indeed, under the Aatmanirbhar Bharat program, the Production-Linked Incentive scheme has given a stimulus to the manufacturing of such gadgetry. But for India to be an innovation-driven nation, our scientific community needs to bridge the fault-lines between natural sciences with engineering. Such bridging is possible if the scientific community views a domain like astrobiology from a practical purview.

The merger of cyber and physical systems, the rise of bio-inspired robotics, and technologies like soft matter, replicating automation depend on a wide variety of in situ, ex situ, in vitro, in vivo, and in silico studies. Let us assume a scenario where an analytical instrument analyses the regolith (soil) samples on Mars, searching for signatures of extinct or extant life, and generates large volumes of data. Such a device will likely demand innovation in interplanetary data communication networks to handle big data transmission over millions of kilometres. Let's also assume a mission is looking for life-forms in the cold and frigid lakes of methane on Saturn's moon Titan. This mission will demand novel robotics and instruments to operate in fluidic environments and temperatures as low as minus two hundred degrees Celsius.

Due to its inherent trans-disciplinarity, astrobiology can boost innovations to many such ongoing technology pursuits. India is an IT giant. We are aiming to become a high-technology manufacturer and innovator. Astrobiology can help transform India from being an IT giant to a giant of the fourth industrial age. It now depends on our ability to derive short-term dividends from this holy grail.

This blog was published in the April 2021 edition of Science India magazine published by Vijnana Bharati.

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