K.T. Ramesh

I think if you're interested in life, you're always interested in basic questions about life, where it comes from and what it can do.

I'm a professor of mechanical engineering and material science and earth and planetary sciences.

At any given time, I'm not quite sure what I do, but one of those three.

So a good way to think about it is to just break that word up into three parts, right?

So litho, stone.

So this is basically about rocks, pan, everything.

Spermio, seeds.

So the general idea is the idea of being able to seed life throughout the universe or throughout the solar system through rocks, through basically life being carried in rocks that move around inside the solar system.

We have some policies that all our countries that are involved in the space program have agreed to.

One of those rules is that we'll be really careful about potentially contaminating another planet.

You don't want to take Earth life and take it to Mars and let it loose and now it's all over Mars, right?

So the way we do this is we define some bodies in the solar system as being restricted bodies, meaning these bodies you have to be really careful about because they may have life.

Right?

Mars is one of those bodies.

So if you go to Mars, you want to be really careful about sterilization.

If you bring anything back from Mars, you want to be really careful about how you bring it back.

Why would you even ask this question?

The answer is obviously no.

That was my view of it.

So it's actually a shock.