Washington DC: If there had been just tiny evolutionary changes, life could have been existed on Venus and not Earth, a new study has claimed.
According to a hypothesis by Rice University scientists, these changes could have altered the fates of both the both Earth and Venus.
Scientists have published their views in a research paper in Astrobiology, which states, that had conditions been slightly different “eons” ago, life could’ve been possible on Venus.
Earth in our solar system lies inside a the Goldilocks zone, which is placed perfectly and it at such a distance from the Sun, that is neither too cold nor too hot to maintain liquid water, making life possible.
Now, scientists are finding out the possibility of planets in the Goldilocks zone in extra solar systems.
“If we find a planet (in another solar system) sitting where Venus is that actually has signs of life, we’ll know that what we see in our solar system isn’t universal,”according to scientist Adrian Lenardic.
The paper, he said, includes "a little bit about the philosophy of science as well as the science itself, and about how we might search in the future. It's a bit of a different spin because we haven't actually done the work, in terms of searching for signs of life outside our solar system, yet. It's about how we go about doing the work."
Lenardic and his colleagues suggested that habitable planets may lie outside the "Goldilocks zone" in extra-solar systems, and that planets farther from or closer to their suns than Earth may harbor the conditions necessary for life.
The Goldilocks zone has long been defined as the band of space around a star that is not too warm, not too cold, rocky and with the right conditions for maintaining surface water and a breathable atmosphere. But that description, which to date scientists have only been able to calibrate using observations from our own solar system, may be too limiting, Lenardic said.
"For a long time we've been living, effectively, in one experiment, our solar system," he said, channeling his mentor, the late William Kaula, who is the father of space geodetics, a system by which all the properties in a planetary system can be quantified.
"Although the paper is about planets, in one way it's about old issues that scientists have: the balance between chance and necessity, laws and contingencies, strict determinism and probability."
Lenardic noted, "But in another way, it asks whether, if you could run the experiment again, would it turn out like this solar system or not? For a long time, it was a purely philosophical question. Now that we're observing solar systems and other planets around other stars, we can ask that as a scientific question."
"If we find a planet (in another solar system) sitting where Venus is that actually has signs of life, we'll know that what we see in our solar system is not universal," he added.
