There are professions in which wishing a happy new year falls far short, and one of them is astronomer. For these explorers of the cosmos, the least you can wish for someone is a happy 2070. That is the date on which, according to the co-discoverer of exoplanets Didier Queloz, we will confirm whether life is a universal phenomenon, a property of the most elemental that arises where physical conditions allow it. And, from what we know, they must allow it on billions of worlds scattered throughout our galaxy, the Milky Way. Read an interesting article in Materia interview with Queloz, last Nobel Prize winner in Physics along with his mentor Michel Mayor, and director of the European Space Telescope Cheops, which has just been launched into orbit to further investigate some of the 4,000 extrasolar planets that have already been discovered.
