Luo was influenced by these ideas in his understanding of how a protein folds up. Some regions of a protein are attracted by water and others are repelled, a Yin and a Yang, which control the folding up of the protein into a stable form.Could this make a Chinese approach to science special? Not at all, for though it could have fed Luo’s imagination, it was probably this type of mysticism that prevented the Chinese from discovering science. Luo accepts without hesitation that there was neither a Chinese Archimedes or Newton and that there is nothing special about Chinese science; science is universal and based on its western origins. In essence this claims that “material” is first and underlies mental processes, that all theory should be based on practice, and that there are two sides to everything – contradictions which lead to unification. This latter Marxist dogma is remarkably similar to the ancient idea of Yin and Yang that came from Taoism.

It was here that Yin and Yang, and even dialectical materialism, were possibly influential.In China dialectical materialism is taught to all students at both school and university. He came to Hohhot as a lecturer and was a successful research worker, publishing 70 papers – about half of them in English – on the physics of fundamental particles. Then, in 1982, the Chinese Nobel Laureate in physics, C N Yang, declared that for particle physics “The party is over”. By that he meant that the experiments, on which theoreticians based their work, had become too costly as they required accelerators to have very high energies.
In response, Luo, who believed numerous problems in biology required an explanation in terms of physics, turned to theoretical biology and the problem of how long molecules, like proteins, fold up. Yin and Yang are very important in Chinese thought.

Surprisingly, it may even influence in a positive way scientific research, as I discovered when I visited Professor Luo who leads an excellent group of theoretical biologists at the Inner Mongolian University in Hohhot. When Luo trained as a theoretical physicist in Beijing in the Fifties there were no higher degrees in China so he never got a doctorate. There is also evidence that it has an ocean and a continental land mass. However, it is very cold (-180C) and its chemical composition means that if you did manage to raise the surface temperature you’d end up with a smell like “a cross between a refinery and a sewage plant”, according to one expert.

On the plus side, a heated- up Titan could be used as a massive refinery, synthesising a host of useful oils and other chemicals – it could even support certain forms of Earth bacteria which can use these products to live, even without oxygen.THE REST: Of the other planets or moons none is a candidate for terraforming, within our present imagination, either because of their size, composition or distance from the Sun.. Truly terraforming Io would be very difficult but making it habitable for some kind of life would not. For one expert, James Oberg, Io is actually “top of the heap” for planetary engineering, even more than Mars.TITAN: Saturn’s largest moon has excited some terraformers, because of its size (larger than Mercury) and the fact that it has an atmosphere (twice the mass of Earth’s). Added water is all that is needed to bring life to Io (it would dissolve some of its sulphur and produce compounds) followed by sulphur-loving bacteria from Earth. These would create equatorial oceans with adjacent “temperate” regions where, though chilly (around 0C), life could exist.Io could be transformed easily thanks to an active volcanic cycle that provides internal heat – in fact, parts of Io are a cosy 30C, though the average temperature is -140C. On Earth, such vents are a rich oasis of life in the ocean depths.

A Nasa probe will soon be on its way to Europa to find out more.Partial melting of the equatorial regions of Callisto and Ganymede has also been suggested, notably by Gregory Benford, who came up with the feasible idea of using the large amounts of deuterium on these moons to power mobile fusion reactors. In theory this could be done but the atmosphere would leak gradually into space and need topping up every 1,000 years or so. However, to get an atmosphere to cling to such a small body it would have to be built very high – so high that it would generate a greenhouse effect making the Moon too hot.THE MOONS OF JUPITER: Of the planet’s 16 moons, Ganymede was one of the earliest sci-fi sites for terraforming in a 1950 Robert Heinlein story. The problem that far out is lack of sunlight and to boost solar energy to Earth-like levels would be extremely difficult. Even if this was achieved, it would melt the surfaces of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, turning them into mini ocean worlds (inhospitable oceans at that).Europa has excited many people with evidence that it may already possess an environment that would support life. It may have a core that provides an internal heat source, which means it could possess a 100km deep ocean (beneath a 10km thick ice crust) which may have hot hydrothermal events on its floor.