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Cosmic Seeds of Life

The notion that life originated elsewhere in the universe and later arrived on Earth is not the stuff of any science fiction writer’s imagination. Today it is a solid scientific theory that explains how life came to Earth from the cosmos.

The first documented mention of the idea appears in the writings of the fifth-century-BCE Greek philosopher Anaxagoras. He called his thesis panspermia, a Greek term that means “seeds everywhere.”

More than two millennia later, on April 9, 1864, the French chemist Louis Pasteur reported his experiment disproving spontaneous generation. This was a devastating blow to Charles Darwin’s theory regarding the origin of life on Earth, which held that life began as a direct result of spontaneous generation. In other words, nonliving things spontaneously produced living things.

Then, in the 1870s, the British physicist Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) and the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz reinforced Pasteur’s findings and argued that life might have originated in space and been transported to Earth.

Next, in the first decade of the 1900s, the Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius theorized that bacterial spores—propelled through space by light pressure—were the mechanism that seeded life on Earth.

In his day, the concept was pure scientific speculation because it had not been proven that life-forms could survive the extreme conditions of interstellar space. In fact, most scientists at the time were not convinced that any could. However, science has since shown that such life-forms, called extremophiles, do indeed exist.

Fig. 1.1. Life from the Cosmos. Photo courtesy of NASA.

In the 1960s, Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe were trying to identify the contents of interstellar dust by finding something that would match its infrared signature. Hoyle was an astronomer and Wickramasinghe an astrobiologist, and neither was out to prove the tenets of panspermia.

More than three decades ago Hoyle and Wickramasinghe began arguing the case for the widespread occurrence of microbial life in the universe. They drew their conclusions from studies of interstellar dust grains and found a vast array of molecules to be present in space, which they believed to represent components that may have derived from biology.

When they began working on this problem in the early 1960s, the standard theory posited that the spectrum of cosmic dust could be adequately explained as obtained from nonliving graphite grains. A new look at the interstellar dust permeating the universe has revealed hints of organic matter that could be created naturally by stars, scientists say.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong observed stars at different evolutionary phases and found that they are able to produce complex organic compounds and eject them into space, filling the regions between stars.

But an imperfect match between the theoretical and actual spectrums—and an implausible account of the formation of the grains—pushed Hoyle and Wickramasinghe to explore other possibilities. In their work—and that of other astronomers and astrobiologists—molecules that were more closely related to biological entities began to enter the picture.

As their research proceeded, other noted researchers reported finding polycyclic aromatic molecules in interstellar dust signatures. Then, in 1972, persuasive evidence showing that the dust contained porphyrins was also obtained. Porphyrins are carbon-based molecules—not rocks; that is, they came from something that probably once was what we would call “alive.”

Next, in 1974, Wickramasinghe demonstrated that complex organic polymers, specifically molecules of polyformaldehyde, existed in space. These molecules are closely related to cellulose, which is very abundant in living, biological forms.

By 1975, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were convinced that organic polymers were a substantial fraction of interstellar dust. Of course, this line of reasoning was considered wildly speculative at that time.

After the middle 1970s, they turned their attention to an apparent anomaly in the spectrum. This spectral feature could be explained if the grains of dust were of a specific size and translucent as well. After trying to fit every known factor to conform to the spectral data and failing, they decided to look at the spectrum for bacteria.

Dried bacteria refract light as irregularly shaped, hollow spheres, which did fit the data, and the pair discovered that their size range was also appropriate. The match between the spectrums for dried bacteria and the ones from the interstellar grains were nearly perfect. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe concluded that the grains were probably dried, frozen bacteria.

Today the panspermia theory posits that the seeds of life proceed when microbes become trapped in debris that is ejected into space after collisions between planets that harbor life and small solar system bodies. These living organisms (bacteria) travel in a dormant state for prolonged periods of time before colliding randomly with other planets or intermingling with protoplanetary disks.

According to the theory, if a given planet presents the right conditions, the bacteria become active and the process of evolution begins. Panspermia is not meant to address the ultimate question of how life began. It only addresses the issue of the mechanisms and methods that cause life to spread and be sustained, and how life arrived on Earth.

The theory does not claim that life only originated at a specific point and was subsequently spread throughout the entire universe. Instead it argues that, once started, it may have been able to spread to other environments suitable for replication via microbes traveling through space.

Today the notion of interplanetary transfer of material is well documented, as shown by meteorites of Martian origin found on Earth. Of course, this was unknown to Anaxagoras or the later nineteenth-century panspermia proponents. This evidence was forthcoming as a direct result of late-twentieth-century space exploration.

The proof that extremophiles do exist and that they do travel through space is a strong piece of evidence in support of some form of panspermia. Some bacteria grow at temperatures as high as 113°C.

At the other end, microbes can thrive at temperatures as low as −18°C; many can be preserved in liquid nitrogen at −196°C. Researchers have found that they can also tolerate high doses of ionizing and ultraviolet radiation, extreme pressure, and so forth.

These observations suggest that it is difficult to define the conditions that favor life, which makes it harder for science to claim that life is unique to Earth.

Mounting data derived from space probes support the panspermia theory, which predicts the existence of extremophiles. If the interstellar dust was devoid of any signs of life and our space probes had not discovered extremophiles, then panspermia would not fit the data.

There is yet another piece of evidence that supports panspermia—the discovery that water also is not unique to Earth.

Mars is believed to have contained water in the past. Space scientists are also excited about the idea of the possible presence of life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, which has been fueled by speculations that this moon may have underground oceans. In fact, in recent years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has found evidence of ice on the moon and Mercury.

The fact that water is relatively common on other planetary bodies would also strongly support the idea of extraterrestrial life. Organic matter is composed of compounds that contain carbon. All living things on Earth are carbon-based, something well known by Star Trek fans.

A variety of organic compounds have been detected in meteorites that have landed on Earth, including amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins—the latter being one of the primary components of living cells.

The presence of carbon-based matter in meteorites supports the possibility that life on our planet could have come from outer space. But even though life on Earth is composed of organic matter, that, in itself, is not considered life. We cannot yet conclusively prove that life exists in outer space and was transported to Earth via bacteria. Nonetheless, we are getting closer to that conclusion.

For the sake of argument, we shall put ourselves at the point in time when the compiled evidence is so strong that it leads science to conclude that life originated elsewhere in space. Now we must still determine how life arrived on Earth.

There is another theory that goes beyond the simple and random spread of life via microbes embedded in rocks or pushed by light waves. Directed panspermia takes the theory a quantum leap further by proposing that the microbes that arrived on Earth were intentionally sent here by a highly advanced civilization.

Once again this may sound like the stuff of science fiction novels, but it is not. As previously noted, Francis Crick proposed the theory in the 1950s. Given Crick’s unimpeachable scientific credentials, being the codiscoverer of the DNA molecule, no one can dismiss this theory out of hand without having himself or herself come under close scientific scrutiny.

Crick presented his view of directed panspermia and the arguments in support of this theory in a small and little-known book titled Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, published in 1981.

At the time, Crick was a member of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. L. E. Orgel, a British chemist, worked for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, based in San Diego, California. In a paper they coauthored in 1973, they wrote the following:

It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that Pasteur and Tyndall completed the demonstration that spontaneous generation is not occurring on the Earth nowadays. Darwin, and a number of other biologists, concluded that life must have evolved long ago when conditions were more favourable. Some other scientists, however, drew a quite different conclusion. They supposed that if life does not evolve from terrestrial nonliving matter nowadays, it may never have done so. Hence, they argued, life reached the earth as an ‘infection’ from another planet.¹

They also addressed the issue of undirected panspermia:

It now seems unlikely that extraterrestrial living organisms could have reached the earth either as spores driven by the radiation pressure from another star or as living organisms imbedded in a meteorite. As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet. We conclude that it is possible that life reached the earth in this way.²

As a prerequisite to proposing their alternative to Darwinian evolution, Crick and Orgel raised numerous scientific objections to that theory. The scientists were not at all convinced that enough time had elapsed on Earth to account for the sudden appearance of complex organisms about three billion years ago.

Crick’s work with DNA afforded him knowledge and observations unavailable to previous evolutionists. He had intimate knowledge of the astonishing complexity of DNA, had researched and confirmed the absence of evidence for a primordial soup, had observed that life appeared suddenly and with complexity in the fossil record, and had confirmed the absence of any fossil evidence for transitional (missing links) forms of life.

In fact, it was Crick and his DNA codiscover, the American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist James Dewey Watson, who proved that any single paired strand of human DNA contains the information to direct the one hundred trillion cells in the human body. DNA also has the capability of both reproducing and repairing itself. It is a molecular chain of approximately one billion nucleotides that form combination strings of four specific chemicals that function like a coded computer program. The pair has to be ultimately credited with discovering the basis for all subsequent DNA research, as well as the principles of bioengineering.

For their part, Crick and Orgel, not convinced that undirected panspermia was a strong enough mechanism to support the arrival of the seeds of life on Earth, proposed that an advanced civilization had packed a space probe with microbes and sent it to “infect” Earth with the seeds of life. In his book Life Itself Crick summed up his views in the following statement:

Directed Panspermia—postulates that the roots of our form of life go back to another place in the universe, almost certainly another planet; that it had reached a very advanced form there before anything much had started here; and that life here was seeded by microorganisms sent on some form of spaceship by an advanced civilization.³

In fact, both panspermia and directed panspermia predict the absence of transitional life-forms, the missing links that evolutionists have tried to uncover, in vain, ever since Darwin proposed his theory a hundred and fifty years ago.

The public is given the false impression that the only missing link not accounted for is the one that separates apes and humans. The fact is that there are thousands of missing links in the plant and animal kingdoms. For example, the question arises, Where are the missing links that should exist between the nonflowering plants and flowering plants?

In addition, where are the missing links that should connect nonpollinating insects and bees that are necessary to pollinate the flowering plants?

In other words, why do flowering plants and bees, which depend on each other, suddenly appear in the record without any intermediate forms? These issues vex hardcore Darwinians, and they were one fact that compelled Crick and Orgel to formulate the theory of directed panspermia.

Hoyle was also concerned about the problem, and he summed up his view of the missing links by comparing them to how computer hardware is upgraded. He wrote:

We saw there that intermediate forms are missing from the fossil record. Now we see why, essentially because there were no intermediate forms. When a computer is upgraded, there are no intermediate forms. The new units are wheeled in beside the old computer, the electrical connections are made, the electric power is switched on, and the thing is done.⁴

Clearly the work and conclusions of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe both agree with and differ from those of Crick and Orgel. Nonetheless, we do not necessarily have to make it an either-or proposition. The universe—as exhibited by the multitude of survival strategies employed by species on Earth—does not appear to be the kind of gambler who bets the farm on everything.

It is more likely that both strategies are used to ensure the spread and continued existence of life, which must be maintained as much as possible in an often very hostile universe.

Now let us review a list of some of the hard scientific evidence in support of the idea that the seeds of life originated in outer space and arrived on Earth very late in the cosmic scheme of things.

September 24, 1970: For the first time, an unmanned spacecraft delivered a lunar “soil” sample to Earth. The Soviet Union’s Luna 16 spacecraft returned from the moon’s Sea of Fertility with 101 grams of lunar regolith in a hermetically sealed container.

February 1972: Only 120 kilometers from the Luna 16 site on the moon, Luna 20 used a drill with a ten-inch, hollow-core bit to collect another regolith sample, which was also hermetically sealed.

1979: The sealed containers from the Luna missions were promptly delivered to a laboratory in 1972 to be examined and photographed. But even after hundreds of the pictures were published in an atlas in 1979, the biological nature of some of the particles was not noticed at first glance.

1984: A meteorite that had been blasted off from the surface of Mars about fifteen million years ago was found in Antarctica by a team of scientists searching for meteors. The space rock was named Allan Hills 84001 (ALH 84001).

May 19, 1995: Two scientists at California Polytechnic State University showed that bacteria can survive without any metabolism for at least twenty-five million years; they opined that they might be immortal.

November 24, 1995: The New York Times described bacteria that can survive radiation much stronger than any that Earth has ever experienced.

August 7, 1996: After a decade of research, NASA announced that researchers had found evidence of ancient life in meteorite ALH 84001 from Mars.

July 29, 1997: A NASA scientist announced evidence of fossilized microscopic life-forms in a meteorite not from any known planet.

Spring 1998: A microfossil that was found in a meteorite and photographed in 1966 was recognized by a Russian microbiologist as a magnetotactic bacterium.

Fall 1998: NASA’s public position on life from space shifted dramatically.

January 4, 1999: NASA officially recognized the possibility that life on Earth comes from space.

March 19, 1999: NASA scientists announced that two more meteorites held even stronger fossilized evidence for past life on Mars.

April 26, 2000: The German team operating the mass spectrometer on NASA’s Stardust mission announced the detection of very large organic molecules in space. (Nonbiological sources for organic molecules so large were not then known.)

October 19, 2000: A team of biologists and a geologist announced the revival of bacteria that are 250 million years old, strengthening the case that bacterial spores can be immortal.

December 13, 2000: A NASA team demonstrated that the magnetosomes in Mars meteorite ALH 84001 are biological.

May 11, 2001: Geologist Bruno D’Argenio and molecular biologist Giuseppe Geraci from the University of Naples announced that they had found extraterrestrial bacteria inside a meteorite estimated to be more than 4.5 billion years old.

June 2002: Geneticists reported evidence that the evolutionary step from chimps to humans was assisted by viruses.

August 2, 2004: Very convincing electron microscope photos of fossilized cyanobacteria in a meteorite were reported by NASA astrobiologist Richard B. Hoover.

January 25, 2005: J. Craig Venter, a biologist involved in sequencing the human genome, endorsed panspermia.

May 10, 2007: Eminent biologist E. O. Wilson endorsed panspermia.

April 18, 2008: Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, endorsed panspermia.

April 7, 2009: Stephen Hawking, a world-renowned physicist, endorsed panspermia.

May 2, 2009: Freeman Dyson, a physicist and mathematician, spoke favorably about panspermia.

February 26, 2010: Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, endorsed panspermia in a ten-minute video, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, episode 11.

May 10, 2010: We Are Not Alone: Why We Have Already Found Extraterrestrial Life, a book about astrobiology by Dirk Schulze-Makuch and David J. Darling that includes the topic of panspermia, was published.

January 25, 2011: Chandra Wickramasinghe had a new article, “Viva Panspermia,” available online.

February 28, 2011: A two-hour video program about panspermia and related topics became available on the Internet, “Finding Life beyond Earth,” NOVA, 2011, available on YouTube.

August 24, 2011: Panspermia is more likely than we thought, a new analysis revealed. Website: panspermia.org, Brig Klyce, article, “Introduction: More than Panspermia.”

September 1, 2011: An article titled, “Earth Could Spread Life across The Milky Way,” by Tammy Plotner, appeared on Universe Today, the space and astronomy news blog, www.universetoday.com (accessed March 20, 2017).

October 10, 2011: The new terms neopanspermia and pathospermia were introduced in a paper available online. In addition to explaining the origin of life, a form of panspermia suggests that life is continually arriving on Earth from space. This possibility Milton Wainwright termed neopanspermia (neo = “new”). Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also suggest that pandemic diseases may originate from space, an idea covered by the terms pathopanspermia or pathospermia.

February 13, 2015: Scientists (U. of Buckingham) in the UK have examined a tiny metal circular object and are suggesting it might be a microorganism deliberately sent by aliens to create life on earth. “UK Scientists. Aliens May Have Seeded Life on Earth.” The minuscule object was discovered by astrophysicist Milton Wainwright.

Mounting evidence supporting some form of panspermia seeding Earth with life in the remote past is gaining momentum every year as new data from space probes is made available. The publicly disclosed acceptance of the theory by eminent scientists in recent years is indicative of the paradigm shift in the scientific community.

We should be clear that the acceptance of the theory of panspermia does not mean that the theory of directed panspermia has also been accepted. However, it may represent an important first step in that direction.

The Genesis Race theory goes beyond all forms of panspermia and directed panspermia by positing not only that life was seeded on Earth by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, but that the same civilization also intervened in the evolutionary process to create humans and to generate civilization.

The first book in this series largely dealt with the cultural and archaeological evidence in support of this theory. The current volume focuses more on the modern scientific evidence while including additional cultural and archaeological evidence.

CONCLUSION

The theory of panspermia, the idea that the seeds of life exist throughout the universe, originated in ancient times. While Darwin proposed that life began on Earth via spontaneous generation, that theory was disposed of by Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century. Thereafter, panspermia was resurrected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and refined by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe.

Then Crick and Orgel proposed that seeds of life, microorganisms, were intentionally dispatched to Earth by an advanced civilization. The tenets of undirected panspermia have become increasingly accepted by mainstream scientists. The Genesis Race theory (Cosmic Ancestry) takes directed panspermia to its conclusion.