An eternal and uncreated Universe — Everything is possible if time is endless So is this the definitive answer of panspermia’s advocates to the problem of the origin of life? A biological big bang made plausible by the HGD cosmological model? Not necessarily. According to Wickramasinghe, even the smallest structures that regulate the chemistry of living beings are so complex that it is…

The biological Big Bang — At the basis of panspermia is the rejection of abiogenesis. As we have seen, according to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe calculations, the probability that the enzymes essential to the chemistry of living organisms have emerged in their entirety, complete and functional, at the end of a process of purely random accumulation…

Interstellar bacteria and mass extinctions — Bacteria from space Regarding the incredible replication power of bacteria, in their 1999 book “Astronomical origins of life,” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe wrote (page 101): Start with a single living cell, say a bacterium. A typical doubling time by binary-fission for a bacterium supplied with appropriate nutrients would be two or three hours. Continuing…

Evolution driven by retroviruses and extraterrestrial octopuses — In the cosmic vision of life typical of panspermia, viruses, particularly retroviruses, have primary importance. Retroviruses from space Viruses are biological “machines” extraordinarily effective and, at the same time, incredibly small. They have dimensions in the order of tens or hundreds of nanometers, often less than the wavelength of visible light. The strands…

Comets as vectors of life — Comets hosting possible microbial life As we have seen in the first part of this story, the study’s authors believe it is extremely unlikely that complex biological structures such as enzymes could have formed by chance, especially in an environment subjected to hellish conditions, such as those existing on Earth during the Hadean. But the…

The origin of life on Earth is unknown. In the scientific field, two theories try to explain the mystery: Abiogenesis, preferred by most scientists, and panspermia, defended by a small but fierce circle of scholars. This article aims to explain what panspermia is and what are the reasons given by its supporters — The protagonists of this story In 1979, the Italian publishing house Mondadori issued “La Nuvola della Vita” by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, a book that I avidly read because it promised answers to the great cosmological questions that, then as now, were at the center of my interests. It was the Italian translation of…

In 2016 the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) imaged galaxies at the very limits of the observable universe — As we have already noticed in another post, looking far into space also means looking back in time due to the finite speed of light. Exploiting this bond between time and distance, astronomers have derived the general lines of the Universe’s evolutionary history by putting together sky observations showing objects…

Everything we see is always an image of the past — As many know, light does not propagate instantaneously but has a finite speed, just under 300,000 km per second. One of the strangest and counterintuitive consequences of this limit is that everything we see, even the closest thing, is always an image of the past. Let us consider the Sun…

The long method, to obtain a correct result to any level of accuracy without resorting to estimates — In the last fifty years, the ever more widespread diffusion of increasingly cheaper and more powerful home computers has made it possible to fully delegate to machines the execution of calculations that only humans could perform until recently. Among these calculations, we can certainly include finding the square roots of…