A right triangle is a triangle in which one of the three angles is 90°. The triangle shown below is right-angled because the angle ⦣ACB between sides a and b is 90°. The side opposite the right angle, c, is called the hypotenuse.
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…
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…
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…
In the cosmic vision of life typical of panspermia, viruses, particularly retroviruses, have primary importance.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
