23. On Panspermia

Did life develop on Earth, or did it come from the stars? Is outer space actually teeming with life? One of our hosts spent the week down the Chandra Wickramasinge internet rabbithole and has some Opinions.

The idea of panspermia is that life is everywhere across the universe. More specifically, if abiogenesis did happen, it probably happened elsewhere, and there is life on Earth simply because life is widespread. Fermi’s Paradox makes this feel unlikely - if there’s so much life out there, why haven’t we seen it? Well, the leading exponents of panspermia argue that in fact we have, in fact the world is being hosed down by protein chains all the time, driven across the void by the solar winds. We don’t notice them because they’re the same as the protein chains that are on Earth already. Obviously.

More intense exponents - Sir Frank Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge - go further and argue that interstellar medium is not just filled with protein chains but is in fact riddled with bacteria and viruses. They’re everywhere, and the massive dust clouds we see in those beautiful false colour space telescope images are their desiccated corpses. Alarmingly, this seems to be backed up by spectrographic analysis (although we’re ill-placed to verify this), and high altitude weather balloons do get covered in bacteria. Now that SpaceX are getting Starship up and running and will be hitting Mars soon we might get some even stronger evidence about this soon - that will be the real test.

Why are scientists so against this? It’s nothing to do with the data, apparently - this is bias, an medieval Earth-centric prejudice. We used to believe that Earth was the centre of the universe, but then the Copernican Principle emerged and we now understand that from a cosmic point of view Earth is not particularly special. Nowhere is. Why can’t we apply this idea to life itself?