- There have been numerous arguments on the origin of life
on earth. Life began in the ocean, or volcanic vents, or ancient tide pools.
Now the theory of panspermia is getting attention. The modern ideas for
this come from the late Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. Panspermia
essentially says that the seeds of life originate in space and are delivered
to earth by comets.
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- At least this is what I understood until I read Cosmic
Life Force by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. My understanding of Hoyle has now
changed. Championing the existence of wide-spread bacteria in cosmic dust
clouds, Hoyle builds a case for the existence of these bacteria in protoplanetary
disks. What does this mean? It means that as the earth formed, that the
material it formed from already contained microbes. This would also be
true of Mars. Then why are the planets so different?
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- Hoyle has said,
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- "The physical and chemical requirements must ...
have been far more favorable for the building of complex molecules before
the Earth was aggregated.... The Earth intercepts only a tiny fraction
of the ultra-violet light emitted by the Sun .... The energy source was
therefore much greater before the planets were aggregated .... Another
point in favour of a pre-planetary origin of life appears when we consider
in a little more detail how the complex molecules were built up. This requires
the addition together of many smaller molecules....
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- If the molecules were dissolved in the sea, for instance,
the chance of enough of the right kinds of molecules coming together would
be negligible.... Bernal has called attention to the necessity for solving
this problem of association, and has suggested that favourable conditions
would probably occur if the molecules were coated as a film on the surface
of a solid particle. Such a condition would undoubtedly best be satisfied
... while the planetary material was still distributed as a swarm of small
bodies.... There is no suggestion that animals and plants as we know them
originated in interplanetary space. But the vital steps on which life is
based may have occurred there."
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- Perhaps at one time Mars was developing conditions for
the development of the eukaryotic cells and multicellular forms, but somewhere
along the way was derailed from fulfilling that destiny.
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- It is remarkable, I found, that one of the smartest people
who have ever lived, William J. Sidis, came independently to the idea that
Hoyle developed over decades.
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- In his Theories on The Origin of Life from his book "The
Animate and Inanimate", Sidis states,
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- "According to our hypothesis, life always has existed
and always will exist under all conditions in some form, though that form
may be quite different from any form of life that comes within our experience.
If we trace back the ancestry of present-day life, we will always be able
to trace it back to some life, though it may be in such a form that it
might be extremely difficult to recognize it as life. Thus, there never
was a time when life started on the earth; it merely developed into its
present complex form from some simpler form that existed on earth when
the earth was in a molten or even in a vaporous condition; still farther
back, it can be traced to some extremely simple form of life that existed
as far back as the nebula out of which the solar system originated; we
shall later attempt to trace it back beyond the nebula."
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- I predict that this theory will be found to be correct
and thus the chances of life occuring on extrasolar planets with the right
conditions increases. What path is taken from the prokaryotic archeabacteria
to intelligent beings is a map yet to be drawn.
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- Bill Hamilton
- AstroScience Research
- http://www.geocities.com/xplorer2x/
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- "I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because
they seem incredible." Fred Hoyle
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