Panspermia

“Aliens definitely exist, and it's possible they're living among us on Earth but have gone undetected so far.” said Helen Patricia Sharman, CMG, OBE, HonFRS, Britain's first astronaut, who visited the Soviet Mir space station in 1991.

Sharman also told ‘The Observer’ newspaper: "aliens exist, there's no two ways about it."… "There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life," she went on: "Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not." Then, in a tantalizing theory that should probably make you very suspicious of your colleagues, Sharman added: "It's possible they're here right now and we simply can't see them."

It is speculated that a simple biological system carrying a message and capable of self-replication in suitable environments may be one possible channel for interstellar communication. A preliminary experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that bacteriophage φC174 DNA carries an extraterrestrial intelligence message from an advanced civilization.

In 1903, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, and the first Swedish Nobel laureate recipient, published in his article ‘The Distribution of Life in Space,’ the hypothesis now called radiopanspermia, that microscopic forms of life can be propagated in space, driven by the radiation pressure from stars.

Arrhenius argued that particles at a critical size below 1.5 μm would be propagated at high speed by radiation pressure of the Sun. However, because its effectiveness decreases with increasing size of the particle, this mechanism holds for very tiny particles only, such as single bacterial spores.

Lithopanspermia, the transfer of organisms in rocks from one planet to another either through interplanetary or interstellar space, remains speculative. Although there is no evidence that it has occurred in the Solar System, the various stages have become amenable to experimental testing.

Thomas Gold, an Austrian-born American astrophysicist, suggested in 1960 the hypothesis of "Cosmic Garbage," that life on Earth might have originated accidentally from a pile of waste products dumped on Earth long ago by extraterrestrial beings.

Directed panspermia concerns the deliberate transport of microorganisms in space, sent to Earth to start life here, or sent from Earth to seed new planetary systems with life by introduced species of microorganisms on lifeless planets.

The Nobel Prize winner Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, along with Leslie Eleazer Orgel FRS, a British chemist, proposed that life may have been purposely spread by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, but considering an early "RNA world" Crick noted later that life may have originated on Earth.

It has been suggested that directed panspermia was proposed in order to counteract various objections, including the argument that microbes would be inactivated by the space environment and cosmic radiation before they could make a chance encounter with Earth.

Conversely, active directed panspermia has been proposed to secure and expand life in space. This may be motivated by biotic ethics that values, and seeks to propagate the basic patterns of our organic gene/protein life-form.

A number of publications since 1979 have proposed the idea that directed panspermia could be demonstrated to be the origin of all life on Earth if a distinctive 'signature' message were found, deliberately implanted into either the genome or the genetic code of the first microorganisms by our hypothetical progenitor

Betül Ka?ar, a Turkish-American astrobiologist, Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin, and director of the NASA Astrobiology Consortium MUSE, calls sending the chemical capacity for life to emerge on another planetary body protospermia.

Reflecting the ethical implications of the possibility that humans are capable of instigating multiple origins of life under a broader array of circumstances than life currently exists, she wrote: "With protospermia, whatever arises after we provide a nudge toward biogenesis would be just as much a product of that environment as our life is of Earth. It would be unique and ‘of’ that destination body as much as its rocks on the ground and the gasses in its atmosphere."

According to the panspermia hypothesis, microscopic life—distributed by meteoroids, asteroids and other small Solar System bodies—may exist throughout the universe. Of the bodies on which life is possible, living organisms could most easily enter the other bodies of the Solar System from Enceladus.

It is generally agreed that the conditions required for the evolution of intelligent life as we know it are probably exceedingly rare in the universe, while simultaneously noting that simple single-celled microorganisms may be more likely.

Both Sir Fred Hoyle FRS, an English astronomer, and Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe MBE, a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist, have speculated that several outbreaks of illnesses on Earth are of extraterrestrial origins, including the 1918 flu pandemic, and certain outbreaks of polio and mad cow disease.

For the 1918 flu pandemic they hypothesized that cometary dust brought the virus to Earth simultaneously at multiple locations—a view almost universally dismissed by experts on this pandemic[citation needed]. Hoyle also speculated that HIV came from outer space.

After Hoyle's death, ‘The Lancet’, among the world's oldest and best-known general medical journals, published a letter to the editor from Wickramasinghe, Edward J. "Ted" Steele, an Australian molecular immunologist, Milton Wainwright, a British microbiologist and al’s, in which, they hypothesized that the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) could be extraterrestrial in origin and not originated from poultry.

The Lancet subsequently published three responses to this letter, showing that the hypothesis was not evidence-based, and casting doubts on the quality of the experiments cited by Wickramasinghe in his letter. Like other claims linking terrestrial disease to extraterrestrial pathogens, this proposal was rejected by the greater research community.

There are plenty of unusual theories over the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. From claims that the virus is a bioweapon, to the idea that 5G transmissions are behind the pandemic, there's been also no shortage of conspiracy ideas. But there's one COVID-19 theory so remarkable that it makes the others look boring by comparison:

The proposal that the coronavirus came from space theory is still more plausible than some other theories of COVID-19. A meteor could, in theory, carry a virus, but radio waves can't!

Jeffrey Kluger, a Journalist; editor and writer at ‘TIME’ magazine, author of 12 books, including "Apollo 13" and the new novel "Holdout" writes, what's happening right now due to the global outbreak of COVID-19 should make us rethink our desire to meet alien lifeforms.

The theory of rodents to humans seems implausible. The same angst over viral origins was also evident when HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and ZIKAV suddenly appeared on the scene. Lets not deal with these earlier diseases as their origins are far less clear cut than COVID-19, and sorting out what is true from what is untrue is a challenge.

One thing for sure, the COVID pandemic has already turned life as we know it upside down...

Food for thought!