Life seeded from outside Earth?

[Siani]

Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University, here in Wales, is adamant that life arrived on Earth from elsewhere in the cosmos. He says that, essentially, all life on Earth is alien.

More here:

BBC News - Professor's alien life 'seed' theory claimed

 

[superjudge]

Sir Francis Crick was one of the co-discoverers of DNA, and below are some of his ideas about this topic.

From PANSPERMIA THEORY directed panspermia lithopanspermia ballistic panspermia Mars Earth - Panspermia Theory

The late Nobel prize winner Professor Francis Crick, OM FRS, along with British chemist Leslie Orgel proposed the theory of directed panspermia in 1973. A co-discoverer of the double helical structure of the DNA molecule, Crick found it impossible that the complexity of DNA could have evolved naturally.

Crick posed that small grains containing DNA, or the building blocks of life, could be loaded on a brace of rockets and fired randomly in all directions. Crick and Orgel estimated that a payload of one metric ton could contain 10¹⁷ micro-organisms organized in ten or a hundred separate samples. This would be the best, most cost effective strategy for seeding life on a compatible planet at some time in the future.


The strategy of directed panspermia may have already been pursued by an advanced civilization facing catastrophic annihilation, or hoping to terraform planets for later colonization.


And from The Secret Sun: The Royal Society and the Rising Alien Expectation


An interview with Sir Francis Crick:

“Is it possible,” I asked Crick, when I reached him at the Salk Institute in San Diego, California, “that our DNA came from another planet?”

“I published that theory twenty-five years ago,” said Crick. “I called it Directed Panspermia.”

“Do you think it arrived in a meteor or comet?” I asked.

“No,” said Crick. “Anything living would have died in such an accidental journey through space.

“Are you saying that DNA was sent here in a vehicle?” I asked.

“It’s the only possibility,” said Crick.

The above scene is interesting considering NASA had a large part in helping make this movie Mission to Mars. Is this NASA's sneaky way of disclosing what they know??
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[TClaeys]

So Siani, .. what do you think about it??

The origin of life is one big mystery. How did life come from something that is not alive?? Maybe it is that life was created, .... by who or what, ... no idea. So, that leads to a few possibilities: life was created by something, life has always been, or life came from non-living materials somehow. Maybe life and non-life are not all that different and we are missing the right lense in which to see this. Evolution certainly has taken place and morphed this simplistic life into everything we see today. Perhaps this is some experiment stemming from the original strands of genetic material. And perhaps the UFO's are just checking up on their experiment.

Sorry- sounding a little woo-woo here, but I just don't know what to make of the origin of life question. It's a much different question than how life changes. How the hell did it happen in the first place and did it travel to Earth?? Panspermia seems more likely than an Earth based origin. It seems that if life originated here on Earth then we would be able to reproduce it experimentally..... but we really have no clue and no experiments have yielded bacteria crawling out of the test tubes.

I don't know about directed panspermia unless it was an intentional method of sending rudimentary life outwards with no apparent purpose. It wouldn't benefit the alien species unless it were for experimental purposes that they could track. Humans wouldn't send bits of bacterial DNA I don't think. We would send blueprints or samples of OUR DNA in hopes that it could be assembled into a human being. That is of course assuming DNA is the common backbone for life throughout the universe. But then again, maybe the aliens are the "gods".

My thoughts are kinda jumbled. Good food for thought, thanks.

 

[Siani]

So Siani, .. what do you think about it??

To be honest - I really don't know . I certainly don't buy the Biblical version of how life began. But I'm no scientist, and often have trouble grasping the very basics of physics, chemistry, etc. I find Prof. Wickramasinghe's theory very interesting, but simply don't know enough to be able to wholeheartedly endorse his theory or to refute it. I hail strictly from the "where the hell did we come from, why are we here, where did it all begin, and if someone made us, who made them?" school of thought. In other words, the whole origin of life issue does my head in! Too many questions, and not enough answers, and even the answers we are offered, simply seem to trigger even more questions, rather than actually resolve anything. Yep, my thoughts are pretty jumbled, too :redface: .

 

[Red]

It is very interesting hypothesis and thanks for posting it. It gives me another thing to ponder. Surprisingly, wikipedia has a pretty good article on abiogenesis, which is the study of the origins of life on the planet. It gives a pretty decent overview of several theories, including the panspermia theory that is the impetus for this thread.

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