Panspermia. Hehe.
June 17th, 2008 Posted in NewsPanspermia, not a drunken frat-boy game. An actual legit theory for the origins of life on planet Earth. So legit, it was even taught in my Biology lectures at University. Then I had to write a stupid paper about the origins of life. OK, I chose to write a paper about it because I find it intriguing, but that’s me.
Think about it — how the hell can we realistically know what happened 3.6 billion years ago? We can’t, so there have been a bunch of guesses, the most popular include the primordial soup (mix of chemicals developed into life-making jazz over long periods of time) and Panspermia — the “spores from space” idea that has fuelled a number of pretty crappy movies. But the idea behind it is a little different from The Day of the Triffids.
Rather than a number of seeds landing in the soup and growing into lizards, Panspermiacs (those individuals that are crazy about Panspermia) suggest that some special molecules unknown on Earth arrived on meteors, then possibly mixed with the soup (the primordial soup idea is the basis of a lot of conjecture regarding life’s humble beginnings, but it does have its opponents), and led to life as we know it. OK, some think seeds were shot out through space like the blue fiery stuff in Starship Troopers, but they might be crazy, and possibly need to get off the drugs.
So why am I writing about Panspermia now? Because awesome Aussie (OK, not sure if they are Aussie, to be honest) researchers have found some chemical precursors to DNA on a meteor that landed in ’stralia in the ’60’s , and this is believed to lend credence to the whole ‘origins of life’ theories. Check out this article at Scientific American for much more specific and slightly more boring information (depending on what you’re in to, I guess). Interesting, ne? Well, OK, there are those among us who don’t care what happened 3.6 billion years ago, but you know what? It still matters! It affects us, people!
Heh. Nah, it doesn’t, but all knowledge is good knowledge, and this information would have a number of scientific applications. Still… hehe, Panspermia.
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