May 9, 2020
Today’s
mind experiment – this morning, I launched the thought experiment by watching a
shared video called Coronavirus from Outer Space – Professor Wickramasinghe,
Astrobiologist. The channel is Green
Tara Guru. The production behind Dr. Wickramasinghe’s mini-lecture was fun; his
home office video was surrounded by a frame, embellished with space CGI and supporting
image video clips for what he is describing at any moment, as well as, a celestial
music soundtrack. (My students would
love if I were able to produce such lecture videos for them.) It was released May
1, 2020, and has a paltry three hundred fifty-nine views, one of which is
mine.
After
watching the video, I did my customary search about Dr. Wickramasinghe’s
background. He is a broadly publish an
award-winning British mathematician and astronomer born in Sri Lanka in 1939.
In the 1960’s he worked with theoretical physicist Dr. Fred Hoyle on a radical kind
of panspermia (the idea that life is distributed throughout the universe,
spread about by space dust, meteorites, asteroids, comets and such). They also
advanced the idea that various new illnesses on Earth have extraterrestrial origins.
He
and Hoyle contended that panspermia had facilitated the macroevolution of life
on the planet. As he writes about the role of panspermia out his research on
the origins of life on Earth, he refers to it as cosmic ancestry. While it is a
theory, I admit it is a compelling idea and one that I have put forward to my Earth
History classes.
In
geology, there is the principle of uniformitarianism that says the processes
that shape the Earth now are the same processes that shaped it millions of
years ago, and so are the results of those processes. I can understand how Dr.
Wickramasinghe might extend this principle into his work. If it is possible
that life on Earth began with extraterrestrial inseminations, then it is also possible
that space flotsam continues to affect its biosphere. Meteors, asteroids, and comets are still a
common occurrence.
I got curious about these contemporary panspermia ideas and dug deeper into Wickramasinghe's research, poking around for feedback from the scientific community. An article from April 7, 2020 by senior astronomer, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute had an interesting rebuttal to the premise that this Coronavirus came to earth from space - there’s also a fundamental problem with the idea of sickness from space. Pathogenic microbes and viruses are dependent on an intimate “understanding” of the biology they disrupt. The game plan of viruses is to commandeer cellular machinery to make copies of themselves. They are exquisitely attuned to the specific chemistry of earthly life, itself the result of billions of years of evolution. To think that organisms from other worlds – worlds where DNA might not even exist – would be capable of successfully manipulating our cells is like assuming that your house key would unlock a random door in Tibet. Apparently, there is a low probability that a space invader virus causes Covid19.
Here are my thoughts on this video; I do love the deep questions that this astrobiologist and mathematician has brought into the conversation. Wickramasinghe’s work in panspermia fosters curiosity for research about biological relationships within the universe and with our explorations for life beyond our little planet. Still, so we can be cautious about where the rabbit holes might be, I am affirmed in the critical role of peer reviews and the scientific method as a sound and prudent way to vet and scrutinize new ideas before we embrace them as fact. I would say that Dr. Wickramasinghe’s conclusions resonate with human tendencies of “we find what we look for, and we look for what we know.” But perhaps he is on to something. In terms of Earth Time, our century is her blink of an eye.
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