By Neil Hogan
After mowing lawns for my parents for several weeks, I had earned enough pocket money to buy a telescope. Not some fancy, expensive bauble that requires two people to move, just a x20 telescope and tripod so that I could view Saturn, according to the box. I was hoping to see Halley’s comet, too. (It was 1985. $1.00 per mow was a windfall for a 14-year old, and $24.95 for a telescope was six months’ work.) Well, I couldn’t see Saturn. I could barely make out some blurred craters on the moon, and Halley’s comet? Forget it. My neighbour’s binoculars could see a lot more. Talk about misleading and deceptive conduct in relation to advertising. However, I didn’t tell my parents the real reason I wanted the telescope. I had wanted to know – were there aliens on the moon?
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Billions of years ago, or maybe even last Tuesday, biological organisms were traveling the emptiness of space, intent on finding a fertile rock to land on. Viruses, bacteria, single-celled organisms, or more complex, tentacled ones, skimming planets, slingshotting stars, avoiding black holes, intent on impregnating the cosmos. This is according to panspermia theory, which hypothesises that life is so abundant it has spread to all geodesics of the universe. A compelling idea, to be sure, but one that has more questions than answers. What kind of organism? How could any survive cosmic radiation without a spaceship? It would have to be pretty tough to deal with such extremes – as strong as, well, an extremophile.
Johann Goeze’s discovery in 1773 of a microorganism that could do just that was the first sign that panspermia could be possible. The tardigrade can live, for a short time, in close to absolute zero and above 150 degrees Celsius, (or over 300 Fahrenheit, which sounds even cooler, er, warmer). They can also go into suspended animation for decades, then reactivate again when conditions are better. In 2020, panspermia theorist Marina Minguez-Toral and her team at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid confirmed that the tardigrade also has DNA armour, making it an ideal space wanderer. However, we still don’t know if it could survive the vast distances between stars. Could there be other creatures even stronger? Perhaps even in the past?
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My telescope turned out to be pretty useless in finding aliens, but I was 100 percent positive that they existed, somewhere. I wanted to explore the universe, discover things so different from anything that I had ever experienced in my own life on this one planet and only an alien race would be able to help. I knew that the universe was billions of years old, with over 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, so that was plenty of time and space for life to arise. But how could I find them? And why? Was it in my DNA that I wanted to travel the stars? Was there some inner voice passed down through selected lineages of homosapiens that compelled them to escape the planet and spread out into the cosmos?
Decades later and we still don’t have alien neighbours. If I had known it would take this long, I might have chosen a more relevant career. I decided it was high time I found some evidence, perhaps published something, or discovered enough to get a role on that show Ancient Aliens. I began investigating careers, hobbies and people connected in some way to space. There must be a job out there that might increase the chance of meeting an off-world entity in my lifetime, surely.
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Panspermia theorist Edward J Steele and his team published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology in 2018 that the Cambrian Explosion, 500 million years ago, could not have come about through normal evolutionary processes. Combining the research of 33 scientist’s papers, he concluded that, when we have a major extinction event caused by comets or asteroid collisions, the new life that arises and evolves afterwards must have come from those comets or asteroids. The research also suggests that the octopus could not have evolved here naturally as the connection between it and its supposed nautiloid precursor is too genetically distant. Were ancient forms of octopi, half a billion years ago, tentacling their way across the galaxy? Though, if cruising eight-legged creatures existed, I’m sure people would be screaming about it from the treetops. Perhaps we could find something that was easily missed that would be more convincing evidence. Something small, like a virus.
Panspermia theorist Koushik Chattopadhyay, in 2014, explored the idea that influenza could be an alien virus. He noted that, whenever a new strain hits, it hits different parts of Earth with no relationship with each other, at almost the same time. He showed that the flu records for 1918 recorded a strain of common flu appearing at almost exactly the same time in both the USA and India, countries that were over 13,000km apart. He also presented research confirming new strains of flu had been found to have appeared in isolated communities with no recent contact from the outside world. In 2020, a team of scientists in Spain, led by Isabel Reche, collected samples from the virosphere that surrounds the Earth. It is an area in the atmosphere where viruses hang out, sitting and waiting for the best environmental conditions before floating down and finding hosts. The scientists found, and probably had a stiff drink straight afterwards, that every day, an average of 800 million viruses per square metre fall on the Earth. If viruses can exist in the atmosphere for decades, even millennia, then our atmosphere is probably full of alien viruses just waiting to make landfall. With viruses not actually being alive, they’re a perfect candidate for panspermia, though they would need a host to be at their destination to activate, so not quite spreading life. What about living organisms then, almost as small, like bacteria?
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No jobs fit my criteria of time, money and aliens. ‘First Contact Specialist’ doesn’t exist yet. Most astrobiologists don’t earn enough as much of their time is spent filling in forms requesting funding. Astronauts haven’t left Earth’s orbit in almost 50 years so taking that job is unlikely to get me fist bumping a four-fingered grey boi anytime soon. I even had a chat with Dr. Megan Clarke AC at the Australian Space Agency about opportunities there and found that there are plenty of office jobs available for qualified candidates. Office job? It looked like I had to prove aliens exist without actually bringing one to a party. But how? More to the point, what if they weren’t around anymore? What if it wasn’t the wrong place I was looking, but the wrong time?
I decided to start at the beginning. That massive explosion that created this universe before even time began must have formed more than just every element in the cosmos. Was life a part of the Big Bang, or did it appear accidentally, like an infection, billions of years later? More importantly, how can we prove it sitting at home with our glasses of cab sav? I began searching the most advanced database known to humanity – Google. Almost immediately, I discovered the theory of panspermia. Could panspermia be the answer to not only my questions, but the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?
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In 2016, panspermia theorist Yuko Kawaguchi and her team, as part of the Tanpopo orbital mission to investigate interplanetary transfer of life, began experimenting on the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. Their findings suggested that panspermia is highly likely as these tiny legends survived vacuum and UVC irradiation for over a year. In 2020, further research confirmed that, when the bacterium gets together in clumps, they use the ones that die from ultraviolet radiation as a shield to keep the ones further in the clump alive. This gives them the potential to survive in space for centuries – compelling evidence for panspermia.
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As the pieces came together and answered the fundamental questions of life in the universe for me, I was blown away by the fact that I should have figured this out for myself. Is that why it wasn’t mainstream yet? Not many had figured it out? Scientists in multiple fields worldwide had proved panspermia from different angles. I was sure this was how life had got here. I was also sure that it meant the universe was teeming with it. The cosmos was probably like a tropical rainforest, continuously spreading upward and outward. But then, another thought occurred. What if it wasn’t the original planetary bombardment or a few comets after accretion that first brought life to Earth? What if it was much later? Closer to our time? Perhaps our cells didn’t descend from those that first appeared billions of years ago. Were they on that comet that destroyed the dinosaurs? Is that why mammalian life exploded across the land 66 million years ago? And then I gasped as the truth hit me. Here I was, searching the universe for aliens, and they’d been under my nose the whole time. We are the aliens – our DNA has travelled the galaxy and made landfall here, possibly even just a few million years ago. Perhaps our real home is another planet with a less intense sun, highly oxygenated water, and a 25-hour day. But how easy is it to spread from space body to space body, and how often does it happen? Is it a one in every 500-million-year event? Or is it more often than we can count?
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Panspermia theorist Idan Ginsburg and his team, in 2019, calculated the space/time likelihood of lifetime survival of microorganisms and their closeness to rocky or ice objects as they travel between stars. They understood that it isn’t how far the organisms travel that is important, it is what is the likelihood of being captured at the end of their journey. They concluded it is highly probable, and that “the entire Milky Way could potentially be exchanging biotic components across vast distances.” The calculations suggested as much as 100 million objects could carry some form of life, making contact between space bodies inevitable. Basically, life could easily spread if you got close enough, like a virus.
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I sat back in my chair, and pondered this latest piece of information. We wouldn’t have to wait millions of years for the next visit of microbes. They’d done their traveling from various points across the universe and were already here, chilling on every piece of rock in existence, waiting for the next flight path. I already knew that between 100 and 300 metric tons of cosmic space dust rain down on the planet every day. It was no longer a case of when they would arrive next, it was where.
Shifting from believing the universe was sterile to it being a much more fecund one had me wondering something else. Was life the natural state of the universe, or was it an aberration, a disease? What if the status quo for the cosmos was rocky and gaseous matter around stars, and millions of spinning galaxies in pretty patterns? The appearance of life might be stuffing that all up! Jumping from planet to planet, consuming minerals to propagate, and converting elements into energy to drive biology and breeding – if the universe is seen as a perfectly functioning body, then these waves of life eating into everything can only be seen as some kind of sickness. Is life actually a disease of the universe? Has the universe succumbed to ancient alien super spreaders? It was one more thing to research and I found evidence too quickly for my liking. In 2015, the Smithsonian Magazine published an article entitled “Life May Have Spread Through the Galaxy Like a Plague.” With us about to spread to the stars, it looks like they were right. We’re intent on starting the cycle all over again.
But, what about other aliens? My aliens. The ones with futuristic starships and a galactic tour to die for. If the universe is so packed full of life, we should have had armadas of diplomatic spaceships from multiple species lining up to meet our leaders. What if there’s a reason they’re staying away? Could it be us that is the plague? Are we the ones they’re scared of, knowing that we’re compelled to spread as far as we can? I can just imagine a galactic doctor diagnosing the Earth before presenting its findings to the Interstellar Alliance. “I’m sorry, Gaia, you have a case of the humans. You’ll need to stay at least 1.5 light years from the nearest star for the next 14 million years or so.” I guess the only option then is to accept our plague status and set course for outer space, spreading our viral colonies wherever we go. Anyone want to join me on a trip to Proxima Centauri B?
References that might not be needed?
Chattopadhyay, K. (2014). The Role of Viruses and Viral Infections in the Theory of Panspermia. Journal of Astrobiology & Outreach, [online] 02(01). Available at: https://www.longdom.org/open-access/the-role-of-viruses-and-viral-infections-in-the-theory-of-panspermia-2332-2519.1000111.pdf [Accessed 25 Aug. 2020].
Ginsburg, I., Lingam, M. and Loeb, A. (2018). Galactic Panspermia. The Astrophysical Journal, 868(1), p.L12.
Emspak, J. (n.d.). Life May Have Spread Through the Galaxy Like a Plague. [online] Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/life-may-have-spread-through-galaxy-plague-180956425/ [Accessed 3 Sep. 2020].
Harvard Gazette. (2019). Harvard study suggests asteroids might play key role in spreading life. [online] Available at: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/07/harvard-study-suggests-asteroids-might-play-key-role-in-spreading-life/.
Kawaguchi, Y., Ott, E., Kölbl, D., Chaturvedi, P., Nakagawa, K., Yamagishi, A., Weckwerth, W. and Milojevic, T. (2017). Proteometabolomic response of Deinococcus radiodurans exposed to UVC and vacuum conditions: Initial studies prior to the Tanpopo space mission. PLoS ONE, [online] 12(12). Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5731708/ [Accessed 25 Aug. 2020].
Kawaguchi, Y., Ott, E., Özgen, N., Yamagishi, A., Rabbow, E., Rettberg, P., Weckwerth, W. and Milojevic, T., 2019. Proteomic And Metabolomic Profiling Of Deinococcus Radiodurans Recovering After Exposure To Simulated Low Earth Orbit Vacuum Conditions. [online] Frontiers in Microbiology. Available at: <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.00909/full> [Accessed 3 September 2020].
Mínguez-Toral, M., Cuevas-Zuviría, B., Garrido-Arandia, M. et al. A computational structural study on the DNA-protecting role of the tardigrade-unique Dsup protein. Sci Rep 10, 13424 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-70431-1
Potter, S. (2020). NASA, ULA Launch Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission to Red Planet. [online] NASA. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-ula-launch-mars-2020-perseverance-rover-mission-to-red-planet.
Reche, I., D’Orta, G., Mladenov, N. et al. Deposition rates of viruses and bacteria above the atmospheric boundary layer. ISME J 12, 1154–1162 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-017-0042-4
Steele, E.J., Al-Mufti, S., Augustyn, K.A., et al. Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?. Prog Biophys Mol Biol. 2018;136:3-23. doi:10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2018.03.004