Boffins' first take on asteroid dust from Japanese probe: Carbon rich, less lumpy than expected Researchers have published the first analyses of samples plucked from asteroid 162173 Ryugu by Japan's spacecraft Hayabusa2, revealing, for the first time, the physical properties and composition of a carbonaceous asteroid. The 5.4g of asteroid sample collected from two surface locations on asteroid Ryugu landed in the South …
Nothing inherently improbable about panspermia, but all it does is kick the origin to somewhere else.
At some point somewhere life emerged, don't see it matters hugely if it was here or somewhere in Andromeda.
If it can happen once in a universe this size it'll happen lots of times.
There are all kinds of theories about the unknowable, but in the end they're all just theories.
One thing I've come to realize over the course of 57 years is that science changes its mind a lot. This year's theory is the next decade's "quaint" mistake or even outright bunk.
Even if you could prove beyond all doubt that interstellar biologic seeding happens through asteroids and comets, do you really think that would dissuade the creationists? People are going to believe what they want to believe, and that includes the scientists. Everyone picks and chooses between a smorgasboard of "realities" available to form their world view.
I've yet to see anyone come up with way of spreading life by comets/asteroids that is anything other than laughable. You do realise space is big? If all life on earth was made of dna and you blew the earth up without harming the dna and by some magic it could cross space without harm by the time you got it to Alpha Centauri there would be only one molecule of dna for every 73 m^2. The statistics involved make it so vanishingly unlikely the only way its going to happen is on specifically designed craft aimed with great precision.
You're assuming a uniform distribution, instead of stuff being randomly clumped together.
In a clumping scenario the chances of reaching a particular star system is remote, though the chances are reaching any star system are somewhat greater.
Not saying anything either way about panspermia, just noting a potential discrepancy in your statistics.
> But lumps of mars have made it to earth.
True: What are the chances some random rock lying on the ground would manage to rise up to space (!) and then manage to go land on a neighboring planet (!!)?... If we didn't have proof this actually happens, one would be tempted to say "terribly close to zero", yet it seems things manage to travel through the endless void of space a lot more than we would think.
Note I don't say panspermia is real, but at this point IMHO the only honest answer is "We don't actually know what's possible".
The panspermia theory seems to be based on: "Planet Earth is only 4 billions years old. Life couldn't possibly have started by itself in that short time, obvs!"
And yet, the whole universe is only 13 billion years old. So it would only have 9 billion years to start somewhere else, *and* then be successfully transported from that place to Earth.
It seems a far-fetched solution to a non-problem. After all, if life could have started in 9 billion years, then it's almost as likely that it could have started in 4 billion years in the right conditions. Plus: the fossil record shows that once life got started, the rate of evolution to more complex forms was sustained, and if anything, became faster over time.
The only thing panspermia could answer would be if the number of places in the universe where life is found is higher than expected. But since the total so far is 1, that's a non-question.
The smoking gun for panspermia would be finding bacteria on other planets or star systems that share evolutionary heritage with those on earth.
But there's about 0.7 billion years during which nothing can concretely be proved to be alive on earth. (There's sketchy evidence for earlier life but it's not cast iron.) So you could argue earth didn't have the conditions necessary to evolve life and that we were a barren rock until some Venusians or Martians hitch-hiked their way here. There's a bit of tangential support for the former in the Faint Young Sun paradox, if you hand wave away the existence of liquid water on Mars.
Or you could just argue that the processes that gestate life are hard and rare and took a long time to happen. Or they just had to wait for the earth to warm up. And until there is better evidence I think that's what Occam's razor demands. Panspermia is an uncalled for complication.
"Panspermia is an uncalled for complication."
And a way of throwing the problem over the wall.
Life is an improbable but not impossible means of perpetuating the consequences of improbable but not impossible events. The only reason we know that it isn't impossible is because we're here to discuss it.
It's improbable that it would have started here but it's equally improbable that it started in any other given place and if it did start anywhere else it's improbable that it would have got from there to here. On the balance of improbabilities I'd settle for Earth as the least unlikely option. Yup, Occam's razor.
Planet Earth is only 4 billions years old. Life couldn't possibly have started by itself in that short time
After about 300 million years, basically as soon as the Earth was cold and wet enough for life, life came along, initially RNA based and basically just pond scum (and stromatolites and all sorts of weird but simple stuff) and then absolutely fuck all happened for a few billion years until multicellular life took off, then all hell broke out leading to the mess we have now.
Life is easy. Getting from pond scum to theoretical physicists is the hard bit.
Whilst agreeing with the overall sentiment I feel that "absolutely fuck all happened" overlooks some very interesting developments in cellular life during this period. It is very unfortunate that more evidence of how life evolved during this period is not reserved in the record. Admitedly it took a wee bit of time.
The development of our knowledge in cellular and sub-cellular processes has yielded many interesting insights and holds out the promise of much more to come.
It's not necessarily DNA that has to travel just the building blocks to get to DNA eventually, ie complex enough chemicals for the cycles of life to be kickstarted.
Seem some interesting stuff that showed some such chemicals could be created by the impact of asteroids even if the astoroid itself contained simpler molecules.
"Complex enough chemicals for the cycles of life to be kickstarted"
You can do that from inorganics and lightning. That much has been done in jars in a laboratory as long ago as the 1920s
Having organic chemicals is a long LONG way from assembling them into building blocks for complex stuff and an even longer way from a finished product
On the flipside, there's a fairly logical argument that life will probably form anywhere there's enough energy available as a way of maximising entropy and also that the basic building blocks will generally follow the ratios we already see because they're the ones mostly seen across the universe - but there may be local peturbations and the actual local permutations are a matter of conjecture
ie: Life is likely to be carbon-based (not silicon) and simpler versions respire using hydrogen before moving to faster oxidisation reactions. That still doesn't mean we'll recognise it when we see it
Nature is random, but given billions of years to keep rolling the dice it's going to hit a yahtzee every so often - the thing is that even on earth it's done that with different combinations at different times - mollsuc vs vertebrate eyes being a classic example (mollusc eyes are the right way around, vertebrate eyes came 200 million years later and are inside out)
You've dismissed the force of gravity - the dominant of the fundamental forces on the large scale and the one that is responsible for all structures like stars, planets, comets, galaxies, clusters of galaxys etc. in the universe.
Gravity will ensure that something flying through the universe will collide with something else eventually. Also, we have time on our side for this to happen, a lot of time.
@msobkow
"One thing I've come to realize over the course of 57 years is that science changes its mind a lot. This year's theory is the next decade's "quaint" mistake or even outright bunk."
.. that's the point.
Knowledge advances, todays best "guess" explanation may have various endings
e.g. it turns out to be total junk and gets binned
e.g. Its incomplete, but is adequate for some simple cases but newer method needed for more complex cases (e.g. Newtonian and Relativistic gravity)
The ideal scientist is not "true to their beliefs", but is happy when new ideas, and more importantly new proofs come along .. in many areas (e.g. physics) there are ideas a plenty, the problem is finding experimental evidence for any of them (hence things ranging from LHC to probes such as this)
.... though in reality, even greats such as Einstein were imperfect in adapting to changes in ideas (e.g. his "spooky action at a distance" issues with quantum entanglement, though TBF, experimental evidence for the idea was not really there when he made that quote)
the favorite thought going through any competent scientists head must be:
"that's odd"
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re:life origin
it seems that chemistry has an affection for carbon compounds (source: my son the PhD Organic Chemist) . . . given energy (solar, lightning, etc) and raw materials (say, all the worlds oceans and what's dissolved in them) and deep time you're going to get some pretty complicated and complex molecules.
enough of them bumping into each other (remember the sample size and the number of collisions/second) and life is almost a certainty.
and once you have that first eater/excreter/grower/reproducer it's off to the races!
"life is almost a certainty"
I'm not sure about that. It involves molecules bumping into each other in a way that produces some quite precise structures. Without enzymes to catalyse the reaction I don't think amino acids in aqueous solution are going to polymerise very readily ti produce any protein let alone a protein that does something interesting such as catalyse the polymerisation of amino acids. It's chicken and egg on a smaller scale.
Even the simplest organisms we see are highly evolved. People have been thinking about this for a long time but I don't think anyone has yet come up with a set of simple structures which could coalesce into something capable of self-propagation let alone the set of circumstances that could produce them. Clearly it happened as we're here to discuss it but it still seems to have been a very unusual set of circumstances and by no means, I think, inevitable.
> in a way that produces some quite precise structures
So what? Throw a coin in the air enough times and it will eventually land and stay on its edge. (Unlikely? It did happen to me once...)
Given enough time and thus enough tries, molecules are bound to assemble into useful structures. Obviously they will fail to do so 99.999999% of the time, and more often than not head off into a wrong direction, but with enough tries those assemblies are bound to eventually result into something "living". It's counterintuitive for us because this process takes millions of years, and where were we a couple million years ago?... We can't wrap our heads around those dimensions.
Last but not least you can't say "it's too complicated to happen accidentally" since it clearly happened (else we wouldn't be having this conversation!). Unless of course you believe some divine engineer came and engineered all this (potentially to his image!), but that leaves the field of science and enters religion, doesn't it.
"over the course of 57 years is that science changes its mind a lot"
Suggest you google and obtain a book called "The half life of facts". It's quite an interesting read, that has been updated via an errata website over the years and basically deals with how predictably science is wrong, and how long it will take for half of all facts within a specific science, to be proven wrong. Upshot of it is, science doesn't get it wrong sometimes, its' wrong most times, and if it isn't, then it will be* soon!
I've tweeted a link for it to Ricky Gervais each time he's been on TV stating his opinion that science is immutable, because scientific facts never change, and they are still facts even if you don't believe them.
*Maths has been the only science that pretty much has remained static. Every not-so-often something new comes along, but unlike other sciences, hundreds of years pass between accepted facts being challenged.
This year's theory is the next decade's "quaint" mistake or even outright bunk
Many medical students are told something along the lines of: 'Half of what we will teach you will be proved wrong - but we don't know which half.'.
See: https://blogs.bmj.com/pmj/2014/05/30/50-of-what-you-are-taught-is-wrong/
'Half' is probably an exaggeration.
Woody Allen offered his take on this in The Sleeper.
The panspermia notion that life originated elsewhere obviously could be true but unlikely and fails to address the fundamental question of 'where was that?'.
There does seem to be enough evidence however, that the building blocks for the building blocks of life definitely are out there.
Given the size and age of the universe, the probability that these building blocks over time with enough attempts will result in something approximating life.
Don't forget the other inconvenient question... how did it get _there_?
It's all very well saying that life came from outer space, but at some point you're going to have to work out how that life first appeared. At that point you either need to find a reason that it could only happen in that one place, or accept that it can start spontaneously and therefore doesn't have to have arrived by interstellar transport.
Is life likely to have started in space? No, it would probably need a planet with lots of water for natural chemical experiments so something like earth. So once its started how do you get it off the starter planet into space? On Mars you'd need to accelerate it at 50,000G for 100m to achieve escape velocity. The only way to achieve that would be next to a meteorite impact which would more likely fry any life and destroy the rock it might have been hiding in as it tried to escape Mars thin atmosphere.
> likely fry any life
Don't forget it's about "building blocks", that means molecules. I'm no chemist, but I imagine some could survive or even assemble in space (using the local star's energy). Obviously there is "some assembly required", so when those molecules reach some favorable environment they might or might not assemble into what might or might not eventually evolve into El Reg commentards.
Of course the notion of "building blocks" is very flexible, since you could even consider H2O a "building block". Life was clearly assembled, that's for sure, but we have no way of knowing if there were any prefabricated parts used to do so, and if yes, how much prefabrication was involved.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that life in a solar system has a tendency to spread to other planets thanks to impact events
Life spreading beyond the immediate zone is highly unlikely though, unless you're talking about something like a couple of stars passing near enough to each other that their debris clouds interact
The thing about life is its a bit delicate. Also the universe didnt start with any of the shit needed to make life - it took a couple of generations of stars to get most of the ingredients. Once they were blown out of the supernova that created them it will have taken a while for them to coalesce into another suitable solar system in a quiet arm of a quiet galaxy where they could take a few billion years to get to some form of multicellular animal form to develop a conciousness to while away the boredom of existence. Its unlikely that the earth is the first source of life in the universe but it very possibly the first where its lasted this long and where it was created first will probably have been somewhere so supernovaly active that it didnt get much of a chance to evolve much before being gamma-rayed out of existence, If we look at things rationally we will see 'goldilocks zones' where nearby stellar activity is calm enough to allow life to develop but by the very inactivity required its likely we are amongst the first to have survived this long.
I can't see life surviving the fiery first four billion years but I'm not sure whether enough organic molecules could. I don't have a problem with the idea of the building blocks coming from space on comets and other junk.
Whatever the truth I am damn sure that it didn't involve any deities.
"fails to address the fundamental question of 'where was that?'."
As Richard Feynman noted, “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
Panspermia might or might not be the origins of "simple life", but at least we can explore the idea without the unpleasantness of yore. Progress!
In 1953 a famous experiment by a scientist named Miller showed that hydrides of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen could form simple organic compounds if in the absence of free oxygen they were exposed to sparks or UV light, etc. But that is a long way from the highly structured DNA or proteins.
That gap is yet to be bridged.
> That gap is yet to be bridged.
They're working on it, first results expected in a couple million years...
(Seriously, don't forget it took an awful lot of time, which means lots and lots of trial & error. We don't really have the possibility to test this, do we. And since we don't really know what really happened, we can't simulate it either, we can only assume and extrapolate.)
> Having assumed and extrapolated we can produce testable hypotheses
Assuming and extrapolating isn't enough. Take panspermia for instance: How do you test something as vague as panspermia? The only proof would be to go somewhere else, quite far, and find life much too similar to Earth's to be a coincidence. And this isn't going to happen anytime soon.
All we know for sure is that life did somehow happen on this planet here, we also have a working notion of how it evolved over time. That's all, and a sample size of one doesn't allow any serious extrapolations, IMHO at least. Any hypothesis on how this came to be is, at this point, pure speculation. Only if/when we manage to find life on other planets we might start having enough data to seriously create hypotheses on how this happens.
>> How do you test something as vague as panspermia? The only proof would be to go somewhere else, quite far, and find life much too similar to Earth's to be a coincidence.
Or ... that would be evidence that the development of life must follow physical processes that result in life following a particular molecular trajectory.
In the 70 years since Miller-Urey, dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of reactions have been recognized that create complex organics from simple components at rational temperatures and pressures. The modern Earth has a wide variety of environments with differing acidities, temperatures, with and without various reactive chemicals, etc. Why would the early Earth be any less diverse? With no microbes to tame the mess, I'm guessing that an organic stew with hundreds or thousands of distinct complex molecules mixed might have been present once liquid water was present. And liquid water seems likely to have been present early on even though our "knowledge" of stellar evolution seems to tell us that the planet couldn't have been warm enough to have liquid water oceans.
On the other hand, we don't actually have any route(s) identified that lead from "organic stew" to "life as we know it" Not even in concept. Much less in detail. And we aren't likely to any time soon.
Could life arrise spontaneously in that situation? Yes, possibly. Could some space traveling spore or critter, survive and thrive in the "stew"? Yes, possibly. (Although I'm ignoring the possibility that some elements of the "stew" are likely to be toxic to any given lifeform). So, is spontaneous organization of life on Earth possible? Maybe .. or Maybe not. How about panspermia? Maybe. ... Or Maybe not.
Yes my problem with panspermia is that it seems to be a violation of Occam's Razor. We know that life exists on Earth but claiming that it came from space means we have to make an assumption about life that is without evidence. Not only that but the idea of life 'floating around in space' actually goes against what we know about life.
It now appears clear that there are organic molecules all over the universe and I can accept that they are sometimes delivered to locations that are conducive to life forming.
But without knowing how you get from 'some organic molecules' to 'it lives!' it's impossible to guess how often life arises. From Earth we can tell that life isn't as delicate as might be thought. It appears to be everywhere including places that must once have been sterile. So I'm inclined to think that life will arise anywhere and everywhere it can.
How often it gets as far as intelligent life is anyone's guess. I sometimes think it's yet to achieve that on Earth.
I'm surprised that the JAXA mission returned just over 5g of material.
And that such a small sample of matter could contain so many clues as quoted in the main article...and that quite a few inferences can be made.
OTOH, I am sure that they would have been happier to collect samples from more than 2 locations on the asteroid. I hope that what was returned, keeps the scientists happy for a while until the next sample collection mission.
5g is a lot of material.
Hyabusa 1 when it eventually got back to earth was carrying milligrams (if I remember correctly) and even that was very interesting stuff.
Getting any at all is a major achievement. You can't land and get out a shovel, there is practically no gravity. It's more like flying alongside the asteroid, and trying to prize bits off it whilst having nothing to brace against.
There is no evidence of life in the samples. Technically what they are advocating is pseudo-panspermia.
We have ample evidence that interstellar gas contains a number of organic building blocks. They are not life but they are the precursors to life and, assuming our galaxy is not unusual, they pervade the universe. The current theory is that gas follows the galactic filaments and clumps into galaxies which will contain organics throughout their galactic disk.
For a list of what boffins have found so far see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_and_circumstellar_molecules
True panspermia, is orders of magnitude more difficult. It's the difference between mailing a box of Legos and mailing a completed Lego kit without it coming apart in the mail. We have some Martian meteorites that contain structures that resemble structures produced by life on Earth. But it is not conclusive. But that has nothing to do with the Hayabusa2 sample.
Personally, I can't imagine how life doesn't exist throughout the universe. I also can't imagine what it would look like. Always remember St Adams:
“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
"It's the difference between mailing a box of Legos and mailing a completed Lego kit without it coming apart in the mail."
Thank you for the visual. Add also the obscured address, the misrouting through a number of wrong countries, the encounters with multiple grumpy customs people, and eventually arriving after the intendeds have moved away.
In your country, does unclaimed mail get auctioned or incinerated?
Earth's previous package had some very stinky cheese stuff.
To borrow from a couple of other great philosophers debating the great issues of the day:
"The way I see it, these days there's life, right? and, ages ago, there wasn't life, right? So, there must have been a moment when there not being life went away, right? and there being life came along. So, what I want to know is: How did we get from the one case of affairs to the other case of affairs?"
"It was too much effort not to have life"
Which given the enormity of space and time, and the proclivity of carbon chemistry to do interesting things seems a reasonable conclusion to draw.
"It's the difference between mailing a box of Legos and mailing a completed Lego kit without it coming apart in the mail."
It also involves assembling the Lego kit without having a Lego kit to assemble or anyone to assemble it. Once you've considered the difficulty of that you have to ask yourself why you have to consider the additional difficulty of mailing it; it's hard enough without adding that.
So, all the matter we see (and still don't see, but think we can detect) magically comes into existence, organizes itself into (nearly) intelligent, sentient life on a planet that just happens to be rich in water and other ingredients required to support life
and surrounds itself with unique invisible barriers that shield its occupants from nasty radiation
and pops into a remarkably stable orbit around another magically self-generated source of energy which emits sufficient but not excessive energy to sustain said life. And the whole affair runs like clockwork.
Like those absurdly simplified odds?
Someone mentioned Occam's razor.
Accept that an intelligent being beyond our puny understanding created what we see and are and everything false neatly into place (excepting Facebook).
If the planet didn't have the necessary ingredients life couldn't form, to say it's coincidence we just happened have the right ingredients is ridiculous (see "anthropic principle"). If the ingredients were different then maybe a different form of life would have developed or maybe none.
As far as probability goes, need I remind you, "Space is big..." - Billion to 1 odds are going to turn up every day in a universe as big as this one.
It's the scientist's equivalent to "the lord works in mysterious ways"
Rubbish. It is a basic principle of probability - closely related to Bayes Theorem.
And it makes it really hard to do certain theorising because we have no way to imagine how to test certain ideas.
"Accept that an intelligent being beyond our puny understanding created what we see and are and everything false neatly into place "
Ok. Accepted. Now, where did the "intelligent being beyond our puny understanding" come from? What did s/he/it evolve from and how?
Ah, missed that misspelling! Was the OP being devious and lead us (me!) into a trap? Or is the OPs subconscious simply rebelling at such a preposterous proposition?
It's also proof that the human mind will see what it expects and not what is actually there unless we remember to take care :-)
Thinking about creation myths I realised that even us puny humans are capable of creating things that can out-perform us. So what's to say life on Earth was created by superior beings, it could equally be the product of "inferior" beings.
But either way I think the important word is "myth".
And for the OP: Occam's Razor is "Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate" "Do not needlessly multiply entities".
Introducing a God into the equation is exactly the sort of thing it warns against.
You've got it all backwards, haven't you!
A star forms,
A planet or several planets form
One might have an atmosphere that would reduce the effect of radiation on any amino acids, f they were formed at some later stage
The atmosphere, if not initially as good as required, could change of
One or two might be in a stable orbit at the sort of distance that might favour the formation of organic compounds
The organics might form amino acids
The amino acids might form some proteins
These proteins might result in primitive life forming
That primitive life might evolve into more complex life.
In that order, not your stupid order.
And even then, life might not occur. But given the number of galaxies in the universe, the probability is greater than zero. Because we are here.
No need for magical all-powerful entities creating life in their own image. Unless you are just a very naive person who believes in magic.
Of course, beyond the philosophical questions about humanity’s maker, there’s also a very real reason to study asteroids and that is that it would be really great to avoid having one hit the Earth and end all the fun and games here.
The most obvious reason to study asteroids is money: mining them to extract resources.
What if, instead of a universe ~13.4 billion years old, we enjoy a steady state universe many trillions of years old . . . then it becomes much easier to imagine a inordinately slow process where, as here with the solar system; the energy from the sun's solar wind has, over the full life of our solar system, blown off the surface of all surrounding planet and large mass objects atmospheres, sufficient fine dust particles, much of which will, inevitably, be organic . . . to explain what has been discovered on another object in outer space. Then add that a visible galaxy is the accretion disc for the Galactic Core Object at the centre of the galaxy, so over such immense timescales, all that mass is eventually re-distributed to form new galaxies . . . which have thus spread the dust throughout the universe . . . now we have a method of distribution that is based upon immense timescales.
Again, with the mass of the sun providing a gravitational field sufficient to support a proportion of the dust blown off of the inner planets being captured by the sun . . . might serve to explain why the surface of the sun, taking consideration of the timescales; has the same properties as the dust particles from the asteroid sample?
And, again, add that the sun is not in a static location; instead it moves in orbit around the galaxy; as also all of the rest of the solar system. Remember, when you sit in front of your TV over Christmas, you are actually moving sideways at up to 1,000 Km's per hour; plus add the motion of the entire solar system orbiting the galaxy. Now, again, add dust clouds in space from the destruction of previous galaxies . . . give clear evidence of many ways dust with organic origins can be delivered over immense timescales. Food for thought?
There's a lot of comments here from people with misperceptions about relevant bits of science.
First off, panspermia is a hypothesis, not a theory, - and it will remain so until such time as some kind of evidence supporting it comes along (if such ever does0
Secondly, panspermia is primarily about the notion that life might possibly get transported between stars via things like chunks of rock blown off the surface of some body that contained life. True, some seem to believe that panspermia accounts for how life got started on earth, despite the lack of evidence for that belief, but that's them. The interesting question is "is there a mechanism that could feasibly transport life from one body to another given sufficient time in which to operate?" and that question is a perfectly good one.
Thirdly, not only is space huge (D Adams, HHGTTG) and contains vast amounts of stuff (I know all the technical terms, me! 8-} ) amidst all the emptiness, but when bits of stuff get together at anything like what we think of as a reasonable temperature, it reacts with other bits of stuff really, REALLY fast. From our perspective, Deep Time s pretty big, but from a molecule's point of view, in terms of things that can happen to substantially change it, Deep Time is vastly bigger squared.
I think it's very likely that life on Earth evolved right here, with or without the help of organic molecules from space. But we've had a few major asteroid impacts on Earth since complex life evolved, there's nothing improbable about the possibility that some chunks of material thrown into space by the dino-killer asteroid may have still contained life forms of some descriiption, and given the astonishing durability of tardigrades, I wouldnt like to bet against such life being at no more than bacterial level. Could such life remain viable over the aeons it takes such a rock to collide with another body that could potentially either host it, or make use of the head start the organisms carcass provides? Very unlikely it may be, but we don't have actual evidence one way or the other yet.
But if life from Earth does in fact make it to a distant planet where it thrive and evolves further, then all I can say is that I hope our far distant descendants welcome their Tardigradoid Overlords! 8-}
Personally I ambivalent on panspermia, don't see it makes a huge difference but veering very slightly against it.
If you are going to critique a hypothesis try to understand it first. Nobody has ever proposed panspermia was viable organisms ejected from one planet and landing on another as still viable entities.
It's all about building block molecules, mainly amino acids and for panspermia they don't necessarily need to be ejected from a planet, organic compounds have been detected in gas clouds.
All panspermia suggests is some molecules were delivered from space, origin unknown, and they kick-started life.
Really it's a philosophical exercise as opposed to useful science, akin to theologians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
> how many angels can dance on the head of a pin
Answer: None.
This is a serious, stern religion demanding constant discipline and contrition, under a grumpy, quick-tempered and vengeful god, and you expect the staff to be allowed to fool around? No way.
*gets hit by lightning*
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