EVIDENCE OF CRATERS ON COSMIC BODIES
Virtually all cosmic bodies have craters, which remind us of the violent cosmic past during which the seeds of life were transmitted throughout the universe.
Asteroid Eros Comet Wild 2
Tswaing crater, Pretoria, South Africa 1.8km across created by a 30m meteor Craters on Earth’s moon
Planet Mercury Callisto - Moon Of Jupiter
While some comets and asteroids explode in the atmosphere, and others explode just before impact several kilometres above ground, as a result of the tremendous air pressure which builds up ahead of it, some actually do end up crashing into the ground. I am sharing this with you because it’s the kind of stuff we always see in sci-fi thrillers, but we never realise how real it all is. As they say, ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, and this certainly applies to the stuff that is going on around us in space.
The best known atmospheric explosion of a meteoroid happened above Tunguska in central Siberia on the 30th June 1908. The explosion flattened the forest for roughly 15 kilometres in every direction, completely devastating thousands of square kilometres of the forest. It was apparently heard up to 600 kilometres away and seen over 1,000 kilometres away. There are reports from Paris, France, that shortly after the event, pedestrians stopped to see an eerie, unusual glare in the east. The object was most likely a meteor, estimated to be around 60 metres in diameter, because a comet that size would have exploded higher in the atmosphere. But nobody investigated the site until 20 years after the explosion, which leaves the evidence a little sparse. There must be some sort of magnetic comet target in Siberia because a similar atmospheric explosion occurred again in 1947. Poor Russians. An atmospheric explosion is much gentler on the invading meteor than a full impact. It allows the content of the meteor to be dispersed over a wide area without being destroyed by the shock of the impact. The effect on the planet is however much more devastating when the object explodes above the ground. This is what the bomb experts in the 2nd World War realised before they dropped the first nuclear bombs on Japan.
In March 1965, a 7-metre object exploded approximately 30 kilometres above Revelstoke in Canada. Investigators arrived promptly and recovered many fragments a few millimetres in size. The amazing thing was that most of them were not altered by heat, proving that a plausible delivery mechanism for living cells from space is not only feasible, but most certainly possible. But the greatest volume of organic space matter comes to Earth in the form of dust. This delivery system far outweighs the deposits from impacts of asteroids and comets. Okay, so if life can survive a large impact, how does it survive the trip in small dust particles through the atmosphere? Surely the heat or the X-rays and even UV radiation will kill microscopic organisms that are so exposed? Some startling discoveries have been made about this method of the transport of life from space to Earth.
Besides being able to survive UV radiation levels 3,000 times higher than humans can, many bacteria actually thrive at temperatures higher than boiling point. Since bacteria and viruses have been known to possess the ability to mutate very rapidly while spreading new forms of disease, causing havoc in the medical field and in the preparation of antibiotics, it is plausible that they could mutate very quickly from a state in which they reside in space, to an adapted state for conditions on Earth. Bacteria actually have built-in cellular equipment that can help them survive sudden heating in space. They are called ‘heat-shock’ proteins, which respond in seconds to external stimuli in bacteria. It seems that these heat shock proteins are closely related across a wide range of species. This is simply one protective mechanism which allows these organisms to arrive alive on Earth, despite drastic and sudden temperature changes. I am convinced that these proteins will be the subject of great interest to genetic engineers, once they have figured out how to incorporate those genes into the human DNA. With genetic engineering, anything is possible, even developing a new human characteristic similar to that of a bacterium that can resist sudden changes in temperature. This would help our human space exploration endeavours greatly, and probably be a necessary scientific process to help NASA reach more inhospitable places in space.
To get back to the vulnerability of organisms in space, it has also been established that a dust layer only a few microns thick will protect the contained microbe against UV radiation very successfully. So the organisms move towards Earth through the mesosphere, about 120 kilometres above the surface of Earth where various gases may also protect them from X-rays. Then they descend through the stratosphere for a few days where they are protected from UV radiation by the ozone. After this they drop quite quickly to the surface. This can be on mountain tops, rivers, deserts or wooded areas, basically spreading into every nook and cranny of the planet.
We have all seen shooting stars at night and many of us quickly make a wish, because somewhere back in time this became a ritual for some unknown reason. I wonder if the origins of this tradition have anything to do with ancient people’s beliefs that comets and shooting stars were often associated with plagues and diseases? The wish was possibly more of a prayer for health and protection against the disease announced by the fiery messenger in the sky. Shooting stars are actually small meteors that enter the atmosphere and fall to the ground while burning up. Most of them evaporate, but many do land up on the surface of Earth. So every time you see a shooting star, you may be witnessing the arrival of extraterrestrial life on Earth. But if shooting stars burn up in the atmosphere, will the microorganisms survive the trip? When tiny meteoroids of a few centimetres crash to Earth they burn up and evaporate. Particles the size of a pinhead will move at about 10 km per second and heat up to about 3,000 degrees Celsius. This is enough to kill any organism entering the atmosphere. But bacteria and viruses are much smaller than pinheads and they do momentarily heat up to about 500 degrees Celsius after entering the atmosphere. Is this enough to destroy them?
The University of Wales experimented with Escherichia Coli bacteria under extreme temperatures to determine if the bacteria can withstand quick temperature bursts of up to 700 degrees Celsius for periods of about 20 seconds. The amazing thing is, the bacteria survived and after being placed in a nutrient broth, it grew back to normality. These experimental temperatures are more extreme than that which would apply to a micro-organism. The organism would slow down quickly, only being exposed to high temperatures for a few seconds, after which it will gently descend to Earth.
In the '70s Hoyle and Wickramasinghe received high levels of ridicule for their proposals but through their excellent scientific corroboration, their critics were silenced, and today it is pretty much universally accepted that space contains the ‘ingredients’ of life. But their theory went a bit too far for some when they suggested that all life comes from space. Including bacteria, viruses, protozoa, seeds, pollen, other bits of organic material containing more complex DNA and even larvae.
There is another theory for evolution of life on Earth referred to as ‘Gaia’. This was introduced in the early '70s by James Lovelock who proposed that life controls Earth’s environment to make it suitable for life. It is this Panspermia and Gaia combination of theories that others have referred to as Cosmic Ancestry.
A strange combination of Darwinian evolution and spontaneous creation. It postulates that while evolution drives all living organisms, life has always existed in the universe before it arrived on Earth, and Earth was just another destination point in the universal path of natural selection while life was spreading to other planets. Well, that’s how I understand it at least. I find this very confusing and unnecessary to say the least. What seems more logical is that all the planets in the universe have had, or will have continuous exposure to new life from the interstellar soup of microscopic life. Some planets have had life for much longer than others and have been able to evolve more over time. But the big question remains – where did the original life forms begin before they were distributed throughout the universe so successfully? This is a
question for philosophers more than biologists and scientists, so I will leave this subject for them to debate. We will see that some of the questions about our origins as humans may point us towards some unorthodox answers about the much bigger question regarding the origin of life. I must point out that my objectives in this book are more to do with uncovering our human origins, and not necessarily finding the origins of life. The following events have been presented as evidence for the theory of Cosmic Ancestry. It does not seem to do much more than present irrefutable evidence to support Panspermia in its original form:
• 19 May 1995: Two scientists at Cal Poly showed that bacteria can survive without any metabolism for at least 25 million years; they are probably immortal.
• 24 November 1995: The New York Times ran a story about bacteria that can survive radiation much stronger than any that Earth has ever experienced.
• 7 August 1996: NASA announced fossilised evidence of ancient life in meteorite ALH 84001 from Mars.
• 27 October 1996: Geneticists showed evidence that many genes are much older than the fossil record would indicate. Subsequent studies have strengthened this finding.
• 29 July 1997: A NASA scientist announced evidence of fossilised microscopic life forms in a meteorite not from any planet.
• Spring, 1998: A microfossil that was found in a meteorite and photographed in 1966, was recognised by a Russian microbiologist as a magnetotactic bacterium.
• Fall, 1998: NASA’s public position on life-from-space shifted dramatically.
• 4 January 1999: NASA officially recognised the possibility that life on Earth comes from space.
• 19 March 1999: NASA scientists announced that two more meteorites hold even stronger fossilised evidence for past life on Mars.
• 26 April 2000: The team operating the mass spectrometer on NASA’s Stardust mission announced the detection of very large organic molecules in space. Non-biological sources for organic molecules so large are not known.
• 19 October 2000: A team of biologists and a geologist announced the revival of bacteria that are 250 million years old, strengthening that case that bacterial spores can be immortal.
• 13 December 2000: A NASA team demonstrated that the magnetosomes in Mars meteorite ALH 84001 are biological.
• June 2002: Geneticists reported evidence that the evolutionary step from chimps to humans was assisted by viruses.
• August 2004: Photos of fossilised cyanobacteria in a meteorite were reported by a NASA scientist.
Source: Brig Klyce - www.panspermia.org
Throughout history comets have been associated with diseases and plagues which followed closely after the comets’ appearance and disappearance. We also now know that thousands of small comets evaporate in the upper atmosphere daily, releasing their precious content to rain down on us. Viruses and bacteria can mutate rapidly, infiltrating our cells and causing random changes to specific genes, which may result in evolutionary changes quite rapidly in a chosen species. This leads to the conclusion that rapid jumps in the physical evolution of species can occur and have occurred.
One such beautiful example, which was reported in New Scientist in the November 13 edition of 2004, is the sudden appearance of bats in the world some 50 million years ago. This is a real evolutionary dilemma, because until now, there have been no fossils found of any intermediate animal linking their rodent ancestors to modern bats. But a gene called BMP2 changed all this around 50 million years ago. This gene is present in bats but not in mice. How did this gene suddenly appear? Given some of the theories we have covered in this book, it is possible that the genome caused itself to evolve as part of the ‘self improvement process’ within a species. This seems a little far-fetched as it would mean that humans could also evolve in this direction and start to fly, if our ‘feedback’ or natural process of selection determined that we as humans would be better off flying. But herein lies the rub as far as I can see. If our human genome already has its ‘foundation’ or its entire structure pre-erected, it must be in some sort of state of suspension just waiting for the right sequence of genes to fill the empty space. It will therefore reject any alien gene combinations and only allow predetermined genes to fill the inactive spaces taken up by junk DNA. But this is a theoretical situation with humans, because we suspect that our DNA has been tampered with. This situation will however not apply to creatures like rodents, which evolved into bats. So what else could have caused the BMP2 gene in bats to suddenly appear? Realistically, as Fred Hoyle has shown, it could have been a viral effect on the DNA of the species causing some kind of mutation in the cells, which resulted in the subtle but dramatic change in its genetic structure.
BACTERIUM
But what is a virus? And what actually happens when a virus infects our body? There are thousands of different viruses recognised by biologists, but it is possible that millions may exist. We all know viruses very well from getting colds and flu. A relatively common virus can sometimes cause unimaginable carnage and death in humans. The 1918 flu epidemic killed around 20 million people and every year about 36,000 people die from a simple bout of flu in the USA alone. The Hutchinson Dictionary of Science describes a virus as follows: “An infectious particle consisting of a core of DNA or RNA, enclosed in a protein shell. Viruses are not cellular and they can only reproduce by invading other living cells where they use the host cell’s system to replicate themselves. In the process they can actually disturb and alter the host's DNA. The healthy human body reacts by producing an antiviral protein called interferon which tries to prevent the infection from spreading to adjacent cells. Viruses mutate very quickly to prevent the host from developing permanent resistance.”
SPORE
When we get flu, the viruses attack our cells, break the cell wall and spill the contents into the spaces between cells. This causes a number of unpleasant side effects, swelling, pain, runny nose, headaches, inflammation and more. Then it interacts with our DNA by first splitting the double-helix strand and attaching itself to one of the strands. The virus then replicates itself many times, while our body tries to fight this invader with its own immune defence system. At some point the virus exits the cell, leaving our DNA to recombine the two strands of the double-helix once again. It can happen that the DNA strands recombine incorrectly, resulting in different activities of the genes. In an instant we have the beginnings of a possible mutation or even an initial step towards evolution of that organism. Viruses can mutate so quickly, it is impossible to keep up with the development of new vaccines. It is clear to see that viruses are perfect organisms that are made for survival. If they have the ability to invade our genome and cause dramatic disfigurative disease and death, is it not possible that they can be equally responsible for genetic mutations that have the opposite effects, which can lead to positive evolutionary steps? Would it not be in the interest of the viral DNA to develop a stronger, more resilient host to ensure its own continued survival? A perfect argument for the ‘selfish gene’ in some respects.
Bacteria on the other hand are microscopic organisms, each one consisting of a single cell which has no nucleus. Bacteria can be found virtually everywhere on Earth. Even in the most inhospitable places with high acidity, high temperatures and low temperatures. Some bacteria are parasites that can be very harmful because they produce toxins. Others can be beneficial to humans and sometimes even vital for our survival, like the digestive bacteria in our stomachs. Bacteria have DNA but also additional small circular pieces of DNA called plasmids. These plasmids carry additional genetic information and move freely between bacteria even if they are of a different species. Plasmids are also responsible for bacterial resistance to antibiotics but they are very useful tools in genetic engineering. The staggering thing about bacteria is their ability to reproduce in as little as 20 minutes. They normally divide into two new equal cells through a process called binary fission. Other single-cell organisms like amoeba also divide in this way. Scientists estimate that we hav
e only identified between 1% and 10% of bacteria on Earth. This figure will probably remain this low, as new bacteria arrive from space every minute of the day. New Scientist published an article in October 2004, in which they describe lightning as “nature's own genetic engineer”. When lightning strikes the ground, it kills the organisms within a specific radius, but the bacteria further away have been shown to undergo changes in their DNA. Timothy Vogel from the University of Lyon, said that the bacteria actually take up any kind of “stray” DNA as a result of the shock: “This could explain why gene swapping is so common among bacteria.” They also suggest that this phenomenon will help bacteria evolve very quickly. Until now scientists have been puzzled by the rate of evolution in bacteria because the natural rate of new DNA uptake did not match their findings. This new discovery has gone a long way to explain the rapid rates of evolution in various life forms on Earth.
Most people think of bacteria as nasty little things that should be obliterated with new knowledge… ‘We don't need bacteria… they just cause trouble and make us sick.’ But we should realise that life on Earth would most likely be impossible without bacteria and when scientists say that the universe is teeming with life, they can back it up because of the properties of bacteria.
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