When it comes to the essential building blocks of life, an interesting theory is doing the rounds.
The panspermia hypothesis suggests that life’s building blocks are widespread throughout the cosmos and can travel between different areas in space. Literally meaning ‘seeds everywhere,’ the panspermia hypothesis has been sparking fierce debates for centuries.
Before scientists in lab coats were conducting complex studies, there were philosophers in tunics proposing complex ideas.
Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher from the 5th century BCE, proposed the idea that life exists everywhere in the universe, coining the term panspermia to describe the concept of life traveling between planets as seeds. Other Greek philosophers such as Anaximander and Thales also discussed the philosophical aspects of the panspermia theory.
Fast forward to the eighteenth century, and Benoît de Maillet, the French natural historian asserted that the cosmos was full of “seeds.” These propagative parts, he argued, had the power to give life to everything in the universe.
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In the nineteenth century, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist who dabbled in both chemistry and physics, suggested that microscopic spores could be transferred through space by radiation pressure from the sun.
More recently, two astronomers put forward an alternative method, shifting the emphasis from the appearance of life to its actions. Essentially, the astronomers’ theory is panspermia with a twist.
They suggest that life can originate on a single planet and then propagate to others through the transportation provided by meteorites. In other words, meteorites act as a sort of Uber for alien life.
By developing a nuanced statistical test, the astronomers were able to identify a group of neighboring planets that possess similar characteristics to our own. As the duo note, their model “shows that as life propagates across the galaxy, correlations emerge between planetary characteristics and location, and can function as a population-scale agnostic biosignature.”
This biosignature remains unbiased (or “agnostic,” as the authors note) as it does not rely on any specific assumptions about the nature of life or planetary features. Instead of considering what life may consist of, it concentrates on a particular hypothesis of what life might accomplish.
“By clustering planets based on their observed characteristics, and examining the spatial extent of these clusters,” the pair strived to “demonstrate (and evaluate) a way to prioritize specific planets for further observation–based on their potential for containing life.”
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Through the analysis of variables, their objective was to pinpoint potential biosignatures that might serve as indicators of life on distant planets. Although their findings have yet to undergo peer review, the research presents a provocative viewpoint on the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos.
This is not the first scientific paper to adopt the panspermia hypothesis and make compelling arguments. A 2018 journal paper proposed that life may not have originated on Earth, but rather was brought here through comets and meteorites from a cosmic biosphere spanning across various galaxies.
The paper, authored by 33 individuals under the leadership of immunologist Edward Steele from the CY O’Connor ERADE Village Foundation, an education and research institute in Piara Waters, Western Australia, served as a modern interpretation of the theory of panspermia.
The same year, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center published a study, aptly titled “Galactic Panspermia.” The researchers found evidence supporting the notion that life or the necessary chemical components for life can be transferred between solar systems and galaxies through astronomical objects like meteoroids or asteroids.
The research was led by Idan Ginsburg, then a visiting scholar at the Institute for Theory and Computation, and co-authored by the enigmatic Abraham “Avi” Loeb, the chair of the Astronomy Department, and Manasvi Lingam, then a postdoctoral fellow at ITC.
By broadening the concept of panspermia to include interstellar travel, the researchers relied on the likelihood of two variables: the frequency at which solar systems acquire objects containing life and the capacity of life to endure the hazardous conditions of space over long durations.
As more and more respectable intellectuals start to take the theory seriously, we should expect to see more and more papers discussing the idea of hitchhiking aliens, basically piggybacking on space debris.
