50 years later what do decades of space research have to say about this radical proposal which posited that an alien race seeded life on earth written by two scientsts?
(The Scientific Case for Alien Intervention)
The opening section of my recently published book, ‘Ancient Alien Ancestors’ presented the theory of Directed Panspermia in brief. In addition, chapters that covered the Fermi Paradox, the Kardashev Scale, and terraforming were in that segment.
In part, I opened the narrative with a science-orientation rather than the historical-cultural slant that books in the genre typically do. I wanted to de-link my work from the Ancient Astronaut box.
In that context, the focus is expected to be on aliens building enigmatic artifacts and appearing in passages of sacred texts. Furthermore, I wanted to bring a more scientific perspective into the field.
When Erich von Daniken’s first book came out, several top-notch scientists were working on a thematically related hypothesis. That was in the late 1960’s. They unhappy with Darwinism being used to explain the origin of life on earth.
‘Chariots of the Gods’ became a huge blockbuster success worldwide. Could extraterrestrial’s visited the planet, even built the Great Pyramid? People were thinking thoughts and asking questions that had not been asked before.
The theory that the scientists were exploring was published in the science journal Icarus in 1973. The paper was received diplomatically, probably because the scientists involved were highly esteemed.
However, the scientific community read it and did not seem to know what to make of it or what to do, in response. Their novel theory never got public exposure of any note. The new theory was quietly put on a high shelf out of reach and forgotten.
Times have changed. Erich is still alive and kicking, god bless him; the pair of scientists have passed on unfortunately. But they authored the scientific version of the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis, which I am now going to present, review and add comments to.
In 1973, paper titled Directed Panspermia was authored by Sir Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, which outlined their arguments against any type of (Darwinian) spontaneous generation of life on earth. Then proposed that life was sent to earth by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.
They also argued against the theory of undirected panspermia while at the same time presenting their more radical version:
“It now seems unlikely that extraterrestrial living organisms could have reached the earth either as spores driven by the radiation pressure from another star or as living organisms imbedded in a meteorite. As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet.” (1)
This was a revolutionary twist on an old thesis. Panspermia was first conceived by Anaxagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher, several thousand years ago. The two modern scientists were the first to propose that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization intentionally seeded life on earth.
However, they were faced with a lack of hard, scientific evidence to back it up in any convincing way at that time. They alluded to their predicament:
“We conclude that it is possible that life reached the earth in this way, but that the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability.”(2)
In fact, NASA, and the Space Age, had only just arisen in the prior decade. Scant, useful data was not available from them it at that point. That has changed over the past 41/2 decades, and in dramatic fashion. What kinds of new data and evidence are we talking about now?
Long before trying to prove that an extraterrestrial civilization seeded life on earth, we must show that the conditions that promote life exist out there. The first piece of evidence toward that end is to find water.
All biological life as we know it depends upon H2O.
The problem was that at the time of their paper scientists did not believe that water existed anywhere else in the solar system. That was the consensus view then, which already seems a quaint anachronism now.
Without any additional data to support their theory Crick and Orgel moved on to other areas of research. No other scientists picked up the baton then, or in recent decades. However, interest in panspermia has increased in recent years.
This seems ironic, due to the fact that water, has subsequently been found on Mars, Enceladus, Eurpoa and Ganymede, that is tangible support for the theory.
In fact, in a 2011 article published in Popular Science titled, ‘The Herschel Space Telescope Spots a Star Spewing Powerful Water Jets into Interstellar Space’ we read the following:
“Researchers looking for signs of life elsewhere in the universe often start by looking for one key ingredient necessary to complex life as we know it: water. And just 750 light-years away, they've found quite a bit of it spewing from the poles of a young, sun-like star that is blasting jets of H2O into interstellar space at 124,000 miles per hour.” (3)
The truth is science has gone through a complete paradigm shift as regards its models of the solar system and universe, since 1973. We not only know that water exists in our solar system but far off in deep space as well.
That raises the probability that life exists ‘out there’ to a very high level, much, much higher than when Crick and Orgel published their paper. It was theoretical then, but empirically proven now.
If NASA, and other space agencies, had failed to find water anywhere else in the solar system, the theory would have slipped into deeper dormancy or even into a coma and oblivion.
However, finding H2O on a number of other planetary bodies in our solar system, and far beyond, lends solid support to the theory. Odd then that scientist’s, in general, have not acknowledged the fact yet.
One of the key confirmations of any theory is its ability to predict a given phenomenon. Directed panspermia inferred that water would be found on other planetary bodies, because it posited life existed out there.
In fact, if we were setting out to prove life exists elsewhere finding water would be the top mission-priority on our checklist. We have and we have duly checked it off.
Now that we have scientifically established that water exists on other planets we can move on to the next item, biological life. Biologists would contend that where there is H20 there is probably some form of life.
True, but that is not good enough, it is not hard evidence. Life must be located, analyzed and identified, in other words proven. That can be a slow, painstaking process.
In effect, it has been done to a degree right on earth using meteorites that have fallen to the planet. These studies have been going on for 50 years.
However they have often been clouded by controversy. Critics have often contended that there is a contamination problem. However, this objection may have been disposed of in recent years.
An article published in space.com and The Washington Post, in 2011, seems to have put the criticism to rest:
“While life has not been found beyond Earth, all earthly plants and animals rely on DNA to store genetic information. At the center of the ladder-like DNA molecule lie ring-like structures called nucleobases.
It’s these tiny rings that scientists at NASA and the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington found in 11 of 12 meteorites they scrutinized.
Two of the meteorites in particular, called Murchison and Lonewolf Nunataks 94102, contained a trove of nucleobases, including those also found in DNA. But these meteorites and also held an extraterrestrial secret, related but exotic nucleobases never seen before, said Michael Callahan, the NASA scientist who analyzed the space rocks.
Analysis of dirt and ice found near the meteorites showed no evidence of these exotic nucleobases.”
Nonetheless ‘the building blocks of life’ are not full-blown biological organisms; but they are necessary precursors and found to exist beyond earth. This offers some support to directed panspermia.
But what we need to find are at least primitive life-forms on Mars, or elsewhere, to confirm the existence of life beyond earth’s biosphere.
Though NASA announced the discovery of water on the moon in 2009, there is some evidence they knew it existed during the Apollo missions.
Moreover, there is also evidence that the early Mars missions discovered life on the red planet 40 years ago.
Former NASA astrobiologist Gilbert Levin designed and built the life detection equipment that was on board the Mars Viking, he describes it, and the test results obtained in the initial search for life on Mars (in an FOIA request sent to NASA n 2013, below):
“I believe the requested data should promptly be made available and free of charge inasmuch as the public taxes have already paid for the entire mission. The legacy of Viking includes holding science news conferences soon after acquisition of experiment results.
The Viking LR executed nine tests on Mars. Four were strongly positive, and five were control runs, all of which supported that the positive tests had detected life. Although the pre-mission criteria accepted by NASA as evidence for life were more than satisfied, that interpretation of the data was not accepted.
Many alternatives have been raised to explain away the evidence for life over the intervening 37 years. None has withstood scientific scrutiny, although two have persisted: the lack of organic material on Mars as indicated by the failure of the Viking molecular analysis (GCMS) instrument to find any; the supposed lack of liquid water…” (5)
Why would NASA dispute or suppress this discovery? We can only speculate. In fact, I will say that in my first book ‘The Genesis Race’ I predicted that NASA would find and announce flowing water on Mars and that was published in 2003. It happened in 2015.
I did so based upon scientific papers (NASA) discussing various aspects of the agencies research findings, and not due to my being a psychic.
It may just be a matter of time until one space agency or another announces that they have discovered microbial life on an exoplanet. Crick and Orgel could do little more than argue for the probable existence of life on other planets on a purely statistical basis.
“The first generation of stars -- because they were formed from light elements -- are unlikely to have been accompanied by planets. However, some second generation stars not unlike the Sun must have formed within 2 x 10gyr of the origin of the galaxy (Blaauw and Schmidt, 1965). Thus it is quite probable that planets not unlike the Earth existed as much as 6.5 x 10gyr before the formation of our own Solar System.” (6)
They extrapolated that there was a high probability that earth-like planets existed, in 1973. Now by 2016, we had hard data from the Kepler Telescope confirming the existence of earth-like planets just in a small slice of our galaxy. Of the 1,284 verified planets, NASA said about 550 could be rocky like Earth.
Nine of the 550 orbit close enough to their sun to allow for the existence of liquid water concentrations, bringing the total number of this class of planets to 21.
Again, these facts and figures lend support to the theory of directed panspermia, though they do not prove it of course.
The high degree of scientific speculation, in the original paper, has been considerably diminished over the intervening years. It does not seem high at all now is seems like valid, grounded speculation. Crick and Orgel also made several points about the genetic code (DNA) in their paper.
“Our second example is the genetic code. Several orthodox explanations of the universality of the genetic code can be suggested, but none is generally accepted to be completely convincing. It is a little bit surprising that organisms with somewhat different codes do not coexist. The universality of the code follows naturally from an “infective” theory of the origins of life. Life on Earth would represent a clone, derived from a single extraterrestrial organism.” (7)
This was stated decades before the Genome Project deciphered the DNA double helix code. Anyway, Crick a microbiologist and the co-discoverer of the shape of DNA, had considerable weight behind his statements. Orgel, a biochemist was also the founder of the RNA world.
Indeed we now know just how universal the code is and that even seemingly very different species often only have a few minor variations in their DNA instructions.
Several surprises were also forthcoming when the human genome was unraveled; humans proved to have far fewer genes than anticipated. Geneticists were expecting 100K but got only 23,000 genes, a fairly typical number that crushed the notion that gene numbers are the critical factor.
In addition, the genome contains a mass of unexplained ‘junk’ DNA. In fact, that suggests that our scientists have a long way to go to truly understand it.
Another observation in this vein; far too much it seems is made out of the human/chimp DNA similarity; and too little about the few obviously critical genes that confer species differentiation. Those are the key ones that we should focus on.
Crick and Orgel argued that the universality of the genetic suggested an extraterrestrial origin. In other words, it evolved, had been tested and found viable elsewhere, and transported here when the conditions were ripe.
The other factor that supports that conclusion is the fact that there is only one ‘code.’ While it would seem logical for ‘blind’ Nature to have gone through a trial and error process until the viable one was constructed.
We must then ask the following question: if driven by blind chance how did the genetic code arrive at perfection on a one-time-through basis? There do not appear to be any competing, failed genetic codes in the paleontological record.
Genome Project revelations have not undermined the “infective” argument. If anything, finding such a high degree of uniformity lends support to it. Moreover, external, genetic insertion events better explain such anomalies – such as the lack of transitional species in the paleontological record.
After failing to find Darwin’s hoped for transitional species Stephen Jay Gould came up with ‘punctuated equilibrium’ to explain the thousands of missing links. However, they can be better explained by infective, intervention mechanisms
In the light of current data, the outline given by Crick and Orgel in 1973 looks far more compelling today:
“OURPROPOSAL The possibility that terrestrial life derives from the deliberate activity of an extraterrestrial society has often been considered in science fiction and more or less light-heartedly in a number of scientific papers. For example, Gold (1960) has suggested that we might have evolved from the microorganisms inadvertently left behind by some previous visitors from another planet (for example, in their garbage).
Here we wish to examine a very specific form of Directed Panspermia. Could life have started on Earth as a result of infection by microorganisms sent here deliberately by a technological society on another planet, by means of a special long-range unmanned spaceship?
To show that this is not totally implausible we shall use the theorem of detailed cosmic reversibility ; if we are capable of infecting an as yet lifeless extrasolar planet, then, given that the time was available, another technological society might well have infected our planet when it was still lifeless…” (8)
In fact, the idea that we can and should terraform Mars is something that has been seriously proposed in recent decades. All of the above converge and prove that it is time to seriously reexamine the theory of Directed Panspermia.
In light of all the new data in our possession now, the time is ripe.
1. Directed Panspermia I?. H. C. CRICK Medical Research Council, Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Hills Road, Cambridge, England AND L. E. ORGEL The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, P.O. Box 1809, San Diego, California 92112
2. Ibid
3. ‘The Herschel Space Telescope Spots a Star Spewing Powerful Water Jets into Interstellar Space’ Popular Science, 6/16/2011, Clay Tillow
4. ‘Building Blocks of DNA Found in Meteorites’, space.com & the Washington Post, Charles Q. Choi, August 8, 2011
5. Freedom of Information Request NASA 2103 Gil Levine
6. Directed Panspermia, Crick & Orgel above reference #1
7. Ibid
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