Living organisms are believed to be of extraterrestrial origin. Certain viruses and the octopus family are proof of this.

 

Ahe question of panspermia, i.e. life from space, is eminently burning. It's been agitating scientists for centuries. New clues have just been brought to light by a team of 33 researchers, geneticists, paleobiologists, biochemists and astrobiologists from universities and institutes around the world, in an article published in the very serious journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. According to them, some viruses and animal species are not terrestrial in origin. Their richly documented analysis calls for a paradigm shift that will have major implications for research on living things, as well as for the surveillance of major pandemics.

 

" This paper involves a radical questioning of the current scientific consensus on the causes that are called to explain the history of life on Earth. "John A Schuster, historian and philosopher of science, co-author of the study is formal. We are witnessing a Copernican revolution. The currently accepted Darwinian mechanisms, linked to the best analyses of the geological history of the Earth, are not called into question. They are, however, placed within a new, broader theoretical framework based, on the one hand, on the latest advances in astrophysics and astrobiology, and, on the other hand, on the latest developments in virology and molecular biology.

 

Until now, the laws of life were established on agreed Darwinian processes, always operating in a precise universe of reflection: the Earth. Research into the evolution of living things operates as equations that describe a system. Sudden changes, creating powerful ruptures in the evolutionary process, were considered to be random. However, for the authors of the study, many changes in the thread of life would be caused by sudden astrobiological inputs.

 

The authors of the study have accumulated an impressive body of multifactorial data in all disciplines of life. This investigation leads them to believe that life was seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish; and living organisms such as space-resistant bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells and organisms, perhaps even fertilized eggs and plant seeds, may have been continuously delivered to Earth since then, thus contributing to the advancement of Earth's biological evolution. This process, since the time of Lord Kelvin (1871) and Svante Arrhenius (1908), has been known scientifically as 'Panspermia'. For a long time this term smelled of sulphur and caused often violent controversies among scientists. Today, however, there is more and more data to support the idea of cosmic life. The last decade has seen a growing catalogue of so-called "habitable" exoplanets. Astrophysicists claim that the estimated total number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, is an astronomical 100 billion!

 

Resistance to the idea of panspermia comes from our oldest culture, starting with the Aristotelian paradigm of spontaneous generation of life. In the 19th century, Pasteur, observing the fermentation of wine and the acidification of milk, discovered that all life comes from life -"Omne vivum ex vivo". This discovery could have abounded in panspermia theories. It did not, for the recurring antagonism with panspermic implications was unshakeable: life came from a primordial soup that evolved over time. More recent discoveries about the extremely complex molecular structures involved in proteins and DNA should have alerted us to this fact. But that didn't happen.

 

In 2017, a study conducted by scientists provides evidence of microbial life in Canadian rocks that formed 4.1 to 4.23 billion years ago. Life in those Hadean days was impossible: it was too hot for even simple organic molecules to survive, let alone evolve into living complexity. On the other hand, this was a time of intensive bombardments of asteroids and comets. It is these celestial bodies that would have probably transported the first microbes to Earth in their space journey.

 

Three decades ago, the first evidence of microbial life in the geological record was thought to be in the form of cyanobacterial fossils dating back 3.5 billion years. From the time of the formation of a stable crust on the Earth 4.3 billion years ago, following an episode of violent impacts with comets (the Hadean era to which we have already referred), there seemed to be a period of 800 million years during which the canonical primordial soup known as "Haldane-Oparin" was able to develop. However, very recent discoveries have shown that detrital zircons, a type of eroded crystal, located in rocks belonging to a geological outcrop in the Jack Hills region of Western Australia, contained micrometer-sized graphite spheres with a biogenic carbon isotope signature. These inclusions can therefore be considered as plausible and unequivocal evidence of the existence of microbial life on Earth before 4.1 billion years ago, at the time of the impact of comets and asteroids. Orthodox abiogenic thought, that the origin of life can only be terrestrial, believes that an essentially instantaneous transformation of non-living organic matter into bacterial life occurred. For the authors of the article published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biologys, this assumption is beyond the bounds of credibility. A much more plausible possibility is that fully developed microorganisms, and perhaps other eukaryotic organisms, arrived on Earth via comets that then carbonized and became trapped in conglomerates of mineral grains that condensed. It is becoming increasingly clear that there are hundreds of billions of planets and other planetary bodies that resemble the Earth, and that exchanges of material between them (meteorites, cometary bolides) must take place on a regular basis.  

 

Without questioning Darwinian or Lamarckian theories, the authors of the study therefore call for a reconsideration of the terrestrial biosphere as an infinitesimal part of a much larger system that is the cosmos. The two systems are inextricably linked: "The two systems are inextricably linked. We are therefore forced, in our view, to conclude that the entire galaxy (and perhaps our local group of galaxies) constitutes a single connected biosphere  "the authors of the study write.

 

Among the elements of life brought from the stars, viruses and retroviruses have a special place. Retroviruses are viruses made up of RNA. They are capable of transcribing it (by retrotranscription) into DNA, in order to integrate into the genome of foreign cells and to bring an important potential for genetic modification. According to the authors of the study, the nanometric size of these living organisms would have enabled them to cross space without being exposed to ionizing radiation. These retroviruses would have played an important role in the major genetic diversification that occurred 541 million years ago, during a period of explosion of life on Earth that scientists call the "Cambrian Explosion". At that time and very suddenly, single-celled life was transformed into complex multi-cellular life and began an accelerated process of genetic diversification.

 

Proof of this accelerated genetic evolution coming from deep space: the octopus. Cephalopods have a genome whose complexity is out of all proportion to the vast majority of species living on Earth. It contains 33,000 more coding genes than the genome of the octopus.homo sapiens. Its evolution goes back 500 million years with zones of shadows that have always questioned scientists.

 

How is it that the octopus is endowed with such complex organic sophistication? This animal has been endowed from its origin, without going through all the stages of evolution, with a huge brain, a sophisticated nervous system, a dynamic ocular device worthy of the best HD cameras today, flexible and hyper-resistant tissues, a very advanced capacity for instant camouflage, etc. This excessively rapid genetic transformation between the ancient nautilus and the current squid is not found in any living being. It defies the laws of Darwinism.

 

For the authors of the study, there is no doubt that the octopus possesses genes of extraterrestrial origin. These unique genes would have been brought by comets or asteroids, either via RNA contained in retroviruses or directly from cryopreserved octopus eggs. Only this hypothesis could explain the dazzling emergence of the genetic complexity of the octopus. And especially the sudden emergence of these animals in the animal kingdom.

 

The great journey of microorganisms and viruses carried by celestial bodies from space may have shaped much of the reign of life on Earth. But this cosmic supply didn't stop in Cambrian times. It continues to this day. Certain aspects of Darwinian evolution and its various non-Darwinian terrestrial factors are therefore most likely caused by the continuous supply of new virions and microorganisms from space with their genetic impact events written on all of our genomes. Indeed, the evolution of hominids can be justified by a long sequence of viral pandemics, each of which is a call for the total extinction of an evolving lineage. The most important genes for the evolution of hominids, like all species of plants and animals, seem in many cases to be of external origin, being transferred across the galaxy largely in the form of information-rich virions.

 

Data from cometary studies continue today to be supported by the recovery of microbial material from the stratosphere (under conditions where terrestrial contamination by upwelling can be plausibly excluded). Biological entities ranging from viable but non-cultivatable microbes to unexplained aggregates of microscopic biological entities continue to be recovered at altitudes in the order of 30-41 km in the stratosphere. Entities are composed of carbon and nitrogen and have bilateral symmetry and organism-like morphologies. The evidence has been interpreted to be consistent with the plausible conclusion that these micro-organism-like entities arrive from space to Earth, probably carried by small comets. The probable survival of biological material descending into the Earth's atmosphere has been demonstrated in micron-sized meteorites. Early evidence of the presence of fossilized microorganisms inside carbonaceous meteorites is well established, and skepticism about terrestrial contamination is now firmly countered. The most recent discovery of microbial fossils in fallen meteorites in Sri Lanka in 2012, and the unequivocal determination (based on oxygen isotope data) that the rocks are not of terrestrial origin, provides further strong evidence of panspermia. Another related phenomenon concerns red rains recorded throughout history, but more recently in Kerala, India and Sri Lanka in 2012. All available evidence points to the presence of red pigmented organisms that are unlikely to be terrestrial in origin.

 

The ravages that epidemics and major pandemics have inflicted on mankind mark its history. All of them appeared suddenly, leaving humans helpless and unprepared. The Spanish flu of 1918, and more recently HIV, were unexpected. Could these great epidemics have their origin in cosmic biology? The authors pose the question and encourage us to broaden our field of vision: " A ubiquitous cosmic biology means that many new micro-organisms and viruses causing emerging diseases will have phylogenetic relationships with existing viral species and genera, as we now envision a "cosmic gene pool" from this perspective. We should then assume, as a first reactive response, that they came from space - even if there are also other plausible terrestrial explanations for the first cause, i.e., the cosmic cause should be part of the possible mix of causal explanations to be excluded either internally or externally. ".

Taking into account the cosmic factor in the evolution of living things implies a violent paradigm shift: " It is important that we do not allow science to be stifled by a reign of dogmatic authority that seeks to restrict its progress along narrow conservative lines. The current situation is strikingly reminiscent of the Middle Ages in Europe - the Ptolemaic epicycles that delayed the acceptance of a planetary system centred on the Sun for more than a century. "The authors add:" Current evidence suggests that we come from space, that we are made of viral genes, and that eventually our evolutionary legacy would return to full extent in space. This will complete the second and final phase of the Copernican revolution that began more than half a millennium ago... ".

 

The scientists who wrote this article are aware that some of their hypotheses need to continue to be supported by further research. They want to open up new perspectives, but they also know that there are many challenges in doing so. Scientific challenges, but also religious and philosophical challenges on the new place of Man in nature.