Panspermia

Danilo Anton

Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the molecule of life, a very long and complex double helix that was called deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA3.
In his book "Life itself, its origin and nature," Crick argued that life could not have arisen from primitive earthly soup.
First, because the DNA molecule can not be assembled alone, it requires special proteins to do so. And secondly, because it does not seem possible that proteins can be formed by chance.
All proteins are made from just 20 specific amino acids. Each of them contains two hundred amino acids which are variable combinations of the twenty of the aforementioned compounds.
According to Crick, the odds of any random protein being formed are just one in 10160, much higher than ALL the known universe atoms (1080).
It's as if a whirlwind stirring a junkyard, "casually" built a B-747 jet ready to fly ...
This author concludes that the complexity that exists in cellular structures can not be due to chance. The initial molecules of life must have come from space.
This theory, which has been called "panspermia", had been proposed by Svante Arrhenius4 in the early twentieth century, and developed by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe during the last decades.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe think that life would have originated at the time of the formation of galaxies, perhaps ours (the Milky Way) or the set of galaxies of the known universe, and from then on it would have spread Contained and transported in the small cometary bodies "planting" the planets that had the appropriate conditions6. The Earth received its first seeds due almost 4,000 million years ago, evolving in different directions according to the conditions of the environments found. According to Wickramasinghe (1974), interstellar dust is essentially organic and bacterial life exists everywhere.
These organisms and organic matter would be reaching the Earth's atmosphere on a regular basis, modifying and enriching the planetary genetic stock.
This would explain the presence of organic compounds detected when some meteorites were burned 80 kilometers high7, and the recent finding of live bacteria at 16,000 altitude8.
The latter author and Fred Hoyle interpret as organic the reddish coloration of certain planetary satellites whose surface is covered with ice (eg Europe, Calisto and Charon9), and other stars located in the so-called Kuiper belt10. According to both astronomers, the interior of these planetoids (whose outside temperature is below -200 ° C), would be "warped" by the processes of radioactive disintegration of their minerals, allowing the existence of liquid water in their interior, and by Biological processes. These authors think that life can survive deep freezing for a long time, perhaps tens or hundreds of millions of years.
From "People, Drugs and Serpentes", Danilo Anton, Piriguazu Ediciones