A theory that seems far-fetched but it may explain a few things about life and the possible contribution of microbes that may regularly arrive to earth hitchhiking meteorites

The coronavirus may have come from space according to  N. Chandra Wickramasinghe and Edward J. Steele 

With a new corona virus making the headlines and causing personal distress to many and extending its realm of havoc into the financial and business world the truest cause of this and other similar pandemics needs to be honestly explored. The main facts relating to the onset and spread of this pandemic can be summarised as follows: • On October 11 2019 a meteoritic bolide (probably fragment of a comet) explodes in a brief flash in Nth East China. We think it probable that this bolide contained embedded within it a monoculture of infective nCoV-2019 virus particles that survived in the interior of the incandescent meteor seen in Fig 1. From the broad range of arguments we shall develop later on in the article we consider the seemingly outrageous possibility (no doubt outrageous to many readers) that literally hundreds of trillions of infective viral particles were then released embedded in the form of fine carbonaceous dust from the flash-exploded bolide. 

In late November to early December 2019 first human cases nCoV-2019 appear in the Wuhan region and environs (by all accounts unrelated to Wuhan meat and seafood market). • 

Isolates of virus now studied in many laboratories show very low or no mutation indicating that the incoming virus is essentially a “monoculture”. This is dramatically different to the picture one gets if the main spread of the virus was through affected victims replicating the virus and spreading copies which inevitably would show mutations over a broad sample of isolates. Everyone in the Wuhan region would have been exposed to essentially the same virus (including many animals , such as mammals, snakes and even perhaps vegetation) • Unsubstantiated claims that people pass on the virus to others without, or before, they show any symptoms implies a very strange pattern of epidemiological behaviour forcing difficulties with the straight forward infective model of human-to-human transmission. On the other hand the meteorite hypothesis is consistent with a wide regional “environmental” contamination which may include clothes, hair, cars, side-walks, trees, grassland, surface water pools and water reservoirs. • From a crude look at the evidence it is amply clear that human-to -human transmission might have occurred yet it is low or difficult or confined to intimate family contacts. In the latter instance the contact transfer model is somewhat confused by the fact these intimate social units may have shared or sampled the same infected space. • A very wide area in China is “suspect” and this area is now quarantined – an operation that would probably have been done rationally based on Chinese government sampling for nCoV-2019 RNA sequences. The strong localisation within China is the most remarkable aspect of the disease, the first cases of which probably began to show up from November 2019 onward. The fatalities reported so far appears to be confined to individuals, particularly the elderly, with underlying health problems, and the death toll so far is said to be less than the thousands who have died in the US in the past 3 months from seasonal influenza. Links of this outbreak to a Wuhan wild life market have been highlighted, but detailed studies conducted thus far have not seriously strengthened the case. It appears that a range of wild animals including bats and snakes had become host species for a very similar corona virus but a causal connection again does not hold up to rational scrutiny. ( Our full scientific analysis of the data with our colleagues is in our letter submitted to The Lancet. The text can be found at viXra.org site viXra:2002.0039 at http://viXra.org/abs/2002.0039?ref=11076818) Readers would need to be reminded that a fireball of the kind shown in Fig. 1 is a meteoroid probably many tens of metres across. Although larger fragments meteorites would fall to the ground almost at once, micron-sized dust released in the troposphere above China would take several weeks to drift to the ground. If these particles became the nuclei of rain drops the transfer to ground level as rain and mist could be protracted and last many weeks. Such a line of thinking might sound bizarre to the uninitiated reader, but not so to anyone who has elected to take an objective view of the rapidly accumulating body of evidence to support the theory that life (all living forms on Earth) have an external origin – the theory known by the name “Panspermia”. Panspermia – an idea originally discussed by the pre-Socratic Geek philosopher Anaxoragas in the 5th century BC - challenges the idea that life originated de novo on the Earth. This theory refutes the idea of Spontaneous Generation as first enunciated by Aristotle in the 3rd century BC, and revived in the 20th century in the form of the primordial soup theory. Despite over 50 years of experiments in numerous laboratories there is no evidence to support this theory, and a large body of scientific evidence from biology, geology and astronomy actually contradicts it main tenets. The support for the alternative view that life is a cosmic phenomenon stems mainly from the fact that the information content of life at a genetic and molecular level is super-astronomical; and this needs at least an astronomical or cosmological setting. Thus, the idea is that life’s information, now locked largely in the form of bacteria and viruses, are everywhere in space being carried mainly in comets. Comets have radioactive heat sources in the interiors and serve as both distributors and amplifiers of cosmic life – bacteria and viruses. The panorama of life on Earth is the result of the assembly of such bacterial and viral genes that has come to be assembled like pieces of a gigantic jig-saw puzzle over some 4.2 billion years. Whenever a planet on which cosmic life has become established is struck by asteroid and comet impacts some of this life is of course destroyed – as happened for instance 65 million years ago with the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth. But a small and significant fraction of the resident life on the planet is actually blasted off into space and would survive space travel to seed a nearby habitable planet. It is only relatively recently that scientists have been able to fully grasp the enormous magnitude of the microbial and viral content of the terrestrial biosphere. We now know that a typical litre of surface seawater contains at least 10 billion microbes as well as some 100 billion viruses—the vast majority of which remain unidentified and uncharacterized to date (https://www.the-scientist.com/features/an-ocean-of-viruses39112?archived_content=9BmGYHLCH6vLGNdd9YzYFAqV8S3Xw3L5). Two years ago an international group of scientists collected bacteria and viruses that fell through the rarefied atmosphere near the 4000 metre peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain. They arrived at an astonishing tally of some 800 million viruses per square metre per day and an associated slightly smaller tally of bacteria - all of which would of course ultimately fall to the Earth’s surface (eg. Reported in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/science/virosphere-evolution.html). The assumption normally made is that all such viruses and bacteria necessarily originate on the Earth’s surface and are swept upwards in air currents; but in such a model many difficulties associated with the upward transport process are ignored. In our view, a significant fraction of this vast number of falling microbes must originate outside the terrestrial biosphere and come from cometary sources – viruses and bacteria that are actually expelled from comets. Further supportive evidence for this point of view has come from sampling the stratosphere for its bacterial content. From a sampling of the stratosphere at a height of 41 km, using balloon borne equipment which was carried out in 2001, we already arrived at an estimated input from this height of 20-200 million bacteria per square metre per day, and 10 to 100 times more viruses, falling downwards to the Earth. If we take into account all the facts available to date we cannot avoid the conclusion that vast numbers of bacteria and viruses continue to fall through the Earth’s atmosphere, and it seems inevitable that a significant fraction is of external origin. We are also beginning to get hard evidence pointing to the first signs of bacterial life being lodged in rocks that formed 4.2-4.3 billion years ago when the Earth was being relentlessly bombarded by comets. The strong indications are that comets carried the first bacteria to our planet at this time, and moreover that the entire subsequent evolution of life on Earth took place against the backdrop of comets regularly introducing new genes. Comets have been regarded with awe and trepidation in many ancient cultures of the world. Almost without exception they have been regarded as bad omens – bringers of pestilence and death. The evidence for comets being implicated in the origin of life on Earth was intensely controversial when these ideas were first discussed by one of us and the late Sir Fred Hoyle. Now there is a growing consensus that this is inevitable in some form. In this article we argue that even today the periodic influx of cometary dust and debris could be responsible for waves of epidemic disease – such as the recent corona virus - that sweep our planet from time to time. As a life-bearing comets makes its repeated orbits around the sun its volatile substances are progressively vaporised and eventually we end up with what could be recognised as large carbonaceous meteorites. The number of close perihelion passages that a comet can survive before becoming completely stripped of volatiles is probably a few hundred. Carbonaceous chondrites could represent materials from comets denuded of volatiles but retaining a residue of silicates and more refractory organic structures. From time to time such objects find ingress into the Earth.

Reference:

https://www.academia.edu/42041228/Comments_on_the_Origin_and_Spread_of_the_2019_Coronavirus