What is your view on panspermia and the exogenesis hypothesis?

It’s really fascinating. I like the idea. Might actually be a fun probe program in half a million years when we’ve explored much of the galaxy.

However, there’s no evidence it happened—the timeline of life on earth isn’t all that strange, so there’s very little reason to expect that it didn’t just grow here naturally.

In short—all the ingredients were here, no reason to import them =)

We don’t have any evidence that this occurred. It puts it in the range of science fiction for now.

I thinking looking will be fun though.

Onboard with Marina on this one. A very interesting hypothesis… but a hypothesis nonetheless.

We’ll see.

I’ll tell ya, these are very long words. Very long indeed.

that’s what… alright. enough, someone needs to stop this goddamned saying.

I’m okay with the idea. To my mind it would explain insects.

It seems more likely that these “seeds” aren’t distributed through time and space the way the definition suggests. They didn’t grow on some other planet and then get sent over here. Space is way too bigh for that.

Rather, the seeds are naturally occuring chemical combinations that can only occur in very specific and limited conditions. So, a “seed” of life could be RNA and RNA could only occur under certain temperature/chemical/energy conditions. The “seed” didn’t travel here from the water in a comet, it was a seed here and a seed way over there, too.

I was wondering if you could use light or other electromagnetic radiation is such a way as to trigger certain chemical reactions if the right chemicals happened to be mixed up in a planet’s “soup.” If so, perhaps life can spring up all over the universe due to the intervention of intelligent life. If electro-magentic radiation can trigger an aurora when interfered with by a magnetic field, perhaps it could be possible to modulate light in such a way that it could actually manipulate atoms from a distance. Perhaps enough to create biological molecules. Just a thought.

@mrentropy What’s wrong with insects?

@daloon Really interesting! Luckily, it seems that lightning is enough to create life…

@bpeoples I don’t like ‘em and they seem alien to me. That includes crabs and lobsters, but I’ll eat them.

@mrentropy Fair enough =)

There’s no real evidence, and it just pushes back the problem of life’s origins one step further.

There is no hard evidence, however our discovery and improving understanding of extremophile organisms should count as weak evidence in my opinion. Therefore panspermia is a hypothesis and more than just speculation or science fiction. And yes, it just pushes back the problem of life’s origins one step further. However it could still be very significant. Suppose we solve the mystery of abiogenesis complementing Darwinian laws with additional mechanisms. We might find out that some of those mechanism wouldn’t work with Earth’s conditions present at the time. A different place in space might offer a way out.