When even the former chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department says he thinks an object from interstellar space was created by advanced intelligence of some kind, it is clear that the origins of intelligent life are fair game for respectable cosmic speculation. Dr. Avi Loeb has published his views on the mysterious object—dubbed ‘Oumuamua’—that passed through the Solar System late in 2017. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, soon became a NewYork Times best-seller, and in a September 2021 followup article for Scientific American he speculated that “a distant star could have created immortal machines to roam the Milky Way and keep its legacy alive.” Could the gift of life itself, one might ask, have arrived on Earth from interstellar realms?
‘Panspermia’ is a theory that life spreads through space between worlds, with spores or microorganisms drifting from one planet to another. The theory is very old, but in its modern form it was first proposed in 1903 by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who suggested that spores or bacteria might be propelled through space by the pressure of sunlight or starlight. More recently, the theory was supported by the late British astronomer Fred Hoyle, and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe, the Sri Lankan-born astronomer, mathematician, and astrobiologist, who believes that the universe is “biologically constructed” and that life has always been present. Many viruses and diseases, such as SARS (or even COVID 19?), he argues, may have originated on comets or cometary fragments.
As science reporter William B. Stoecker wrote in Atlantis Rising Magazine #117, “worlds like our own, though rare, almost certainly exist. Just how similar would their life forms be to our own?” Is some kind of Supreme Being controlling ‘evolution’ everywhere and producing parallel patterns of plants and animals on multiple worlds”? The answer, at least for most of academic science, is yet to be determined, but for some, like Chandra Wickramasinghe, and Avi Loeb, the evidence is already very strong.
