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THE CASE FOR OUR COSMIC ANCESTRY
New data signals a major paradigm shift in science
by Chandra Wickramasinghe
(Vidya Jyothi Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, MBE, is an Honorary Professor at the University of Buckingham, UK, Honorary Professor at Ruhuna University, Sri Lanka and Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Fundamental Science, Sri Lanka)
How did life arise? Not just on the Earth, but anywhere in the Universe? Does life emerge on every Earth-like planet that have oceans and an atmosphere by spontaneous processes involving well understood laws of physics and chemistry? Or did it involve an extraordinary, even miraculous intervention?
How old is the universe itself? How did it originate, if it indeed did ever originate? Is there evidence of life outside the Earth? In comets, the space between stars in our Milky Way galaxy, on other planets, in other galaxies? Science must necessarily exclude miraculous options of course, but the questions continue to be asked and demand answers. Many of these questions have an antiquity that predates Western traditions that go back to classical Greece in the first century BCE. The answers may have a genesis that goes outside the realm of Western culture. The concepts of zero, infinity (Ananta) all have an Indian origin and are inextricably linked with Hinduism and Buddhism. It could well be for this reason that the idea of an infinite universe has been so forcefully resisted in Western science!
In the past six months many strongly-held opinions in science have been challenged by the arrival of new data. We may be now ever closer to finding answers to the age-old questions to our cosmic ancestry and the origin of the universe.
The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) launched in 2021 is the most powerful astronomical observatory surpassing the range and capabilities of the earlier Hubble Space Telescope. It was designed to see deeper and further into our origins: from the formation of stars and planets, to the birth or possible birth of the Universe itself. Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and CSA.
Discoveries using the new James Webb Telescope have shown the existence of galaxies that are much older than the age of the currently fashionable Big Bang model of the universe itself – a universe which is just 13.8 billion years old, barely three times the age of the Earth.
This unimpressive smudge of light called CEERS-93316 (Fig.1) was observed by the James Webb Telescope and is presumed to be the most distant galaxy at a distance of about 35 billion light years. This latest discovery, amongst others, lend support to ideas of a steady-state universe with an infinite age, or models of the cosmos involving alternating phases of creation and destruction. These emerging models of the cosmos are remarkably in agreement with ancient Vedic, Hindu and Buddhist ideas.
Another equally important paradigm shift that is happening now relates to the question of the origin of life, and the connection between life on Earth and the wider universe. The Kepler Orbiting Telescope in launched in 2009 was dedicated to discovering habitable Earth-like planets in our galaxy outside the solar system. A large number of such habitable planets have been discovered so far, and a few weeks ago the James Web Telescope was deployed to study one of these exoplanets in some detail.
This “Earth-twin” known by the name K2-186 is located some 120 light years from the Earth. The surprising discovery was a molecule called dimethyl sulphide, along with carbon dioxide and methane, in the atmosphere of K2-186 that has been hailed as definite evidence of extraterrestrial life. The argument hinges on the fact that the molecule dimethyl sulphide appears to be only produced by biology on the Earth – by marine plankton in particular. So rather belatedly scientists have accepted that a second living planet exists 120 light years away from the Earth. So, the outstanding question now is how and by what processes did life originate on this planet? Or indeed on any other planet?
The Galaxy CEERS 93316 at a distance of 35 billion light years from Earth
The long-held view (going all the way back to Aristotle in the third century BCE) is that life emerged and emerges easily and “naturally” on a planet like Earth (or on K2-186, for that matter) as soon as the “right conditions” prevail. The modern version of this concept that has been defended from the dawn of the 20th century is the so-called “theory of spontaneous generation”. Without any substantive proof for it and a great deal of contrary evidence this concept remains part of the holy grail of biology.
According to this theory of spontaneous generation organic molecules in the Earth’s oceans are supposed to assemble themselves naturally into primitive living systems that subsequently evolve over billions of years to produce the magnificent panorama of life of which we form the most trivial part. Needless to say, there was never any substantive evidence to support this point of view, but nevertheless it was one that has been accepted by the entire establishment of science, more or less like an act of faith.
Experiments to “prove” the process if spontaneous generation and to synthesize life from non-life have continued to be conducted in the most advanced biotechnology laboratories across the world for well over half a century. Every attempt that has been made to replicate the process of spontaneous generation in the laboratory under the widest possible range of conditions has ended in dismal failure. The reason is simple: the probability hurdle needed to go from non-living organics to the simplest evolvable living system is of a scale that is super-astronomical. The origin of life requires a system that transcends the scale of the Earth, our solar system, our Milky Way Galaxy and perhaps involves the entire universe, that is now appearing to be possibly infinite in scale.
The alternative to spontaneous generation of life is the concept of life being a cosmic phenomenon or panspermia as it has come to be called. This basic idea has an antiquity in Western tradition that predates Aristotle and is attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxoragas. Anaxoragas suggested that the seeds of life are all pervasive in the cosmos and they take root and develop into living entities whenever the right conditions prevail. This is the theory of Panspermia (from Greek roots: Spermata – seed; Pans – everywhere). Similar ideas are implied in Buddhist, Hindu and Vedic cosmologies and of course these predate the ancient Greeks by many centuries.
From the 1970’s onward the late Sir Fred Hoyle and the present writer became torch bearers for the theory of cosmic life which was a revived form of the ancient theory of panspermia. The starting point in our investigations involved the identification of cosmic dust, the trillions upon trillions of micrometre-sized “dust” that makes up a few percent of the mass of the entire Galaxy, and shows up as conspicuous dark clouds and striation against the background of stars in the Milky Way. By 1984 we had accumulated enough astronomical evidence to conclude that a very large fraction of this cosmic dust in fact linked to life – bacteria and viruses in various stages of decay and degradation, but still largely preserving the information required to initiate life on any habitable Earth-like planet.
Case against spontaneous generation of life
The most powerful single argument for life being a cosmic rather than a purely terrestrial phenomenon was articulated by the late Sir Fred Hoyle way back in 1980, summarizing the position that we had reached at the time:
“The very small probabilities, which one calculates for the assembly of these substances (e.g. enzymes), demonstrates as near to certainty as one would wish that life did not originate here on the Earth. Indeed, the infinitesimal probabilities demonstrate that life is even too complex for its origin to be confined within our galaxy alone. The resources of the whole universe were almost certainly needed……”
If there was a deep principle of nature that drove inorganic systems towards the emergence of primitive life – the evidence for this would have long since been discovered in the laboratory, which as we noted, has not. Moreover, with calculations showing grotesquely low a priori probabilities for the transition from non-life to life only two options remain: –
(1) The origin of life was an extremely improbable event that must have occurred on Earth against all odds (because we are here!) but will consequently not be reproduced elsewhere. In that case we would indeed be hopelessly alone as a life system in the Universe.
(2) Alternatively, a very much vaster cosmic system than was available on Earth, and a very much longer timescale was involved in an initial origination event, after which life was transferred to Earth and elsewhere by processes that the late Sir Fred Hoyle and the present writer proposed many years ago – cometary panspermia.
We then went on to argue that this cosmologically-derived legacy of life, along with its full evolutionary potential (contained within the genomes of bacteria and viruses), were distributed mainly by comets and other repositories of cosmic dust onto habitable planets like the Earth. Comets in this theory are incubators and distributors of the information of life throughout the universe in the form of bacteria and viruses.
Whilst in 2023 comets are conceded by most scientists as being the repositories of complex organic molecules that may have contributed to spontaneous generation of life, their role as carriers of life itself, despite an ever-increasing body of contrary evidence is still fiercely resisted. Hard evidence of comets containing organic molecules that can only reasonably be derived from biology are coming in fast and thick. The Rosetta Space Mission to a comet – Comet 67P/C-G – launched in 2013 has yielded a formidable body of evidence, all showing consistency with the existence of microbial material in comets.
Another comet, Comet Lovejoy, has more recently been observed and found to be emitting large amounts of ethyl alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space – equivalent to 500 bottles of wine per second. These are the natural products of fermentation, which is clear evidence for sub-surface microbial activity in a comet.
Are cosmic bacteria continually falling to Earth?
One crucial test of the theory of cosmic life is to probe the stratosphere for in-falling alien genetic systems – bacteria and viruses. To urge international space authorities with the capability of doing this was far from easy. The first dedicated effort to test the idea of bacterial in-fall from comets was carried out in collaboration with scientists at ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) in 2001.
Positive detections of in-falling microbiota were made, and the number of bacterial cells collected in a measured volume of the stratosphere at 41km led to an estimate of an in-fall rate over the whole Earth of 0.3-3 tonnes of microbes per day. This converts to some 20-200 million bacteria per square metre arriving from space every single day.
Very recently microorganisms were discovered on many occasions between 2013 and 2017 on the outside of the International Space Station that orbits at 400km above the Earth. There is no easy way to maintain that such microorganisms could have been lofted from the surface of the Earth.
This discovery is so profoundly important for science that it needs to be repeated; but the desire to repeat it is difficult to find. A similar experiment, however, is being planned by a team of scientists led by Professor Dhammika Maganarachchi at the National Institute of Fundamental Studies and myself. A balloon launch to this end is being planned within the next six months. The team at NIFS will be assisted by my grandson, Reuben Chandra Wickramasinghe, who has a visiting appointment at the Mathematics Department of the University of Colombo.
Concluding remarks
I believe that in 2023 we have reached a crucial turning point in the history of human civilization. When it is finally accepted that life on Earth is a minuscule part of a vast cosmic biosphere the implications for humanity will be profound. Even more important would be the recognition that alien life in the form of microbes – bacteria and viruses – exist in our very midst even now and are continually raining down on our planet. Such microbes could be responsible for devastating pandemics, but more positively, we should recognise cosmic viruses and bacteria could have the potential to augment our genomes – the genomes of all terrestrial lifeforms – and over long periods unravel an ever-changing panorama of cosmic life.
Whilst advances in technology continue at accelerating pace humanity as a whole is becoming ever more fractured. Wars and bitter sectarian conflicts and heart-rending suffering are to be seen everywhere. The “climate-change” marches and protestations of young people that are gaining momentum are perhaps emblematic of a desire to rebel against reigning paradigms that seem to be threatening our very existence.
Thomas Kuhn famously declared “…when paradigms change, the world changes with them.” One could perhaps assert that a reversal of this causality is also possible – “when the world changes paradigms can be forced to change.”
Further reading
Wickramasinghe, N.C. and Wickramasinghe, R.C., 2023. Life and the Universe: a final synthesis, Journal of Cosmology, Vol. 30, No.10, pp. 30160 – 30174
Wickramasinghe, C., Wickramasinghe, K., Tokoro, G., 2019. Our Cosmic Ancestry in the Stars (Inner Traditions, NY)