Panspermia huh? Sounds a bit unsavoury doesn’t it? Suspiciously like something you’d find on the internet; not on a science blog.
It’s actually the idea that life on Earth could have come from elsewhere in our galaxy, that life may have travelled through space originating from a different planet, and when it reached ours it flourished and evolved into all the different forms we see today. So we may actually all be aliens. Great idea huh? Pretty awful name though.
Sperm actually means ‘seed’ and pan means ‘all’ so panspermia means all-seed, OK that doesn’t really help, I’m not sure who first coined the term but they certainly didn’t have a flair for marketing. Anyway, how likely actually is it?
In this first post I’ll examine the ‘traditional view’ of panspermia, including some evidence, and in the next post I’ll look at some more extreme versions of panspermia, such as the idea that intelligent aliens deliberately seeded the galaxy with life.
The inspiration for these posts came from commenter hartm242 who gave me the idea of writing about panspermia in the requests section of this blog. You should definitely check out his excellent blog too, it’s about exploring alternative forms of life on planets unlike our own, and he’s created a hypothetical alien planet with its own biosphere.
Continue reading ‘Panspermia: did life on Earth come from space? – Part 1’