Scientists Offer 'Overwhelming' Evidence Terran Life Began in Space 556
An anonymous reader writes "Using data from recent comet-probing space missions, British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against. That is, we're not originally from around here. Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years, they say, which along with the clay and organic molecules found on-board would provide an ideal incubator. 'Professor Wickramasinghe said: "The findings of the comet missions, which surprised many, strengthen the argument for panspermia. We now have a mechanism for how it could have happened. All the necessary elements - clay, organic molecules and water - are there. The longer time scale and the greater mass of comets make it overwhelmingly more likely that life began in space than on earth."'" jamie points out that the author of this paper has many 'fringe' theories. Your mileage may vary.
Of course it started in space (Score:5, Funny)
Panspermia (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Panspermia (Score:5, Funny)
(all together now!)
"My eyes have seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord..."
Or rather: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Panspermia (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Of course it started in space (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, Earth, one of the many planetary eggs fertilized by the big G's... er, comet. It's like pollination on a galactic scale.
Cheers,
Fozzy
Re:Of course it started in space (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Of course it started in space (Score:4, Funny)
Tomorrows headline (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Of course it started in space (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course it started in missed sleep (Score:4, Funny)
And there was a 50/50 chance that I'd get the punchline right, and I got it wrong thanks to a spelling mistake.
Either it happens, or it doesn't.
Re:Of course it started in space (Score:5, Funny)
Of course! And it wasn't a cat; it was a moose.
(And while he was looking around for a big enough box, the moose bit his sister.)
No kidding (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. Adams' writings are more consistent, structured, and believable than Hubbard's.
Also, it helps that Douglas Adams wasn't a complete batshit loon.
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
What nonsense. Adams changed the whole story substantially every few years. The radio told one story, then the record told another, then the books told yet another, and then there was the other version of which we do not speak for horror at the memory of the Babel Fish Puzzle, and then there was the TV series...
Oh wait, hang on. That only qualifies the saga all the more for religious status :-)
Re:No kidding (Score:4, Funny)
Oh right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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"You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that--and shudder." - James 2:19
Everyone in hell, according to the non-straw-man version of the Christian worldview, will be there because they have rejected God's offer of free righteousness in Jesus Christ:
All faith acceptable to God throughout all time has been on the basis that God wo
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According to the BBC series, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect where on the 'B' Arc that crashed on earth as well as there already having been 'cavemen' on earth at the time of the crash.
Thus, it's inconclusive that life came from the 'B' Arc. Bath anyone?
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Since they were part of the computer, they were then capable of producing the answer just like any other part of the computer. Since their unplanned presence screwed up the calculations, the answer they came up with
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No kidding (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd post spoilers, but I'm lazy. 8^P Suffice it to say that all the main characters survive and it is implied that they live happily ever after - except Marvin who can't help it.
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
hm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hm.. (Score:5, Funny)
My car won't start in space, you insensitive clod!
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And Protoss life began on... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And Protoss life began on... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And Protoss life began on... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, come on... (Score:5, Funny)
Others? (Score:3, Interesting)
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For stuff outside of our own solar system, I think right now we're only just beginning to learn how to detect planets smaller than Jupiter, so finding an object smaller than a planet that far out is probably beyond our capabilities at the moment.
Even so, if you're looking for really complex life (such as intelligent life), you'd be better ser
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Organic compounds are everywhere at the Solar System. It is so easy to detect them at dust released by commets or at surfaces that it doesn't make even news anymore.
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Life doesn't need a perfect atmosphere; it creates its own. The only reason Earth's atmosphere has free oxygen is because of life. In fact, life is also responsible for all of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, even what we're releasing; after all, coal and oil came from prehistoric plants and animals.
Having a temperature range that allows liquid water to exist for at least part of the
Re:Others? (Score:5, Interesting)
Space is very big, and planets are very small. Given enough time (billions of years), any rogue comet may eventually be influenced by a planet's gravity. But that doesn't mean it will hit it. Gravity doesn't work like a frog catching a fly; chances are the gravitational influence will merely change its course. And chances are that influence will be small, unless it passes close to a large planet. The comet would have to be heading pretty much straight at a planet in order to hit it. Even if it were to skim the outer atmosphere, it's unlikely that it would enter a terminal orbit.
Consider this: The Earth is 8000 miles in diameter. The distance from the Earth to the moon is 239,000 miles. The distance to the Sun is 93,000,000 miles. To put this into perspective, imagine a walnut on your desk. That's the Earth. The Moon is a blueberry on the other side of your desk. The Sun is a car three blocks away. Jupiter is a pumpkin a mile from the Sun Car. Mix in the other planets at their proportional distances, and you still have a lot of space in which a comet (anything from a grain of sand to a pea at this scale) can miss everything as it passes through the solar system.
The only object that will definitely have a strong influence is the Sun, and even it may or may not pull the comet into orbit.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Extrapolation of probability using two variables?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:2)
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right and wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
The good professors should embrace, as they say, the healing power of 'and'.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Insightful)
The conditions of early Earth can be determined to some degree, and the time between Earth forming and the earliest known signs of life can also be determined. Any theory which states that life began on Earth has to explain how said conditions lead to life in said timeframe. This far none has.
Panspermia, on the other hand, claims that life was born somewhere else at some point after the Big Bang and earliest signs of life on Earth. "Somewhere else" doesn't constrain the possible set of circumstances nearly as much as "on Earth", and the timeframe is far longer too. It is also impossible to prove false.
Given the choice between lots of time-consuming chemistry reasearch and a hypothesis which is impossible to falsify or really even research but allows a lot of poetic pseudo-philosophical nonsense in the vein of "we are children of the stars", "cosmic bortherhood", and "the thrut is out there", which do you think people will choose ?
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that it doesn't really. If the timeframe Earth has been around is 1/1000th of the average time you'd expect the abiogenetic process to yeild life on average, well that's ok. There are likely to be 1000s of Earth-like planets in the galaxy. All those stochastic molecular events are not only taking place on the surface of primative earth, but every other primative earthlike planet in the universe. It only has to happen once for us to be here and puzzle at how rare we are. I mean, the chances of winning the lottery are extremely low, but someone usually wins.
Given the choice between lots of time-consuming chemistry reasearch and a hypothesis which is impossible to falsify or really even research but allows a lot of poetic pseudo-philosophical nonsense in the vein of "we are children of the stars", "cosmic bortherhood", and "the thrut is out there", which do you think people will choose ?
You are right there. No doubt about it.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, these great big statistical arguments against abiogenesis aren't even arguments against any hypothesis that scientists are putting forth.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Informative)
There is a fairly (and far beyond me to explain) statistical aspect to evolutionary biology, but the main thing to keep in mind is that modern evolutionary theory predicts that all life, extant or extinct, will fit into a nested hieararchy. The bonus of the Modern Synthesis and of the last thirty or forty years of genetic research has given us a twin-nested hiearchy; not only do the fossils give us a pretty good notion of the faunal succession, but the genetic data, by and large, confirms and extends those observations.
This is the root of why evolution is a well-supported scientific theory. It's nice to have a single line of data, but when you get to evidentiary lines that fit together as well as the fossil and genetic data does, I don't think it's any great leap of any kind to state "Here is evidence for common descent".
Let's remember the flip side of all of this, and that's falsification. For common descent to be falsified, one need only provide some examples of organisms that fall outside of the twin-nested hieararchy, or of fossils that violate the faunal succession. So, if you can produce some bacteria that uses an entirely different genetic scheme that is not related in any way to the way life as we know it does, then common descent has been falsified (though, you'll note, evolution has not). As to the faunal succession, if you pull a rabbit fossil out of strata, say, 3 billion years ago, where bacterial colonies represented the most complex organisms around, then we have a very serious problem.
Now, how do we falsify a common Creationist retort; that God (or the Designer(s) or whatever) used a common toolkit, and that's why all life uses the same basic nucleotide system, or genetic language if you will. On the face of it, it seems a reasonable retort, until your factor in that said Designer likely could use any genetic he/she/it/they pleased, and there's every reason to expect that there might be a half a dozen, or a hundred or any number you like (and can expect to be likely to be useful for inheritance) such systems as there is just one. In short, any and all observations are essentially compatible with the claim "God did it" (or whatever formulation of God/designer/alien scientist/etc. you want to invoke).
The reason Creationists are picked on for their "million to one, 747 out of a scrapyard" arguments is because those arguments do not in fact address anything that modern evolutionary theory or Common Descent states, but rather knock down oversimplified and rather silly strawmen of what those theories claim happened. There's nothing positive in their claims, simply just fallaciously-formulated arguments against everything from the Big Bang to the formation of the first cell.
If one observers that all extant organisms fit into a hieararchy, then I don't think it's an inference too far to state that that relationship is more than just happenstance. If that observation fits within the predictive nature of a specific theory, then is it unreasonable to state that that observation is in fact a piece of evidence for that theory?
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That stated, it'll take more than a few numbers in a formula to convince me. I'm not going to believe this until a cometary probe comes back contaminated with an alien microbe that destroys all life on the planet. And even then, I'll be a little bit skeptical.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Funny)
When I was in grad school our group was trying to make a particular type of superconducting circuit. After many attempts we got one that worked, wrote it up, and presented it at a conference.
During the Q&A, someone asked my advisor what our yields were. "On a good day, 100%". The followup question was, "what's your yield on good days?"
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Insightful)
Hoyle at least used to be a real scientist. I'm not sure if Wickramasinghe ever was. He said "
"The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747" in 1982, so he's been a crackpot for a long time. This guy's just one step less crazy than Behe and the other 'intelligent design' crackpots. The only difference is that the intelligent designer posited by Wickramasinghe and Hoyle is a natural one, not a supernatural one; all the other problems with their claims are the same.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Interesting)
My flatmate, who was a paleobotany postgrad at the time, had some very disparaging things to say about him. He had co-authored a few papers claiming the Archaeopteryx was a hoax, based on his poor understanding of the subject matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx#Authen
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Informative)
For those interested in why the tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747 is a useless analogy for the process of evolution, the simple explanation is that evolution works by a ratcheting effect: improvements are made one tiny step at a time, in sequence, for a cumulative effect of complexity. The selection process by which those steps are made - i.e. mutations that constitute an improvement in fitness survive and others die out - is simple and nonrandom. The tornado analogy implies instant emergence of full complexity, which is nothing at all like what actually happens.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense. Any replicator subjected to differential survival pressure is capable of evolving, and there are simpler replicators than bacteria.
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In the absence of pre-existing organic life, none of those things are self-replicating. Ideas evolve as well, even simple ones, but that is again not helpful in determining the simplest thing which can (without help from another organism) replicate. To my knowledge, bacteria, or the bacteria-like organisms thought to precede them, are the simplest such things currently known, or in any meaningful way theorized. It's been speculated that maybe there wa
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The laws dictating how different elements and ions react and combine with one another are not random. Chemistry is not random, it's stochastic. You don't combust hydrogen and oxygen on different days and get water on Monday and aluminum file cabinets on Wednesday. Nobody, but nobody other than creationists and other folks engaged in trying to misrepresent the position they're arguing against holds that DNA or anything else "randomly" assembled itself from a preexisti
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You're right back to the 747 in the junkyard. The problem with scientists - and biologists in general - is that we usually don't realize how difficult it is for some people to understand DNA didn't spring into existence in one single instant any more than people, lizards, sponges or bacteria did. Many simpler replicating mechanisms exist - viruses, RNA, protein (prions), and so on. The backwards path of evolution follow
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Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:4, Funny)
Soooooo, they used two numbers (mass of clay & # of comets) to generate a 1e24 to 1 odd against life having started here? Seems like they might have left one or two variables out of their equation. Hopefully this is just junk reporting rather than junk science.
I have a new meta-theory for these sorts of things: if your hypothesis sounds like the Chewbacca Defense, it's almost certainly bogus.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:4, Insightful)
Gotta say that last time I checked the water is liquid right here on planet earth also.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:4, Insightful)
Coming up with such a precise number seems particularly brilliant, considering that we have no
idea how life really originated.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Interesting)
We know that life was here between 3.5 and 3.9 billion years ago, with some iffy evidence suggesting it was even older. That gives us a net time advantage for any given comet of no more than about 500 million years. That sounds like a lot, but in reality it really isn't that big a span. Beyond that, considering that our knowledge of cometary history is still rather sketchy, and that our sample size is exceedingly small, this is nothing more than a pretty substantial "what-if", itself based upon one particular abiogenesis theory, which has been somewhat supplanted in recent years.
If we're going to start talking about interstellar comets, to add more time to the equation, someone is going to have to a) provide evidence of such bodies and b) provide evidence that radioactive decay is going to produce heat long enough for liquid water within the body to act as an incubator for the VERRRY long stretches of time that some organisms or proto-organisms are going to survive.
Now, weight all of this against the fact that the early Earth had all the ingredients for life to develop; *plentiful* amounts of liquid water and lots and lots of energy (in the forms of solar radiation, atmospheric conditions like lightning and geothermal energy from oceanic vents and vulcanism). Can someone kindly explain to me how a comet, even with clays or clay-like crystaline minerals and some sort of low-level radioactive decay (it has to be pretty low-level too, because anything too energetic or in too high a quantity is more likely going to be delerious than helpful) is going to provide this more wonderful environment.
As with every generation of panspermia advocates, the underlying argument is essentially "We don't think there was enough time for life to develop on the early earth, so we've got to find a way to add more time." Even if we give them this part of the argument (and I frankly think even that is FAR too generous), they still have to explain how conditions elsewhere (comets, other planets orbiting other stars) are somehow more environmentally-friendly to abiogenesis than Earth was.
This is not to slight the largely unrelated idea that comets could have been the source of organic molecules that could have been some sort of organic "seeds" for early self-replicators to develop and to use as raw materials and energy.
Re:Extrapolation of probability using two variable (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the most basic problem with panspermia is that it seeks to solve a problem that we don't even know exists yet. It seems to violate Occam's Razor by adding a good many entities to the abiogenesis argument, and still doesn't really answer the origins issue, merely pushing it back.
If, and I'll admit at this moment that it is an if (big or little), life requires water (or some liquid capable of dissolving and suspending molecules for more complex organic chemical processes to occur), along with energy, it would seem that the early Earth had both of these in abundance. There are problems with modern abiogenesis theories, there is no doubt about it, but the problem with panspermia models is that they do no better job of answering the real dilemnas than other abiogenesis theories, save perhaps that it adds more time, though in an environment that is extremely hostile to life, particularly over long periods of time.
Panspermia seems to commit essentially the same error as Intelligent Design, by insisting, with really no evidence at all, that there is something so inherently complex in life that the time between the formation of our planet and the cooling stabilization of the surface was insufficient to produce life. The problem here is largely in what these arguments tend to think of as life and what abiogenesis researchers are referring to. There seems to be this attitude that life must have, under terrestial abiogenesis theories, sprung up pretty close to being recognizably modern, when in fact, it seems far more likely that there was a progression from some sort of primitive self-replicating molecule through a number of evolutionary stages until we end up with the first primitive cells (which might not, other than being bags to isolate internal chemistry for the external environment) necessarily resemble modern life at all.
We do know that there was plentiful amounts of energy on the Earth at that time, and if energy is ultimately the major engine driving the evolution of life from organic molecules into forms we could confidently call living organisms, then time may not be that much of an issue at all. We're still talking about about a hundred million years or more here, and if life couldn't form in a hundred million years, how does increasing that by a factor of five make it that much more likely.
I won't even get into the really goofy trans-stellar or trans-galactic versions of panspermia, which are even harder to defend.
They "could" keep water in liquid form? (Score:2)
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So they are saying... (Score:2)
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Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
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Someone should conduct an experiment with a known quantity of live flies in a jar dropped from a skyscraper (first clearing the impact zone of bystanders) and count the number of survivors.
worms survived the Columbia crash (Score:4, Interesting)
http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/01/04/0334
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-6016657-7.html [com.com]
Overwhelmingly underwhelming (Score:2)
Re:Overwhelmingly underwhelming (Score:4, Informative)
Sure... (Score:3, Informative)
1. Can survive being frozen for indefinite periods of time,
2. Can survive excessive radiation and heavy metal contamination,
3. Can survive without sunlight (remember, it's in the center of the comet),
4. Lives off unknown chemical reactions (organic chemicals mean squat without an energy source)
5. Exists
Even if it is true, we cant explain the origin of (Score:5, Insightful)
Please before you mod me troll, listen. The Theory of evolution does not explain the origin of life, just the origin of species. Most folk who believe in things like ID (I= intelligent or idiotic depending on your perspective) confuse the issue and attack science. Let us not make the same mistake on the science side. Even the most ardent supporters of the Theory of evolution, like Dawkins, have only proposed very tentative speculation about the origin of life. They readily admit that right now science does not have any definitive theories about the Origin of Life.
This has nothing to do with evolution. Let us keep the discussions straight.
Re:Even if it is true, we cant explain the origin (Score:3, Interesting)
That makes a big difference, though. It's a question of probability. If life cannot spread through space, then it must have begun here of its own accord, and so we're looking for a theory that allows good odds that life will start on any planet chemically and environmentally favourable for it to do so. If life, once started somewhere in the Universe, can spread through
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That's the trick though - you don't actually need good odds at all.
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Is there any evidence that comets have such isotopes at such concentrations? This sounds like the sort of thing Lex Luthor would be involved in.
We're not alone (Score:4, Interesting)
It's probably also worth pointing out that this result has probably increased the chance of life existing elsewhere in the universe by a similar amount. There are far more commets than planet and they are a truly huge number of stars.
Moreover, it is more plausible that a comet could fertilize many star systems if it was knocked out of the orbit of various stars in its life-time. While this sort of event is in itself unlikely it is orders of magnitude more likely than life being liberated from a planet from a violent impact. The life would have to survive the fiery, high G, exit from whatever atmosphere there was surrounding the planet and would still have to have sufficient momentum to escape the star. These properties taken together pretty much eliminate any chance of that happening.
Compare this to the following comet hypothesis. Life gets started on a comet with a highly elliptical orbit billions of years ago. How this happens is open question but for the moment assume it does. As the star uses up its fuel it loses mass and the orbit slowly stretches. Eventually, the comet is able to free itself from the gravity of the parent star. Hundred of millions of years later, the star goes supernova. The blast wave from the supernova gently accelerates the comet into a planetary nebular. It just happens to be the one that our Earth was forged in. As the nebular condenses the life that started inside the comet transfers itself to the billions of water droplets and mineral material. You can guess what happens next.
I've always suspected we are not alone. It's just whether we're all too far away from each other for the knowledge to make any difference.
Simon
Curious but probably wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
If I understand their argument correctly, the abundance of clay in certain comets provides the template for RNA formation and eventual RNA-based life (with DNA coming later). There may be other factors which are discussed in the actual paper. As such, consider these thoughts preliminary.
There are several factors that would seem to argue against life starting in comets. First of all, planets have a far greater volume than comets with larger and more diverse areas in which life might form. Comets must not only reach planets but deliver their biologics intact. These biologics must then be suitable for propagation in the environment in which they arrive.
That last point is quite important. If comets did provide a birthplace for life, it is quite likely that their cargo would be unable to survive such an abrupt transition. Far more likely is that the life started on the planet in the first place.
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I do recognize that the total mass of comets is larger than the terresterial planets. However, I dispute that the usable volume is as high as the authors might want to claim. Much of the cometary volume is too cold, with short-lived radioisotopes for heating (particularly 26Al). Terresterial planets get consideral benefit from gravitational heating and convection to create long-lived zones with stable temperatures and limited ionizing radiation.
I think we can safely say that the odds of multicelled life
What good are galactic space odds... (Score:2)
these atheist scientists (Score:5, Funny)
i demand equal time for the godly and righteous theory of intelligent comet placing!
comets did not just fall randomly to earth and create life!
god himself intelligently directed comets to come to the early lifeless earth 6,000 years ago!
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Fidgit: That was no man. That was the Supreme Being.
Kevin: You mean God?
Fidgit: Well, we don't know Him that well. We only work for Him.
Randall: Shut up!
--Time Bandits
Sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)
British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.
That they can even presume to put a number on the probability of life is evidence enough that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Anyway, the odds of life are totally irrelevent to anything. See: anthropic principle.
not surprising (Score:2)
Controversial result? (Score:5, Informative)
Into and out of (Score:2)
Edumakation (Score:3, Funny)
Department name is somewhat appropriate... (Score:5, Interesting)
As to the relative plausibility of comet-seeded or locally-formed progenitors to life, given that reactions propagate, commonly leading to repeating and self-feeding cycles of reactions, the only argument for extra-solar is the added timescale and potential additional area for productive area for pre-life to evolve in.
Given that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life on the earth is nearly that old, and that the universe has only been cool enough to support planets or life for much of that time, I don't believe panspermia buys us that many more orders of magnitude of time to work with.
So, it doesn't buy us time, how about area? Again, I can only guess using very rough psuedo-numbers here, but the matter we could get from previously existing worlds or small super-fertile comets has to come from somewhere previous. Given the expanding nature of the universe, we're generally only going to be getting a pie-slice of potential sources for any life-by-projectile, and each of these sources has to have been fed by enough nuclear sources to make the building blocks of simple pre-life. I can imagine a multiplication of potential sources this way, and even though it would only take one source to seed the whole set... just imagining the mass that actually makes it into out solar system, and then actually hits our earth... that likelihood doesn't seem much stronger than the numbers we think of with abiogenesis via selective pressures here on earth.
Ryan Fenton
this is crazy with no consensus on life's origin (Score:5, Insightful)
Add to that the fact that we really don't have a clue as to how life started here (or anywhere else for that matter) and you really begin to question the judgment of giving odds to this sort of thing.
I'm not saying they're wrong, I like panspermia theories as well. It's just for people to put some sort of numerical values on this kind of thing when we know so little is just well crazy. And what numerical values! Maybe after if we send out some cometary probes and find them teeming with primitive life could you claim such a thing. Even then do they use DNA or RNA? Any evidence of spectral emission lines of this from any of our flyby probes? (It would be even more earth-shaking if there was DIFFERENT life there!)
Still I enjoy reading ScienceDaily.com. (Daily in fact) It's a great site not like some pseudo New-Scien(tist) kind of site.
Not even wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no doubt that comets rain down on the earth. There is considerable controversy [google.com] regarding the frequency, size, and origin of comets raining down upon the earth.
Wickramasinghe's conclusions appear to be speculation masquerading as science. What he's proposing doesn't appear to be testable. As Wolfgang Pauli said of other proposals that were untestable, "not even wrong."
Meaningless statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever.
Bad math? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It seems to me that life originated right here on Terra, but I sure as hell can't prove it. But I see no reason to look to comets or panspermia or wha