Scattershot Theory

It came from outer space

Today’s topic is a weird one – panspermia. What is panspermia? It's a theory that life's building blocks exist throughout the Universe, in space, and they may have been delivered to Earth in a random or directed process, depending on which version you go with. The mechanism for delivery to Earth's surface has been variously described as meteor showers or even rain showers. Some proponents think such life bombardment only happened at the outset of Earth's history, other's think it's a continuous bombardment that causes new diseases and possibly even genetic 'macro' mutations. Some proponents think that both planet Earth and Jupiter's moon Europa got their oceans from frozen life-harboring meteors. Got all that?

Why I bring it up, is that two highly prominent British scientists embraced the theory -- Francis Crick who discovered DNA, and Sir Fred Hoyle, a preeminent British astronomer. These men were no dummies; they sought to reconcile that great divide between religion and science. They saw evidence of a providential 'hand' but wanted more than a hand-waving science theory (Darwin's theory of random mutations) or a hand-waving theology (Special Creation) to describe an intelligent mechanism of life creation. Though I don't really find panspermia to be a very credible theory, there are underlying discussions that I love:

- What is life?
- Is life necessarily made of oxygen, hydrogen and carbon?
- Are prions and viruses living? What is the threshold whereby you say life exists?
- Could life exist in other dimensions, or scales of size?
- Can life exist in extremes of heat or cold, can it exist in space?

These are all questions for a 1st-year medical student, into his second pitcher of wine cooler. They aggravate the mind, violate your 1973 biology text and absolutely frustrate your theology professor. Here, here to discussions that move beyond the mundane and over to the bizarre.

There are some things I don’t like about the theory – mostly its randomness. The life pieces are floating aimlessly in space, and then fall scattershot on the surface of planets. If this were truly the mechanism, you would see weird, frequent mutations happening to prairie grass, rodents, trees and any living thing soaked by raindrops. But the ‘vector’ of evolutionary change that we see doesn’t follow any such pattern. The ‘new’ diseases that we see – HIV, Hantavirus, ‘Iowa’ mumps and avian flu – are all mostly variants of things familiar, following familiar Earth-bound disease routes.

If you make it ‘directed’ Panspermia, it’s a bit more credible, or is it? If an intelligent force on another planet were assembling life here, wouldn’t it want a delivery vehicle more reliable than a meteor or a storm cloud? Surely it would have a vehicle that makes precision landings, on precision routes. Would it not make its presence known somehow? I’m reminded of the Gary Larson cartoon where God has just dropped a vial marked ‘humans’ and He says, “Oops”. The theory can be salvaged if you bend it around a bit. “Another planet” could be a simplistic way of saying “a better place, at some remove”. Kind of like “somewhere over the rainbow”. Characterize the intelligent force as ever-present and involved, but not perfect. OK, now it could make more sense. It’s no longer “panspermia” but what the hey. If the creator that made us is imperfect, you can’t expect perfect consistency from our theories.