On Panspermia

Did life develop on Earth, or did it come from the stars? Is outer space actually teeming with life? One of our hosts spent the week down the Chandra Wickramasinge internet rabbithole and has some Opinions.

The idea of panspermia is that life is everywhere across the universe. More specifically, if abiogenesis did happen, it probably happened elsewhere, and there is life on Earth simply because life is widespread. Fermi’s Paradox makes this feel unlikely - if there’s so much life out there, why haven’t we seen it? Well, the leading exponents of panspermia argue that in fact we have, in fact the world is being hosed down by protein chains all the time, driven across the void by the solar winds. We don’t notice them because they’ ...