Star Larvae: Panspermia

The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature’s Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Panspermia

Biological life impregnates planets, where it gestates, until it returns to space symbiotic with its technologies.

Think you're Bright? Rise and Shine at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/

The prospect of simple organic molecules from space having contributed to the origin of life on Earth becomes less controversial with each new research project in astrochemistry. But scientists on the whole remain sceptical about the prospect of whole viruses and bacterial cells having arrived from space. The job of championing that heresy falls, or fell, to the eminent British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle.

During the last decades of his life, Hoyle argued that biology cannot be native to Earth, but must be of extraterrestrial origin. Hoyle did not originate the hypothesis, called panspermia, and he acknowledged its long history. But, with new research data in hand, Hoyle waved the dust off the idea and, in collaboration with astrochemist Chandra Wickramasinghe, labored to bring it to public attention. Wickramasinghe and colleagues continue the project today.

Hoyle's campaign met with resistance in the scientific community generally, and to the extent that it was not overtly attacked or dismissed, it was ignored. But ongoing research into interstellar chemistry and the discovery of "extremophile" bacteria, which thrive in harsh environments, continue to build the circumstantial case that biology originated far from Earth. The ongoing research continues to expand the catalog of organic molecules identified in interstellar space, which now includes everything from alcohols to amino acids. But cosmic-scale organic chemistry was not predicted by any scientific theory. It was an empirical surprise.

"In our first paper referring obliquely to biology entitled "Primitive grain clumps and organic compounds in carbonaceous chondrites" (Nature 264, 45-46, 1976) we wrote:

'The formation of simple amino acids (e.g., glycine) is expected to take place in dense molecular clouds which may well be the cradle of life.'

Even such a tentative proposition was regarded as outrageous heresy in 1976, although now in 2004 it is regarded as obvious."

-- Chandra Wickramasinghe
A Journey With Fred Hoyle

But Hoyle and Wickramasinghe continued to raise the bar, by insisting that the infalling organic material responsible for life on Earth was itself alive. They proposed that functioning bacterial cells and viruses rained down on the early Earth and from those extraterrestrial visitors biology took root. They insisted furthermore that the rain continues and that various epidemic diseases are the result of "genetic storms"—of exceptionally active episodes of infall. And the heresy expanded further with their argument that the evolution of complex life was itself largely the result of genetic infall. This part of the argument has been bolstered by the growing body of evidence that supports horizontal gene transfer.

Researchers have demonstrated that when viruses insert their genes into host organisms—the normal mode of infection—the viral genes can infect germ cells and appear in the next generation of hosts. In this way, the genome of a species can be augmented with new genes. Scientists increasingly invoke this process of gene transfer in their explanations of evolutionary change. But in whatever ways genes might be shuffled among organisms, few scientists look to outer space as a source of new genetic material.

As for the means by which interstellar bacteria and viruses might make their way to planets, Hoyle identified comets as the likeliest vehicles. Comets originate in, and during their eccentric orbits travel through, interstellar clouds of organic dust and gas. Hoyle contended that organic material evaporates off of comets as they round their host stars, a well-documented phenomenon in the case of our own solar system, and that the freed material, including whole cells and viruses—the controversial part—makes its way through planetary atmospheres to the planets below.

In short, Hoyle proposed that comets harbor microscopic life and disperse it across the orbital paths of planets. Whether life "takes" or not on a particular planet may be influenced by various circumstances idiosyncratic to that planet. Such circumstances might include the planet being positioned within a "habitable zone" surrounding the given star. The idea is that only planets at the proper distance from their stars provide the optimal conditions for life to evolve complex ecosystems. Habitable zones have been proposed for entire galaxies, as well, being defined as the space at a given distance from galactic center that includes stars of certain types, namely those that form from "enriched" starter material, that which includes the assortment of elements produced by previous stars and which constitutes the building material necessary for planets. The growing body of evidence for Hoyle's version of panspermia theory is archived and regularly updated by advocate Brig Klyce at www.panspermia.org.

"Thus in the controversy about the Plurality of worlds, it has been considered, on purely antecedent grounds, as far as I see, to be so necessary that the Creator should have filled with living beings the luminaries which we see in the sky, and the other cosmical bodies which we imagine there, that it almost amounts to a blasphemy to doubt it."

—Cardinal Newman
on the "Illative Sense" in the Grammar Of Assent, 1870

The star larvae hypothesis extends the model of Hoyle/Wickramasinghe/Klyce by positioning evolution—phylogeny—in an overarching ontogeny and in so doing adding a teleological dimension to their (and the normal) account of evolution. As radical as their model might seem, it conserves the primary doctrine of normal evolution theory: The single mechanism of evolutionary change is natural selection working on genetic variation.

H/W/K contribute mechanisms to normal evolution theory that extend the range of genetic variability and which thereby give selection more to work on. The mechanisms they propose are (1) horizontal gene transfer from viruses and bacteria to unicellular eukaryotes and metazoans, a process itself amplified by (2) continuing infall of viruses and bacteria from space. Horizontal transfer is becoming less controversial as genetic sequencing data accumulate. Infall from space remains outside the paradigm of normal science. Regardless, their model remains nonteleological.

Hoyle presented an argument on behalf of the mechanics of life’s arrival on Earth and its subsequent evolution. His account of the evolution of complex life has to do with the amplification of unicellular life to produce complex organisms through the addition and exchange of new genes via viruses. He conceived of planets as being something like petri dishes in which bacteria multiply, only to rejoin the life suspended in the interstellar medium when the planets they inhabit meet their ultimate fates. This aspect of his thinking seems to be Hoyle’s least satisfying conjecture. Panspermia is a one-way street in his view, with no apparent role for complex, multicellular life other than to host bacteria and viruses. As outside of mainstream thinking as Hoyle’s proposals were, and to a significant degree still are, they nonetheless were highly conventional in their nihilistic view of phylogenetic development. His is another theory of evolutionary purposelessness.

The star larvae hypothesis, in contrast, proposes that multicellular life plays an essential role in the natural evolution of the cosmos. The hypothesis incorporates panspermia, which it takes to be the critical process in the stellar life cycle that delivers biological building blocks—bacterial life—and genetic sorters—viruses—to planets. Beyond that it proposes that the life cycle includes a "return trip," the graduation of biological life to the adulthood of extraterrestrial civilization and ultimately stardom.

That graduation is a complex process that bridges the divide separating the organic from the inorganic. It involves the metamorphosis of biological metabolism into nuclear metabolism, a process mediated by technology. The technological dimension of the process culminates in a replenishing of the universe's essential building blocks, protons.