Panspermia #1 - Peter Occhiogrosso

Have you heard of the theory of panspermia? Despite its wacky name, it was actually first proposed by the Ancient Greeks and it holds that microorganisms capable of seeding life on other planets have been carried by meteoroids or asteroids and inadvertently deposited on Earth. More recently, prominent scientists including Carl Sagan and famed British astronomer Fred Hoyle (who invented the term “Big Bang”) proposed a variation called “directed panspermia.” This theory says that those same alien microorganisms were deliberately transported into space by other civilizations aiming to introduce their species on lifeless but habitable planets—including Earth. I like this theory because it implies that we humans did not evolve by some random, mechanical process of evolution but instead are genetic descendants of a highly advanced race living in another part of our Milky Way galaxy—or maybe in another galaxy far, far away.

Much as I admire the writings of Sagan and Hoyle (who, by the way, later said that he’d coined the term Big Bang sarcastically, and did not believe it ever occurred), the most concise explanation of directed panspermia that I’ve found appears in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled “The Chase” (Season 6, Episode 20). In this brief segment, a holographic projection of an Ancient Humanoid describes why and how her race used directed panspermia to seed the universe eons ago. #panspermia #directedpanspermia #CarlSagan #SirFredHoyle