"Panspermia" .. Has life come to Earth from space ?!

About a year ago, on a quiet and usual summer evening, security staff were preparing to receive the night shift by handing out the cards. The atmosphere in the corridors of the Mwc Laboratory of Astrophysics at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu was left only by a small multidisciplinary research team, It was just trying to be a new experience of its kind, a simulation of a set of very elementary conditions that made what we now know as a very familiar, life!

To understand this, let's start with phosphate compounds, which are found in the chromosomes that transmit our genetic information. They are found in DNA, and they are a major part of the cell's energy structure. However, images of phosphate compounds on the ground do not dissolve in water and can not be used to initiate chemical reactions that in turn lead to the formation of these building blocks of life, prompting some researchers to imagine that these compounds could have come from the sky .

Panspermia!

In their first experiment, the Hawaii team developed phosphine, a toxic image of phosphate compounds but common in planetary disks that precede the formation of solar groups, with frozen rock grains, with water and carbon dioxide, in a very low temperature chamber, -300 ° C), low pressure, exposed to high-energy rays similar to the cosmic rays that spread throughout the universe. The result was the conversion of phosphine to phosphoric acids similar to those found on the surface of the famous comet "67P / Churiumov-Gerasimenko" It was also the result of phosphine shifts on the comet's surface.

In fact, the hypothesis that the source of phosphate compounds found in living organisms, from the bacterial cell to the sane, seminal origin, precedes the experiments of the University of Hawaii team, proposed by Matthew Bazic of the University of South Florida in 2004, The "Sharipersite", which contains iron, phosphorus and nickel, and is found in many meteorite rocks, is the main source of phosphorus found in various life forms.

But it goes even further when we decide to call Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, the famous astronomers, and founders of what we know as the principle of "universal panspermia," the idea that the seeds of life are scattered in the universe, In an elementary primary image, whether in other planets, inside or outside the solar system, asteroids, comets or only in the space between stars and galaxies, we will talk about it more broadly soon, but let us reflect on this proposal in the 1970s Of the last century, that the basic components of interstellar dust are organic compounds, (3) Wickramasinghe was able to prove it later.

This opens the door to an interesting idea of ​​the origins of life, but to understand them let us begin in 2017 when an international research team, led by Dominique Papigno of the London Center for Nanotechnology, of the University College of London, announced the discovery of the oldest fossil fossils on Earth , A single-celled microorganism that lived 3.7 to 4.2 billion years ago, suggests that life may have appeared on earth only several hundred million years after it was formed, which in turn poses a difficult question: How did this happen?

Dust stars

According to the simple foundations of chemistry and biology, we know that the first images of life from non-living compounds take a lot of time to happen, that very early period of Earth's history seems at first glance insufficient to complete the first vital processes, prompted by a team of astrophysicists to imagine that life They did not originate on earth, but came to it, whether the first bacterial cells came to Earth, or just the building blocks of life, which are organic compounds containing elements such as carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, oxygen, and of course hydrogen.

The latter case is called Pseudo-panspermia, which suggests that the organic molecules needed to start life are created in space, very far from here, and then incorporated into the solar nebula of the child, when the sun is surrounded by a giant planetary disk Of gas and dust. In that case, chemical transformations can be faster. The compounds are ionized by cosmic rays, making them more sensitive to chemical reactions. Dust surrounding them will protect them from deadly ultraviolet rays coming from the sun.

This is possible. We know that gold, for example, worn by almost all women in the world, has a celestial source [6], because gold can only exist during a massive astral explosion, Gold moved through space into the primitive solar nebula, mixed with earth, and then we were. Organic substances made up of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen can not be sourced from the sun, because in their childhood the stars contain only hydrogen, which turns into helium at a later stage, then carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, a stage not yet reached by the sun. By the term Carl Sagan, we are just dust stars.

There are also indications of complex organic compounds in interstellar space. For example, in 2013, astronomers from the Large Atamama Observatory Observatory (ALMA) announced their observations of 7 organic compounds in an astral cloud about 25,000 light-years away (thiamanethaneamine and ethanamine), compounds that in turn are the bases for the formation of molecules Such as adenine in DNA and alanine, an amino acid involved in protein synthesis. In 2012, 8 NASA researchers exposed interstellar orbital hydrocarbons and over time became more complex organic compounds, which, according to the study, Correct for the installation of building blocks of life, DNA and proteins.

On the other hand, in the same year, researchers from the University of Copenhagen were able to detect the presence of a glycolytic compound in a binary star system located 400 light-years from Earth. This compound is also a base for the formation of ribosome DNA, In recent years, in 2016, the newly received culprit 67P / Churiumov-Gerasimenko has been confirmed to contain glycine, one of the essential amino acids involved in protein synthesis. This is not the first time we have discovered Guilty of something vital to such a vital element, in 2009 also enables NASA astronauts to monitor the "Glacin" on the comet (11) "Wild -2 "He said.

Can life survive in space?

In their book "The Cloud of Life: The Origin of Life in the Universe," Wickramasinghe and Howell view the main idea that life is possible in this universe, and that it will be formed if circumstances allow, so that its seeds arose during the first billion years of history The universe, all that is needed is that the first stars are formed and then explode leaving the essential elements of life and motivating them to spread here and there. These elements - as hypothesized - will interact with one another to form the first organic compounds which in turn enter the path of the main interactions of life, The hypothesis also extends to the same life in other places Z in the universe, in the image of the first cell, and then moving way to the ground in the first stages of their formation.

At that point, the first question that you have to worry about is whether a living organism can live in the extreme conditions of outer space. According to this hypothesis, living cells with a comet are supposed to travel, for example, billions of kilometers in space. Well, it's complicated. We know that there are already primordial organisms that can withstand very extreme conditions, such as high or very low pressure, high or very low temperatures, extreme droughts, In deep oceans and in the upper atmosphere, in highly toxic chemical environments, with or without oxygen, they are images of life that we never imagined existed.

For example, a study published several years ago in the famous journal Plus One suggested that specific types of bacterial cells could grow and multiply more than what happens on Earth when exposed to space conditions. On the other hand, Only two years ago, scientists from the University of Burgham Young had been able to detect the ability of bacterial vesicles called basilas spatilis to stabilize under extreme conditions of stress and strain, indicating that there were already species of bacteria capable of tolerating travel conditions Space.

Life is a reflection of what we think, and its roots are most extensive in this existence. But our problem with humans is that we give a definition of life and death that relates only to what we see and feel. To understand what we mean here we can contemplate the news that sparked the scientific climate some 20 years ago, When researchers from the University of California found bacterial vesicles that could be resuscitated in the fossilized pits of a bee suspended in amber some 25 million years ago, this discovery was repeated about five years later in another fossil buried in the ground where salt crystals contained bactericidal bacilli For a lifetime of (16) 250 million years!

Bacteria traveling by the force of the sun

But it was not so easy. The first to suggest a possible mechanism for this kind of life-moving space was by the late Nobel laureate Svant Arenius at the beginning of the last century when he said that radiation pressure, the ability of any kind of radiation to pay , They can push very small bacterial vesicles at high interstellar speeds. This is called the case of radio Panspermia (17), but experiments on bacteria in space conditions indicated that bacterial cells could not withstand a few seconds in the presence of ultraviolet radiation from the sun, even in cases of concussion, when covering the bacteria The same thick envelope, do not think to hold up very much.

At this point we see what we call "lithosphere" (18) (Litho Panspermia), an attempt to solve the problem of harmful ultraviolet radiation of bacterial cells, where a relatively large rock envelope can protect bacterial cells buried between its granules of ultraviolet radiation Or any other cosmic ray, we know that some microorganisms that love extreme conditions can hold up well within the rocks for long periods of time, but that hypothesis also has a problem with takeoff and landing.

According to this hypothesis, if we decided to extend the lines to its integrity, and assumed that life on Earth came from another planet in the primitive stage of the age of the solar system, the process of taking off the rock that contained the bacteria, and landing process as well, will require an intense friction with the atmosphere of the Earth and the other planet May generate temperatures up to 10 thousand Celsius. In addition, such trips will be very long. We are talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of years if we are lucky, and millions of years if the situation is normal. The maximum degree of stability we have obtained from vesicles The bacterial in the space was only six years, and in the ambiance Less severe than landings and takeoffs.

What if we live in someone's experience ?!

It is complicated, and although there is a chance that it will happen, it is too small to be skeptical, but it is possible anyway. This has led some to imagine that if the source of life on Earth was space, it would be directed in one form or another, All the possibilities of many failures. In a clearer sense, life can be brought to earth by an act.

One of them, a space object of unknown nature or purpose, has decided to direct the seeds of the first life to the planet to grow and develop, perhaps experimentally or for another purpose, called Directed Panspermia (20) These may be the task of humans one day when their civilizations progress and expand to the entire galaxy, the task of deliberately planting the seeds of life in other planets. But, what if this is what happened to us? Of course, some people intervene at that point on the part of my religion to say: Why did not God (the gods) do it in some way? Planting the seeds of life on another planet is very expensive and requires enormous techniques and resources and its results are not settled. If this kind of intervention happens, who can do it?

As you can see, despite all the evidence that supports the validity of the "Benspermia" hypothesis, it is still the closest thing to a philosophical imperative, because all that the evidence offers is possibilities and possibilities, those possibilities are more acceptable to talk about organic compounds and less acceptable If we talk about direct images of life. However, in the end, the most radical criticism facing the hypothesis of "Benspermia" comes from its essence, and its visionaries imagine that the seeds of life are possible and exist throughout the universe whether the possibilities are large or weak, and that they have already arisen during the first billion years of the history of the universe, Where the chemical elements that allow this are formed, here the important question arises: Where did life go then?

If the seeds of life were born 13 billion years ago, and allowed to evolve like the life we ​​know so far, why not find an impact in the universe until now? Is not life supposed to complete its journey to reach a rational civilization? But to what extent can a rational civilization arrive? To understand the technological progress that a civilization can reach, let us contemplate the history of mankind in just 200 years. All we see of industrial and technical progress was the son of this period, and only 20 years ago we could not have predicted that 6 billion people from this planet would have telephones Portable, progress occurs relatively quickly.

At that point, let's assume that there is a planet called the planet Krypton, almost Earth-like, within the viable range, but it was born 6.5 billion years ago, while the earth was born from the dusty cloud surrounding the sun just 4.5 billion years ago , This means that the planet is now two billion years ahead of us, which also means that it is supposed to reach a civilized level that can communicate with us. Here, Russian physicist Nikolai Cavendish intervenes to say that there are three basic levels of civilization Technical.

The first level is the ability of civilization to use and store its energy from the star orbiting its planet. At the second level, civilization may be able to manufacture techniques of accuracy and evolution so that it can encapsulate its entire star to exploit every atom of energy emanating from it, The third is able to use and store all the energy of the galaxy. If we are two Earthlings, we are still trying to be of the first level civilization, and the planet Krypton, our oldest friend by two billion years, may now be ready to enter the third stage, Holders of the title "Third Level Civilization". Here, we will ask, in the words of the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, "The Paradox of Fermi" (22): Why if this civilization has not yet come? where are they? Where did life go and why are we so alone?

The hypothesis of "Benspermia" does not answer this question, on the contrary, it makes it more complex. In addition, another fundamental problem with the hypothesis of "Benspermia" is that it does not answer the question of the origin of life, but only postpone it, Scientists, from all related fields, are: How can life arise? Or "What is life anyway?", We know little about how it develops on Earth, and there are already promising attempts to understand the form of the first primitive transformations that may have led to its origin, but what is certain is that we have not yet moved into the assertions concerning With these issues, the question of life is still the mystery of this greater existence.