Chandra Wickramasinghe - 14 May

OUR
COSMIC
ANCESTRY
IN THE
STARS

Our Cosmic Ancestry in the Stars is an excellent read! Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, a pioneer of the theory of panspermia and cosmic biology, writes of the accumulating evidence that life populates all capable hosting places throughout the galaxy and the universe. The authors of the book conclude that our salvation as a species lies in the recognition and acknowledgment of our inalienable cosmic origins.

RUDY SCHILD, PH.D., EMERITUS ASTRONOMER
AT THE HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN
CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS

This is a beautifully written book about our cosmic origins and will be understood by everyone wanting to learn more about the origins and further evolution of life on Earth. All the authors have been actively involved in assembling the hard scientific evidence for panspermia and communicating these important proofs to a wider audience. For the past 50 years Sir Fred Hoyle, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, and their many contemporary collaborators, such as Gensuke Tokoro, director of the Institute for the Study of Panspermia and Astrobiology (Gifu, Japan), are causing, through their untiring efforts, the second Copernican revolution. Thus 500 years after Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, then Newton displaced the Earth from the center of the universe, which heralded the birth of the Renaissance in medieval Europe, we are now witnessing an extraordinary rebirth in scientific thinking. We therefore live in revolutionary times. Life did not originate from nonliving elements on the early Earth as is commonly believedas promulgated by the traditional neo-Darwinian theory of terrestrial evolution. It originated at some unknowable time in deep cosmic antiquity and has spread by panspermic infections and further evolution to all life-compatible habitscomets, moons, planetsthroughout the universe.

EDWARD J. STEELE, PH.D.,
COAUTHOR OF LAMARCKS SIGNATURE

Chandra Wickramasinghes central belief that basic microbial life in the universe could be very common and that it naturally spread across the galaxy is extended in this book to take on the topics of evolution itself and the future progress of humanity. Half a century after Neil Armstrongs one small step on the moon, this book is timely, as the authors ponder key cosmic questions about where we may have come from and what our future holds.

NICK SPALL, SPACE AND SCIENCE WRITER

Everybody should read this brilliant book! It tells you the answers to many of the things that keep you awake at night. Ultimately, this is a book of hope, the hope of the universal prevalence of life and that we are all part of a cosmic community which has no ending. Read this book and see everything you thought you knew in a new and vital perspective.

ROBERT TEMPLE, AUTHOR OF THE SPHINX MYSTERY

PROLOGUE

OUR INALIENABLE LINK TO THE COSMOS

W e predict that ten years from now our cosmic origin will be deemed as obvious as the sun being the center of the solar system is considered obvious today. Ask a school child: Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we heading? The answer without the slightest hesitation will be: We came from space, we are an assembly of cosmic viruses, and ultimately we must return to the cosmos.

With the pace of scientific discoveries in diverse fields from astrophysics to molecular biology that all point in the same direction, a long-overdue paradigm shift from geocentric life to cosmic life appears destined to happen. The result of accepting the new paradigm will be far-reaching and profound.

The oldest human remainsthe remains of Homo sapiens sapienswere recently discovered in a cave in Morocco and were dated at about 350,000 years ago. This new discovery pushes back the moment of human origin on Earth more than 100,000 years earlier than was hitherto thought. The theme of this book is that our own genes (DNA), the genes of modern humans, along with the genes of all life on Earth, predated Earth and originated in a vast cosmic context. All our important attributes of life were cosmically fashioned. Instincts for combat, hunting, communication, complex social behavior, and curiosity were all cosmically derived. This deep connection with the universe is one of which we are instinctively aware but so far have chosen to ignore.

The tiniest of viruses, bacteria, microscopic animals (tardigrades), and even seeds of plants have been discovered to be natural space travelers. They can survive in the harsh environment of space and can flit from planet to planet with impunity, building a complex interconnected web of life throughout the cosmos. We humans are effectively part of this web of life; we are no more than complex assemblages of microorganisms, so we owe our links to the wider cosmos. The forces that drive us to ignore this connection will be one of the themes of this book.

The beginnings of our story must go back to the time of Classical Greece. In the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, pupil of Plato, tutor to Alexander the Great, made two assertions that were to change the course of history. The first was that Earth was the physical center of the universe, that the stars, planets, and all heavenly bodies revolved around the central Earth. The second was that life of every form arose and continues to arise spontaneously from nonliving inanimate matter on Earth through a mythical process of abiogenesis. Both these assertions turned out to be wrong, but because Aristotle became a towering figure in Western philosophy, his views held sway for centuries.

The first Aristotelean principle, of a geocentric universe, which was held so adamantly and steadfastly, set back the progress of science for many centuries. Only after the completion of the Copernican revolution, which involved the combined efforts of Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Newton in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and after major confrontations with the Catholic Church was the geocentric philosophy finally abandoned. The second Aristotelean principle, of life centered on Earth and arising spontaneously on this planet, continued to dominate philosophy and science for centuries and still continues to do so.

As we shall discuss later there is no doubt that life did not originate on Earth and could not have done so. Nor could it have started de novo on any one of the hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets that exist in our Milky Way galaxy alone. From the arguments we advance in this book we conclude that life, anywhere and everywhere, must have an ultimate origin that is in some way connected with the beginnings of the universe itself. Every single life-form from the humblest single-celled organism to the most complex of plants and animals has an antiquity that stretches as far back in time as we can imagine. Our inalienable links to the cosmos cannot be ignored. Facts that establish this viewpoint continue to unfold without remission.

A sonnet by the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay from her Collected Sonnets, Huntsman, What Quarry?, encapsulates the theme of our book:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,

Rains from the sky a meteoric shower

Of facts... they lie unquestioned, uncombined.