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Panspermia 29 Astronomy has demonstrated to the satisfaction of most that physical law is universal. Biological law also might be universal, suggested Dick, but that has not yet been proven. Even if the Earth is not physically central, the question of whether it is biologically central remains unanswered. The widespread assumption that alien biology exists still is an expecta- tion, not a proven fact. But what an expectation. Just one success in proving an independent origin of life, and the biological Copernicans win. The interested public seems at ease with this, as the consequences are assumed to be largely scientific. Finding nonintelligent alien life would not resolve the question of greatest concern to nonscientists: whether or not the universe has produced other minds equal or superior to ours. We must gradually accustom ourselves to think that living beings have endured for eternity, and thus have no origin in time, that they originate through germs which come from other celestial bodies, that they die out when conditions have become unfavorable, but that they then live on else- where in the universe. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras hypothesized that all life came from the combination of tiny seeds pervad- ing the cosmos, a “panspermia.” Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius revived this concept, visualizing that spores spreading through interstellar space could reach favorable planetary environments such as ours. Seventy years later, biologist Francis Crick and chemist Leslie Orgel suggested that technological societies—which might have arisen elsewhere before the formation of the Earth—might deliberately spread life through the galaxy in a “directed panspermia.” We ourselves might be descendants of life forms deliberately or accidentally transferred to Earth’s surface.” Researchers have shown that some amino acids in meteorites can with- stand collisions with the Earth. “There’s just no doubt that some of the amino acids survive the impacts,” said biochemist David Deamer. A mol- ecule, literally dropped from the sky, could have jump-started or acceler- ated a simple chemical reaction key to early life.” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe argued in a series of books that life on Earth stemmed from a piecing together of prebiotic molecules from outer space. Instead of being the biological center of the Universe, our planet is just an assembly station; no great innovation in biology ever happened here. Even viruses and bacteria that cause disease may come from beyond the Earth. “Attacks of a viral disease represent the final stage in an attempted match- ing process,” they claimed, “a process that, in the minority of cases where it succeeds, is responsible for directing the evolution of species. Diseases are foiled evolutionary leaps.” Panspermia —Svante Arrhenius, 19037°