Survival of 'water bears' in space strengthens Panspermia theory, says Lankan born scientist

Walter Jayawardhana

The European Space Agency scientists' discovery that tiny insects have survived during a space journey of 10 days despite huge doses of radiation has blown new breath into the theory that life could have travelled from outer space to Earth, proposed by Sri Lankan born scientist Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe.

Wickramasinghe in an interview said: "I think this finding goes a long way towards proving that we are truly creatures of the cosmos. If life evolved on the Earth in isolation from the rest of the Universe there is no need for such remarkable space survival attributes to develop.

Obviously, humans and cows cannot survive an unshielded journey in space. But for bacteria the situation is different, and now for even for some types of small insects interplanetary transport appears to be possible."

Last week scientists at the European Space Agency reported that a millimetre sized insect species called tardigrades (water bears) have survived a journey in outer space for some 10 days. Wickramasinghe, a pioneer of the modern theory of panspermia, welcomed the new data and said it might even prove that insects came from space some 250 million years ago.

He said: "New results are coming in thick and fast all of which support the ideas that Fred Hoyle and I championed 30 years ago. At the time we were thought to be heretics! It's time now for the scientific community to go back and look at our writings and admit that we were right." Panspermia is an ancient idea asserting that life seeds are distributed throughout the cosmos. But the modern versions of the theory can be traced back to the pioneering work of Professor Wickramasinghe and his collaborator the late Sir Fred Hoyle.

Wickramasinghe and Hoyle argued that comets in the solar system are the main repository of life and that injections of material from comets led to the start of life on the Earth. But comets are with us still and comets continue to inject material that is potentially laden with life.

The possibility that evolution of life on the Earth is modulated by such continuing injections was discussed in a book Evolution from Space published by these authors in 1980. In this book Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have a chapter 8 entitled "Insects from Space" in which they speculate that frozen eggs of insects or even larvae may be transported across the solar system.

"It has always been a puzzle to understand how certain life-forms like insects appeared suddenly in the fossil record." he said.